Textin' Collection at SFMOMA

SFMOMA's video about their "Send Me" program (link below).

I'm too excited about this news to omit it from this blog on the grounds of not being a display technique. Anyway, as a highly interactive medium to generate visitor interest in the collection, it is part of a synergy with actual displays—and, crucially, it works outside the museum as well as inside. So what is this all about? A recent article in the New York Times reports that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is reaching potential visitors via a text message program. Texting the museum at 57251 with the request "Send me ---" will retrieve an automated response of a photo of an artwork at SFMOMA captioned with its creator, title, and year. In a twist of modern hilarity, the "---" can be a word or, yes, an emoji. This has led to fascinating data on visitors' desires and interests:

• "The top emoji requests included the robot, the heart, the rainbow, 'and, of course, poop,' Mr. Winesmith said. 'And then, because it’s the internet, it’s a lot of food and a lot of animals.'"

​Requests at night are apparently more personal, referring to family and home. Some requests are denied by the museum's autoresponse system: nudity, but also, interestingly, artists' names. The museum wants its text-visitors (they are still visitors, aren't they?) to be more creative than that; and they've found that the requests immediately following denied requests are indeed more creative. What a marvelous experiment! We can learn a lot from this about how to improve museums both within and without their walls.