Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Magic Pen

Such an amazing museum.

Such a great idea the interactive pen.

Here's more about the pen:

The new interactive Pen further enhances the your experience by letting you “collect” and “save” objects from around the galleries. Carry it in your hand tethered with a convenient wrist strap—it is always ready when you need it.

You receive your Pen with your admission ticket which contains a dedicated web address corresponding to your visit. To collect objects, simply press the flat end of the Pen to any museum label. Transfer your collections to the interactive tables to explore them in more detail or add more objects. At home or on your mobile device visit cooperhewitt.org/you and enter the code printed on your ticket—everything you collected and created will be waiting for you! Come back to the museum and keep building your collection, or share it with your friends.

And how it was developed:

Asked by Cooper Hewitt to come up with a visitor technology that emphasized play and spoke to the specificities of a design museum, the concept for the Pen originated from Local Projects working with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The Pen was pitched as a way to invite visitors to learn about design by designing themselves. Beyond working as a tool for drawing, it would encourage visitors to engage with the works on view in the museum, rather than looking at them through the small screen of the more traditional approach of a ‘museum App’.

The Pen combines two main technologies. Its interface with the interactive tables employs the sort of conductive materials common to touchscreen styli. Its interface with the object labels employs near-field communication technology. A sensor in the end of the Pen reads the information on small NFC tags embedded in the object labels. This information is stored in the Pen’s onboard memory and can be read at the interactive tables.

Using the large, ultra-high-definition screens on tables designed by Ideum, visitors may explore and manipulate the objects they have collected, discover related objects in Cooper Hewitt’s collection, retrieve contextual information, learn more about designers, design processes and materials, watch and share videos and even sketch their own designs.

 I've gone back several times to look at what I really liked. Most of the pictures I post will include those items as well.

What a great edition to a visit.