Cabinet of Wonders: The Way We Live Now
- It’s 2112. Write a detailed review/description of a historic house/ place museum about the way we live now. Think of the Tenement Museum and other historical houses you have seen. Be clear on the experience—the wayfinding, the media, the content, what are the stories, how does the audience experience it.
Cellphones, smartphones, telephones, fax machines, computers, scanners, internet apps, hands-free, GPS, voice-activated, headphones, credit cards, cash, coins, cash registers, ATMs, bikes, watches, heart rate monitors, treadmills,
Daily papers, magazines, books
Washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, laundromat, refrigerator, freezer, oven, stove, grill
YouTube, sneakers, t-shirts, fashion trends
As I think of a museum about the way we live now, I focus particularly on the many Things in our lives that were not present at the Tenement Museum. Our lives right now seem particularly distinguished by the devices and technologies to which we have access. Across classes, smartphones persist, for example.
My museum of the way we live now:
Entrance:
A five story building off of a paved sidewalk. Street signs outside: a “No Parking Anytime”, with bicycles locked to the bottom of it. A tree planted in dirt on the concrete of the sidewalk. The building has an awning with the title “The Way We Lived: 2012”, a street address and a phone number. The awning and frame are painted bright red.
The doors are open and lead into a small cafe where coffee and muffins are sold. The coffee machines are exposed and the servers make the coffee or tea etc. - we are already in the experience - supposing that in 100 years, the coffee machines (if they exist at all) will be remarkably different than they are now.
Next, you would exchange your money system or payment system for ours - somehow - and you would buy your coffee with cash or a card. The servers would be ready to answer any questions about how they prepared the drink and how and why people consumed it in the past. If, for example, you were interested in how currency, cash, credit and banking systems worked in our days, you could go slightly to the right of the purchasing counter and watch an animated video explaining the way our economic systems work.
While there would be a typical menu, there would also be a general explanation next to the menu, with descriptions of why people consumed coffee and muffins in our days.
You could then have the option to continue into the museum - purchase a tour with our money - and if you did, you would go behind the counter and through a backdoor out of the cafe, up a flight of stairs and into an apartment. Here you would find all the typical fixings of an apartment - the machines we use, the mobile devices, the music systems and video systems. Everything would be as “on” as we usually leave it - so maybe the TV is on, music is on, the smartphone is picking up new text messages and emails - but the shower may not be on. You could walk around and turn everything on or off - even toasting bread if you wanted - or turning on a movie. There would be “tour guides” hanging out in each area of the apartment, explaining the device or the way it was used as needed.
For example, the closet would be full of the current fashion of clothes for a woman and a man. The tour guide might ask why the tourers think we had so many pieces of clothing. The response might lead to a discussion about the way that we displayed our identities through our choice of clothes, what we carry, what we drive, etc… how these might display our socioeconomic status. And / or how many find that purchasing new items gives them pleasure, which could lead to a discussion about the role of pleasure in our lives - how it balances with the work we did, or not, what a few typical forms of pleasure-getting were - for example, from drinking and doing drugs to spending time with family and friends.
Each broader concept, as referenced above, would become a story so that the visitors from the future might better understand our habits and such. If we were discussing the concept of pleasure, the tour guide might tell a story about how “Emily”, who lived in the apartment, used her first pay check in her first job after college to buy a beautiful pair of boots. She kept good care of the boots and saved them for years. They were a piece of her memory as she transitioned from job to job and apartment to apartment - here it might be interesting to discuss how careers have shifted, but also the history of Emily’s own career (lawyer). It could lead to the tour guide explaining the way that women used to be treated before Emily’s own time, how their role in society changed.
There would be magazines and a newspaper on the kitchen table, as well as a tablet and a smartphone with pre-programmed apps such as NPR, TED, hopstop, words with friends. The stories in the paper would be accurate to our time and might lead to stories about the presidential race this October, 2012, how the country was seen by some to be polarized between a liberal left and conservative right, how we were still struggling with our role in politics in the Middle East… a wallet on the table, with keys, Metro Card, a train ticket to upstate New York - discussion might ensue about transportation in the city and out of the city - why people might choose to take a train an hour away, what activities they might do out of the city, or an in-depth description of the subway system - where it came from, how it developed in other cities, how NYC’s subway system in 2112 compares…
At the end of the tour, the tourers could just trickle out whenever they pleased, stopping by a gift shop where they could buy any of our old technologies and some of our styles of clothing. There would be an explainer as they exited who would describe the way that various people moved through the city - on bicycles, subway, car, and how the various business owners on the fictitious street might have worked with one another (or not).
The experience of this Museum of the Way We Live Now would be that each object might have a full story, a full lesson behind it - whether an economic or a cultural lesson - and each could provoke interesting discussions on the way our technology systems but ideally, the way our value systems may have changed. I would be most curious as to the difference between the way we find value in our lives now and the way we will find value in our lives. While the Tenement Museum and the Teddy Roosevelt museum had 1 tour guide for many, the Museum of the Way We Live Now would have several educators, much like the NYSCI experience. Rather than be led through room to room, object to object, you would be let free to choose which objects, rooms or devices you wanted to check out and then ask questions or listen to explanations as you saw fit.
To this point, the experience would have the option to have an augmented reality tour - when you purchase your ticket for the full experience, you could take out an iPhone that had an app installed on it where when you hovered the camera over a bicycle, for example, it could tell you (by text or audio, your choice) about how that bicycle had been used, why there are stickers on it, what the stickers mean, and possibly a video with the band of one of those stickers playing at a rock concert. This AR option is available throughout the tour though it would be less publicized because the hope is that you engage with an educator directly.
Ideally, each conversation would include a historical element - history before 2012, a 2012 description, and then a question about how things are in 2112 and whether this is better or worse? Why would they want to come back to 2012 or why wouldn’t they? What about 2112 reminds them of 2012?
