The Codebreakers. Digital infrastructures in everyday life
As a public memory institution dedicated to the critical mediation and reflection of technical developments and their socio-political impact, the project team at the Technisches Museum Wien (TMW) asked itself the following questions: How can museums create the basis for a future understanding of the impact of technology on society in times of digital change? How can museums increase the accessibility of digital technologies in everyday life and/or critically question them? How do we turn the museum into an "institutional friend" to whom individual experiences in everyday life with digital infrastructures can be entrusted, and how do we communicate these to a broad public without violating the protection of privacy? How do we define and collect functionality?
The overriding premise in approaching all of these questions was human-centred positioning and evaluation in the sense of digital humanism. The focus was on the exemplary investigation of the handling of digital infrastructures, their everyday use and how much we can and/or must trust them - namely on the basis of an ATM that was in use until 2017 and has since been a collection object at the TMW. In the context of interviews and two think tanks with users and international experts, we developed possible strategies in a transdisciplinary exchange in order to keep (historical) software functional for the benefit of authentic interpretation. The results led to a strategic roadmap and are incorporated into the digital collection strategy of the recently founded Software Collection at TMW. www.technischesmuseum.at/museum/research_institute/software_collection/the_codebreakers Partners: aBITpreservation, TU Wien, Payment Services Austria, Salzburger Banken Software