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Category: Technology

Boatbuilding

Boatbuilding

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In Fall semester 2019 I co-taught a course called Boatbuilding: Design, Making, and Culture, with Chris Bull and Shep Shapiro. Here’s the description: This course introduces the study of the design, engineering, work, material culture and history through the construction of a traditional workboat, a Maine peapod. As the class builds the boat we’ll gain a hands-on understanding of issues of engineering, design, skill, and workmanship. At the same time, we’ll do historical research and visit museums to gain insight…

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Open Access Articles! or, what happens to old articles

Open Access Articles! or, what happens to old articles

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How best to make journal articles accessible? Over the years, I’ve published a few dozen essays, in a range of journals, books, encyclopedias, newsletters, and blogs. A recent discussion with folks from the Brown University Library about the Brown Digital Repository got me thinking about how accessible they were, and how to make them more accessible. And so I spent some time trying to figure out what was on the web, what was open to the public, and what to…

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Teaching Skill

Teaching Skill

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In the Fall semester, I taught a new course, a seminar for first-year students: “Skills: From the Medieval Workshop to the Maker Movement.” It was historical and hands-on: I wanted students to understand skills by reading and writing as well as by doing. We read history, psychology, and anthropology; manifestos, manuals, and memoirs. The Brown Design Workshop Tools and how-tos at the Brown Design Workshop We also got out into the shop — we met in the Brown Design Workshop, a new School of…

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Making things

Making things

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I’ve finished my “Lessons from the Lost Museum” book manuscript and I’m starting to think about a new project. I’ve gotten in the habit of writing and may as well keep at it! The new project is about making and technical skill. Not sure how to frame it, or what the end product might be. I’ll teach a class on this in the fall to think it through. I know that part of it will be actually making things. Here’s a first attempt…

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Design Objects in Museums

Design Objects in Museums

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[my talk to the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, RISD, March 2015] The call for papers placed this conference in the context of RISD’s recent interest and success in “transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries to encourage more holistic, multi-faceted approaches to art and design practice.” In my talk I’d like to focus on disciplinary boundaries in how museums use artifacts, and offer some suggestions on how we might transcend some of those traditional boundaries for a more holistic, multi-faceted museum. The disciplines whose boundaries I’d…

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Building a skiascope

Building a skiascope

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                “The theoretic value of the skiascope is incontestable.”  —Benjamin Ives Gilman In his Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (1918 ), Gilman gives detailed instructions for making a skiascope, a device that will allow museum to see paintings and sculptures more clearly, by blocking glare, and other distractions. The instructions are long and complicated. Here’s a quick pictorial guide: First, cut out the top and bottom Make the wires, and attach them. Make two…

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Collecting the History of Technology at the National Museum of American History

Collecting the History of Technology at the National Museum of American History

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Collecting for history museums is challenging work, and there needs to be more research and writing on both its history and how to do it. We need to understand how and why collections came to museums; what decisions that shaped collections they hold today? And we need to talk more about how to collect, how to train museum curators to collect, and how to evaluate collecting and collections. We need to share best practices. Those were among the conclusions of a session on…

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Beautiful Data

Beautiful Data

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I spent the last two weeks of June at Beautiful Data, a workshop funded by the Getty Foundation and run by Harvard’s MetaLab. I’m not sure why the name, “Beautiful Data”: but it seems fair, given that the workshop address both data about beautiful things and data made beautiful by its utility. The question for the workshop was what we might do with the newly available data about the collections in art museums. The workshop was pretty intense. Twenty two…

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