Museum 2.0

More Delightful Secrets: How Much Space Would You Give to an Exclusive Subset of your Audience?

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:07:00 +0000

A month ago, I wrote about the pleasure of secret, exclusive places in cultural venues, and many of you wrote in with stories of your own. Last week in Denmark, I experienced two more delightful hidden treasures, and they led me to this simple question: how much space and money would you devote to providing an exclusive experience within your institution?

Let me explain. I visited two museums in which resources were devoted to experiences that only a tiny fraction of the visiting public would consume. In both cases, these exclusive experiences were wonderful surprises. Were these underutilized wastes of space or special places for the special visitors?

My first experience was at the Experimentarium, a science center just north of Copenhagen. The Experimentarium offers an impressive mobile phone-based activity called Ego Trap which transforms a two-hour visit into a narrative, social game. Ego Trap uses voice and text messages to immerse visitors in a research study carried out by mysterious hosts, who entreat them to use certain exhibits, answer questions, and perform multi-person challenges as part of the elusive study. Eventually (spoiler!), players realize that a hacker has gotten into the system, and they must choose whether to side with the scientists behind the study or the hacker. Visitors who choose the hacker approach a secret door, marked STAFF ONLY. They input a code into their phones and the door unlocks to reveal the headquarters of the science research study: a dark lair filled with electronic equipment and... rats' nests. The scientists running the study were in fact rats out to enslave humans and turn them into lab animals! The rats' HQ challenges visitors to tackle a final game to escape successfully from the rats' lair.

This game, and the secret room that hosts it, is only available to the tiny fraction of people who play Ego Trap and make it all the way to the conclusion of the game (which takes about 2 hours). I was only able to access it because a staff member was touring us through and gave us the behind-the-scenes look. As my husband said, that secret room with its mousy trappings was "the coolest part of the whole museum." Is this an example of a powerful reward for highly engaged visitors, or a missed opportunity for more visitors to see the Experimentarium as full of secrets and mystery?

As a second example, we later sojourned north to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, a lovely art museum surrounded by incredible grounds on the seashore. At one point, we strolled out a non-descript door from the cafe to examine an outdoor sculpture. Beyond the sculpture, we noticed a path, and then a gate. Uncertain whether we were leaving the museum's grounds, we wandered through the gate and into a magical enclave that included a mist-covered pond, a wavy slide, and several art installations--whimsical huts of all kinds. While the museum and the main grounds were packed, this large and beautiful outdoor area was virtually deserted--not surprising given how hard it was to find.

In both of these museums, our favorite experiences came when we stumbled onto or were let into these secret, exclusive places. We felt a special kind of ownership of these spaces that we had discovered. We were like the early explorers, delighting in our own cleverness, ignoring evidence that these places had been previously discovered by other worthy trekkers (and of course, created by their designers).

It's very hard for a museum to justify dedicating space and resources to something that will remain unmarked and unadverstised. Especially in the case of Louisiana, which was packed with people, we were shocked that such a beautiful part of the grounds were kept "private" when it could have been occupied by many happy visitors. But these were also the most memorable parts of our visits, the aspects I felt compelled to share with friends and family--and with people like you.

Could your institution include an intentional set of hidden surprises, a secret "extra level," or just a hidden door to a small experience? Would you be willing to exclude the majority to give a small group a sense of specialness that might not be otherwise attainable? What's the business argument for doing so, and how much space and money might be usefully employed in such a manner?

Quick Poll: Progress on the Book and a One-Question Poll

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Hi folks. This is just a quick post to update you on the status of my book on design for participation in cultural institutions. Three items worth noting:

I completed the entire draft manuscript. I'm currently slowly uploading the new text to the wiki, and it will all be there for you to review, edit, and explore by the end of this week.
I've retained Jennifer Rae Atkins, superlative graphic lady, to create the cover art and illustrations for the book.
The current schedule is to complete content development by the end of the year, copy-edit and layout in January, and go into final layout and production in February. You should be able to hold a book in your hand in March 2010.

I promise this blog will not be overly book-oriented in the coming months; in fact, I hope to get back to a more regular blogging schedule now that the creative work on the book is mostly completed.

But for now, I have one simple task I hope you can help me with: naming the book. Please fill out the one-question poll below to share your thoughts on the most effective title. And thanks!

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Reflections on MuseumNext and Facilitating Brainstorming

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:05:00 +0000

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext, a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. It was held in Newcastle in the north of England, and about 70 folks from around the world (but mostly Europe) came to play, learn, make stuff, and help each other work out challenges inherent in trying to make risky ideas happen. Thank you to everyone who came and helped co-create an exciting experimental event in a beautiful city.

MuseumNext had four main sections:

Interactive activities, including an opening workshop with a group of designers associated with an extremely wonderful exhibition called Doing it for the Kids featuring sustainable toy designs. Participants sewed sock aliens, injection-molded army men, constructed robots, and drew animals. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.
"Wild idea" sessions, featuring six dream projects, some already in motion, others firmly ensconsed in their creators' heads. Folks from the Utah Museum of Natural History, Worcester City Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, Centre for Life, Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany) brought projects they wanted to make happen, and each worked with a group of about 10 other participants for about four hours over the course of the two days to work out plans and ideas to move the projects along. The projects ranged from activating a dead collection to developing a mystery game around a strange artifact to developing a hackerspace to planning for massive changes to institutions new and old. Click any link above to see the video from the initial pitch and final report from each group.
Unconference sessions, featuring topics as diverse as "playing an ARG" (with real labyrinth adventures), "engaging visitors who were dragged to the museum," and "measuring and defining success in participatory projects." We only did two rounds of these, but they were very active and I think a lot of people were surprised to find them so useful even though they were organized on the spot.
Facilitator bits. I gave an hour-long talk about participatory design practices (video here), and Jim gave a small tour of an exhibition he had organized nearby. We also had quite an extensive reporting-out session at the end with the Wild Idea session leaders sharing what they had learned and where they would go next. I was thrilled to frequently hear, "I started out thinking X, but my group convinced me Y."

To me, the greatest value of MuseumNext was the Wild Idea sessions, but they were also the component that I would most revise in a future incarnation of this kind of event. On the positive side, the Wild Idea sessions allowed people to do something that is usually very expensive: get outside perspectives and support on their projects. I was very interested in the way an event like this can effectively flip the standard model for brainstorming with outsiders; rather than each project leader paying individuals to come help work on their project, everyone paid to come and help each other. While the program still involved money and travel, to my eyes, it was much more efficient to bring together a large group of smart people, let them pick the projects they thought they could both contribute to and learn from, and then let them go at it. I'd like to see larger conferences incorporating an element like this--a structured opportunity for people to brainstorm with those who are outside their own personal networks.

That said, the phrase "structured opportunity" is where MuseumNext suffered most. While Jim and I explained clearly to Wild Idea proposers what they needed to do to submit their project for consideration before MuseumNext, we didn't give them enough support in actually facilitating their group brainstorming at the event. The groupwork was not easy; few participants knew each other or the institutions in question before showing up the first night. I realized too late that brainstorming with strangers is something I'm used to, but it's not inherent in the job descriptions of most museum collections managers, educators, and researchers who were leading the groups. Everyone worked hard and did do a fabulous job, but we had the typical problems with unbalanced participation, people getting confused or frustrated, and overall project time management.

And so I would like to offer a public apology for this, and to share with you some of the lessons of facilitating brainstorming that I have learned over many years of successful and not so successful workshops. I tried to help workshop leaders work some of these in on the fly, but that put unreasonable stress on them. I'm sorry. You did great.

To remedy this error, here are four things I've learned about facilitating brainstorming sessions. They sound obvious, but several took me years to figure out.

Vary the activities. I like to incorporate talking, writing, and doing/making into workshops. This both breaks up the time and supports participants who feel most comfortable expressing themselves in different ways. By varying activities, you can involve everyone without putting quieter participants on the spot--instead, you find the activity where they shine. This started for me when I worked with a group that included some very vocal and very quiet folks - we used worksheets to balance out the skills and avoid always favoring the big talkers. And I'm a really active person, itchy if sitting too long, so I like to add in some physical exercises to get people moving (and, where reasonable, engaging with visitors). If you need a source for good activities, there's a world of training methodologies on the web.
Give a schedule and list of target goals, even if you don't entirely stick to it. People like to feel that they are making progress, and if you can "check things off the list" as a group, it helps everyone stay focused and motivated.
If you are working for several hours, slot it over two days. In my experience, one-day brainstorming sessions for new projects leave some people a bit uneasy because it moves so quickly. They feel like things are getting "decided" before they can really think things through. Sleeping on it often brings people back on day two focused, confident, and ready to work. At MuseumNext, we used this model, and while many people left on the first night in some form of despair, they were amazed at how everything came together on day two. I've seen this bear out in many kick-off meetings for projects, and that's why if you call me about a one-day workshop, I'll probably ask for two.
Always start and end with something creative. This may reflect my bias towards doing, but I find that if you get people doing something a bit silly, they get out of normal patterns and hangups and are more willing to think broadly. Also, how people feel at the beginning and end of a workshop significantly impacts how they feel about the overall event. At MuseumNext, these creative bits were the design workshop and the Exquisite Corpse activity, but I've done everything from social games to zombie yoga (seriously).

What do you find helpful in facilitating brainstorming on new projects with diverse group members? If you were at MuseumNext, what else can you share about the event to help others understand what you got out of it?

Please Don't Send Me to My Personal Webpage

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:15:00 +0000

Yesterday, I visited the Experimentarium, a science center just north of Copenhagen in Denmark. There were many intriguing exhibits and a novel cellphone game (more on that in another post), but I was particularly interested in their new special exhibition on the brain. This exhibition uses RFID tags to allow visitors to save their work throughout the space--something that many institutions have been experimenting with for almost ten years now. And while the Brain exhibition has some qualities that were significantly improved over other RFID-enabled exhibitions (better scanning of the tags, more content-rich personalized welcome screens, effective timeouts if you walked away, a semi-useful group option to accommodate families), it offered an output mechanism that is dated and downright frustrating: the personal webpage.

Many institutions that are pursuing online/onsite experience connections have lighted on the personal webpage as THE way to deliver post-visit experiences. Here's the basic idea: while you are at the museum, you save digitizable content--either content you make (photos of yourself) or content you collect (museum-supplied text or media of interest). When you get home, you type a long code into a web browser or receive an email with a link. Go to that link, and you will find a custom webpage featuring all of the assets you saved or made onsite.

The personal webpage has many adherents, and some institutions, like The Tech Museum in San Jose, have been offering them for almost a decade. There are some obvious positives to this strategy. It provides visitors with a "special place" for their content, which is both highly customized to their experience and out of view from other visitors to the museum's website. But these positives are outweighed by a glaring negative: these personal webpages are (usually) an experiential dead end. They provide the bare bones of what you've created in a totally decontextualized way, outside the infrastructure of other institutional digital content and outside the social context of other visitors. These pages often look barren. They don't live in an ecosystem of other experiences. They display the assets you've created and beyond that, nothing but a link to the institution's main website.

This makes for a very low-engagement post-visit experience. For example, check out this personal webpage I produced with my partner, Sibley, at the Experimentarium yesterday. We swiped our RFID tags all over the Brain exhibition to save our actions, scores, and preferences. We spent time on a digital profile-building activity that required us to enter many fields, including name, age, gender, and four screens of subjective questions about how we think (so much that our friend Nynne didn't do it because it was taking so long). Given all of the time commitment we were asked to put into the tag system onsite, I assumed that when we got home, we'd get some kind of personal profile that showed what we'd done, how it mapped to our profiles and our behavior relative to each other or other visitors to date.

Instead, we each got a basic set of text recommendations to cultivate our brains, against a psychedelic background that provides links to the exhibition's webpage but no substantial ties between our experience and the exhibition content, or even with each other. In some cases, we were provided with the same results we saw onsite (Sibley's time in a learning curve activity... not sure what happened to mine), but onsite, we were able to explore that data relative to other visitors to date, whereas the webpage just provides a static image. At the bottom of the page, there's an option to "remove my personal data" (please don't click this) - and I found myself staring at it semi-incredulous that this impersonal website had anything to do with the data I had generated onsite.

I will not be using this webpage to dig deeper. I will not be coming back to it for more in the future. While it has generated a single click from an email to the web (and many more clicks if you check it out), it has not sent me down the road towards a deeper relationship with the content, the exhibition, or the institution. It didn't even let Sibley and I laugh at how we compared to each other! It's an outpost for some cheap content, and that's immediately obvious to me when I get there.

The Tech's system is barely better in what is provided, offering a glimpse into the actual exhibits you visited and the content (mostly photos) you took onsite. But again, this content is not connected either to more content nor to other visitors. I'd love to see my thermal camera shot in a gallery of many thermal camera shots, and learn from how other visitors used the camera to generate strange images. Instead, I just get my narcissistic output, which may be a reasonable souvenir but is little else.

How can museums improve on this personal webpage strategy?
Contextualize the output with more content. There are some museums which, instead of giving you your content on a bare webpage, create an "account" for you on a more dynamic and content-rich site. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Take Action website does this. Associated with a small exhibition on genocide in which visitors can make personal pledges (extensive coverage here) that are digitally tracked, the website allows visitors to "log in" with their pledge number to access custom content--but that content is layered into the multi-media site rather than living in a barren online outpost. This means that visitors are encouraged to keep exploring the rich content on the site related to genocide, rather than checking out their creations and then closing the page.

Contextualize the output socially. It's perhaps even better (and cheaper) to wrap visitors' digital creations in a social enviroment than to do so with authoritative content. You don't even need your own platform to do this. Exhibits that produce content that goes to social websites like YouTube or Flickr are automatically presented in relation to other visitors' productions. When you make a video in the Mattress Factory's iConfess booth, it shows up on the iConfess YouTube channel. When you augment a photo in the Chicago History Museum's Get Lincolnized! system, your image becomes part of a Flickr stream. This allows each visitor to see her actions in the context of what others have done, and to become part of a light "community" of participants.

The Holocaust Museum's Take Action website incorporates this social context with a digital display allowing online and onsite visitors to browse pledges made and see their own words amongst those of others. Particularly for activities that emphasize the collective power of many individuals working toward the same goal, showing how each visitor's action is connected to the larger effort is essential.

Finally, if visitors are saving their activities in competitive environments like games, being able to see your score relative to others--either in your party or overall--is incredibly engaging. Imagine the return visit potential if the institution could automatically send visitors online alerts that someone else has bumped their top score off the chart, or if it challenged dad to try a comeback game against mom next month.

Motivate further active engagement. Remember, the people who chose to produce content onsite--to track themselves, to play games, to make pledges, to mess with their photos--were drawn specifically to active participatory experiences. They may not be the same people who are driven to read or consume lots of authoritative content on a topic. And so while some may appreciate deeper content experiences based on their initial entries, more may seek further ways to actively engage with the institution. If visitors make stop-motion animations at the museum and come back to the web to view them, why not provide a tool or links to places where you can make really complex animation products (which can also then be shared with the visitor community)? If visitors make pledges to reduce waste or stop genocide, why not provide more activities for them to do and ways to track them? I worked with the Boston Children's Museum on a project called Our Green Trail (check it out!) that encourages visitors who play games at the museum related to green behaviors to keep doing those behaviors and playing associated games online in a social virtual world. In this way, Our Green Trail tries to keep people motivated and focused on the activities that initially attracted them while opening up more and more content and social experiences to fuel continued action, in their own lives and on museum visits.

What online/onsite connections have you seen that work particularly well or poorly? What do you want from the digital component to your next cultural experience?

Great Conversationalists: Reflections on Being a Dial-a-Stranger

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:02:00 +0000

The afternoon of September 24 was hectic. I called in to participate in a radio show in Seattle, then zoomed downtown for meetings, after which I headed home to cook for a dinner party. I had everything timed to the minute, and was just getting into the chopping zone when my partner yelled that I had a call. I ran in and picked up the phone, fully intending to quickly dispatch whoever was on the line and get back to my tight cooking schedule.

What followed, instead, was a 20 minute phone call that changed my day and has had a powerful impression on me since. The call was from Mercedes Martinez and Zachary Kent, the people behind an internet radio show called Dial-A-Stranger.

Dial-A-Stranger is what it sounds like. People sign up to be called by submitting a phone number to be added to a database. Other people submit questions they'd like to have answered by strangers. Mercedes and Zachary pick people randomly out of the database, call them, and ask a contributed question. They edit the conversations into radio shows, which are then made available as a podcast (you can listen to episode featuring me, #89: Museum Secrets, here).

But it's more complicated than that. I've known about Dial-A-Stranger for awhile, but I haven't written about it before because as a listener I don't find the show that compelling. The conversations are often long--20 minutes or more--and Mercedes and Zachary only get to the question at the end of a meandering conversation with the guest. As a listener, I get frustrated that the show isn't more tightly edited, and I wonder who really cares to hear the conversations Mercedes and Zachary have with perfect strangers.

Now that I have been a Dial-A-Stranger, my perspective on this has changed. I still get fidgety listening to the podcast, but now I see it as an artifact of a supremely conducted participatory project rather the sole product of the process. Dial-A-Stranger was one of the best participant experiences I've ever had. It improved my immediate mood and made me feel special in a lasting way. Mercedes and Zachary did all the work with no apparent effort, carrying the conversation in a friendly, positive, interested and interesting way. And they made me appreciate them as superb facilitators as a particular kind of participatory experience: conversation with strangers.

What made Mercedes and Zach such great conversationalists?

They really cared about me. I've written before about how, when designing questions for use with visitors, staff should make sure they genuinely care to hear the answer. Mercedes and Zachary don't even ask their own questions, and yet they demonstrated unbelievable interest in me and my experiences during our conversation. I even made some gaffes--for example, confusing the University of Texas natural history museum with the Utah natural history museum (the "UT" slipped me up)--but they took it in stride, continuing the conversation without embarrassing me. They made me feel comfortable enough to make some dumb jokes and brag a bit--things I'd probably be reticent to do with strangers in most situations.

They started with a good question. Mercedes and Zachary have a formula to the beginning of their calls. They call in the evening, announce themselves, and then ask, "how was your day?" This is a great question because it is comfortable and open-ended. Everyone has answer to this question, and in the context of a show like Dial-A-Stranger, few people give a one-word answer like "fine." They want to explain themselves, to assert some aspect of their identity (consciously or unconsciously) that then drives the conversation. When I answered their question with a response about work, we spent the rest of the call talking museums, but I suspect if I had talked about moving the woodpile, we would have just as easily continued on that vein.

They listened, responded, and shared. Mercedes and Zach aren't just interrogators; they also shared their own reflections and stories throughout our conversation. We never would have talked about taxidermy (and the basement I shared with dead animals at the Boston Museum of Science) if they hadn't started talking about their local natural history museum. They never steered the conversation in a direction that was jarring or expressed a disinterest in what I was saying; instead, they kept building on a shared experience, validating and querying and scheming, which made me feel like we were in cahoots together rather than having a typical interviewer/interviewee relationship. By the time they got to the actual question at the end of the conversation, I was ready to share personal stories with them and did so enthusiastically.

Of course, all of this greatness is still coupled by the problematic feeling that the product of the conversation--the podcast--is not (for me) a great audience experience. But now I wonder if I was too literal in seeing the only product as the stranger's stories. I've learned to listen in a more nuanced way and to appreciate the skill with which Mercedes and Zachary draw out their guests, who are after all perfect strangers. And there are other products as well: the database, the conversations, the questions and the people behind them. The podcast is take it or leave it, and there are probably people out there who love hearing the relationships Mercedes and Zach build with strangers in a short time over a phone line. I know I hear them differently now that I engaged in one, sort of like how you see art differently if you make it.

When I asked Zachary why they don't edit the shows more tightly to focus on the questions and answers, he explained that they sometimes do edited shows, or shows borne from conversations at live events, or shows that focus on voicemails received on their line. I listened to a couple of voicemail shows and found them more quirky but less satisfying in terms of their depth, and I can see why from Mercedes and Zachary's perspective it might be most valuable to engage in longer conversations with people. He commented that, "When we started this it was an experiment to see what would happen so we thought up a lot of ways that Dial A Stranger might work and we've been trying them. As the show grows and changes we grow and change how we do it and make different kinds of shows along the way."

And so I wonder--in which direction can and should Dial-A-Stranger grow? Should Mercedes and Zachary train others as hosts, to support more conversations and provide more people with transformative experiences as participants? Should they experiment audially with ways to produce an audience-facing podcast that better conveys that transformation? What would you do with this kind of project?

And even if you don't have an answer to that question, I encourage you to sign up with Mercedes and Zachary, be a stranger, and let us know what you think.

Why Are So Many Participatory Experiences Focused on Teens?

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:51:00 +0000

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. A large number of the collaborative projects of which I'm aware (in which staff partner with community members to co-develop exhibits or programs) are initiated with teens. Even the most traditional museums often manage educational programs in which teens develop their own exhibits, produce youth-focused museum events, or provide educational experiences for younger visitors. And while I enjoy working with youth and consuming their creations as a museum visitor, I'd like to call into question the idea that they are or should be the primary audience for participatory experiences.

Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? I see four main reasons:

Most participatory experimentation in museums starts in educational departments, and many educators primarily engage (and are funded to work with) students. Teens are a known (and somewhat controllable) entity.
Teens are developmentally focused on social identity-building and may feel more compelled to share their voices and express themselves than others than other visitors.
Teens are perceived as more interested in technology-mediated experiences and more familiar with social technologies in particular than their adult counterparts.
Teens are perceived as an audience that is particularly disaffected and hard to reach, and institutions are continually seeking new techniques that might connect them to core content experiences.

The first of these reasons is practical. The other three are cultural, and I'm not sure how accurate they are. Teens are certainly not the only people who like to express themselves and engage socially through technology. There are plenty of people who don't feel compelled to visit museums, but teens' disinterest may be more immediately evident because droves of students are forced to visit museums on field trips (whereas adult non-visitors are invisible). The challenge of engaging disaffected visitors is not teen-specific, and the potential for participatory techniques to address this challenge need not be limited to this audience.

Here are four reasons I think that cultural institutions should look more broadly at potential audiences for participatory experiences:

While teens are heavy social media users, they may not be the right audience for content-focused social experiences. Teens more commonly use the Web to stay in touch with their pre-existing social groups than to join new communities based on content affinities or interests. As researcher Danah Boyd has pointed out, teens spend time on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks because that's where their friends are. This means that teens are not necessarily more savvy or more interested than other groups in engaging in communities of practice around content experiences. Users active in online social environments based on social objects like Flickr (photography), Ravelry (knitting), and Wikipedia (information) often trend older. Presumably, cultural institutions are more interested in providing opportunities for people to participate with and around content than providing venues for pre-existing friend groups to hang out, and this suggests reaching out to a broader audience.
If your activity is compelling because it involves gimmicky new technology, it's not a good activity. In several instances, I've heard about new gadgets and handhelds that are targeted at teens because of their novelty. While some youth (and adults) may be seduced by sexy technology, is that really the reason you want people to engage with your content experiences? I'm working on one cellphone-based game project that was originally conceived as being focused towards teens because, the thinking goes, teens like using their cellphones. In the end, we've developed a program that uses phones in such a simple way that the client is now talking excitedly about how much fun seniors are going to have playing the game. Complex technology integration may appeal more to some audiences than others, but it's denigrating to suggest that teens will engage just because an experience involves something shiny that beeps.
Teens are already frequently engaged as active participants in museums, and while they are a good starting point, focusing on them may have less significant institutional returns than expanding to other audiences. I suspect that one reason teens are often a core audience is that museums are already comfortable providing participatory experiences to youth in the form of camps, internships, and classes. It's potentially easier and more in-line with standard institutional practice to add a new special kind of internship or camp that focuses on teens contributing or collaborating on production of new content under the guise of youth outreach. For example, the National Building Museum offers an excellent summer program called Investigating Where We Live (IWWL), in which thirty local teens work with museum staff for four weeks to create a temporary exhibition of photographs and creative writing about a neighborhood of D.C. The program is coordinated and directed by staff, who select the neighborhood for the season, provide photography and writing instruction, and generally shepherd the project to completion. The program operates like a camp that is co-led by the teens involved. While this program is wonderful, it's very enclosed within the "youth education outreach" activities of the museum, and doesn't necessarily push other staff members in design or curatorial to consider integrating community members into their exhibit development processes. Also, from the teen perspective, while IWWL is a unique and valuable experience, participants may not differentiate it from any other ways they engage with the museum. This means that it may have less impact on their perception of and relationship to the institution overall, as compared to the potential impact on audiences with whom there are no pre-existing collaborative relationships. Imagine if instead of working with teens at the museum, IWWL was conducted as a collaborative project with mixed-age residents of the neighborhoods to be exhibited. IWWL would undoubtably get more complicated (and potentially harder to fund), but it might connect the National Building Museum with a much broader community of locals who care deeply about their neighborhoods and have more varied prior relationships with the museum.
Teens are not the only people with stories to tell. Teens may be particularly drawn to self-expression, but that doesn't mean that their contributions are any better than those of others. Because of their comfort with expressive technologies, teens are low-hanging fruit when it comes to participatory projects, but again, the impact of participatory experiences on them (and on other museum audiences) may be lower than that on participants with less access or ability to share their stories, skills, and memories. I'd like to see more multi-generational participatory projects in which young people are employed as staff or volunteers to help older audiences contribute their own content. Museums are not in the business of giving anyone who wants one a soapbox. Cultural institutions should be deliberate about setting up opportunities for communities of interest to participate, whether those be artists or amateur astronomers, veterans or housekeepers, gardeners or genealogists. The more thoughtfully we design participatory platforms, the broader our opportunities to use them to work with the visitors and audiences who matter most to us.

What do you think? Is it a problem or a great starting point to focus on participatory experiences with teens?

Avoiding the Community Manager Superstar

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:32:00 +0000

Every time a colleague tells me her museum has just hired a "community person," a part of me cringes. I whole-heartedly support the goals that motivate the hire--to connect with visitors online and onsite in more meaningful relationships--but I worry about focusing such a broad mandate into the tiny point of a single individual.

When community managers are the sole masters of their own dominions, two problems arise. First, their efforts are not fully integrated into the overall work and focus of other staff, which can lead to conflicts between institutional and community needs. And second, the communities they manage often become unhealthily centered on the managers' personalities and abilities, causing problems if those community managers ever choose to leave.

I've been this community manager and know these problems first-hand. When I was at The Tech Museum developing and leading the Tech Virtual community, I tried to involve a wide range of staff members in the online exhibit development community, so that we could spread out the interactions and relationships built between amateurs and experts. But The Tech's management decided that spending time in the online community space was a "waste of time" for staff whose role was not explicitly focused on that community, and the engineers and fabricators who had enthusiastically engaged early on were forbidden to continue. Left on my own, I put on my best cheerleader face and cultivated a couple volunteers to help manage a growing community of amateur exhibit designers. The project was a chaotic experiment in several ways, and because things kept changing, the community had to keep relying on me as their sole source of information about how things would move forward. We started to form unhealthy relationships in which I was the cheerleader, coach, and point person to all community members. While my energy and enthusiasm as a community leader held the group together, once I left at the end of my project, the community fell apart. While subsequent museum staff have kept the project going, the community had connected with me as the focal point, and there has not been a new person who has been able to comparably rally the community to high levels of activity.

I don't tell this story with pride; I tell it with shame. It was partially my fault that the Tech Virtual community did not thrive beyond my tenure. I was a good community manager, but the system we set up to perform that management and cultivate the community was ill-considered. It's a warning sign when community members make comments like, "it was only boundless encouragement from Avi (Nina's Second Life avatar) that prevented me from giving up more than once." This is a person who was one community manager away from leaving the group. It may be easiest to quickly rally a community around one dynamic or charismatic person, but that doesn't make for a healthy, sustaining project.

Why does this happen in the first place? There are two good reasons that organizations tend to focus community activities around a single individual: it consolidates resources spent on a particular strategy, and it simplifies the interaction for community members. Let's look at each of these briefly.

Institutions are accustomed to associating individual staff members with specific projects and associated resources. But community managers, like floor staff managers, are responsible for interacting with a vast and varied group of people who engage with the institution. In one way, they are like development officers who cultivate small, targeted sets of individuals via personal relationships. But they are more importantly the face and voice of the institution to everyone online, a floor staff army of one. This is a problem. If you only had one person who worked the floor of your museum, and he was incredibly charismatic and quirky, you'd appreciate that his personality puts a unique and specific stamp on the onsite experience, one that attracts some visitors and repels others. The same is true for online communities. The more voices there are in the mix, the more the community management team can effectively welcome community members of all kinds. The Science Buzz blog, which is managed by a team of exhibit developers, science writers, and floor staff at the Science Museum of Minnesota, is a good example of diversified community management that models the inclusion of a range of voices and opinions. The Buzz staff even argue with each other in blog comments, modeling a kind of healthy scientific debate that would be impossible for a single community manager to hold (unless she is schizophrenic, which is not a recommended solution to this problem).

But this leads to the concern that diffusing the community "voice" among multiple staff members can generate confusion and frustration for visitors. This is a valid concern, especially on social sites that are not tightly aggregated. On Buzz, for example, every author is part of the same overall blog, so it is not hard to conceptually manage the idea of multiple institutional authors. But on Twitter or Flickr or across multiple blogs, it can be very hard for visitors to understand who exactly they are connecting with. Many museums are attacking this problem by hosting a central "community" or "social" page on their websites (see COSI's or the Brooklyn Museum's) that aggregates all of the Web 2.0 activities managed by museum staff so that visitors can understand at a glance what is available and who directs it.

Many organizations focus on a single individual as the point person for community engagement for clarity. If you do this, make sure that this individual is devoted to the institutional mission and not their own empire-building. If your community is focused around one person, you must plan for succession and think about what will happen if that individual leaves. Even the most well-intentioned community managers may not be able to transfer their unique personality and style to new staff. Imagine the most popular person in a friend group moving away and anointing a new, unknown person to take her place in the social network--it's nearly impossible.

The best community managers are people who effectively manage networks, not celebrity. They help other staff members understand opportunities for connecting with communities of interest, and they provide support and training so that many individuals across the institution can work with their communities in ways that are sensitive to staff abilities and resources. One of the community managers I most admire is Beck Tench at the Museum of Life and Science. During her tenure as director of web experience, Beck has helped staff across the museum start their own projects on several social websites. With the horticulture team, she set up the Flickr Plant Project, in which the scientists upload a single image of a flower with some information per week and then encourage communities of flower-lovers to share their own photos, stories, and questions about the same plant. The animal keepers run their own blog about the crazy hijinks of their furry team. Online social engagement is also intelligently tied into the efforts of the membership, marketing, and exhibit design teams, without Beck having to be the face of each project to the intended audience. Beck even organizes weekly happy hours for staff to promote community internally. And while she tracks and supports all of these projects, Beck's not the queen of any of them from the visitor perspective.

The ideal community manager is more like a matchmaker than a ringmaster. He points visitors to the networks of greatest interest to them and helps staff connect with communities that they want to serve. She is energetic and passionate about serving the needs of the institution's community. It's fine to have a community manager who is the "go to" person, the face of all of the projects, as long as that person is ultimately pointing visitors to other venues for engagement. After all, you don't want everyone who visits your institution to have a relationship with just one person. You want visitors to connect with the stories, experiences, and staff that are most resonant to them. A good community manager can make that happen.

Please Help Make My Book Incredible

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:14:00 +0000

Dear Museum 2.0 readers,

I'm almost done with the first draft of The Participatory Museum: A Practical Guide, a book that explores the theory, practice, and design techniques for involving visitors and community members in the creation and sharing of cultural content. Many of you have offered encouragement and great ideas through the writing process on the development wiki for the book and in the blog posts that are excerpted from the draft. Now I'm reaching out again to all of you to ask for your explicit help.

I am currently writing the first draft of the final chapter of the book, after which I will begin editing and reworking the text. By the end of October, I expect to have a rough edit completed, and that's where you come in. I am looking for assistance with editing, content review, artwork, and formatting. If you are interested in helping in any way, please fill out this form.

Specifically, there are five fun and exciting ways to help with this effort:

Want to spend a little time but don't want to make a big commitment? Go to the wiki, read a bit, and add your comments and suggestions for improvement.
Want to help substantively with the content of the book? Consider filling out this form and signing up as a technical reviewer (more on this below).
Have great illustration or layout skills to share? Doodle on this form and share some of your work.
Are you a crack recreational copy-editor? Offer your help and I will sing your well-punctuated praises!
Are you not ready to help now, but interested in marketing/evangelizing the book when it is available? Sign up now, and I'll contact you in the new year.

Technical Review? What am I getting myself into?

Technical review is not an easy task. Technical reviewers are folks who commit to read the whole draft in November, add lots of comments, questions, and exclamation points, and generally help me improve the content. I expect this to take about 2.5x the amount of time it would take you to just read the draft (which is about 400 pages if it was a typical paperback size).

I'm looking for people who are current, previous, or aspiring practitioners of audience engagement in museums, libraries, zoos, parks, alternative education facilities, and cultural institutions. I'm interested in reviewers from a diversity of institutional types and sizes, and ideally, a diversity of perspectives on the value and utility of participatory projects. I want skeptics and dreamers, freelance hipsters and company lifers. I will select a small group of technical reviewers based mostly on diversity of backgrounds and approaches. You don't have to be someone I know personally to do this, but you do have to explain who you are and why you want to help.

Technical reviewers will receive a copy of the draft manuscript (digital or physical, your choice) to mark up by November 1. I am not focusing on copy-editing at this time, though I won't complain if you want to litter the text with punctuation red marks. Reviewers will be expected to read and critique the entire draft and return their markup to me by December 15 (the earlier, the better). We may have asynchronous dialogue throughout November if you want to engage with me on a particular point or question. I will integrate your comments, redevelop the content, and generally move forward based on your recommendations.

I know this is a big ask, and you should not feel obligated to sign up. In fact, I hope you will only sign up if you feel you have the genuine interest and time to do a full review (or do whatever it is you are offering). Thank you so much for your continued support.

Another Exclusivity Paradox: Secret Gardens, Hidden Museums

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:04:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I gathered a group of creative folks in San Francisco and asked them, "what makes a social venue feel welcoming and friendly to you?" To my surprise, secrecy and exclusivity were at the top of the list. One effused about the bar Bourbon and Branch, where you need a secret code word to gain entry. A woman gushed about Wild Side West's hidden backyard garden area, which includes eclectic statues and cozy corners to curl into. And then there's the Berkeley Ace hardware store, which has a basement lair devoted to model trains.

I had specifically asked about places that feel welcoming, and the responses were about exclusive experiences. What's going on here?

Exclusive places reinforce our identities powerfully. Despite the fact that we often think of welcoming places as being designed "for everybody," the places where we actually feel most welcomed and comfortable are often designed not for everyone but instead feel like they are made just for us. When you find a bar with your favorite song on the jukebox, or a museum room that feels like your grandmother's living room, you suddenly feel a strong affinity and are able to see yourself reflected in the space. In his identity work, John Falk determined that people use cultural institutions to reflect their personal self-concept as learners, social leaders, spiritual pilgrims, hobbyists, and experience seekers. The extent to which an institution can fulfill that self-concept is directly related to how specific and personal the visitor experience is. You never say, "this place is so me" when talking about a generic public space. You say and feel that in spaces that are unusual, distinctive, and in their own way, tailored to your preferences.

Secret places are a pleasure to discover and share. My friends all commented that they love bringing new friends to their favorite secret places; it makes them feel cool and magnaminous at the same time. I know I feel that way about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles; I feel a bit of pride every time I usher a skeptical friend through the non-descript storefront and into a world of strange wonder. Not only do I get to experience the fun of opening the door to something mystical, I get to play porter and grant my friends access as well. Additionally, because I feel like the Museum of Jurassic Technology reflects my self-identity well, I feel like I am letting my friends in on a secret about me as well as a secret gem of Los Angeles. While it sounds paradoxical, I'm more likely to talk about and bring friends to a place I perceive as exclusive than one that is transparent, because I feel like I'm more likely to offer them value by sharing the secret experience.

Secrecy introduces novelty to the visit experience. Entering a secret place has an emotional weight to it that affects the way that visitors approach and use these spaces. Sometimes, as at Bourbon and Branch, the secrecy is ritualized into a simple challenge that allows entering visitors to see themselves as "in the know" and having "earned" entrance into a special place. In other cases, just walking through the dingy, dark hallways that you know lead to your favorite secret spot can give you a feeling of accomplishment, specialness, and anticipation. You earned your private reading tree or library back corner, and each visit continues to confirm your value as a special and clever person.

In a world of over-advertised experiences, understatement can go a long way. Taking pleasure in hidden things increases when you live in an environment where everything is available and highly documented. I'm not surprised that this group, who live in an urban culture where everyone knows the cool new spots, gravitate towards experiences that they perceive as less exposed and perhaps more authentic. Secrecy operates on a scarcity model; if everyone knows about it, it's not as appealing. As knowledge shifts away from a scarcity model and towards one in which information is freely and instantaneously available, experiences are continue to be valued for their exclusivity. In fact, I'd argue that the value of exclusive experiences is increasing and diversifying. While wealthy people have always had access to exclusive experiences (country clubs, art openings), more and more people of other socio-economic classes are clamoring for personalized and exclusive experiences as an alternative to the mass-market, one-size-fits-all model.

Of course, the problem with all of this is that it sounds crazy from a business perspective. It may be great for a natural refuge to remain hidden, but that sounds like a disaster for a restaurant or museum. If your institution has a killer roof garden, why wouldn't you promote it? If there's a fabulous mosaic in a dusty third floor reading room, why would you let it sit there unadmired by the masses? And if you make design choices that intentionally keep your experiences secret, aren't you doing a disservice to institutional goals to serve broad audiences?

I think one answer to these questions (not a business answer), and the final reason we love secret places, is that they are a little crazy. They don't fit our expectations. We're used to things that are packaged, lit, and presented in a certain way, and we don't expect trap doors or weird dingy entrances or secret web pages. In 2007, I interviewed digital artist Jason Nelson about his work creating strange games and he talked at length about the beauty of working with hidden things and creating intentional "weirdness." As he put it, "I also think people connect with my stuff because it flirts with failure. How do you make something that’s messy, that isn't polished, that seems almost kind of broken? A lot of the content on the net is so polished. And I think there’s something ingrained in us that wants error."

It's a pleasure to discover an aberration in the system--a secret garden in the city, a hidden museum by a gas station, a cave in the hillside. Designers call these elements "Easter eggs" because they are little gifts that you have to find hidden in the system. Easter eggs are never practical to design, but they bring pleasure both to their designers and to the small percentage of audience who find and are rewarded by them. I hope that we will all continue to design a little more secrecy and weirdness into our work, both for ourselves and for those who love to discover wander the secret garden.

What Easter eggs have you designed into your own work, and what secret places bring you pleasure? Do you feel like secrecy is a problematic design or business proposition, or is the affinity it breeds is worth the exclusive approach?

Frameworks and Lessons from the Public Participation in Science Research Report

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:09:00 +0000

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? This isn't just a rhetorical question. The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. A participant who writes her reaction to an object on an index card is very different from one who donates her own personal effects to be part of an institutional collection, and both of these people are different from one who helps develop a new program from scratch. How do we define and talk about these different kinds of participation? Fortunately, science has a (partial) answer.

Earlier this year, a group of informal science researchers, led by Rick Bonney of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, published an extremely useful report on public participation in science research (PPSR). In this report, the authors describe three specific models for public participation: contribution, collaboration, and co-creation. They provide detailed case studies of projects in each area, including project descriptions, informal science education goals, participant training techniques, and evaluation outcomes. While the evaluation component of the report is focused on the extent to which these various projects promote science learning and behavior change among participants, the rubric of participatory models introduces a language that can be useful to many kinds of institutions and projects.

Models for Participation

Here are the three PPSR models (plus one more I've added):

In the contributory model, visitors are solicited to provide limited and specified objects, actions, or ideas to an institutionally-controlled process.
In the collaborative model, visitors are invited to serve as active partners in the creation of an institutional project which is originated and ultimately controlled by the institution.
In the co-creation model, visitors and the institution work together from the beginning to define the project's goals and to generate the program or exhibit based on community interests.
I would add a fourth model, tentatively called co-option. In the co-option model, the institution turns over a portion of its facilities and resources to support programs developed and implemented by external public groups.

Participation in science research is a good basis on which to develop a framework for participatory models because it is based on a consistent scientific process with many steps. Scientists state a problem, make a hypothesis, develop a test regimen to test the hypothesis, gather data, analyze the results, and make conclusions, which may include stating new problems or hypotheses. This table from the report shows how the different models correlate with participation in different steps of the process.

In citizen science projects, the public is invited to participate in "real science" by working with scientists on projects that benefit from mass participation around the world. But most citizen science projects are contributory; participants collect data based on specifications determined by scientists, to help answer questions posed by scientists. The scientists control the process, steer the data collection, and analyze the results. Unsurprisingly, studies have shown that these kinds of citizen science projects are enormously successful at engaging the public with science but are not successful at exposing participants to the entire scientific process.

For this reason, some citizen science projects are now moving towards collaborative and co-creative models. As in the contributory model, in the collaborative model of citizen science, the scientists still determine the research question and the overall data collection and analysis methodology. However, the public is actively involved in multiple steps of the research process, including collecting data, analyzing results, and drawing conclusions. The scientists and the public participants become partners in the implementation and dissemination of the scientific research, though the research is still led by the scientists.

In the co-creative model for citizen science, the public comes up with a question or issue and then works with scientists to answer the question and suggest solutions. These projects include equal partnership between scientists and participants in all stages of the scientific process, including developing new research questions and regimens for data collection and analysis. In many cases, these projects are initiated based on some community concern, such as issues around local sources of pollution, invasive species, or unsafe consumer products. The community-stated need drives the development, implementation, and dissemination of research activities.

I've added a fourth model to this citizen science typology, one may be more appropriate to facilities like museums than to scientific organizations: co-option. In this model, the public uses institutional facilities or resources to develop and manage projects of their own devising. In some cases, the use of institutional content or facilities is known to the institution; for example, when a museum allows a community group to hold meetings on the premises or develop their own exhibits. But in other cases, people may use institutional resources without the institution's knowledge. For example, programmers may use museum collection database information as the basis for their own software, or game enthusiasts may use the grounds of an institution as a giant playing board for imaginative play. Visitors co-opt institutional facilities every day for their own agendas, whether to impress a date, bond with family, or work on their photography skills. But there are policies that museums control--from open hours to photography rules to digital access--that significantly impact the kinds of co-option that are possible or institutionally supported.

Contribution, collaboration, co-creation, and co-option. In the scientific sphere, these models are progressive since they are based on the number of steps of the scientific process in which participants are involved. Because most PPSR projects are currently contributory, the authors encourage more project leaders to integrate collaborative and co-creative components to increase overall scientific process learning and impact for participants. Wisely, they recommend adding higher-intensity components to existing projects rather than initiating new entirely collaborative or co-creative projects. They point to successful hybrid models of "peripheral participation," in which there is a core group of highly involved participants who work collaboratively with staff to develop new research questions and methodologies and a secondary group of participants who contribute on a more basic level.

In the case of The Tech Virtual, as in some collaborative and co-creative science research projects, the core group of super-participants was self-defined based on personal inclination, which made them more effective than a group pre-selected by staff may have been. However, in at least one collaborative science research project related to forest harvesting, the scientists explicitly recruited a group of non-inclined core participants (harvesters) so that they could connect to a largely inaccessible community of interest. The project had fundamentally different outcomes for these participants, for whom impact ranged from science learning to increased social capital. When projects effectively address pressing community needs, scientists can work effectively with new audiences who may not previously have seen themselves as participants in science.

Applying the Models to Cultural Institutions

When we move to participation with cultural institutions from science research, these four participatory models can no longer be seen as progressive towards a model of "maximal participation." Consider, for example, the difference between a project in which a museum sources exhibit material from visitors (contributory) and one in which the museum works with a small group of outsiders to develop an exhibit (collaborative). If the first project results in an exhibit made entirely of visitors' creations and voices, and the second results in an exhibit that looks more like a "typical" exhibit, which project is more participatory? There are many contributory projects, such as the World Beach Project, that produce entirely user-determined outputs, and some professionals might consider this kind of project to be "more" participatory than a collaborative program like The Tech Virtual, in which users' roles were broader but the outputs more institutionally-defined. And when it comes to co-option, the connection to the institution can often be so light that it is hard to determine whether the participants are engaging "with" the institution at all. For example, in the case of the YouTube meetup at the Ontario Science Centre in 2008, Kevin Von Appen commented that "I'm still wrestling with how the interactions of participants - mainly drinking, dancing, gossiping and shooting video of same squares up with our mission to engage people directly with science and technology..."

What's more participatory, making art or doing research? Developing exhibits or using them to make new media products? Working with the museum or using the museum as a platform to do your own thing? There is no "best" level of participation for museums and cultural institutions overall. Instead, I'm interested in the question of how to understand the diversity of options and determine which models and levels of engagement will be most valuable for different projects, at different institutions, at different times. The PPSR rubric is a great starting point for this conversation.

One last thought on evaluation. The PPSR report is focused on the participant experience and the extent to which participating in science research changes people's understanding of and attitudes towards science. From a museum perspective, I'm more interested in evaluations of the audience experience of participation. I think we are all fairly comfortable with the idea that direct participation enhances participants' connection to institutions, content, and builds skills. The real question is how participatory projects' outcomes impact the broader visitor/consumer experience of the content. In the scientific world, the coherence and quality of participatory outcomes is essential, since most of these projects are based on the premise that participants can contribute data or work of a quality that can be included in professional scientific projects and publications. But in museums, we have no such standard for participatory outcomes, whether for professionals or for wider audiences.

We often get overly focused on the experience of participants, but these people represent a tiny minority of the people whom participatory projects impact. If you work with a community group to co-create an exhibit, that exhibit will be experienced by all of your visitors, not just those who were part of the co-design process. It is not enough to design robust structures to support participants; you must also ensure that the outcome of participation is enjoyable and useful for your greater community as well. I hope we will soon see more institutions evaluating the extent to which participatory projects create outcomes that are valuable, educational, and possibly, differentiable, to broad audiences of visitors.

The World Beach Project: A Creative Contributory Project that Shines

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:04:00 +0000

There are lots of museums (and organizations of all kinds) looking for ways to inspire users and visitors to produce their own content and share it with the institution online. Today, a look at one of the projects I believe does this best--the World Beach Project.

The World Beach Project is managed by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with artist-in-residence Sue Lawty. It launched in October of 2007 with a very simple and understandable idea: to produce a global map of pieces of art made with stones on beaches. The World Beach Project does not exist in the V&A Museum. It doesn't involve visitors coming to the museum at all. It's a project that requires people to do four things that are both simple and complex: go to the beach (anywhere in the world), make a piece of art using stones, photograph it, and then send the photos to the museum via the Web.

The World Beach Project is one of very few online museum projects that has truly "gone viral," enjoying press attention and growing participation from people all over the world. In the first two years of its existence (Oct 2007 - now), the World Beach Project received more than 700 contributions, including submissions from every continent except Antarctica, and submissions continue to come in each day. Run a quick search, and you'll find references to the project in over 1,400 blog posts, mostly from individuals around the world who love art, or beaches, and who share their discovery and delight in the project with their small networks of friends.

What makes the World Beach Project so successful? It's not marketing hype. The project has not had any heavy marketing campaigns or contests associated with it. The artist, Sue Lawty, maintains a blog with her reflections on the project and occasionally celebrates particular contributions, but this blog is fairly contained within the project website and is not a major source of web links. The beach artworks are not on display in the physical V&A galleries, nor will their creators receive prizes. Visitors to the website can't even comment on the photos or mark them as favorites. These are not shareable objects beyond the beachcombers who tread the same shores and the people who light upon this part of the V&A's website. The act of making art, and the recognition on a simple website, are the only rewards.

And yet this reward, mixed with an intelligent project design, are enough to make this project attractive to people all over the world. The ask is clear, the activity is compelling, and the display of contributions is simple and inspires greater participation. Let's look at how each of these aspects--the ask, the activity, and the display--contribute to the overall success of the project.

The ask is clear.

The World Beach Project doesn't have a flashy website or fancy animations. It features three parts: very clear instructions on how to participate, a map of all of the contributions to date, and photos of the contributions. The simple statement "I want to add my beach project to the map" is always accessible and obvious in the upper corner of the map, allowing inspired consumers to quickly transition into participants.

While contribution may take many steps, the website instructions are written to make contribution as simple and painless as possible, using phrases like "it is really easy to join in" to convey in everyday language welcome and support for would-be participants. The World Beach Project also uses the classic format of encouraging visitors to the site to browse the content before participating, which encourages people to view model content and further understand how they might be able to contribute. Beach art is democratic, and while Lawty, a professional artist, modeled the activity by making beach sculptures of her own, the artistic endeavor required to be successful is attainable by anyone, and participants didn't need encouragements or instructions to know how to make beach sculptures.

Each contributor is required to submit her name, the location of the beach, the year of the creation, a photo of the finished artwork, and a brief statement about how the work was made. Contributors can also optionally upload two additional photos: one of the beach and one of the work in process. The process is well-designed to remind participants what will be asked of them and how to meet the criteria, and the V&A provides participants with legal terms and conditions explaining that you are granting the museum a non-exclusive license to your contributed content. While the terms are written in legalese and may not be understandable to all participants, I appreciate the V&A's placement of the terms out in the open (rather than asking you to agree to something you have not read). Many museums do not provide participants with clear terms surrounding their submissions, and for savvy people (especially artists!) such statements are a must not only from a legal standpoint, but to promote mutual trust and understanding between participants and institutions.

The activity is compelling.

Contributing to the World Beach Project is not easy, and yet, the Victoria and Albert Museum has received many more submissions than other museums receive for much simpler photo- or video-based online contributory projects. I have browsed hundreds of contributions that are beautiful, thoughtful, and on-topic. What makes the World Beach Project so successful? This is a project in which participants immediately and self-evidently perceive the personal benefits of participation. You aren't trying to win anything; you're just going to make a piece of art on a beach and share it with others. Sue Lawty, the artist who initiated the project, is a textile artist, and she wrote about the World Beach Project being "a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch." Through her own personal take on the project, Lawty encouraged participants to think of themselves as part of something greater--part of a community of artists and a geologically-connected ecosystem.

In their personal statements, beach artists wrote about profound connections to nature. They celebrated structures that disappeared after ten minutes but were "worth it." People shared stories of coming back to visit their creations again and again, seeing how the ocean and other people had altered their designs. The World Beach Project is, in its own small way, important. It isn't about collecting photos for a marketing campaign, or making a quick-e-card to send home. It's about making art, connecting to the earth, and being part of something greater.

By asking people to do something that is complicated, Lawty and the V&A express their respect for participants' competence and artistic ability. Yes, many contributory projects succeed by asking people to do something quick and easy - to register an opinion or share a small personal expression. But these are only as successful as the ask is genuine. Visitors, like all people, want the opportunity to show the world (and themselves) that they are interesting, capable, and worthy. Too often, we look at dismal rates of participation in basic contributory projects and assume, "this is too complicated for visitors." But in many cases, visitors may simply choose not to submit a photo for a contest or a thought into a comment box because the request seems insincere, demeaning, or silly. No one likes to have their time wasted.

In her research on happiness and gaming, Jane McGonigal has stated that people need four things to be happy: satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be part of something bigger. The World Beach Project accommodates all of these goals for participants. In other words, it's a contributory project that is optimized to make participants happy. And that sets it apart.

The display is easy to navigate and inspires participation.

As noted above, the display of the beach artwork is blended well with the ask, so visitors can easily transition from spectator to participant. That said, the World Beach folks recognize that this is a fairly hefty ask--not everyone can get to the beach--and I assume that many people come to the site, like myself, to enjoy the artwork without making their own contribution. The content does not live behind click after click; instead, you can access every submission from the world map. It is easy to move around and zoom in on the map and access contributions directly in the form of photos and text statements. These contributions don't send you to another page; instead, they pop up over the map, encouraging you to surf quickly from one to another. If you want to dig deeper into a particular submission, you can click to see other photos and longer statements from the artists on dedicated collections pages.

It is a bit strange that the World Beach Project is housed within the Collection subsection of the V&A website. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, it's a pain to have to find the project hidden beneath the textiles category of Collections (who would think to go there?). And the project might be more attractively displayed on its own site, outside the fairly staid templates of the V&A's overall site design. On the other hand, placing the project within Collections reinforces the idea that these beach artworks are accessioned into the museum's collection, and that the project exists within a larger context of dialogue about what textile art is and can be. The World Beach Project is a gem hiding in a vast space populated by other objects and experiences. Maybe that's where all great museum experiences live.

What's Your Leisure Identity? Does it Bring You Into Museums?

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:17:00 +0000

I spent last week on vacation in the High Sierras rock climbing. Between high-altitude hijinks, run-ins with wildlife, and very long days of hiking, I finished John Falk's new book, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience. In it, John provides a model for the museum visitor experience based on one fundamental idea: people visit and make meaning from museum experiences based on their ability to fulfill identity-related goals and interests. In other words, if you are a curious person, you will go to museums to learn new things. If you are someone seeking spiritual refreshment, you will go to museums to relax and recharge. Different people in the same museum on the same day can have very different experiences--and memories of their experiences--based on the personal context in which they enter.

John details five identity needs that are well-served by museums: explorer, experience seeker, recharger, professional/hobbyist, and facilitator. The explorer is a curious person who loves to dig into things. The experience seeker wants to see the icon, the superlative item or experience. The recharger wants a mental break in a relaxing setting. The professional/hobbyist has a very specific, directed goal for her visit related to her work or a focused hobby. And the facilitator wants his friends and family to have a good time. We all embody these identities at different times, but we may not perceive all museums as equally able to accomodate their associated needs. I might not go to a children's museum for a recharge, nor would I necessarily see myself as a good facilitator if I dragged my friends through a crowded mega-museum. John argues that the way for museums to succeed--in marketing, in programming, and in providing value to visitors--is for them to enhance and support accomodation for different identity needs.

John contextualizes this argument within a larger discussion about leisure and American life. He cites many studies showing that as people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we have transitioned from focusing on work (a means of survival) to leisure (a means of personal fulfillment). Also, as more people do work that is not physically taxing, the desire to "veg out" has faded and the desire to use leisure to improve our bodies, minds, and creative abilities has increased. The more we see our leisure activities as tied to our self-identity, the more consciously we choose what to do with our free time.

And this brings me back to the mountains. I've always felt slightly guilty that I don't choose to use my vacation time, or really any significant amount of my leisure time, to visit museums. I enjoy them when I visit, but they aren't the first thing that springs to mind on a Sunday afternoon. Reading John's book, I realized that while there are times when I want to explore, seek experiences, facilitate social endeavors, pursue hobbies, and recharge myself spiritually, I rarely see museums as places to do any of that. Additionally, I have other more central leisure identity needs--to be physically active, to take risks, to be outside, to make things--that are rarely accommodated by museums. I saw every part of our vacation through the lens of the book, and my climbing partner (a highly active and artistic guy) and I spent a lot of time analyzing the choices we did and didn't make and how they reflected our expressions of identity. We both love carrying all necessary belongings on our own backs, producing our own food and shelter, and using our physical abilities to propel ourselves into new, gorgeous situations.

We did stop at two museum-like places on our drive home: a photography gallery featuring images taken by a climber, where we pored over his photos and personal effects and compared his gear to our own, and a place that attracted us with a giant sign that read, "COME AND SEE HOW CHEESE IS MADE." In both cases, our identity needs were met. At the gallery, we were curious rechargers, connecting our own personal experience to some incredible art and stories. At the cheese place, we were experience seekers, and though the production values on the "exhibit" were lousy, we still enjoyed ourselves. But these two stops were each a blip on a much longer trip spent pushing ourselves physically and mentally in a remote and astoundingly beautiful place.

And so I came down from the mountains wondering what identity needs are not well-met by museums. Clearly the desire to be outside and take physical risks is rarely accommodated, especially for adults. Another thing museums lack is the ability to improve at a chosen vocation. Every time I go climbing or run, I have the opportunity to push myself and increase my skill level. I know there are some people who use museums as an opportunity to increase their knowledge, but there aren't many explicit measures by which a more goal-oriented person like me can perceive successive mastery. Finally, as a person who spends lots of my leisure time working on home projects and building whimsical things like ziplines, I note that museums are rarely places where (adult) visitors can make things, especially things that take time and matter to them.

My three priority leisure goals are to be outside, increase my physical abilities (usually in a social setting), and create fun and beautiful things to use. That's how I spend my out-of-work time. At the end of his book, John suggests that the way to bring in new visitors who are unfamiliar with museums is to demonstrate to them how the institutions can meet their explorer, experience seeker, recharger, professional/hobbyist, and facilitator needs. While I agree that we all have these needs, there are many people like me for whom these needs are not primary in their personal leisure profile. Yes, I use rock climbing as a way to seek new experiences, pursue a hobby, and mentally recharge. But those goals are secondary to the primary focus on physical challenge and achievement. And for good or ill, I see other activities, like reading and playing games, as a better way to satisfy my explorer and facilitator sides.

For me, a museum would have to be significantly different--outdoors, involving challenges, inviting me to spend my time working on something of value--for it to be my first choice during leisure time. In some ways this sounds impossible, but there are several small gestures that could get me in the door more frequently. Roof gardens and sculpture patios pull me into comfortable recharging spaces. A hackerspace or co-creation project would bring me in to work socially and actively on creating something for myself or for the community. Outdoor biking tours, games, or exhibits like the New York Hall of Science's mini golf course could attract my active outdoor side.

Museums are already successful at addressing the five identity needs that John describes. Is this enough? Should museums focus on supporting these five and hope that new experience seekers and explorers and rechargers will start to see the museum as a good place to accommodate their goals? Is it ok that that means that people like me still won't see museums as a priority leisure destination? Or are there other leisure goals that museums should consider accommodating? Would it diffuse museums' core competencies to provide experiences for people like me, or would it enhance their ability to serve the public?

How do you spend your leisure time? How does it reflect your personal identity? And where do museums fit in?

And one more thing: I have an extra copy of Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience to give away. If you think it would be useful to you, please leave a thoughtful comment with some kind of contact info and I'll randomly select a recipient to receive it by midnight, September 13.

Interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard Part 2: Rethinking Membership and Admissions

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:05:00 +0000

This is the second part of a two-part interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard on their book Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. This post focuses on my favorite part of the book, in which Beverly and John argue that museums need to rethink their financial and programmatic relationship with their best customers--their members. I've written before about the problems with value membership (and innovations like 1stfans), and I was intrigued and challenged by John and Beverly's alternatives.

One of the more provocative ideas in the book is the concept that members should not get free admission, but should instead get a set of elite perks that give them special status and opportunities at the institution. You talk about comparable programs like elite flyer programs. I love this idea, but I often find that museum staff are really nervous about making any changes that might alienate current members/donors. How would you recommend that museums transition in this direction? What will it take to make this happen?

John: I think you sort of have to phase it in. Beverly did some interesting things when she directed Old Sturbridge Village to offer pricing schemes around opportunities for members only that were fee-based. The phasing in is beginning to communicate that being a member comes with privileges, but those privileges are not necessarily free. That said, at some point you do have to draw a line in the sand and say we’re going to move in this direction and start doing it.

Beverly: What became so clear at Sturbridge was that our membership was really tuned in and loyal. Members are a group of people who have already bought in – they already like you. You’re spending a lot of money to serve them and not getting any more dollars after their initial payment to show for it. The first time we tried this, we offered an exclusive tour to members for $25 and it sold out immediately. Members told us they wanted more behind the scenes exclusive programs. We kept raising the price and they kept coming. We had families start clamoring to become members to gain access to special programs of this type. And it wasn’t just about money--we used every opportunity to deepen the relationship. Our intent was to give members a say in things, talking to them personally, what next, and they began to drive that program more.

I also heard about an incredible experience like this from the Newark Performing Arts Hall. They started a new music program by targeting small groups of members with special shows and building up, to the point that now their audience for new music is huge. I think sometimes we focus too much on the creative things we are making--the programs or the exhibits--and we forget that the recipients of these programs want a personal, special experience. Members really want a special relationship--that's why they join.

John: There are sort of three key ideas behind this. The first is going back to first principles. We have historically been in this industrial one-size-fits-all mode, not just for exhibitions and programs but for membership as well. Very few institutions take the time to appreciate that people become members for different reasons and have different needs. Second, a lot of people become members because of a sense of personal need and identity and a relationship with the institution. And yet there are very few institutions where if you took staff out on the floor, they could successfully point out which visitors were members and which were not. If these folks are your best customers and you can’t identify them, then you aren’t meeting their needs to be special because you don’t recognize them as special. And the third idea is around money. If you could treat people not as a number, and meet their needs, they would pay you for that! That’s what people want. By using a standard membership as a discount device, the institution commodifies the museum and communicates that the primary value of a museum is its price. This sells the institution short as well as the members. People are willing to pay if they feel they are getting something worthwhile. If you are just offering something cheap, you aren’t offering value.

Beverly: If you start to do the numbers on what it costs to retain members and provide for them, you end up very often on the short end of it. Many families join on their first visit because it looks cheaper, but in fact all they got was a bargain to begin with and then it costs the institution to make all the repeated contact via newsletters, etc.

One of the most challenging concepts in the book for me came under the issue of admission pricing. Following on Crawford and Mathew’s work on consumer values, you state that if the experience is superlative and truly satisfies visitors’ needs, people will not perceive price as a barrier. And yet you also talk about institutions that focus on providing free or low-cost learning experiences to visitors. Where do you feel museums fall in the experience economy, and how should they determine their pricing?

John: The short answer is: With great difficulty. It would seem to me – and I have never been the ultimate decision maker when it comes to pricing – that it begins by working back to value. If value is this mutli-dimensional piece, you have to have clarity on what is the value you are giving to people. Museums are not things that anybody needs - museum experiences are not necessities like food, shelter, clothing. So then what is a museum’s value? How can we ensure that it is as great a value as possible? And what would it cost to have a comparable value any place else in a comparable way? So start there and reverse engineer what the price of the value is and you will arrive at a fair cost. I’d recommend this approach instead of doing a marketing survey and asking people what they’d be willing to pay. The place to start is to determine what you are and what you provide, and then the economic value should fall out of that as well (of course you also have to then deliver on that value to justify the price you’ve set).

Beverly: Why do people buy $100 sneakers? Why do people spend all that money at Whole Foods? Part of what people do is seek out things that reflect something about themselves, and consequently that value added piece is something people are willing to pay for when it reflects something about their identity. It’s not only about meeting members’ needs but finding ways to support individual experiences for everyone, so that every visitor can say, “something was done for me.”

Much of this book is focused on high level analysis and discussion. But many museum professionals are not in the position to rethink their entire institutions. What do you recommend as starting points for museum staff who are not ultimate decision-makers?

Beverly: There are probably lots of entry points. If I were someone whose responsibility has to do with orientation or front desk, I would get to know people coming in and ask them what people were coming in for. At Sturbridge there was one whole set of visitors coming in and asking “what can we do in an hour?” With this knowledge, we could put together floor staff and educators together to develop something for those visitors. Visitor service staff can also provide a personal greeting and recognition that there is interest from the institution in visitors’ needs.

In education, it’s relatively simple to look through a gallery, observe people, figure out where do people gather, what reflects different visitors’ interests – and educators too could take on some of that role to customize the experience.

I think designers can think about how we can individualize and design different types of exhibits that reflect the ways people learn, in groups and as individuals, at different stages with different needs.

And so you can gather a lot of information and that can be a starting point. I also think everyone in the institution should be required to spend time on the floor.

John: And if you want to ratchet it up to the next step, organize a discussion group and encourage conversations across the institution to talk about these ideas and debate them, and see whether they make sense in your institution. Try to engage administration in these conversations, and challenge them to be part of it. The book actually provides discussion questions at the end of each chapter expressly for this purpose.

Beverly: The more we talk about these things and not get our feet stuck in the sand, the further we can go.

Thanks to John and Beverly, and here's to keeping the conversation going!

Thriving in the Knowledge Age: Interview with John Falk and Beverly Sheppard, Part 1

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:33:00 +0000

In 2006, John Falk and Beverly Sheppard, seasoned museum researchers and practitioners, released a co-authored book entitled Thriving in the Knowledge Age: New Business Models for Museums and Other Cultural Institutions. This remarkable book mixes business theory, visitor identity research, historical information about the evolution of museums, and predictive recommendations for museums moving forward. While at times wonkish, the book is also energetically adamant that museums need to change in several significant ways to be valuable and relevant to their audiences.

I've split my interview with John and Beverly into two parts for comfortable reading. This first part focuses fairly generally on the question of how to determine museums' value and developing institutional business models. The second part will delve more deeply into two topics: membership and admission pricing. I encourage you to share your own questions and thoughts in the comments, and of course, to read this excellent and challenging book.

This is a pretty powerful and provocative book—you talk about rethinking the whole business of museums. You argue that museums need to abandon the blockbuster and move towards providing personalized, customized learning experiences. In the three years since the book was published, what direction have you seen museums take and why?

Beverly: It’s really a mixed bag. I think to me one of the things that continues to be the most frustrating is the fact that admissions numbers continue to be the core metric of success. But on the other hand, I’ve heard people say, “well it shouldn’t be.” There’s a sense of frustration and awareness that there should be something else but people are having great difficulty sorting out what that should be. It’s indicative of the ways the museum world to me is a very conservative world. Even when there’s desire for change, it’s very difficult to shift practices across the board.

John: There has been receptivity to many of the ideas that we talk about in the book, but that receptivity far exceeds any change. So museum professionals are happy to say “we need to do things differently, and we know there are problems with numbers, blockbusters, etc” but the rhetoric exceeds the reality at this point. But it must be acknowledged that a leap into an unknown future is daunting and nobody knows exactly what that future should look like.

Beverly: And it’s not just the museums that need to make the shift. It is the whole system. When you go to your county for support or fill out a grant application, the question of numbers and things you do is part of their expectations as well.

Late in the book, you introduce Crawford and Mathew’s value matrix of five essential consumer values: access, experience, price, service, and product. You note that their research showed that the most successful businesses seek to dominate in only one area, be distinguished in another, and acceptable in the final three. Museums are very used to trying to be all things to all people. How do you recommend institutions prioritizing their focus?

John: I was quite taken by Crawford and Mathew’s notion that to try to be excellent at everything is a recipe for bankruptcy. It rung true, and in some ways, I think the same shoe fits for nonprofits as well. It’s not about saying we’re going to be bad at something or exclude some people. It’s about being honest about what an institution can do that will help make them truly be unique in their community – their specific community. The Smithsonian and a small history museum have very different communities and thus should have very different expectations of what makes them unique. Find the thing that you can uniquely provide to your community and focus on that. Prioritizing does not imply exclusion, but it does acknowledge that you can’t serve all people equally well.

Beverly: I know in a consulting role, everyone says that their audience is “everyone.” It’s nice, but it isn’t true or useful. Finding your niche should be exciting. For example, I talked today to someone from the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Juana Guzman, and they have fabulous ideas about connecting to community, saying we must connect in really integral ways with those people whom we serve. Guzman said, “we can talk about the appreciation of art and the aesthetic experience, but we don’t talk about every art form that we could fit in here. We talk about a cultural aesthetic.” It’s about understanding who you are and where your strengths are.

And then a lot of conversations I’ve had have come back to the concept of service. While it's one of the five consumer values Crawford and Mathews identified, it's an essential one for all museums. If you have excellent service, you should pick one other value to focus on as well.

Customer service is a fairly new term to the museum field, and I meet many museum professionals who are somewhat uncomfortable or leery of business terms of this type. Thriving in the Knowledge Age is very much a business book. How can we help museum professionals feel comfortable focusing on the bottom line while also keeping close to institutional missions?

Beverly: I’m somewhat astounded that there is something unsavory in the museum field about business terms. When it comes down to it, museums are businesses. They provide services. They sell things. It may be an implicit business model, but it’s a business model. The important thing is to focus that business model on the things that make the visit valuable to individuals and families. When you do this, it becomes obvious that customer service is about supporting the quality of experience. Aspects like orientation and how you are greeted help put visitors' anxieties aside and allow people to enjoy the experience. If you don't believe me, you should read the book The Museum Experience. Your customers do not differentiate between the cleanliness of the bathroom and the museum experience. It’s the whole deal.

John: The real currency in the 21st century is not about money – it’s about time. The competition is over peoples’ time, need and value of identity. That’s the business that museums are competing in. To pretend we’re not in competition for people’s time and their desire for a heightened experience doesn’t make sense: we’re absolutely competing in the truest business sense of the word “competition” for these values.

Beverly: But I would also put that uneasiness about “business” in the same category we used to think about “marketing.” Over time, museums have grown comfortable with the idea that marketing is a reasonable set of communication functions which let people know what’s going on, how to find and participate in things, how to know they are welcome.

It seems like collections-oriented art and history museums potentially have the hardest time picking a particular community to serve because they serve two—the donors who support them financially and the visitors who walk through the door. This seems like two very different customer bases, and I wonder if it leads to a kind of schizophrenia for institutions trying to serve both.

John: You’re right; art museums and collections institutions that have historically derived most of their funding through donors have been schizophrenic because the donors are their main customer. But then the question becomes, what about the public? Are we here to serve the public or to serve these donors? Are the donors here to serve the public? And that conflict needs to be wrestled with at the highest level; in other words with the board of directors.

Beverly: Many donors to museums also fund social service initiatives, but in those cases, the funders are explicitly supporting the public mission. This goes back to the problem of museums poorly defining their role. If museums are clear about what it is that they do relative to the public, they can find funders who support those goals.

I look forward to seeing your comments, and John and Beverly will check in as time permits to join the conversation as well. (But bear in mind I'm on vacation and won't be able to respond until the weekend.) Tune in on Thursday for the second part of this interview, when we will dive more specifically into John and Beverly's recommendations for new pricing and membership models for 21st century institutions.

Designing Talkback Platforms for Different Dialogic Goals

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:55:00 +0000

"Where were you last night?"

If someone asked you that question, how would you answer? Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. People answer questions differently in harshly lit interrogation rooms than they do in welcoming therapists' offices or in the privacy of their own computer terminals. We have different conversations on the phone than we do in person or in internet chat rooms. The outcome of our conversations is dependent on the diversity of designed environments in which they occur.

If you want to design opportunities for visitors or users to respond to questions or engage in conversation, you need to think not only about what you want to ask visitors but how you will design conditions that are conducive to the types of answers that interest you. I'm not talking about guiding content; I'm talking about guiding form. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, you can only respond with 140 characters. We don't have the same limitations when designing talkback stations and other physical platforms for conversation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't intentionally design the conversational tools offered. Many institutions do this unintentionally--by providing post-its or comment books, pens or crayons. Each design choice impacts the amount of thought and efforts visitors will put into their responses and the extent to which they will stay on-topic or proactively build on other visitors' arguments.

Here are a few design rules I use to think about what kinds of designed dialogue environments are right for different experience goals. I encourage you to share your own rules and thoughts on this in the comments.

If your goal is to encourage visitors to perceive themselves as partners in the content co-creation experience, make room for their thoughts sooner rather than later.

You don't need an entire gallery to frame a social question, but you do need to think about how the question or questions will be designed into the experience for maximum impact. The most common placement for questions is at the end of content labels and the end of exhibitions, but this location is by no means the most effective. Positioning questions at the end of labels accentuates the perception that they are rhetorical, or worse, afterthoughts. Similarly, making the only space for dialogue at the end of an exhibition ignores the thoughts that visitors brought with them into the experience or had along the way. If you are hoping for visitors to discuss their responses to questions with each other, or to share their answers with the institution, you can't end with the question; you need to provide several opportunities for questions and responses.

If your goal is to encourage visitors to share complex, personal responses to questions, consider offering private booths and progressive questions for visitor responses.

This technique was used in the Slavery in New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society and continues in the popular StoryCorps project. When you want visitors to spend a long time reflecting and sharing their thoughts, you need to design spaces for response that are comfortable and minimize distractions. In the case of Slavery in New York, the end of the exhibition featured a story-capture station at which visitors could record video responses to a series of four questions about their reactions to the exhibition. The story capture experience averaged ten minutes, with visitors being given four minutes to respond to each personal, relatively imprecise question about how the exhibition affected the them. Richard Rabinowitz, curator of exhibition, noted that the progressive nature of the questions yielded increasingly complex responses, and that "it was typically in response to the third or fourth question that visitors, now warmed up, typically began relating the exhibition to their previous knowledge and experience." A lone "What do you think?" question station is not necessarily enough to elicit the rich personal reactions visitors might have to exhibitions. Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors." It was the lengthy progressive response process that turned what is often a series of brief and banal comments into a rich archive of visitor experience.

If you feel that your audience needs monitoring or social support, position the talkback stations in open settings.

This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums. Placing feedback stations in the open lowers the probability of socially inappropriate behavior, and it also allows parents and teachers to help struggling visitors answer the questions at hand. There was a wonderful example at the Ontario Science Center in their Hot Zone area, which features several voting and commenting kiosks popular with teens. There was one kiosk in particular that was drawing several inappropriate comments, until it was moved from a corner into an open space close to the entrance to the women's bathroom. In its new location, under the watchful eyes of moms and other visitors, the inappropriate behavior diminished.

If your goal is to motivate dialogue between visitors and objects, questions and answer stations should be as proximate to the objects of interest as possible.

Visitors can speak more comfortably and richly about objects that they are looking at than objects they saw 30 minutes earlier in the exhibition. In many cases, visitors encounter talkback opportunities so infrequently throughout a visit that they seize on those opportunities to share many off-topic thoughts about their overall experience. This can frustrate museum staff, who wonder why the visitors are straying so far from the question posed. The more frequent explicit talkback opportunities are, and the more tightly and consistently connected to specific exhibits, the more visitors will focus on the experience at hand.

If you want to invite a wide range of visitors to respond to questions, it is best to design them into a context where visitor responses are of comparable aesthetics to the "official" museum content in the exhibition.

If a label is printed beautifully on plexiglass and visitors are expected to write responses in crayon on post-its, visitors may feel that their contributions are not valued or respected, and may respond accordingly. One of the things that makes the visitor stories contributed in the Denver Art Museum's Side Trip exhibition so compelling and on-topic is a design approach that elevates visitors' responses to comparable footing with the predesigned content. The vast majority of the signage in Side Trip was handwritten in pen on ripped cardboard, which meant that visitors' contributions (pen on paper) looked consistent in the context of the exhibition. The image at the top of this post is from one of their simple visitor feedback interactives which was built into a familiar, casual rolodex. By simplifying and personalizing the design technique used for the institutional voice, visitors felt like they were part of a natural conversation with the institution.

If you want visitors to answer questions collaboratively, whether in real-time or in a distributed manner, make sure your question and answer structure clearly supports visitors building on each other's ideas.

Unfortunately, most talk back walls don't support the grouping of visitor contributions or attempt to encourage conversational threads to develop. The Signtific game does this virtually by encouraging players to respond to each other by "following up" on other players' entries. But you could easily imagine doing something similar in physical space, either by using different color paper or pens for different types of questions and responses, or by explicitly encouraging visitors to comment on each other's responses or group their thoughts with like-minded (or opposing) visitor contributions.

If you want visitors to consume and enter in dialogue each other's responses, make sure that the visitors' answers are displayed in locations that makes them most useful to others.

A colleague recently called me to discuss an idea for a low-tech recommendation engine in which visitors could mark places on paper museum maps that might be of interest to other visitors like them. We talked about the fact that while visitors were most likely to be able to generate their maps of recommended spots as they walked through the institution, the completed maps would be of most value to subsequent visitors on their way into the museum rather than the way out. In this case, we talked about placing a large physical map of recommendations in the lobby rather than at the "end" of the experience, where visitor feedback often lives. This may sound obvious, but I think we often think about the creators and consumers of visitors' content as being the same people, whereas they are often visitors at different stages of their experiences with different needs.

What design techniques do you use to create successful visitor dialogue experiences? What have you seen work well, and what have you seen fail?

Museum Photo Policies Should Be as Open as Possible

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:13:00 +0000

I'm working on a section of my book about sharing social objects and am writing about the most common way that visitors share their object experiences in museums: through photographs. While doing research, I found myself digging back into old arguments on museum listservs about photo policies and I want to add my two (very opinionated) cents on this.

While the majority of experience-based museums like children's and science museums have unrestricted noncommercial photography policies, many collections-based art and history museums continue to maintain highly restrictive photo policies. As I understand it, there are five main arguments for restrictive policies:

Intellectual Property: Museums must respect diverse intellectual property agreements with donors and lenders, and in institutions where some objects are photographable and others not, it's often easier to use the most restrictive agreements as the basis for institutional policies.
Conservation: Objects may be damaged by flash photography. Some conservators argue that if non-flash photography is permitted, light levels in the galleries may be increased to accommodate visitors' cameras, which indirectly damage artifacts.
Revenue Streams: Museums want to maintain control of sales of "officially sanctioned" images of objects via catalogues and postcards. If people can take their own photos, they won't buy them in the gift shop.
Aesthetics of Experience: Photo-taking is distracting for other visitors. Looking at artwork through a lens means you are having a less rich experience. Visitors may make inappropriate gestures in photos with museum content, thus distorting institutional values and intent.
Security: Photographers might take photos with intent to do harm; for example, with plans to rob the museum or stalk another visitor.

I respect the first and second arguments. I understand the third, though I think it is misguided. And I think the fourth and fifth are bizarre and ungenerous to visitors.

To me, an open photo policy is a cornerstone of any institution that sees itself as a visitor-centered platform for participatory engagement. Here are five reasons I think museums should have totally open photo policies:

As long as it does not promote unsafe conditions for artifacts or people or illegal behavior, museums should prioritize providing opportunities for visitors to engage in ways that are familiar and comfortable to them. Yes, some people (especially vocal museum staff!) hate the sight of people taking photos in museums. But what about visitors? If your argument is based on visitor comfort and distraction, it should be backed up by visitor research, not personal impressions. Would staff members who hate photography be comparably disturbed by visitors sketching in the galleries? Sketching takes up more space and is more distracting than photo-taking (and pencils could be used to damage objects!), and yet many museum professionals look benevolently upon that activity as a positive meaning-making visitor experience. This is prejudicial treatment. I know that many people are uncomfortable with the growing culture of self-documentation, but no one should let their own aesthetic preferences dictate others' behavior without good reason.
Restrictive policies erode staff/visitor relations and overall museum mission statements around inclusion. The majority of cellphones now have cameras embedded in them, which means that many visitors are walking through your doors with camera in hand. Visitors get upset when they are told to put their cameras away, and it is becoming increasingly hard for guards (and, down the road, marketing staff) to control the taking of photographs and their spread on the Web. Telling visitors that they can't take photos in museums reinforces the sense that the museum is an external authority that owns and controls its objects rather than a shared public resource. How can visitors be "co-owners" of museums if they can't own an image from their experience?
Photo-taking allows visitors to memorialize and make meaning from museum experiences. There have been several studies that show that creating a personal record of an experience and reviewing it later increases learning and retention of content. When visitors flip through photos from their trip, they are more likely to recall their interest in a given artifact or exhibit than without visual aids. And it's not just about recall. There are thriving groups of Flickr users who share photos of themselves imitating art. When my mom, sister and I visited the de Young sculpture garden, we spent about an hour posing alongside the sculptures, which forced us to spend a lot of time carefully observing the art and directing each other into position (see above photo). We spent significantly more time with the art to create these photos than we would have had we just been strolling through.
Visitors use personal photos differently from store-bought ones. The majority of visitors use their cameras to casually record their personal and social experiences, not to take authoritative images of artifacts. A visitor who wants a picture of "mom with the giant penis statue" wants something that the museum is not selling. Visitors who want "the best shot ever of the penis statue" are still likely to buy in the store. And even if visitors do take authoritative (noncommercial) shots, they are unlikely to reduce sales. A great shot of your institution, shared on Flickr, serves as a free piece of marketing that may generate ticket sales. How do you measure the potential lost income from a photographer not buying a postcard against the online impressions his photo makes on others? In the related world of online image licensing, some museums have done studies of the affect of open digital photo distribution on their revenue from image licensing and have seen flat or positive effects from the actions, not negative ones (see this in-depth paper from the Powerhouse Museum).
When people share their photos of your museum, they promote and spread your content to new audiences in authentic ways. In 2008, a team led by MIT media researcher Henry Jenkins published a white paper entitled, "If it Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," which argues that media artifacts have greatest impact when consumers are able to pass on, reuse, adapt, and remix them. There are two parts to this. First, every time a photo is shared, it extends the reach of your objects and exhibit stories. But perhaps more importantly, Jenkins argues that the creative adaptation of cultural objects through photos and other spreading tools supports communities' "processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them."

At the conclusion of Jenkins' paper, the team claims:

"So what is spreadable media good for?
To generate active commitment from the audience,
To empower them and make them an integral part of your product's success,
To benefit from online word-of-mouth
To reach niche, highly interconnected audiences,
but most of all, to communicate with audiences where they already are, and in a way that they value.

...
Those who have the most to lose are those companies which:
have well established brand messages
have messages that are predictably delivered through broadcast channels
who are concerned about a loss of control over their intellectual property
who have reason to fear backlash from their consumers.

Even here, remaining outside of the spreadable model altogether may cut them off from younger and more digitally connected consumers who spend less time consuming traditional broadcast content or who are increasingly suspicious of top-down advertising campaigns."

Of course, museums shouldn't let marketing desires, popular opinion, or cultural forces drive all decisions. The intellectual property arguments in particular are very complex and should be taken seriously. But visitors and visitor research deserve voices in the discussion about whether photo policies are open or closed. The cultural and educational value of spreadability deserves weight in decision-making. From my perspective, this value is so high that I'd recommend museums think twice about taking on temporary exhibitions or loans that would endanger the ability to allow visitors to take photos across the institution.

And one final thought on this topic: I've been surprised to learn that some museums have restrictive photo policies and aren't sure why. I've heard stories of museum staff at two large institutions trying to figure out who "owns" the policy--conservation, marketing, curatorial, etc.--so that it might be revised. If you don't know why you restrict photography in your institution, please think about both the benefits AND the drawbacks of allowing photography before you perpetuate the policy.

Learning Together, Playing Together: Where Do You Form Social Bonds?

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 17:57:00 +0000

Let's say you want to create a program that will result in strangers forming new relationships and making deep connections with each other. Maybe it's a learning program for people who want further content knowledge, or perhaps an activity-based program where people make music together or blow glass or build robots. Would you develop a program for experts--people who already have a strong shared affinity and ability--or for novices--people who are new to the topic or activity at hand?

I used to think that experts were the obvious choice here--that people who are already personally invested in an activity are the most likely ones to want to seek out new friends and activity partners who share their interests. But this summer, I had a novice experience that has changed my personal understanding of the differences between relationships formed in new and known situations.

Exactly two months ago, I took a beginner's volleyball class. The class went for five weeks, 2 hours a week. We were all new to the sport, and on the first day, the teacher, Phil, gave a long speech about how great volleyball is and how obsessed we would become. Several of us looked on skeptically-we already had booked schedules and were eking out 2 hours on Tuesday to make this happen. But Phil was right. This past weekend, I spent about 7 hours playing beach volleyball, with another 5 hours spent at a barbecue with my new volleyball friends. That's 1/4 of a weekend spent on a new activity with new friends.

I spend a lot of my free time playing sports with other adults, but I've never bonded so quickly with other players as I have this summer through volleyball. For several years, I've played ultimate frisbee both casually and on organized teams, and I've never been one to socialize immediately with other players. I'm focused on self-improvement and enjoying the game. We get together, we play hard, and then everyone goes back to their lives. I'm friendly with lots of ultimate folks, but it takes me years, not weeks, to connect with them off the field. Similarly with rock climbing, a sport that forces you to play with a partner at all times, I've made fabulous friends... after months or years of one-on-one interactions on the rock and in the gym.

What makes volleyball different? The group of us learned together. We were brand new to the sport together and now we struggle together to improve. We show each other more vulnerability and uncertainty than I do in situations when I'm confident of my ability. We feel bonded to each other in our shared inability--and our beginner status also makes us more comfortable playing with each other than trying to step up and play with the "big kids."

And our instructor primed the social connections intentionally. On the first day of class, Phil said, "You're all a little nervous today. You don't know anyone else, you don't know how to play. It's ok. By the time you leave you will have lots of friends to play volleyball with." He required us to play with lots of different people throughout the class. He set up an email list and encouraged us to set up another evening a week during the class to practice together. About 20% of us went for it and started playing on our own, and now, we have a group of about 10 people out of the original 50 who play together frequently. We went from being led by a strong instructor to being a self-organized group who follow the values we were taught and are starting to connect with each socially in a more substantive way. In other words, what started as a pretty standard programmatic experience was an entrypoint to a much more self-directed, social one.

The barbecue on Saturday night included five of us from the class plus families and significant others. Around the table, everyone remarked on how they felt nervous on the first day of class, how they couldn't believe that it was true that we'd made friends and learned to love a new activity. It was a really special experience, and it has made me much more interested in how we can provide visitor and user experiences that bond novices together as co-learners on a shared journey, rather than just accommodating individual learning goals or focusing on those who are already immersed in an activity.

Phil's technique wasn't complex. He did two important things: he set up expectations that our experience in the program would be social, and he encouraged us to find ways to continue meeting up beyond the course. This is a very simple way of creating a "platform" for us to connect with each other rather than relying on him as the authority who delivers the experience. It helps that he hosts monthly tournaments, which are connection points that help motivate some members of the classes, but I think we'll keep playing together, tournaments or no. And I believe Phil's techniques could be applied to designing volunteer training programs, new member programs, or general content activity programs and experiences.

Is my observation a personal quirk or a familiar story? Do you bond better with others in novice or expert situations? Do you design programs to encourage novices to work and learn together (and make friends)? Have you been part of a novice group that became a tight-knit group of friends? How would you alter the way you deliver programs to novices to encourage them to make friends and continue exploring their new passion together outside of class?

"It Is What It Is," and the Challenges of Dialogue-Focused Exhibits

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:13:00 +0000

I sat down this morning to write a negative review of an exhibit. Now, two hours of YouTube exploration later, I'm not sure what I think.

Earlier this year, the New Museum and Creative Time commissioned a traveling piece by artist Jeremy Deller called "It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq." The piece features two guests, an Iraqi translator and a US Army reservists, who hang out in a conversational space, flanked by maps of the US and Iraq and a powerful artifact--a car that was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad. The goal is to support "messy, open-ended discussion," and the draw is the idea that you can go to the museum and talk about Iraq with someone who has actually been there during the war. It Is What It Is was first shown in NYC at the New Museum and has traveled across the country, stopping at various public sites on its way to a longer engagement at the Hammer Museum in LA.

I saw It Is What It Is twice at the Hammer Museum. Both times, the central square in which it was situated was well-trafficked with people enjoying art, hanging out with friends, and working. I saw many people check out the car, but I never saw anyone engage in dialogue with the program participants. Even with a couple of comfortable couches, a provocative object, and a sign that said, "Talk to Esam from 3-5," the barriers to participation were high. Even for me, the barriers were too high. Why would I want to talk about Iraq on a visit to an art museum? Why would I want to talk about it with a stranger? Why would I want to sit on a couch and engage in an open-ended, messy conversation with a stranger?

It Is What It Is highlights how difficult it is to invite people into dialogue--not just on tough topics like the Iraq War, but any topic. From my perspective, It Is What It Is was not designed with sufficient structure to robustly and consistently support dialogue. It doesn't clearly welcome people in or bridge the social barriers that keep us from naturally talking to strangers. It doesn't set expectations for what will happen (which was intentional) and that makes people wary and also less interested, since they can't look forward to a "successful" outcome.

I know it may sound like I'm asking for something overly structured, but compare It Is What It Is with another dialogue project, the Living Library. In the Living Library, there is a concrete entrypoint to challenging discussions. Visitors check out "books," which are people who embody certain stereotypes, for forty-minute one-on-one conversations. The Living Library has guest experts (the books), but it also has facilitators in the form of the "librarians" who help you sign up for a library card, browse the catalog, and select a book for discussion. I'm not suggesting that the Living Library is the only way to have dialogue about tough issues (far from it!) but that it is a much more structured platform than that provided by It Is What It Is. Living Library events consistently draw visitors and are packed with people having intense, messy conversations about culture, politics, and human relations.

Deller says the "conversation is the most important part" of It Is What It Is but I believe he over-estimated the ability of simple objects and live "guest experts" to get people talking. It Is What It Is and other unstructured platforms just plunk down the people and hope for dialogue. Occasionally, some really interesting and surprising things may happen. But they are a lot less likely than in designed settings like the Living Library.

A volunteer manager at a major US history museum once told me about a failed dialogue program in which older volunteers would sit in rocking chairs on an exhibit component themed to look like a front porch. The idea was that visitors would come up and hang out on the front porch, listening to the elders' stories of the past. This is a nice conceptual structure that had some visual reinforcement in the physical space, but it failed miserably. No one approached the volunteers. They had stories to tell and were happy to talk, but the social barriers to participation were too great to make it happen.

Unlike the front porch program, which was silently discontinued, It Is What It Is received a lot of press as a revolutionary art piece indicative of artists moving towards focusing on social experiences rather than objects. But I haven't found any press or blogs from people who actually went to the exhibit and had a discussion; the press seems to focus on the interestingness of the idea rather than the impact of its implementation. If you experienced the exhibit (or find someone who did) and engaged in dialogue, please share your story--I don't want to unfairly castigate this exhibit based on two personal experiences.

And there's another reason I don't want to criticize it. When I dug deeper into the exhibit's website, I found a series of lovely, short videos recorded along the exhibit's across the country. Watch this amazing video of an older Sioux man reacting to the blown-out car and recalling Vietnam. Or this one of the team touring a farm in Tennessee and discussing the differences between American and Iraqi burial rituals. I got lost in these videos, and I started to question my expectations about what makes an exhibit like this successful. Is it about the number of conversations had or the quality of those discussions? Is it about drawing people in who may not have walked up with an interest in the topic, or is it about engaging those who have a deep and immediate desire to talk without prompting? Is it about what happens in the museums or on the streets in-between?

Considering these questions, I come to three uncertain conclusions.

First, it appears from the project documentation that It Is What It Is was more powerful when dropped into everyday street scenes and college campuses than when situated in contemporary art museums. Maybe there was less pretension, maybe the space felt more owned by the individuals approaching (and therefore, maybe the visitors felt more comfortable engaging). I say "maybe" because I'm only seeing curated clips, and for all I know there were just as many wild interactions in the New Museum and the Hammer as there were on the streets of New Mexico. But if this observation is valid, then it speaks to the additional social barriers museums introduce that we have to be aware of when designing for dialogue.

Second, because this was an art project, I doubt that Jeremy had explicit goals for how many people would engage and in what ways. He said as much in his introduction, commenting that he "hopes" there will be dialogue but he really isn't sure what will happen. When working on dialogue projects, I try to get beyond guessing and hoping and really consider--who do we want to engage with this? How will we design the experience to encourage participation by those people? What are the evaluative measures by which we will consider the dialogue experience successful? I'm not sure It Is What It Is had such measures, and members of their team shared their tension about this issue. Along the drive west, It Is What It Is team member Nato Thompson commented in the road diary:

What can be gained by ephemeral interactions in public space that briefly exist in YouTube videos and on a blog? With such an ambivalent, open-ended tone, what prevents people from leaving these conversations without a single view challenged or sense of self altered?

There are good questions, and in an art project, it's often acceptable to use the piece as a vehicle to expose and explore the questions rather than answer them. But museum staff rarely have this luxury. They are always accountable for the impact of their work, and it's important (and doable!) to design dialogue platforms to specific impact goals just as you would a didactic content experience.

And so finally, with regard to impact, I believe It Is What It Is is more valuable to a broad audience as a cultural multimedia story than as an exhibit. Seeing the exhibit, I was ready to cast this off with a joke about two guys and a car walking into a museum. It was not made "for me," a visitor who didn't know what to expect. It wasn't designed to bring mass audiences into an uncomfortable experience, or if it was, it failed to do so. Jeremy Deller admitted in his artist statement that this piece was motivated by his own very personal interest in Iraq. As he put it:

In a sense I am selfishly doing this for my own benefit simply to plug the many gaps that exist in my knowledge and to satisfy the arguments that have been going on in my head for the best part of this century.

So in a sense, this piece is a performance in which Jeremy spends time with his guests, learning and traveling together. And it was the representation of this performance, not the opportunity for dialogue, that captivated me. I both enjoyed and learned from the road videos, the diaries, and the interactions among the travelers.

Watching the videos, I reconceived the exhibit as a transparent "making of" for an unstructured documentary rather than an end into itself. And this challenges my long-held passion for involving visitors in the behind-the-scenes and the process. Visiting It Is What It Is, the exhibit, was dull and off-putting. I had a bad experience. But I loved watching the curated cultural products of the exhibit. Does this mean that I didn't want to see the process and only the product? Or am I just frustrated that they sold the exhibit as a dialogue product, an experience unto itself, when the real product was a performance?

Pointing at Exhibits, Part 2: No-Tech Social Networks

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:44:00 +0000

I've spent the last two weeks working on the third chapter of my book about network effects of social participation. This can be an incredibly technical topic, as it focuses on the ways that platforms (online, exhibits, museums) can harness the individual activities of many visitors and create meaningful experiential outputs that connect people to each other. And it's brought me back to a blog post I wrote a year ago about the Science Museum of Minnesota's Race: Are We So Different? exhibition.

Race is a remarkably social exhibit; visitors spend a lot of time pointing things out to each other and talking about them. Paul Martin, VP of Exhibits at SMM, took several photos of people in the exhibition over its run, and he noted something strange: there was an incredibly high percentage of photos in which someone was pointing at an exhibit label, artifact, or component. In many cases people were pointing at things that were simple in design and form--quotes, statistics, facts and figures. But the content was so remarkable that visitors felt the need to just to consume it but to point it out to others.

When I wrote about this in 2008, I focused on the question of how to design exhibits to be optimized for "pointiness." But now, I'm looking at the story of visitors pointing in Race in a different way: as a low-tech example of a socially networked platform.

The Complexities of Socially Networked Museum Platforms

How do you design physical infrastructure that ties individuals together in meaningful ways? Designing exhibitions, or whole institutions, that operate on socially networked principles is incredibly difficult. It requires that each individual have a personalized profile that evolves with her growing relationship with the institution. It requires that the profiles of each visitor be networked in some common system with rules for how different profile items interrelate. And then it requires an output mechanism that helps visitors physically connect to the people and experiences with which they have network affinity. Throw in the real-time nature of a museum visit, visitors' reticence to participate socially in the museum, and archaic data systems, and this may sound downright impossible.

But designing an entire museum that functions this way probably isn't your goal. The goal is more likely to promote social learning, participation by visitors, and interpersonal exchange around museum content. And with these goals in mind, there are low-tech ways to perform or simulate every component of a socially networked platform, many of which are more effective than their high-tech counterparts.

Consider the example of people being able to save their favorite exhibits and share them with others. We can all imagine complex ways to do this with mobile devices (and many museums and private companies are experimenting with such systems). A visitor could register her phone with the museum, so that her number is uniquely associated with her personal profile. As she moves through the museum, she uses a web-based application to tag her favorite exhibits, or perhaps she texts a rating for each exhibit to SMS short codes posted at the bottom of each label. She can choose to "send" her favorites to individuals, or to broadcast them to the whole network of people using the system. As a higher-tech alternative, you could imagine a system in which visitors' motions are tracked, and standing in front of an exhibit for an abnormally long period of time would trigger an entry marking that exhibit as "compelling" whereas exhibits that occupy just a few seconds might be marked "dull" or "skipped." Again, the technology today may be unsavory or clunky, but these possibilities are on the horizon and there are some institutions experimenting in this domain.

The Simplicity of Pointing

And this brings us back to Race. As Paul commented, "you don't point at things when you're alone." Pointing is a no-tech version of the favoriting system. When you point at something, you are effectively suggesting to the people around you, "look at that." Visitors see things that intrigue them, point at them, and other visitor look. The Race exhibit served as a facilitation of potential dialogue based on a very simple finger-based exchange.

Pointing is a social behavior that works best in physically proximate, real-time situations. Past incidences of pointing in Race or any exhibit are not saved and networked for future use; you can't look at the exhibit label and see that "57 people pointed at this in the last week." Nor would that information necessarily be compelling to most visitors. The thing that makes pointing compelling is the fact that it is an interpersonal interaction. If you are a stranger, and you point something out to me, you are taking a risk. You are effectively saying, "this thing I am pointing at is so important, so cool or special or surprising, that despite the fact that I know next to nothing about you, I think you should see it." It makes the pointee feel special to be singled out (even if only selected for physical proximity to the pointer), and both people enjoy the intimacy of a shared experience.

This intimacy and specialness is lost if you move to a more generalized "57 people pointed at this" networked system. That statement has very little meaning to most people because it is entirely decontextualized. What do I care what 57 random visitors thought? I only care what a stranger points at if they are pointing it out to me. It's the personal, immediate nature of the experience that makes it compelling.

Of course, the riskiness of the exchange also makes stranger-to-stranger pointing quite rare. You are more likely to point something out to a friend or companion. The better you know someone, the more you can tailor the things you point out to them in a variety of settings. When talking about the social network of people whose profiles are known to us, we are able to meaningfully abstract the pointing experience. That's where it becomes useful to send certain tidbits of information to particular people, or groups of people. The news I want to share with my rock-climbing friends is different from that I want to share with my museum friends. When I'm with them, I point out different things.

Online, people have been pushing the boundaries of both the personal and urgent nature of the pointing experience. I comfortably "point things out" to different people remotely by clipping articles, sending links, and flagging online content. I also point things out to a mass audience when I post ideas to Twitter or Facebook. While these situations appear to erode the personal, urgent requirements discussed above, the most effectively "pointed" content online is still personal and urgent. You are more likely to look at a link I send directly to you, or to a small group of people with a shared affinity including you, than one I send out to my entire network. From the urgency perspective, on Twitter (which is a kind of virtual museum we are all slowly walking through), you only have a few minutes from the time that you post something for it to be noticed before your comment is lost in the sea of others. The more the agency to act on a shared link is placed on the pointee rather than the pointer, the less likely he or she is to follow through. When you make a direct, personal, immediate appeal, you can get anyone--even a stranger's--attention.

Design Implications

The "pointiness" of an exhibit is a metric that reflects the extent to which the content motivates visitors to share things with strangers and friends alike. What affects how likely a visitor is to point things out in an exhibit? The content certainly matters but so does the extent to which visitors feel that they are pointing things out to friends or associates rather than strangers. The better individuals can express their unique interests and orientations, the more easily they can form affinity networks with other visitors, and the more likely they are to perceive those people as less strange. To me, this exploration boils down to two design questions:

How do we let people personalize their identity in the museum such that they feel less like strangers and more like potential associates?
How do we design spaces that support sharing and intimacy among associated visitors?

These questions take us away from the design of nonsensical "pointing data networks" and towards something more essential: supporting interpersonal connections. If we think about network effects not in terms of data collection but in terms of a useful outcome for visitors and institutions, we can design platforms that reflect our participatory values. For some institutions or exhibits, promoting dialogue may be a value, in which case the "pointiness" of an exhibit is a useful goal to work into the design process. In other cases, other values, like creativity, authentic sharing, group collaboration, or reflection on others' experiences might be primary, in which case different platforms (and related metrics and mechanisms) would be more appropriate.

What "no-tech" visitor actions or interrelations reflect your participatory goals? How can you identify metrics for success that are not based on how many people have bought a ticket or left a comment? Design for participation in museums still struggles on the evaluative side--we don't have well-documented ways to measure how many people connect with a stranger or learn something from another visitor. "Pointiness" may be the first of many new metrics we use to understand how visitors relate to each other through museum content. What others should we consider?

Eight Other Ways to "Connect with Community"

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:56:00 +0000

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission. While there is much talk about supporting participation and making museum content relevant, the word "community" hangs like a poorly-defined carrot on a shtick. The article ends with this unfortunate quote from marketing consultant Roger Sametz:

"It's all about making personal, meaningful connections with a community, now."

It sounds as if Mr. Sametz is frantically casing city streets with a heat-seeking metal detector, on the hunt for a miscellaneous batch of confused folks whom he can stun into "connection."

Who is this mysterious and desirable community with whom museums wish to connect? The general public is not a community. Nor is "everyone who doesn't currently visit here." The article suggests that museums have previously served one community--"traditional" museum patrons who are white and elderly--and must now be relevant to several other communities that are diverse in cultural, educational, and socio-economic backgrounds. This seems a little ungenerous to museums; while institutions may bestow more love upon wealthy, elderly donors than the general visiting public, museums have actively courted mass audiences for years. The problem--one which is not addressed in the article--is that museums have not been willing to cater to new target audiences to the exclusion of their traditional patrons. We're always happy for more bodies in the door, but if supporting teens means alienating seniors, there's a problem.

Connecting with communities means making conscious decisions that invite in particular people. It means making some conscious choices that push your institution towards being more of a "third place." The article references connecting with young people via social media, at-risk youth via exhibit co-creation, and urban creatives via public art installations. But it skips some of the fundamental design and operational choices that separate community centers from the rest of the civic and cultural landscape.

And so I'd like to suggest a few other ways to "connect with community." In most cases, they are less flashy than those covered in the CS Monitor, but that doesn't diminish their utility (or the challenges inherent in making them happen).

Pick a specific community (or two). Don't say that your institution will be a "town square for the community." Which community? The Filipino community? The student community? The homeless community? Pick a group of people to whom you would like to be relevant, and work with them to deliver programs that meet their needs. When their needs conflict with other pre-existing communities' needs, make a choice. Prioritizing a community demonstrates that you care about them and are willing to defend their needs. The Brooklyn Museum allows skateboarders to use their public outdoor space, much to the chagrin of some locals. But they stick by the skateboarders as a community of value.
Be free, nearly free, often free, or free for locals. Community centers don't ask you to cough up a $20 every time you come to hang out. While free admission has not been shown to shift the overall demographics of museum visitors on its own, it sets an expectation that this is a place you can use whenever you like, for as long as you like. It's not a recreational destination you visit once a year. It's a place you can use.
Be open at times that your "community" is likely to come. I was at San Diego's Balboa Park two weeks ago for a workshop and spent a glorious evening wandering the gardens, outdoor concert halls, and sports fields. There were thousands of people in the park for plays, free music, and beautiful scenery. And none of the museums in the park was open. Extending museum hours makes it easier for people to integrate museum-going into their evening recreational time and diminishes the prepare-to-visit-destination behavior.
Open your doors really wide. Lots of museums look like fortresses against the streetscape. They are protected by expansive parking lots or metal gates. The more museums can be porous to the outdoor environment and continuous with other neighborhood venues and businesses, the more easily people can flow into them as part of their day.
Make time for staff to hang out with visitors. There are many museums that require all staff to spend an hour a week working the floor or the front desk of the museum. These programs are usually used to help staff have a better sense of front-line needs and challenges, but they're also an obvious way to help all staff literally "connect" with visitors. Recently, I've been talking with one art center about turning their "floor hour" into an "art hour" where staff can do whatever creative activity appeals to them and might help them relate to visitors. Not all staff want to actively lead tours or programs, but if "connecting with community" is a core part of your mission, then all staff should have some aspect of their performance evaluation tied to making nice.
Appreciate regulars. Is a big corporation like Starbucks really better at promoting a sense of community than museums? If a barista can remember your double soy latte, why can't museums give special treatment to members and frequent visitors? I've been writing a lot about regulars and loyalty recently. There's no way we can serve a "community" if we act like amnesiacs every time they come back through the door. Museums need to develop ways to track frequency of use, whether with technology or otherwise As David Gilman commented, "How can we be friends if I not only keep forgetting things about you, but never learn them to begin with?"
Make food and drink and comfy chairs available. In Ray Oldenberg's list of hallmarks of a "third place," food and drink ranks as not essential but very important. Museums are fatiguing. People like to sit down and drink a cup of coffee or a beer. Even better is the opportunity to drink a beer while checking out an exhibit--most museums separate food and comfort from the exhibit experience, creating a false dichotomy between the place where you hang out and the place where you engage with museum content. The ideal situation is one like that at El Rio, a bar in San Francisco that lets you bring your own food and also offers free barbecues and oysters every week. Nothing says community like free bbq on the patio.
Consider operating a storefront in the community. If you want to reach out to a community that is not within walking distance of your institution, why not open a satellite in their neighborhood? One of the reasons that 826 Valencia is so successful as a tutoring center is its location right in the middle of a busy mixed-use urban neighborhood. The "community" doesn't have to leave their block to get there. Commercial real estate is cheap right now (and getting cheaper). The Denver Community Museum was an entire institution in a little storefront. Imagine what a big museum could do with a little space.

I'd like to close with a few words from the "About Us" section of El Rio's website. This bar ("El Rio: Your Dive") may be humble, but it "connects with community" with flying colors. Their About Us section is mostly not about them, but about the ways they want to connect with you, their potential community.

Check out the way that they welcome in different particular communities...

We are a mixed bar- all sexualities, colors, ages(21+) are encouraged and very welcome.
We are a bar so you must be 21+ to enter. We id folks we don't know.
We welcome people with disabilities. Our entrance and most of the club are wheelchair accessible, including the back deck but not the yard. Our bathrooms are not wheelchair accessible and do not have grab bars (and would not be accessible without assistance). We do not have a parking lot. For more information, please call 415.282.3325 We will do our best to accommodate you!
We have no dress code but a strong preference for tutu's and wigs.

Or how they communicate their values...

We love nice people.
We love kids but can't allow them because of foolish laws.
We love people who clean up after themselves, a lot.
We love this place, it's our home.
We have a pool table, shuffle board, juke box and have been known to have very loud dice games.
We are a work in progress and open to hearing opinions so speak up. See the link to the left.

And a final statement...

And lastly, we are not for everyone but for those of you who feel welcome and at home, we are very, very happy you found us.

Helping Strangers Participate through Instructions: Deconstructing the MP3 Experiment

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:23:00 +0000

I’ve long admired Improv Everywhere, the NYC-based participatory public art group. They construct wild performances in everyday settings, invite regular people to participate, and document their work well.

I particularly like the MP3 experiments, events at which Improv Everywhere distribute an audio file to people for free as a podcast. Participants gather in a physical venue with their own digital audio players, and everyone hits “play” at the same time. For about half an hour, hundreds of people play together, silently, as directed by disembodied voices inside their headphones. The MP3 experiment is a model for how a typically isolating experience—listening to headphones in public—can become the basis for a powerful interpersonal experience with strangers. In this way, the MP3 experiment is an example of the ways that technological barriers can become benefits by mediating otherwise uncomfortable interactions.

The MP3 experiment is an exercise in following instructions. The voice tells you what to do –stand up, shake hands, play Twister, make silly shapes—and you do it. Over the years, the experiment has grown in popularity (recently, thanks to this NYT article), and the participants have a sense that they will be asked to do something a little unusual in the context of the event. But it’s still impressive how quickly the recording sets a supportive tone in the face of absurdity. And I think there are lessons in the details of the recording for anyone interested in encouraging visitors/users/participants to step outside their comfort zones and try something new.

Listen to the first 5 minutes 30 seconds of the audio file for mp3 experiment 4 (download via this page), held in Manhattan in 2006. Deconstructing just these few initial minutes of the program reveals a lot about what makes this project so successful.

The recording starts with two and a half minutes of music without talking. While this feels long if you are listening at home, in the context of the event it’s a way to get comfortable with the whole idea of the experiment without being asked to do something right away.

Two and a half minutes in, the “omnipotent voice” Steve introduces himself. He explains that you will have to follow his instructions to have “the most pleasant afternoon together.” Steve has a deep, fake “god” voice, which makes him sound both benevolent and like someone you want to please. He’s not your friend, but he likes you. He’s not quite human, but he understands your world. You feel like you are in safe hands.

The first thing Steve asks you to do is to look around the park to see who else is participating—or not. This is an incredibly easy introductory task that doesn’t make you look silly. It bolsters your confidence that others are participating and that they also look like regular folks, not stupid at all. Then he asks you to take a deep breath. Again: easy, non-conspicuous, non-threatening.

Finally, at 3:45, after those two non-physical activities, Steve asks you to stand up. Like a preschool teacher, he asks you three times if you are ready, and then says, “stand up now.” He asks you to wave to others who are standing up. Now you are starting to feel a little foolish and exposed, but also welcomed by the others who are waving to you. It’s a friendly kind of discomfort, and you’ve had enough build-up to feel okay doing what you are told.

At 4:30, Steve starts a “pointing game” in which he asks you to point to the tallest building you can see, then the Statue of Liberty, then Nicaragua. For each of these, he says to point even if you can’t see the place – just point to where you think it is. You don’t have to have the right answer: you just have to try. After giving you a few seconds, Steve always says, “good.” After the Nicaragua question, Steve says, “Most of you are pretty good at geography.” This is hugely generous of Steve. He could easily make fun of the (likely many) people who can’t identify the direction of Nicaragua. Instead, he declares that you are pretty good.

Finally, Steve asks you to point to the ugliest cloud. These silly requests establish complicity between you and him, an understanding that you are special people doing special things. You have moved from making a factual judgment to a subjective one, and again, Steve validates your choice, saying, “I agree. That cloud is pretty ugly.”

The experiment continues, and participants do stranger and stranger things—following people, playing freeze tag, taking pictures of each other, forming a giant dartboard. But it’s all founded on these first few minutes, which create an environment of safe progression, clear instruction, and emotional validation.

I think many of us could construct comparably successful participatory experiences of this type to develop exhibits or audio tours that explicitly support unusual social and interactive behavior. But it’s rare that museum exhibit designers or audio tour developers are willing to explicitly require certain kinds of actions by visitors. It feels too "guided"--even when it opens doors to new kinds of experiences. We want our cake (exciting social interactions) but aren't willing to overly prime visitors. Perhaps one of the obstacles is a lack of an introductory framework to help people feel comfortable engaging in an open and creative manner. How can you provide as friendly and comforting an introduction to strange cultural experiences as Steve does? How can you use specific yet evocative instructions to invite visitors into complicit acts of exploration and art?

Innovative Punch Card Systems that Motivate Deep Engagement

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:37:00 +0000

When I moved across the country, a friend gave me a gift of a National Parks passport. This little booklet that lists all the US national parks and has a spot for a special stamp that you can obtain at any of them. In the years I have owned this passport, I have visited several national parks. But I have never stamped the passport. It sits in the glove compartment, helpfully taking up space.

I have another item in my glove compartment—a National Parks annual pass—that I use all the time. This card allows me free entry into national parks. It’s a membership.

I find it very strange that the parks passport and the parks pass are not related. Why doesn’t the passport motivate me to visit more parks with rewards? Why isn’t my annual pass fee or renewal status in some way correlated or discounted based on my stamp collection? In short, why isn’t this a better incentive system?

Recently, I’ve been exploring the range of unusual punch card incentive and loyalty systems. In February, I wrote about the complex and somewhat creepy system that Harrah’s casino employs to promote loyalty, but today I’m focusing on the lowly punch card. We’re all familiar with the most basic version, ubiquitous in coffee shops, in which you can slowly accumulate stamps or hole-punches and receive a free drink after six or eight or ten purchases. There are virtual versions, such as the REI coop system, in which members of the coop receive 10% back on all REI purchases available in store credit or cash at the end of the year. There’s even a theater that offers a play with forking paths (such that you can’t see the whole show on one occasion) and a diminishing ticket price for each subsequent visit.

I’ve often wondered why I’ve never seen a museum with a punch card system. Even at the most basic level, punch cards do a couple of important things:

They establish an expectation that you might visit multiple times.
They allow staff to see, with no complex technology, that you have visited previously.

Presumably, a membership does these things as well. But many large museum membership database systems are dismal at tracking members’ or visitors’ repeat attendance. While the visitor is “growing their relationship” with the institution over several visits, the museum plays the amnesiac, treating each visitor like it’s the first time. And where the databases fall short, punch cards thrive. Seeing that a person’s card has been punched several times allows front-line staff to engage in conversation about what they liked on previous visits, what’s new, and what they might particularly enjoy.

But a simple punch card is not enough. Like national parks, people visit museums infrequently enough that the punch card does not incentivize repeat use. If you get coffee every day, and there’s a place that offers you a free cup for every ten you buy, then you can get free coffee every couple of weeks. Museums don’t work that way. I suspect that most people (with the exception of rabid young families at children’s and science museums) would lose a museum punch card before making it to visit number ten.

Here are some clever innovations on the punch card system:

Menchies, a frozen yogurt shop in Los Angeles, offers a punch card with a free yogurt after you’ve purchased seven. When my dad entered as a first-time customer and bought a yogurt, he was given a punch card with six punches already completed—functionally, a two-for-one coupon for his next visit. Not only did this bring him back to Menchies, it was probably more effective than a coupon would have been in priming him to take a new punch card and presumably continue frequenting the shop. Some museums have been experimenting with sending students home from school trips with a free ticket for a followup visit with the family; maybe starting them with a punch card would be a more effective way to connect them to the institution.
Tina, We Salute You, a hip coffee shop in London, makes their punch cards a social in-venue experience. Rather than carrying your own card, you are invited to write your name on the wall and draw a star for every coffee you’ve drunk (see image at top). Purchase ten and you receive a free coffee—and a new color to continue advancing your stars. This creates a feeling of community and entices new visitors to the shop to add their own name and get involved. There’s a game-like “keeping up with the Joneses” aspect where people feel motivated to get more stars, to have a more adorned name, etc. because their participation is being publicly showcased. Instead of the reward when you reach ten and get a free coffee being a private feeling, you get to celebrate with the store and the rest of its patrons. Again, this could be a lovely way, particularly for a small museum, to encourage visitors to think of themselves as part of the museum community and to desire a “level up” in their nameplate on the wall. It’s like a low-budget, dynamic donor wall.
The Winking Lizard Tavern is an Ohio-based chain of thirteen restaurants that puts on a yearly “world beer tour,” this year featuring over 150 international beers. People can join the tour with a ten dollar entrance fee, which grants them a color guidebook of all the beers, a punch card for the beers they’ve tried, and an online beer-tasting tracking system. When you hit fifty beers, you get a gift, and at one hundred, you receive the “world tour jacket” featuring the names of the year’s beers. This is functionally a membership, including email newsletter and special events, but it is driven by the idea that you will keep purchasing new (and different) beers. It’s a brilliant way for each entry, each purchase, to enhance the value of the punch card rather than making people wait entirely until the end. If only the parks service had taken this path with their passport. You could easily imagine a similar system for a museum to incentivize visiting different institutions, exhibits, or trying new experiences across the institution (educational programs, lectures, performances, discussions, etc.).

Punch cards and incentive schemes aren’t just about getting people in the door. They’re also a way to establish a deeper connection with regulars and to reward people for whom the museum is a significant part of their lives. As more museums have moved towards offering “value memberships” that are essentially discounts on admission, membership renewal relies largely on repeat visits. If the member doesn’t come several times, she won’t renew. Particularly at children's and science museums, there are many visitors who use the museum as an extension of their other family learning activities and environments, but membership programs don’t fully exploit this. While children's progress in online educational game environments is tracked and provides feedback to parents, no such feedback exists for museum visits. Exhibit designers spend hundreds of hours developing content that is developmentally appropriate for different kinds of learners, but that information is not used to enhance and amplify the learning value of the museum experience. There are many children's museums that provide label text at adult eye-height encouraging parents to observe and learn from their children's approach to play. Why can't the museum automate some of this observation, bake it into a membership punch card system, and provide recommendations that can help families "grow with" the museum? If the Winking Lizard Tavern can do it for beer, why can't we do it for children's education? Why can’t we do it for any visitor who is eager for the deepening, complex relationship museums purport to offer?

There is no such thing as a townsquare for faceless individuals. When you are treated like a "regular," that connotes special value. Punch cards are a simple step towards acknowledging that value, encouraging repeat participation, and moving towards more robust museum communities. How might you use them to meet your institution's goals?

MuseumNext: Camp Comes to the UK, Oct 22-23

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:17:00 +0000

Many of you know how much I love camp-like professional experiences. And so when Jim Richardson of Sumo Design (the guy behind the brilliant I Like... Museums site) asked me if I'd like to come to England this fall and put on some kind of camp with him, I was thrilled.

MuseumNext will be an intense 24 hours of fun in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, which I've heard is just like the beaches of California but with more beer. We are using a hybrid unconference/workshop model in which participants work collaboratively to explore and brainstorm a few pre-selected "wild ideas" for future museum initiatives related to audience participation. I often feel frustrated that conferences focus generally on topics without explicitly applying the content to specific projects of interest. In the case of MuseumNext, you bring the projects (or skills to support new projects) and we will all leave having hammered out some of the particulars--from the creative to the practical.

Let me give you an example. I'm working on a project to open an interactive museum/bar in Santa Cruz focused on social participation. It's slowly moving from the "dream" stage to the "possible" stage - but it's still far from being real. I have some ideas about how it is going to work, but there are a lot of big questions in my mind about how we are going to connect with audiences, run a functional business, and design experiences that are inclusive and exciting without feeling clubbish or overwhelming. I work on this project mostly on my own, and I often wish I had the opportunity to hash out ideas for it with other smart, energized people with complementary skills.

So many of us have private fantasies like this, projects we wish we could start or complete. They may be small programs you'd love to get going at your museum, or an idea for a whole new kind of exhibit or venue. These dreams tend to get trapped in our own heads and get shoved aside by more pressing day-to-day work. MuseumNext is a place to bring these dreams out to play, and hopefully, push them closer to the "reality" side of the ledger.

Not everyone has to have a project, or, as we're calling them, "wild ideas," to participate in MuseumNext. To keep it manageable, we'll select just a few project proposals on which to focus the workshop. Everyone else will be asked to come with their unique skills in mind, and to consider offering unconference sessions (discussions) on topics that relate to making innovative projects happen. Whether you are a graphic designer, an educator, a designer, a marketer, or a programmer, you have some skills that can help make someone's dream possible. You don't have to be an employee of a museum or in the museum field to attend; you just have to be enthusiastic about supporting innovation in cultural venues.

Please feel free to contact me or Jim with any questions. You can sign up now; there is an earlybird rate of £130 until August 14, at which time the cost will go up to £190. I'm trying to come to London beforehand and hope to have the chance to see many of the fabulous museums behind the people and projects I've admired from across the ocean.

And I can't wait to hear what wild ideas you're going to bring to Newcastle!

Museums that Get Better the More People Use Them

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:38:00 +0000

On Wednesday, it's my birthday. Today I got an early present from the San Francisco NPR station, KQED, which aired a piece on Museum 2.0 featuring me (as well as the fabulous Lori Fogarty of the Oakland Museum of California).

In the interview, we talk about the idea of Web 2.0 being based on a simple premise: software that gets better the more people use it. Every person who clicks on a Google search result, rates a movie on Netflix, or adds a photo to Flickr improves the overall experience for subsequent users. The extent to which I can learn from Wikipedia or waste time on Youtube is directly proportional to the volume of other users' participation--creators, critics, and spectators alike. This is what Tim O'Reilly refers to as an "architecture of participation"--one in which the rewards of engagement are not felt only by individual users but by the community as a whole.

This concept has spawned a question I like to obsess over: What would a museum look like that got better the more people used it? Not one that got more dirty and broken, or crowded and frustrating, but one for which every subsequent visitor experience was improved by those that had come before?

What might this look like? It might be a recommendation system that helps visitors find things that they'll like or be inspired by based on the preferences of previous visitors. It might be an exhibit that evolves over time, growing richer (but not cluttered) by continued visitor participation and contribution. It might be an educational program that links visitors to each other via their affinities and skills rather than staff providing all of the instruction. It might be a membership program in which the member can grow with the institution not via donor levels but via deeper content experiences with other members.

In the next chunk of the book I'm writing, I'm exploring the ways the network effects of many visitors' actions over time can generate exciting possibilities for subsequent visitors. I'd like to push beyond the most obvious and often-technologically mediated examples to find some clever, elegant, low-tech ways for visitors to enhance each others' experiences. The Haarlem Oost library book drops are one example, but I'm sure you have seen or created others.

And so I have a birthday request for you. Sometime this week, please think about this question and share your response here as a comment.

How could a museum get better the more people use it?

You will make everyone who reads this blog's experience better by sharing your brilliant ideas, and you'll give a great gift to one curly-haired almost-birthday girl. Thanks in advance!

Making Alternative Meaning out of Museum Artifacts

nina@museumtwo.com (Nina Simon) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:32:00 +0000

Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is a temporary gallery for the summer school holiday in which the Powerhouse is displaying eighteen very odd objects alongside fanciful (and fictitious) labels written by children's book author Shaun Tan, schoolchildren, and visitors.

The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. That discussion has traditionally focused on visitors' ability to distinguish real artifacts from props and the question of whether an experience with a reproduction is lesser than, equivalent to, or superior to engaging with "the real thing."

But in the Odditoreum's case, it's not the object that's in doubt but the interpretation. The objects are real, the labels absurd. Of course, the objects were chosen for their pecularities, and in some cases, such as a giant licorice tricycle shaped like a shoe, the imagined usage (guide dog training distraction device) is almost as reasonable as the real thing (2000 Olympics closing ceremony vehicle).

Last month, I met an artist who was part of a group that created a renegade podcast tour for the Portland Art Museum. I enjoyed listening to it (virtually, not at the museum). The silly imagined situations that corresponded with the art certainly got me looking at the pieces for a longer period of time than I typically would, and in some cases, made me think about the deeper meaning of the piece or what might have inspired the artist. But I also found myself wondering if this imagined set of interpretations for the art was any more compelling or useful than any other imagined set of interpretations. If I made up stories to go with the art, wouldn't I think just as hard about what it might mean, what inner jokes or profundity I might spin into my creation?

For this reason, I was not surprised to see that the Odditoreum's talkback area is sparking "a remarkable level of participation." There is a very popular part of the Odditoreum where visitors can write their own labels for the artifacts, and the visitor-submitted ones (such as the one at the top) appear to be inventive and on-topic. People are having fun with this experience, and who can blame them? We make up stories about strange objects all the time--the makeup torture devices in our aunt's bathroom, the weird old statue in the outhouse (yes, I have one). We use these stories to try to understand objects and the people who own and use them, and to poke a little fun while we're at it.

Here are a few design decisions I noticed that I think really add to the Odditoreum's success:

They are only featuring a few objects. At the end of his interview, Seb wondered if you could have "an entire museum" like this. You can (and there is - the unparalleled Museum of Jurassic Technology). But the educational value of the Odditoreum rests on the fact is that it is situated in a large museum full of objects with accurate labels. In the Museum of Jurassic Technology, you feel as though you are in a funhouse. You feel disconcerted and overwhelmed by the ambiguity of the interpretation. In the Odditoreum, you know you are being given a little space to have fun and poke at the rest of it all. The rules of the museum still exist, and it's more powerful to subvert them in little bits than to throw them out altogether.
The framing is about imagination and meaning-making from objects, not silliness or childishness. While the Odditoreum was initiated fairly explicitly for children and family on holiday, the Powerhouse doesn't message it as something just for kids. The introductory label talks about "strangeness, mystery, and oddity" and comments that, "when things are strange, the brain sends out feelers for meaning." This is a powerful statement that encourages visitors to really think about the "why" of these objects. It made me recall researcher Sherry Turkle's work with "evocative objects" and her statement that "we love the objects we think with." At this year's AAM conference, Sherry struggled to provide us with a good metric for determining which objects are evocative enough to have emotional and intellectual resonance. It appears that the Odditoreum is full of these, and that the framing--both by Shaun Tam and by the Powerhouse--accentuates the mystical power of the objects rather than their ridiculousness.
The participatory element employs an accessible speculative question. I've written before about the power of "what if" questions and the fact that it is easier for visitors (or any novices) to answer speculative questions than factual ones. The Odditoreum's "write your own label" program is very successful because visitors are being asked to author imaginative content. There are several museums that have experimented with "write your own label" programs, but they tend to involve some programmatic hand-holding to help people get over the threshold fear that they will do it "wrong" in some way. There is no wrong answer to the question, "what do you imagine this thing might be in your wildest dreams?" It is a much easier and less pointed a question than, "what do you think this thing is?"
The participatory element is modeled well by the "official" content. Theoretically, you could take the idea of writing imaginative labels and offer that as an activity anywhere in the museum. That's functionally what the Portland Art Museum renegade podcasters did. But it's much harder for the institution to motivate visitors to be imaginative if the official museum content around them is accurate and dry. It feels like the visitors are being asked to do an extraordinary (and possibly denigrated) activity that is atypical museum behavior. That's why the podcasters were "renegades"--they were deliberately subverting appropriate interpretative behavior. Not every visitor is willing to be subversive. In the Odditoreum such irregular actions are not only invited but modeled. The official labels are beautifully written and artfully printed, but they are comparable in content and tone to what visitors are being asked to do. They model the requested visitor contributions. And the addition of schoolchildren alongside the celebrated author means the museum is also modeling that anyone can be a successful contributor of interpretative content.
The answer is given, but separately. One of my favorite parts of the interview is Helen Whitty's explanation of how the museum chose to display the "real" information about each object. As she puts it:
I didn’t want the fantasy label immediately next to the real information, thus spoiling the approach (’really you thought we were going to fun but really its business as usual’).
Instead, the museum mounted the real information ("What they actually are!") together on one large panel nearby. It's available, but it's not the point of the whole exercise.
It's not self-important. Seeing the content from the Odditoreum made me reflect on all the art pieces I've seen in which artists comment on regular life or objects in some way. When it works, it's great, but too often it feels like an inside joke not meant for me to understand--one that might be disrespectful to the object as it winks in an insular direction. I think the family focus (and perhaps the fact that it was initiated through the public programs department) kept the Odditoreum from being overly self-important or ironic. It was interesting to read that Shaun preferred not to select art objects because those already had a layer of interpretation "built in." The Odditoreum labels I've read seem genuine in their desire both to entertain and dig deeper.

Seb concluded by asking if you could make an entirely fictitious museum. I'm ending in a slightly different place, asking: Why isn't there an Odditoreum tucked into the corner of every collecting museum?