Transcript of Melissa Firth's presentation
Ko Melissa Firth ahau. I'm chief digital officer at Te Papa. And we have, over the last two years, been doing quite a lot in the digital and also innovation space, which I'll attempt to summarise in five minutes today.
It was nice to hear Amelia talk about need and purpose, because whenever I give any presentation, I always start with, what is Te Papa's purpose under the Act? And it focuses the mind not only for us in digital, but actually everybody at Te Papa. We're here to understand and treasure the past, enrich the present, and help New Zealand meet the challenges of the future.
So we're kind of operating as an autonomous Crown Entity as the culture, social cohesion, and well-being, to some extent, part of government. And how do we need to change when all of the world's information is available at our fingertips all the time? Museums are a lot like media organisations that have been used to having a one to many broadcast channel for decades, which is sort of a model built on the printing press, really. And social media, and all of the affordances of social technology is actually a return to the chaos of a more oral tradition and the marketplace of ideas, in which we are beacons, but we're also competing with all of that noise.
Our aspirations in digital are really around providing easy access. Our place, if you remember Te Papa Our Place, 10 x, so you know, inclusive, participatory, social. We put audiences at the heart of innovation, and so we do that two ways. One is through data analytics, and the other is we have built, over the last six months — which took a year to actually make happen — a user experience team that also does a lot of contextual and inquiry and behavioural research.
And on the transformation side, it's about building digital into our DNA so that we’re doing not just the shiny things. It hasn't been about apps since I arrived. It's been about, how are we going to create transformative processes, people, technology. When you think about business and digital and horizons, strategic horizons, exhibitions are our horizon one. And so Te Papa has always been pretty good at innovation on what exhibitions are. Gallipoli is a good example.
And the experience — you know, there's that quote from Maya Angelou, "people will forget what you said. They'll forget what you did. But they'll never forget how you made them feel." That emphasis on experience is really important. And horizon two, which is, I guess, building from what's our current business model to, what do we do at the moment that we can leverage, that creates a new value for people or connects with people in different ways? We've just two days ago, launched our new digital collections online website, which is sitting on an API for the first time ever
And Digital New Zealand now has a key to that API. And that means not only can we start curating and editorialising and providing more meaningful customised views into our collections, but so can everybody else that has access to that API. If I think about what we might do in horizon three as far as artificial intelligence is concerned, just one example is, we have one media sales person at Te Papa. And about 60% of his time is currently spent servicing very low level image licensing requests. If we automated that, then it means he can spend his time focusing on business development opportunities from the IP and the copyright we hold, that the creates sustainability for the museum as a whole.
Another example in Horizon two, is something that we've called art wall. And this is a new little — it's a minimum viable product at the moment. You can look at it at tepapa.govt.nz/artwall on your phone. And basically, at the moment, it's providing a view of about 600 of Te Papa's artworks, which you can choose, put a comment against, and then send it to the wall above the cafe and espresso on level four at Te Papa.
And what we have found with this — I've lost the text on the side there, but I'll try and remember it — is that when people are on their own devices, they take a lot more care over their selection than they do when they're using our kiosks. And they spend on average five minutes and 30 seconds engaging with art at Te Papa. And this is intergenerational. We've had groups of Pacific schoolboys come through and be doing playoffs with each other in the space. We've had grandparents delighted with the ways that they can use digital. And it's generated a lot of very high quality conversations about art, actually, in a space of the museum where art is not typically represented.
One of the key things we're trying to do here — and actually that was a bit of a text here. One of the things we're trying to do is to create relevance to people. And it doesn't have to be highfalutin. Some people have actually used it to create something humorous. And a recent piece of audience research we did said that relevance is the key barrier for art galleries, as opposed to museums in New Zealand. And we can hope to get about 30% to the art gallery inside Te Papa, where 50% goes to the Museum, of the general population.
So, relevance — how we connect on an individual level is what we're trying to do. Also in the horizon three space is Mahuki. How many of you have heard of Mahuki? It is Te Papa's innovation accelerator. We started it last year, and we're now about halfway through our second cohort. It is both an acceleration programme, where we have a set of 12 or 13 challenges that we, as a cultural institution have, and we know other cultural institutions globally have. We invite applications.
And then we select those teams to come in and spend four months in the hub, basically learning how to validate their product or business idea. We take them overseas to do market research and to connect them with potential clients. And at the end of the programme, we also support the afterwards through our global networks. And the reason we're doing this is, it's not just about giving opportunities to creative businesses in our ecosystem. It actually has driven innovation and innovative thinking in our core business. For example, when we had VR teams from last year asking our digital collections team for our 3D models, the collections team had to turn around and say, oh, we don't even have a 3D scanner. No, we haven't started thinking about that.
A lot of the cohort from last year, we've done deals with and we're using in different ways inside the museum. We take a small equity stake in exchange for the $20,000 cash we give them to give them noodle money for the four months during the programme, and for the value of the programme overall. And the relationship that we have with them on going, again, is helping to strengthen what we're doing in our core business. That's sort of what we do while they're in there. Excio, which is a team that's been a lot in the news just in the last few weeks, have created a mobile app that enables owners of content to connect with audiences on their own mobile devices through Google Play as the storefront.
The impact of digital, and you know I haven't talked a lot about the emerging tech side, but it's horses for courses. It's which tech solves the right problem. We've grown digital visits to Te Papa 22% over the last year, and that's about having responsive mobile technology. And it's about creating content people expect to see from us. We use Lean, Agile and design thinking product development processes, and that has been adopted not only from digital but actually back into other areas of the business as well. We've been running Google Design sprints for our exhibition development teams, and that is accelerating the process of actually conceptualising exhibitions.
Audience insights are absolutely key, and we've started using platforms to create much better user experience and consistency for both our digital product that's in the gallery, but also available online as well. And the thing I'd say too about open by default is, thinking about GOAL. We recently, for instance, decided to create a commons open licence. All of our scientific images for use by researchers, because we find if it's not available in collections online and people can find it, then it's as if it doesn't exist.
I've lost the image there, but it was a shot of Mahuki. Yeah, everything's impossible till somebody does it. Thank you.