MIT Museum Without Walls (MWOW)

The MIT Museum is leading an innovative location-based storytelling research project, Museum Without Walls (MWOW), to put history and science in your hand and turn the world into a museum. The goal is to help reveal the hidden and the extraordinary in the MIT landscape by encouraging people to learn about their surroundings. It begins with an Institute-based effort but the project is pioneering the development of technologies as a model usable by any institution or community.

Technology’s Storytellers -- This is an exciting period for enthusiasts of geographic information systems and electronic devices. From MapQuest and Google Earth to the GPS system in your mobile phone, there is an extraordinary interest in the ways locative technologies can link digital information to the physical world.

Just as a museum curator puts a label next to an artifact on display in order to help tell a story, the new technologies allow for similar sorts of tagging of the spaces outside the gallery walls. This concept -- so easily expressed -- is an enormous challenge. MIT has one of the most pervasive wireless internet (WiFi) networks of any institution and a vibrant community of researchers experimenting with all aspects of ubiquitous computing and geographic information systems. It is the perfect environment in which to conduct the experiments focusing on the dissemination of scientific, technological and historical information that will provide a new model for cultural exchange about science and society.

We wish to present MIT as a dynamic museum whose “exhibits” will be constructed collaboratively -- not just by museum curators and other experts but also by the entire MIT community. A rich repository of digital information and stories (indexed by location, time and thematically) will make possible a truly “Infinite Corridor,” meaning almost limitless ways to explore and understand the Institute — past, present and future. The real goal, however, is a system that any institution can use.

What if you could walk around MIT and hold its history in your hand?

The MIT Museum Without Walls project is inspired by the idea of in situ exploration, meaning that one would use a mobile device while actually on the campus but it will also be as powerful on a desktop computer halfway around the world. The pace of technology development is such that we are certain that there will be new devices to supplement the iPods, cellphones, PDAs, tablet computers and laptops common today. We are equally certain there will be new systems to supplement the GPS and WiFi systems that help us figure out where we are. The project is meant to help us learn how to accommodate technological change while preserving and expanding the repositories that store the cultural legacies in bits and bytes.

The project will leverage leading-edge technologies but will generally not require the development of new technologies. The approach is primarily one of systems integration, albeit one that requires a considerable amount of technical effort as we integrate existing and emerging technologies into a suite of applications that allow for easy creation, storage and experiencing of digital multimedia materials and exhibits.

Additionally, the project’s success hinges on an ability to tap into the vast storehouse of materials that exist in many places around the MIT campus in a way that has not been possible before. To do so will require us to make demands on the keepers of those materials that will stretch their ability to deliver the materials in a digital form tagged with location, time, and thematic keywords.

The project is nearing the end of the first phase of a planned four-phase project and is now engaged in continuing discussions with many members of the MIT community.

The project is proceeding on several fronts:

(*) Technology assessment and technical design
(*) Media access discussions and arrangements with key MIT partners
(*) Concept development and project planning
(*) Identification of likely research and development partners from outside the MIT community
(*) Phased fundraising based on the evolving understanding of the project
(*) Outreach via community meetings, email list, and web site

The next two phases are the crucial ones as we develop the technical infrastructure to support a myriad of applications from tours to tools that will support further research.
Long-term benefits of the project to MIT

The initial desire to have this project be a major element of the MIT Museum’s contribution to MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2011 continues to influence and shape the project schedule. As part of the project definition and planning work, we have been talking to many groups at MIT and a clear theme has emerged. MIT as a whole has a vast treasure of information about its history and innovative work in science, technology, and the arts. Yet the long-term access to this treasure is jeopardized by the sheer amount of resources needed to properly preserve and make it available to the national and international community. The hope is that this project will be a catalyst to galvanize the entire MIT family to protect and maintain its heritage and to preserve a record of its ongoing activities.

The MIT Museum Without Walls project is a challenging experiment. Typically, technology is developed first and content is an afterthought. This five-year effort is an attempt to develop both simultaneously. The plan that follows necessarily gives much more detail for the next phase which entails the development of a prototype system. As we build, test, use, and evaluate this initial system, the specific plan for Phases Three and Four will naturally evolve.