MuseTrek: a Culture Platform in the Works

By Maria Mortati, Sr. Exhibit Developer

Recently we posted about a gallery experiment out of Paris called Le Laboratoire. Turns out the force behind it (David Edwards) has been busy.  Enter MuseTrek, a web 2.0-plus-iPhone system that seeks to allow people to create their own narratives and tours of museums, public spaces, objects, and ideas:

"MuseTrek is an exciting new company that aims to transform how we explore cultural resources and museums around the world. The company was created by Harvard University students at the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard, and is being developed by TechPoint Ventures, a Boston based business incubator and development firm. MuseTrek has formed a special partnership with Le Laboratoire, an innovative experimental art center in Paris..." -MuseTrek press release

So far, it appears that the project is in the early stages with students and local area folks in Boston and Paris making "tours" and adding content. In other words, there's not a lot there yet. 

However, it's an exciting umbrella to develop. Whether the public is able to make this happen with existing tools, or MuseTrek can expand to become a culture-sharing platform remains to be seen. Yet the drive to share and make sense of what people see in museums remains quite powerful.

For more:
http://www.musetrek.com/
http://www.artscience100k.org/prize/pilot_years.html
http://tedxboston.org/videos/79-musetrek

Update: the San Francisco Chronicle just posted an article about Scenic Route: "...a site that builds custom, on-demand walking routes anywhere in San Francsico". In the UK there is a similar project to MuseTrek and Scenic Route called I Like Museums.

Design affects behavior? Sure!

[Guest post by Justine Roberts]

At Gyroscope we expend quite a lot of effort on this point, and it is not news to urban planners, public artists, environmental psychologists, or many educators. A google search of “design affects behavior” reveals articles on how design affects voting behavior, inmate behavior, and the feeding behaviors of cows. The significance of the influence of design on learning is perhaps most succinctly articulated by Reggio Emilia in the phrase “the environment is the third teacher” (after the parent and the classroom teacher).

This past spring a new “gallery experiment” at Le Laboratoire, the art/science innovation space in Paris, explored how mood might influence design standards for housing. Studio R&Sie(n) and the mathematician François Jouve have created an experience in which they can measure the neurobiological responses of visitors (their mood) as they explore an on-going robotically built environment. At a sales desk “visitor/clients” were able to place an order for their bio-architecture to be implemented as part of the collective structure being created on-site.

Le Laboratoire is the brain-child of David Edwards and is designed to bring scientists and artists together through a series of year-long collaborations. The first exhibit documented the work of French artist Fabrice Hybert and Robert Langer of MIT who investigated intelligence. The second experiment paired Michelin-starred chef Thierry Marx and colloidal scientist Jerome Bibette who explored molecular gastronomy.

In the gallery visitors could have coffee served with a whiffer of chocolate. Le Laboratoire also released a product line of aerosolized chocolate for sale in the store.