Here is a record of my visit to the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. There were 22 objects I liked enough to collect and I made 3 things myself. (Favorites: poster, staircase model.) I will be able to remember these things forever because of The Pen.

The Pen is a new thing at the Cooper Hewitt. My buddy Aaron Straup Cope was one of its creators. It’s pretty simple to use. When you visit the museum they loan you a fancy digital pin, on a lanyard. You point it at the labels for objects you like. You can also use it to design things on big computer screen tables. When you’re done you can visit the website on your ticket any time to see your collection. Unlike 90% of fancy museum technologies, this one actually works. It's used a lot. It’s designed to keep working for many years.

Aaron and his colaborator Seb Chan wrote a very long essay on the design of The Pen. It’s totally worth reading if you are interested in this kind of technology. But for the tl;dr crowd, a few key points.

• The pen is the smart component with the powered computer. The wall tags are passive NFC beacons. That is backwards from what I would have guessed and it’s that way for good reasons.

• Every object in the Cooper Hewitt has a unique identifier and an entry in a database. The museum has an API for accessing that database. Aaron's mystical belief in the power of integer IDs is justified. The ID is the bolt that connects the museum’s curation expertise to the rest of the world.

• Building complex tech that will work reliably in a real museum for many years is difficult.

The impressive thing to me is how simply all the tech worked without requiring you to understand or learn it. I wasn’t too excited about the design-your-own-objects part, but the tool for remembering the stuff I liked was excellent. I do wonder if there’s a simpler way to just build the collection product, something between this fancy three year project and simply adding some ugly QR-code stickers. Any new system designed for a museum will be well informed by The Pen.