When he took the job, the museum had already received a $10 million gift from the Maltz Family Foundation to create Gallery One, a large space near the entrance to the museum that would offer some particularly flashy uses of technology — and also train visitors to use the iPad app as they moved through the rest of the building. In the initial plan for Gallery One, artworks were going to have screens mounted in front of them. That concerned Mr. Franklin, as did the sense was that Gallery One would become what he called a “high-tech ghetto,” a place for showing off a lot of gee-whiz effects that had no follow-up elsewhere in the encyclopedic, 100-year-old museum.

So Mr. Franklin began working with curators to fill Gallery One not with second-rate art (or worse, reproductions) but with some of the museum’s best pieces. And he brought in Local Projects, a Manhattan firm, to rethink the digital displays.

“We surprised the museum, because we’re the technology firm and we proposed eliminating three-fourths of the technology,” said Jake Barton, the 40-year-old president of Local Projects. Mr. Barton said his goal was to “create something where if you’d never been in a museum before you’d be intrigued, and if you’ve been to many museums you’d still feel comfortable.”

In January, Gallery One opened to the public with just half a dozen touch screens, mounted unobtrusively on podiums. Look into a camera, make a face, and the screen displays pieces from the museum with similar facial expressions. If there’s a serious point, it’s that for thousands of years artists, despite differing media and styles, have conveyed similar human emotions.

Another screen lets you take the elements of a large tapestry depicting the myth of Perseus, and rearrange them in either comic book or movie-trailer format. Though the process is fun, Mr. Barton said the point was a serious one: getting people to understand the purpose of the tapestry as “a storytelling machine.” A few feet away, you can take elements of Picasso’s “Still Life With Biscuits” and rearrange them, on a touch screen, into a new composition.

Though the museum expected the young to be drawn to the screens, Mr. Franklin said it was older users who — once they figured out the technology — seemed to have the most fun with it. On a recent afternoon, Suzanne Cooper, 59, was working on moving items from the s0-called Collection Wall to her iPad. “I’m a bit overwhelmed, but I’m determined to get it,” said Mrs. Cooper.