Herb wrote:
The last lesson of Bob Pease, may well be as suggested in the title of the article: "What is this stuff, anyhow?". What's to be done - if anything - with artifacts of technical work and products? Do they have value? What do they mean? Can they inform us, or simply amuse us, or do they just get in the way?
On 8/26/2019 4:01 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
This is why, when giving museum tours, I focus hard on explaining the "so what" instead of technical specifications. Other than storage (how many of these doodads are needed to make one modern memory cards), most of our visitors couldn't care less about speed, memory, or whatever else. They want to know what is this thing and why should I care. If you don't make that point early, then you lose them.
So Evan, what works for the visitors you describe?
It depends. I welcome them, ask if they've been here before, find out if they're techies or normal people :), and size up the situation from there. Sometimes I ask if they want a tour or if they just want to look around. Other times I push into one choice or the other. Basically I try to get a sense of who they are and what's the best way to entertain+inform them. The hardest situation is when a group has one engineer, one non-techie with mild interest, one teenage kid, and one toddler ... how do you pick the best thing for all four of them? That type of thing happens a lot. One thing I * always * do is pick the youngest child or the uninterested spouse and tell them their job is to make sure everyone else in their party doesn't touch anything! It works great. I could go into a lot more detail/examples, but it would be threadjacking.