The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt: Finally, the Museum of the Future Is Here - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/how-to-build-the-museum-of-the-future/384646
▻http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/mt/2015/01/cooper_1/lead_large.jpg?nihoqg
Some things belong in a museum. But at the Smithsonian’s recently reopened museum of design, a team has been rethinking what a thing is in the first place.
The Cooper Hewitt has transformed into an organization not unlike Wikipedia (...) : Somewhere between a media and a tech firm, it is a Thing That Puts Stuff on the Internet. Or, more precisely, A Thing That Puts Things on the Internet.
Cope held up his smartphone at one point and pointed at it. “Everyone walks in with one of these,” he said. “We’re gonna have to find a different way to air-quote compete, so why don’t we just try to meet people halfway? All the visitors arrive with superpowers.”
(...) But the real treats are in the museum’s interactives that draw from its collection. they were created in collaboration with the Labs team, and—more importantly—they used an infrastructure developed by the team. It is the infrastructure that lets the museum plan for the near future, that lets it bridge digital and physical, that lets it Put Things on the Internet: the API.
(...)the API at the center of the museum.” The Cooper Hewitt’s API connects to the museum’s two operational databases—its vast collections database and its complex customer and ticketing databases—and fuses them. Then it makes the collections part public and accessible.
(...) What the API means, for someone who will never visit the museum, is that every object, every designer, every nation, every era, even every color has a stable URL on the Internet.
(...) these shareable and permanent URLs start to stand in for the locked-away object.
(...) “What ’digital’ in the museum means is really that everything is available whenever you want. Wherever you want, whenever, however"