Design for Social Engagement: Pointing at Exhibits

What makes an exhibit “social?” How do you design an object experience that encourages participation among visitors? This blog often analyzes how websites, designed spaces, even dogs promote participatory experiences among users. Today, we look inward for a how-to on one type of participatory design as applied to museum exhibits.

The photos above were provided by Paul Martin of the Science Museum of Minnesota from their award-winning exhibition RACE. When he speaks about these photos, Paul spends little time on the content of the exhibits. Instead, he focuses on what the visitors are doing: pointing at things. In RACE, visitors point things out to each other and start talking about them.

Paul has suggested that this metric—pointing—may be a valuable evaluation measure of a particular kind of engagement. On one level this is fuzzy. What does it mean when people point at things? Do they point because the thing is unusual or surprising? Do they point because the thing is familiar?

It’s hard to determine the pointer’s motivation for interest in the object. But there’s a simpler way to look at it: people point at things because they want other people to see them. Pointing is a measure of how viral something is. Some people point, others forward videos. The motivation behind it is the same: the body language equivalent of saying "you should look at this."

Exhibits that induce pointing are social in a couple of ways. Pointing advertises and spreads the exhibit’s impact. If nobody points, then each visitor has to approach each exhibit (or not) and find something interesting (or not). When pointing happens, the work of figuring out whether an exhibit will be worthwhile or not is circumvented. She points, he looks. The exhibit uses the initial pointing visitor as an advertisement, spreading the content virally to others in the space. You may or may not find the thing your friend pointed out interesting, but either way, you are likely to look at it.

Second, unlike viral web experiences, the in-person pointer is setting up a social interaction with the pointee. On the web, content gets distributed semi-anonymously through networks and email lists. But in the museum, the distribution method is more personal. One person points, another person looks, and a social exchange takes place. The people may talk about the exhibit, or they may just communally revel in their interest in what was pointed at. Either way, the act of pointing has changed the exhibit from one that speaks to individual visitors to one that speaks to visitors in pairs or groups.

How do you design an exhibit that people will point at? To do so, you have to focus on providing something that people will want to show other people. Here are some design elements that can improve your "pointiness":

• Make the object of interest simple enough to require little explanation. The goal is to make the barrier to pointing as low as possible. It's much easier on the pointer if all he has to do is say, "look!" and the other person/people will understand. If the pointer is then obliged to explain why she pointed, that increases the demand on her. In this way, non-interactive exhibits, objects, and text labels can all be sources for social interaction, assuming the message they have to share is clear and compelling enough to induce pointing.
  
• Make the object of interest big and or accessible enough to be seen from a distance. If the thing you are pointing at is small, you have to bring the pointee close to the exhibit (and close to you) to share it. This can be fine, and is useful for promoting intimacy among family groups who are visiting together, reading labels together, using interactives together. But if you want to point things out to strangers or to disparate members of your group, it's easier if you don't have to drag them away from their current position to come close to you. Again, the size lowers the barrier to pointing by allowing people to do it without invading each other's personal space. The ultimate example of this is an eclipse. The sun is big. Everyone can point at it and share that experience from wherever they stand.
  
• Make it easy to access and share the moment of interest. If it takes a visitor several minutes of interaction to get to the "pointable moment," and then that moment only lasts for a short time, that visitor has little incentive to point. It's too hard to explain what the other visitor will have to do to get to the good stuff, and it takes too long to want to stick around. Many of the most remarkable experiences in interactive exhibits are outcomes, so it's useful if those outcomes are long-lasting and easily experienced by several people. For me, a great example of this is the Exploratorium's Watch Water Freeze exhibit in which visitors look through polarized lenses at ice crystals forming extraordinary rainbows. The "pointable moment" is the outcome, but it's very easy to get there--you just look through the lens. When at the Exploratorium, I constantly find myself pointing this exhibit out to strangers because the barrier of explanation is so low ("look through the lens") and the payoff is high.
  
• Make the exhibit spectacular, scandalous, or totally surprising. People point at things that are aberrant. This doesn't mean you have to go for the fireworks. In RACE, one of the most pointed at exhibits is a vitrine featuring stacks of money representing the average earnings of Americans of different races. Money is somewhat exciting, but the real power in the exhibit comes in the shocking disparity among the piles. People are compelled to point out of surprise. The powerful physical metaphor of the stacks makes the information presented feel more spectacular without dumbing it down or over-dressing it.
  
• Make the exhibit break social barriers. This is an element that I'll explore in more detail in a future post. The idea here is that when an object breaks some of the social mores preventing communication among strangers, it's easier for people to take that break as an opening for their own socially aberrant behavior. This is why dogs are social objects--they don't understand societal rules against licking strangers. If the exhibit "licks you," then you may feel more comfortable and interested in sharing it with a stranger. In the example of RACE, the very topic opened up a socially locked door, which then gave "permission" for discussion. One of the accidental design elements was an overabundance of audio bleeding into the space from a large number of exhibit videos. The SMM folks found, to their delight, that the buzz from the videos creates a kind of sound landscape of people talking about race. When you hear other voices talking about race, you feel more comfortable joining or starting your own conversations. The sound bleed was a design interloper that changed the rules of engagement with RACE and may have made visitors more comfortable pointing things out to each other.
  

There are drawbacks to designing exhibits that encourage pointing. These design rules aren't for every exhibit. Encouraging "pointiness" can require letting go of design practices that encourage personal ruminating or communing with the exhibit. It doesn't work well when the exhibits involve sequential interactions or prolonged engagement. But it is useful when you want to encourage informal social interactions among visitors. You don't need to start with participatory design shooting for the deep discussion among strangers. Sometimes, all you need is someone to point you in the right direction.

The Novice Interpreter and the Art of Conversation

This week, I listened to the new podcast episode of Radiolab, my favorite NPR show. The podcast featured the two hosts, Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, speaking to a crowd about their unique partnership. For those who haven't listened, Radiolab is an hour-long popular science show that looks in-depth at topics like "emergence," "time," and "mortality" from a range of scientific perspectives. Radiolab does what I hope all great museum exhibitions can do--take a deep topic and make it compelling on many levels. Near the end of the talk, an audience member asked,

How do you choose which level to approach a topic when your listeners range from people who know nothing to people who know all too much?

and at minute 15:30, partway through the answer, Robert said something extraordinary:

I think we both start also as virgins. We don't know really what we're talking about at the beginning--we find out along the way. And we make that very clear. So we never pretend to anybody that we're scholars cause we're not. And we do represent ourselves as novices, which is a good thing. It is a good thing in a couple of ways. First, it means we can say, "what?!" honestly. And the second thing: "can you explain that again?" honestly. And then the third thing is, it allows us to challenge these people as though we were ordinary, curious folks.

We have a show coming up right now about synthetic biology, where engineers are building life forms that are new to existence, new to the history of life. And they're doing it quite... aggressively. And we, we yell at them and we fight with them and we argue with them, and they give right back. But we're trying to model a kind of conversation with important people, powerful people, but particularly knowledgeable people, where we say--YOU can go up to a person with a lot of knowledge and ask him "why?," ask him "how does he know that?" Tell him, stop! Ask him why he keeps going. And get away with it. And that's important.

Effectively, Robert is saying that Radiolab isn't just a show where the hosts have conversations with scientists. It's a show where the hosts model a way for YOU to have conversations with scientists, a way for regular people to engage with experts rather than deferring to or ignoring them.

To do this kind of modeling, Robert and Jad actively portray themselves as novices. They make themselves look stupid so we don't have to feel that way. They articulate the basic questions and knee-jerk reactions in our own minds, carrying us deep into the content from a common starting place. By humbling themselves in this way, they create a powerful learning experience. Robert and Jad aren't content experts, but they are interpretative experts, skilled interviewers and producers. And those skills drove the cultivation of personae that are wonderfully accessible.

Which brings me to museums and how we present content. Reread the question and substitute the word "visitors" for "listeners." Reread Robert's response. Could you imagine a curator, designer, or museum educator speaking this way about an exhibition? Ever?

After listening to this clip a few times, I wondered: what if museums dropped the authoritative voice, the cultural voice, the friendly teacher voice, and adopted a novice voice? What would it feel like to read labels that challenge the information provided or acknowledge the questions in everyone's head: How did they get this giant sculpture in here? Why does anyone care about this dead stuff? Why is there lots of snow if global warming is happening?

My feeling on this is mixed. I love the Radiolab experience, but I wonder how much the success of the "novice voice" is contingent on the context of conversation. A novice challenging and discussing with an expert is interesting. A novice alone on an exhibit panel could be as isolating as any other single exhibit voice, and potentially more annoying.

So maybe it isn't just about novice voice. Maybe it's about interplay among many voices and levels of expertise. Should museum content and exhibit labels use dialog more heavily? One of the most popular interactives at the Monterey Bay Aquarium is the Real Cost Cafe, in which visitors select fish from a menu and hear their choices dissected in terms of environmental impact on video by a waitress, a cook, and a dishwasher in a restaurant. It's not the most fun game ever. It's engaging because the content is presented as a dialog among characters. The characters aren't expert scientists or fish researchers. They are knowledgeable, normal, relatable folks.

Like Radiolab, the Real Cost Cafe models a conversation on a contentious topic. Perhaps its greatest strength is this modeling, this suggestion that environmental food choices are worth discussing at the dinner table. That it's ok to have strong opinions, ok not to provide a balanced take on everything. This is what Radiolab does so well--acknowledges that science is not an objective abstraction. It's something worth getting worked up about, confused about, passionate about.

Isn't that what we want to model for museum visitors about our own content? What's the difference between a label that models a kind of content engagement and one that purports to provide that engagement?

Museum Skunkworks: Carving Out a Place for Risk-Taking

I once asked Elaine Gurian how museums can change. She said it happens in one of two ways: either the place is small and inconsequential enough that no one is watching, or there's a passionate, gutsy director willing to risk his or her job.

Here's the problem with both of these ways: they require circumstances that are outside of most museum employees' control. Where's the bottom-up option for people who are motivated to do something new within sprawling, bogged-down places? Where's the opportunity for risk in museums that are too big to avoid the media microscope?

There's a third way, a way modeled in huge tech companies trying to compete with young start-ups. "Skunkworks" are internal mini-companies given specific, often tangential projects outside the larger corporate bureaucracy. They can be secret advanced projects like the Lockheed design of the U-2 (Lockheed coined the term skunkworks in 1943). They can be parallel projects, in which a small team works independently to innovate something already in progress on a larger scale. Or, they can be satellite projects, exploring uncharted institutional territory.

Skunkworks projects have two advantages:

• they allow institutions to develop really great ideas that would get squashed by standard channels and processes
• they allow institutions to take risks in a controlled way that does not impact the majority of staff, day-to-day functions, or revenue streams.
  

The thing that all skunkworks projects have in common is a pass from standard bureaucratic procedures (see Lockheed's skunkworks operating rules for an example). Project leaders are typically given a small budget and team and let loose to work. They don't have to fill out forms or ask permission. The point is to encourage "safe risk" by segmenting it so that the related chaos does not adversely impact the entire institution. In a museum context, this effectively means carving out a small group and letting them function like a small, inconsequential, visionary institution--one that can move quickly, fail often, and hopefully innovate some new opportunities and methods for the larger museum.

The change created by these skunkworks doesn't tear the institution apart or require vision retreats. It's small and isolated. The failures, the successes, and the risks are owned by a few staff in their own world. This means not only that innovation can happen, but that it can happen in a controlled way--and can be applied, scaled, or ditched for the institution as a whole.

How do skunkworks projects get started? There are two ways: directive from the top or desire from the bottom.

There's more attention these days on the "from the top" model. Fast Company published a wonderful article in 2005 about IBM's skunkworks, the "emerging-business opportunities" (EBOs), which were initiated in 2000 by the senior vice president of strategy. In IBM's case, the EBOs carved out a space where experienced managers could develop new business models in industries that weren't viable in the short-term (and thus were systematically excised by execs focused on shareholder value). Their success is laudable (producing $15 billion in revenue in the first five years), and by encouraging entrepenurial rising staff into avenues outside the traditional bureaucracy, IBM can hold on to people who might otherwise peel off to their own ventures. IBM can offer these risk-takers something most startups can't: a safety net. When EBOs fail, the teams don't lose their jobs. IBM can learn from the mistakes, absorb the relatively small financial and morale losses, and move on.

But again, the "from the top" model requires something that few museum staff have: authority. And while they may receive less press, the more typical path for skunkworks is grassroots. An ambitious staff member goes to a manager and says, "I have this crazy great idea." The manager affirms the crazy-greatness of it--and its non-viability within the corporate structure. But instead of the conversation ending there, the staff member says, "here's how I think I could do this." They set a small budget, decide how much time the staff member (and any others) can devote to it, and the person goes at it.

We've all done this at some point--worked on something on the side and then presented it to hopefully delighted managers. But it's more powerful when the organization has a way to support these kinds of activities, so the renegades feel institutionally connected and the quiet geniuses feel motivated to come forward. It also lets people propose things that are outside of their own departments.

Another way to look at this is as an R&D arm for the museum. I met recently with some folks from an experience design firm who frequently do short 6-8 week research projects in fields outside their expertise. This summer, they're building a museum exhibit. There's no client, no cash. They don't see it as a waste of time to try these new things--they see it as a controlled way to explore new industries, technologies, and application of their skills. And they put some of their best people, not their interns, onto these projects. It's a way to have their leaders moving forward instead of spending all their time managing others.

Ok, you might say. But why do I need to put these people in a separate room and let them ignore the accounting forms? Doesn't that fracture our overall institutional culture? Can't we innovate into our current systems?

Yes. But it will be wrenching institutional change, or it will be wrenching institutional lack of change. It will not be nimble. It will not be controlled chaos.

Consider this anecdote. A few years ago, I worked at a museum that held a $1000 contest to come up with a great new advertising idea. I won with a suggestion ripped from The Mystery Spot--give out free bumper stickers as people leave, and watch them spread the brand around town. I was given a check, and the marketing department was given the idea. Nothing happened. Zero bumper stickers made. If they had given me the $1000 to start my own bumper sticker campaign--heck, $250 would have been sufficient--I could have designed a sticker, had it printed, and started handing them out. Instead, a new idea got passed through the standard channels and went nowhere. It had executive-level support, but it didn't fit into the schedules and standard way things were typically done, so it couldn't be done.

It can be painful and scary to try to change your core services. It's hard to try a "whole new approach" to exhibits, programs, fundraising, etc. while the train is moving. Rather than wishing on visionary directors or out-of-the-way places, we can use skunkworks models to support our own mini-visionaries in the nooks and crannies of the institutions we already have.

What do you think? Can you imagine your institution supporting a skunkworks project? Can you see yourself suggesting one? If you could start your own tiny universe to innovate one thing in a museum, what would you do?

Get on the Bus: How Mass Transit Design Affects Participatory Potential

There's a tag applied to many Museum 2.0 posts called "Unusual Projects and Influences." Posts under that tag tend to examine non-museum things, from malls to games to ad campaigns, and draw some design lessons for museums from their foreignness. Today, we look at a familiar thing: urban mass transit. Specifically, we analyze the relative social behavior of people on buses versus those on trains, and look for clues as to what design elements contribute to different kinds of participatory behavior.

In my highly anecdotal research, the bus is a more social space than the train or subway. The express bus I take most days to get to work feels like a big, slightly uncomfortable family. People talk. The bus driver waves as I bike up. One guy sings. It's on the cusp of personal--any moment the people reading and chatting might spring into action, to make change for someone getting on, offer first aid, or run after someone with his forgotten jacket.

Others have written about the propensity for social engagement (both desired and undesired) on the bus, and one woman I spoke to told me she STOPPED taking the bus because the communal feel of it was overwhelming at a time in the morning when she'd prefer to be left alone. In contrast, the subway is often a sterile world of passing through, a place where people ignore each other studiously. The voices are recorded, the doors perpetually closing.

This post is not intended as a pro-bus manifesto. Instead, I'm interested in the why. What design elements make buses more social than trains? What aspects of that socialness are desirable in museums (and how might we mirror buses or trains to promote them)?
And most of all:

Why do people feel empowered to express themselves and engage strangers on the bus?

Small size, repeat visits. You may take the same train every day, but chances are that train is eight cars long. Even if half of the other people on your train are regulars, the distribution of people throughout the cars means you are unlikely to have a repeat familiarity with many of them (which might open the potential for a casual relationship). On the bus, in contrast, you can see almost everyone, even if it's packed. I take the same bus every day and recognize many of the people on it. Some folks even have "their" seats. The repeat experience is progressively familiar, so I feel like I am entering a space with known faces.

This has its positives and negatives. I'm cheered to see the woman who likes to talk hiking, less so the man who flips through mail-order bride catalogs. The better you know the other folks, the more they set the flavor of the experience. This sounds risky to institutions like museums, where we want to design the experience through exhibits and architecture, not interpersonal exchanges. But in cases where there is interest in promoting more dialog, it's worth thinking about the power and challenge of a cumulative community to create the feel of the place. How does the repeat experience in a museum become progressively (and positively) communal?

The driver provides live facilitation. Bus drivers are welcomers, info-desks, guides, gates, and protectors all rolled into one. I was not surprised that most of the images I found on Flickr related to buses showed an open door and a smiling driver. In a world of increasingly automated commercial exchanges, bus drivers provide a human interface. If I get on the bus without money, the bus driver has the discretion to wave me through. If I'm biking up behind the bus and he sees me, he waits. If someone is being too loud or aggressive, she steps in. And if someone is celebrating, he sings along. I've written before about the power of live facilitators. To me, the opportunity for the bus to feel personal rests largely on the role of the driver/facilitator, whose job is less to drive the bus than to convey passengers safely to their destinations. How can all of your staff become facilitators of people instead of devices?

The bus stops where you want. The train stops where it is scheduled to stop. The bus stops when people on the bus pull a cord or the driver sees someone who wants to get on. Stopping is a human-powered activity. This makes the bus feel friendly, less robotic. Again, this relies on the facilitated element of the driver, but it also gives the individuals getting on and off personal agency (and responsibility) to manage their own experience. I still get a weird thrill when I pull the cord. It feels powerful: I am stopping the bus. Also, the frequency of potential stops means the bus is more likely to get you close to where you want to go. It's reasonable to say "the bus picks me up." Trains, on the other hand, just pass through. How can museums take you where you want to go, from your own personal starting place?

We have childhood memories of social bus rides. Even I, who never rode a school bus, can identify with that cultural experience. We see it on TV. We have memories of idiosyncratic drivers, bullies, and being jammed together like sardines. We expect buses to be rowdy, social spaces. If people have childhood memories of trains, they more likely recall the scenery, the long trip, the feel of moving along the tracks. The things we remember about buses are about people. The things we remember about trains are about transit. What memories do you want people to have about your museum--the people, the architecture, the stuff?

Buses travel familiar landscape. Unlike trains, which depart from dedicated, specific structures and often travel underground through landmark-free tunnels, buses are on the streets where we live and work. They go where cars, bikes, and pedestrians go. They have windows so you can see what you are passing. The first-time bus experience requires much less decoding than the train experience--no special place to start from, no weird machine to dispense tickets, no turnstile. If you get confused, there's a driver to greet and assist you. And while bus schedules and maps are at least as complicated as train maps, you can use familiar locators--known intersections and buildings--to navigate. You don't have to learn a whole new lexicon of stops and related aboveground locations. You're on the sidewalk, then on the bus, then on the sidewalk again. This relates to the frequent discussion on this blog of museums as destinations versus places in the path of daily life. How can museums become part of rather than set away from the everyday?

The bus takes a long time. The frequency of stops and the local windiness of buses makes them downright provincial. As a driver said in this charming article about the glacial pace of NYC buses, "the bus is only as fast as its slowest rider." Social chitchat among strangers is something associated with small towns and areas where people move slowly. It's no surprise the bus can simulate that experience, even in Manhattan. What museum experiences slow you down while simultaneously bringing you in contact with others?


Looking at this list, none of these design elements intrinsically relates to a social or expressive experience. Buses don't employ drivers or operate on city streets to improve the comfort and participatory experience of riding. But a few simple elements--the live facilitation, the small size, the placement of service in a familiar area--have a cumulative effect that makes the whole bus experience more personal, more comfortable, and thus, more conducive to social engagement.

This can be extrapolated to other forms of transit. Elevators are unfacilitated, speedy automatons that are so non-conducive to social behavior that good friend will cease their conversation during the ride. On airplanes, my husband now flies business class and reports more friendliness and conversation with neighbors: more comfortable seats, more personal service, and long hauls may contribute.

What social experiences have you had on mass transit? What lessons do you see that can be extrapolated to experiential spaces like museums?

The Lab at Belmar: Museums Coming Soon to a Mall Near You?

Let's say you want to start your own funky, irreverent exhibition and program space. How would you start? Try to convince folks at a big institution to give you a forgotten wing? Start an exploratory project to open a small, probably struggling, museum? Raise a ton of money for a world-class building and pray for visitors? Forget your grand dreams and try to weave awesome strangeness into your regular museum job?

In Denver there's another way. It involves an exotic museum bedfellow, the suburban real estate developer. Billed as "part art museum, part public forum," The Lab at Belmar is a contemporary art space in a suburban Denver development. It's a hip, energetic place. It also has an unusual founding story. From the first issue of the Lab's Notebook:

The Lab was conceived in 2003 when a few high-minded young developers of a new, 104-acre urban development called Belmar approached the Denver Art Museum and asked if, maybe, they could borrow some of those nice paintings the museum wasn't using. The point of Belmar was to replace a dying shopping mall with a vital city center for Lakewood, an inner suburb of Denver, and art seemed to be part of that concept. At the time, I was Master Teacher of Modern and Contemporary Art at the museum. Director Lewis Sharp and I quickly convinced the Belmar developers that they didn't want paintings from the basement, but a dynamic alternative to the traditional art museum. Creating a new city center provides the opportunity to create new forms of civic life.

You can debate among yourselves whether an outdoor mixed-use retail shopping space constitutes a "vital city center." The point is that developers saw art as a valuable contributor to a self-identified "vital city center," and museum folks saw "vital city center" consumers as a viable audience for a new kind of institution. Many museums call themselves town squares but exist in isolation. The Lab is delightfully, challengingly mixed into an active (albeit manufactured) social space.

There have been studies showing that active support for the arts contributes to healthy, thriving communities. Museum folks wave this research in the face of anyone who will listen each time budgets get cut. But perhaps a more powerful argument--the one currently being tested in Belmar--is that arts institutions support commerce by providing a cultural flavor to otherwise generic retail and mixed-use spaces.

In this way, The Lab is selling an art experience the same way Urban Outfitters sells youth culture--and in my mind, that's a positive, not a negative. The brand, the marquee, the fabulous set of quirky and irreverent programs all support the idea that The Lab is a hip place to be. In turn, from the developers' perspective, that hipness is transferred to the entire Belmar development, transforming it from a standard mixed-use outdoor retail district into a Place where Ideas and Art are Happening.

And isn't that what museums should contribute to their local environments? Like the 826 Valencia project, The Lab at Belmar is both physically and intellectually set into the landscape of popular recreational experiences. Finally, a museum that does MORE than its retail neighbors, offering burlesque performances, tag team lectures, and art fitness training. When juxtaposed against the movie theaters and Ann Taylor Loft, The Lab offers something distinctive. Even the shoppers who walk by and will never enter The Lab are affected by its inclusion in the development. The Lab doesn't have to be a destination. It's part of the place, offering commentary, the way any good art institution should.

I know there can be a dark side to this. In the same way that a civic "nice to have" museum can fall off the political funding agenda, a commercial "nice to have" can get dumped if it doesn't contribute to net revenue. But I don't think an institution funded by real estate is intrinsically less independent than one funded by grants and major donors. Maybe it's a brilliant marketing ploy, but when I see statements in the Notebook like:

The Lab sincerely apologizes to our neighbor Dick's Sporting Goods for hanging a sign in our window stating, "We're not Dick's." Apparently, we are.

I laugh, I cheer, and I feel good about the potential of museums in daily life.


What's your opinion of the Belmar model?

Addendum: I received an email from Adam Lerner, head honcho at The Lab, who clarified the financial arrangement as follows:

The support The Lab receives from the developers of Belmar was seed money that had scheduled ramp down from 100% in 2004 to a baseline 30% in 2008 -- and the 30% is actually public money from property tax in the Belmar district through a very complicated and interesting arrangement. I think it matters that we are not simply a developer’s philanthropic project. It’s more honest.

And honestly, they still aren't Dick's.

Content from AAM: Virtual Worlds and Eye on Design slides (and more)

My more complete thoughts and reactions to the AAM (American Association of Museums) conference are forthcoming in a longer post soon. Today, I want to share slide presentations and interviews you might be seeking related to the sessions I chaired this week.

First, Charting New Territory in Virtual Worlds, which featured Paul Sparrow (Newseum), David Klevan (US Holocaust Memorial Museum), Chris Lawrence (NY Hall of Science), and Nora McCartney (NY Hall of Science). We talked honestly and openly about a range of virtual worlds projects, ranging from the funded to the unfunded, the small (serving 20+ students) to large. Chris bravely served as our "applause-o-meter" (see right) so that we could prioritize which questions to answer first. In fact, the slides (while minimal) contain content that was not covered in the session, since we focused only on the questions of most audience interest. You can view the slides here, or download them by clicking "view" in the player below.

| View | Upload your own

After the session, Jonathan Finkelstein, author of Learning in Real Time and blogger behind Real Time Minute, interviewed the panelists (sadly, I was rushing to session #2 and could not join them). You can read Jonathan's post and hear the panel interview here. Jonathan also interviewed me separately--to listen directly to the interview, click play below.

Download Interview with Nina as MP3

Next up was Eye on Design: Inspiration from Outside the Museum, which featured Emily Sloat Shaw (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), Jennifer Rae Atkins (Andrew Merriell and Associates), Eric Siegel (NY Hall of Science), Penny Jennings (West Office Exhibition Design), Brianna Cutts (IDEO), Darcie Fohrman (Museum Exhibitions), and John Chiodo (Chiodo Design). The AAM blog covered the session, and you can download the slides here.

| View | Upload your own

This session was extremely well-attended and audience members shared some great comments. One man, upon seeing Smart Studio's use of a flashlight-like device to reveal interpretative content in a historic space, talked about how his museum used cheap flashlights as a "do it yourself" lighting source for small, intricate jeweled artifacts. Another woman talked about how the use of visitor-manipulated art (in her case, blocks of clay) transformed a quiet university museum space into an active, social opportunity for creative expression and exploration.

For those who want to explore the design inspirations in the slides further, here are some useful URLs:

• The Fenway Victory Gardens (presented by Emily)
• The Albuquerque Isotopes (presented by Jennifer Rae)
  
• Mandolin Brothers guitar shop (presented by Eric)
  
• 826 Valencia (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• Nike+ (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• World Without Oil (presented by Nina), related post here
  
• Body Movies (presented by John)
• Smart Studio (presented by John)
• On Air (presented by John)

What questions or thoughts did these sessions, explorations, and inspirations bring up for you?

We Tell Stories: Thinking Inside New Boxes

On Tuesday, I'll be chairing a session at the AAM (American Association of Museums) conference called Eye on Design: Inspiration from Outside the Museum, in which we will feature creative and intriguing design elements from worlds away from museums--guitar stores, baseball stadiums, and more. Today, a teaser--an recent design project that didn't make the cut for the session but offers unique insights into innovative practice.

It's easy for people in any industry to get siloed in our own knowledge prejudices, even though research has shown that innovation happens when we strike out and try something outside of our comfort or knowledge zone. As Janet Rae-Dupree, author of this NY Times article puts it:

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

We often talk about overcoming these barriers by thinking outside the box. But today, we look at a project that innovates not by thinking outside the box, but by defining a very strange set of small boxes in which to operate.

We Tell Stories is a digital fiction project sponsored by Penguin Books that explores the idea that "there are at least six different ways to tell a story." Penguin commissioned authors to create stories in unique, often interactive forms. One is a garden of forking paths. One winds along a google map. One unfolds word by word in real-time. One is distributed across blogs and twitter feeds. One lets you put yourself into the tale. And one is composed entirely of infographics.

Reading the stories, I flashed back to the writing exercises I used to give students in poetry classes. Few contemporary poets publish sonnets, sestinas, and other form poetry, but these devices are still used to stretch creative abilities. Can I express this concept in verse? Can I shift the mood while using the same words?

When you put yourself under strict and novel constraints, you struggle against them, and that struggle often creates something new. We've seen that happen with The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop. Being forced to design inside the bizarre physics of the Second Life design environment has taken us places we wouldn't have gone with traditional exhibit design tools.

Because this is the REAL paradox of "out of the box" thinking: it's overwhelmingly, stultifyingly open. When we want to do "something new," we cast our eyes everywhere, looking for the most compelling design, the wildest technology, the most intriguing label copy. But creativity isn't about hitting the global buffet. It's about training our minds to go down unfamiliar paths--to put ourselves in new, weird, snug boxes and see what comes out. It's not always pleasant. It should be hard. And that's one of the reasons we avoid it.

But the other reason we avoid these little boxes is suspicion about the quality of the result. Are the products of We Tell Stories great art? Would the stories have been "better" if written in a standard narrative form? That's a question of personal taste. But testing out different forms is useful as an early design exercise even if the products never make it to primetime. If any part of our process needs diversification, it's the beginning. The ways we initiate and prototype projects are the processes that are most likely to cement our thinking into well-worn paths.

Getting into new boxes also can bring teams together. By setting up stringent, strange rules for expression, people who come to the table with very different expectations and predilections are forced onto "the same page." I often have problems in meetings understanding what people really mean. I rarely have that problem when playing a game with set rules.

I think this can be a particularly powerful tool if several forms are tested in parallel for the same project. What are some novel "exhibit forms" that we can use to rethink the way we tell stories in museums? Let's go to the very beginning--the definition of an exhibition and its goals. Some starter ideas for new ways to attack that...

• Write the exhibition goals and big idea as a story. Does it have a surprise ending? Is there a main character to root for? Too many exhibitions lack a strong narrative, and some of the ones that do it most convincingly tell stories we'd rather not hear.
  
• Write them as a conversation between two visitors as they leave. If visitors make their own experience, what experience do you want that to be?
  
• Write them as positive and negative reviews on a community website. What will people love and hate? Who will love and hate what?
  
• Show them as photographs taken by imaginary visitors. What will they remember? What will they ooh and ahh over?
  
• Write them as a series of "I wish" statements. We all have desires about what the exhibit will do, and when we personalize and voice them they become less generic (and highlight differences in the group).
  

None of these ideas require tools more complex then pen and paper. They do require some bravery and honesty--to confront the fact that some visitors may walk out saying, "Eh. What's for lunch?" But the benefit is an opening up of conversation, of what ifs, and, hopefully, new smart directions for the final result.

What sneaky boxes do you put yourself in to move your brain in new directions?

Participation through Gifting: Pass It On

Last week, a coworker came in with a big smile on his face. When I asked what had happened, he explained that he had been the recipient of an act of tollbooth goodwill; the person in front of him in line had paid his toll.

This simple act, a $2.50 donation to the universe, is a gift. We've all received (and hopefully given) gifts from strangers before--the woman who lets you go to the bathroom first, the family that hands you some carnival tickets on their way out and your way in. We're suspicious of gifts given by corporations and organizations, casting a wary eye on the cheerful Red Bull guy or anyone handing out religious leaflets. But a gift given from one person to another, however small, feels magical.

Why discuss gifting on Museum 2.0? No, I'm not angling for a present. One of my greatest interests is the "participatory museum," in which there is substantive, unfacilitated visitor-to-visitor interaction. When I heard the tollbooth story, I started thinking about gifting as a model for participatory experiences in museums.

This post discusses participatory gifting in three parts: the why, the what, and finally, the how.

Why is gifting a model worth exploring?

1. Gifting is a powerful game mechanic. In her fabulous presentation on game mechanics in functional environments, Amy Jo Kim lists "social exchange" as one of five key elements that make experiences sticky. These exchanges can be explicit (trades) or implicit (gifts). Why does Ebay email you a certificate to celebrate "your first positive feedback" on their site? Why do people pay a dollar to send each other virtual hot dogs and pinatas via Facebook? Giving and receiving gifts is a strong reason to come back to a site (whether virtual or real). Collect the e-card. Spend the certificate. And when the gifts are public, as on Facebook, the perception of the site as a "place of giving" serves both the individuals using the service and the site's image.
2. Gifting makes you feel good. The University of British Columbia recently published a study in the journal Science demonstrating that people who give away a small amount of money in the form of a gift are happier than those who spend the same amount on themselves. One of the authors of the study commented, "This suggests that even making really small changes in how one spends money can make a difference for happiness." Often, when we think of stranger-to-stranger participatory experiences, we think of stressful events like elevator outages. It's hard to convince a museum or other institution that they should intentionally create stressful environments to encourage visitors to talk with each other. It's much more palatable to use something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy, like gifting, to get there.
3. Gifting extends your message. If your kid gets his photo taken at the museum and can instantly "send that photo to grandma," two things happen. 1: kid gives gift to grandma (and both are happy). 2: museum brand leaves the walls and goes to grandma's house. When you give someone a brochure or take-home element in an exhibition, it ends up in the trash. But if you give them something to give to someone ELSE, then your content spreads, packaged in a bundle of goodwill.
   

OK, so gifting sounds good. What are its forms, and which are most effective?

Most gifting is personal, both in real life and on the web. I give my friend a cookie. My dad sends me a NYTimes article. Personal gifting makes for powerful participation because you are directly interacting with another individual. But it's small-scale and typically occurs between people with a pre-existing relationship. We aren't culturally comfortable giving gifts directly to perfect strangers.

Web 2.0 encourages a lot of semi-anonymous gifting. Whenever you review a restaurant on Yelp, post a video on YouTube, or heck, write a blog post, you are giving content to an unknown audience of other user/recipients. You're not recommending something to a specific stranger, so it lessens the ick factor. There's a lot of argument about whether the Web 2.0 gift economy exploits users, but the benefit for the content creators is a kind of fame and recognition. There's some participation among givers and receivers, but that participation most commonly takes the form of "in kind" actions. You gift the community a book review, I gift an overlapping community a music review.

Then there's anonymous gifting. My Hebrew school teachers told me this is the best kind because it's truly selfless, yada yada. That may be true. But when it comes to encouraging participation among givers and receivers, this kind of gift is low on the list. Whether you are writing checks to charities or sticking quarters in expired parking meters, you have only an abstract relationship with the other people involved in the transaction.

How can we improve on these models to becomes sites for participatory giving?

The real participatory power comes when we create a kind of hybrid model of facilitated or site-enabled giving. By serving as a safe barrier, websites, museums, and other venues can triangulate and match-make personal gifting, packing the punch of one-to-one giving without the ick factor of dealing with strangers.

This is where the tollbooth fits in. It would be extremely strange to walk up to someone's car window and offer them $2.50 for the toll. They might be offended. They might be suspicious. But by giving this gift through the toll booth operator, you shuttle the unsafe personal transaction through a safe transaction venue. It's semi-anonymous: the receiver can perceive the giver and his little blue Honda, but neither party is threatened by the requirement to actually engage with the other. And rather than impacting two people (giver and receiver), it impacts three (tollbooth operator).

The tollbooth enables personal giving between strangers and brings a third person into the experience. Arguably, three people who would never have met now get to share a nice experience and memory of generosity.

But we can take it even further. In the tollbooth case, it's up to the giver to take the initiative to pay for the person behind him or her. It's not a ready option that the tollbooth operator provides; in fact, in some cases it may take a bit of convincing to make this gift happen.

Sites that are serious about participatory giving don't leave all the work to the inspiration of the giver.

Here are some key actions that encourage gifting:

• provide "gift kits" that are easy and rewarding to assemble (e-cards, lanyards).
• make it easy to send or share the gift.
• make the gifts public so that others who are neither the giver nor recipient can bask in the glow of the giving experience and be encouraged to participate themselves. This is what Facebook does. I've also been to ice cream shops and bars that feature a "gift wall" of statements like "Ben buys Susie a pint" so you can pick up your free beer next time you visit. An interesting public version of the formerly private gift certificate.
  
• find a way for givers and receivers to track the gift if it passes from hand to hand. This can be Web-enabled, like sites that track messages written on dollar bills via serial number. Or, it can be charmingly low-tech, like books with previous owners' names written in them.
  
• thank the giver for giving, suggest to both giver and receiver that they give again.

How can you integrate facilitated gifting into your institution? Where have you seen it succeed (or fail)? Give us the semi-anonymous gift of your comment, and we'll respond with affection and interest!

Guest Post from Museums and the Web: Bryan Kennedy

Thanks to Bryan Kennedy from the Science Museum of Minnesota for providing this overview/reflection on the Museums and the Web conference that recently concluded in Montreal. I was particularly interested in the ECHO project and Bryan's comments about the lack of in-house technical staff in museums and how that affects ability to innovate.


Museums and the Web 2008 guest blogger Bryan Kennedy here. For those who haven't attended, the Museums and the Web conference brings an international audience from art, history, cultural, and science museums together to talk about new ways to engage with their audiences via the web. Because of the dynamic and changing nature of the internet this conference serves as a good barometer of new and innovative approaches in the museum world.

If you want the quick and dirty look at the conference, check out the ephemera tagged #mw2008 (twitter posts, flickr images, a blog entires). The back-channel was an especially active and important part of the conference this year.

And now, on to the exciting bits.

Sharing Authority

...or prying it from the clenched fists of staunchly opinionated old-schoolers. It was refreshing to see a wide array of projects and presentations that put sharing authority at the center of the visitor experience. Who's sharing authority and how?

• Flickr's Commons project - Flickr is offering up its powerful community tools for museum photo collections. Institutions like the Library of Congress and the Powerhouse Museum are getting thousands of quality tags and comments on previously hidden away images. (paper). And apparently people are also discussing how this will mesh with more nuanced approaches like the Steve.museum project.
  


• The Walker Art Center is turning its teen website over to the teens. Recognizing the power of the mullet, they put the business-end up front and the party in the back. You can drag a literal splitter bar across the page and view a community-created site blinged out by the teens or the business site for funders and professionals. Sure, they need both, but take a guess which one is a more compelling read.
  


• Developers of the ECHO project are exploring new ways to use web technology to bring native voices into museum exhibits and research. Their task is both especially important and challenging. If the new web is about a spirit of openness and sharing how do you incorporate a group of people into the process who have historically shared to the point of exploitation? Many native groups are not eager to offer up their cultural stories and history for mash-ups on the web. This multi-museum collaborative is undertaking a thoughtful process to tackle these issues.
  

New This Year: Life After Facebook

The last couple years at Museums and the Web were dominated by discussion about the need for museums to engage with visitors in new social spaces like facebook, blogs, flickr, and the like. Our argument was that if we didn't participate we would be defined in these spaces in our absence. Many institutions that have experimented in these new social realms have seen that this isn't only an imperative but also enormously rewarding. So what's next?

A New Trend: Diggin' Data

The new year brings some new trends in how people are using the web and with them brings new realms for museums to explore. Some of the largest web ventures are opening the doors to their content by giving savvy scripters direct access to the databases that drive these sites using programatic interfaces or APIs. Want to plot all the Wal-Marts on a map over time? You don't need Wal-Mart's permission, just an API and a source for the data.

Data is also getting stored in new places. Efforts like Freebase, which hopes to be the wikipedia for data, are giving communities the ability to collaboratively share data. If these trends continue museums will need to adapt. Museums hold the objects in our collections in the public trust, but will we trust the public with our object's data? Would you post your entire collections database as a downloadable file on the public website? What if the government said you had to?

Frankie Roberto from the London Science Museum gave what I thought to be the most compelling talk at the conference on this very topic. By submitting Freedom of Information Requests he was able to get listings of several major UK museum collections. He then set out aggregating and displaying this data in a unique fashion, "eschewing details in favor of high-level overviews and visualizations." (public site coming soon) Frankie was able to create compelling maps and graphs of many interesting aspects of these collections in aggregate.

But what is truly interesting about this research project was not what he did but how he did it. Even though this was done by a museum employee it could just as easily been undertaken by a museum visitor. Once acquired, the data could have been placed in a public site such as Freebase. Maybe the data could even have been improved upon making the public copy more accurate in some ways than the version in the museum's enterprise collections database. This seems simultaneously exciting and terrifying for those who manage this data.

What exciting mashups will our visitors create if we open up our collections data? One of the Best of the Web winners, IMA's Dashboard, goes a step further than collections alone, exposing all kinds of data about their museum online to give visitors a unique look into the organization, from memberships sold to energy consumed.

P.S. Hire Programmers

As a final note I want to remind everyone out there in museumland that the people writing the code (programmers, scripters, those computer nerds on level 2) are at the core of many of these new initiatives. Aaron Straup Cope of Flickr presented on this very idea and wrote that:

Computer programming is the acid bath of the Internet. In its purest form it can be harsh and threatening but it is also the vehicle that allows a cold sheet of metal becomes a lush and absorbent canvas.

More museums should be building these programming skills in internal teams that grow expertise from project to project. Far too many museums small and large rely on outside companies for almost all of their technical development on the web. By and large the most innovation at Museums and the Web came from teams of people who have built expertise into the core operations of their institution.

I fundamentally believe that at least in the museum world there isn't much danger of the technology folks unseating the curators of the world from their positions of power. I'm more interested in building skilled teams within museums so that the intelligent content people aren't beholden to external media companies but rather their internal programmers who feel like they are part of the team and understand the overall mission of the museum as well as how to pull UTF-8 data out of a MySQL database.


Did any other Museum 2.0 readers attend the conference? Like any conference there were entire threads of thought (specifically some exciting discussions about the semantic web) that I simply wasn't able to attend. Please post any other reactions in the comments below.

Brooklyn Clicks with the Crowd: What Makes a Smart Mob?

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. They're now running a compelling experiment in crowd-sourced exhibition creation and curation via the photography exhibition Click. This post provides an overview of the project, what makes it stand out, and some analysis of the strategic implications.

What is Click?

Click is an exhibition process in three parts:

1. The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.
2. On the web, a jury of the masses (anyone) can evaluate the photographs in terms of aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme. All evaluations are private; all artists are unnamed. It's very easy to sign up and judge... and you can do so now by registering here.
   
3. The photographs will be installed in a physical exhibition running for six weeks this summer. The art will be displayed in order of the average juried scores. Visitors will be able to see how different subgroups (including art experts) ranked and responded to the art. The exhibition will coincide with programs about art theory, online communities, and crowd theory, providing a forum for public evaluation and discussion about the process.

What makes Click special?

There are several tactical and strategic things that differentiate Click. Let's start simple...

It is 100% community-based. Anyone can submit art. Anyone can judge. While there are many juried exhibitions that feature an open call, and a few exhibitions that allow visitor judging or rating, I don't know of any besides Click that do BOTH these things. Usually, the institution wants to maintain some control--whether over where the content comes from or how it is selected and organized. As Shelley Bernstein (exhibition coordinator) put it,

The entire exhibition is based on the participation of the community, both in the open call and in the evaluation stage, so the exhibition's contents are entirely up to the community. We are just providing the container, the mechanism so it can function...

In this way, Click is a powerful example of the "venue as content platform" definition of 2.0.

The internal team is led by a non-curator. The in-house team for Click included two curators, one interpreter, one artist/designer, and two web developers, but the person managing the whole project (Shelley Bernstein) is from Information Systems, not curatorial. If this were a web-only project, I wouldn't be surprised: many museum directors and curators ignore what happens on their websites (and technology people use those loose reins to create all kinds of content experiences). But it's pretty unusual to have a REAL exhibition led by a web person. This highlights the fact that while participatory design is by no means exclusive to the Web, that is the place most of the current experimentation is happening. You don't need to be a technologist to conceive or lead a project like this, but in many museums, non-techies just aren't as exposed to the ideas and products that typify participatory experiences.

They kept the interface simple. Register to be a Click judge, and you'll be amazed by how little is asked of you. They don't want your home address to send you brochures. They don't require you to agree to an arduous set of terms and conditions. They ask only what they truly need to make the exhibit and the judging successful. This may sound obvious, but we all fall victim to featuritis when we get seduced by the idea of live bodies. There's a reason they call it "capturing" data. With Click, I don't feel like a prisoner.

They make it easy to evangelize. While Click intentionally doesn't allow you to send your favorite photos to friends (scroll down to the "What Makes Click Really Special" section for more on this), there is a lovely page full of ways to join their virtual street team, telling others about the project through Facebook, Flickr, and more.

They are sensitive to the artists who are being judged. At some institutions, there has been friction when artists find out that their work will be judged or commented on publicly by visitors. Much of that friction arises from the fact that the judging/commenting features are added after the artist has already conceptualized and installed their work. In Click, Brooklyn made the scope and depth of participation clear from the start. There's a specific FAQ for artists that explains not only how to upload art, but what's going to happen to it. Artists could choose to remain anonymous throughout the whole process or to have their names revealed in the final exhibition. While artists couldn't choose whether their score or comments would be shown, they could choose whether and how to participate given that knowledge.

They ask judges to self-define their art knowledge. I found this part of the experience really interesting. When you first log in, you are asked two things: where you live and how much you know about art. You rate yourself from knowing "nothing" about art to being an "expert" on a 1 to 5 scale. When the exhibition opens in June, visitors will see the photos ordered by aggregate score, but you will also be able to look at the scores by art knowledge (and geography) on the web and on interactive kiosks. How will the art novices' choices compare to the art experts'? What conclusions will we draw from that difference? There could be really interesting research implications of this in terms of what we think we know about how different kinds of visitors respond to art. Relatedly, the geography question could glean some relevant data about how local and non-local visitors view and judge the efforts of a community-based museum.


These research questions are where I start to get really excited about Click. There are implications of Click that represent more than just photo arrangement.

But what makes Click REALLY Special? ... the Strategic Implications!

Click is not just an application of Web 2.0 concepts and technologies to a museum project (which Brooklyn has done successfully before). It establishes Brooklyn as a leader in the development and discovery of participatory experiences more broadly--an institution that community and content managers at all kinds of (museum AND non-museum) organizations can learn from.

Specifically, the Brooklyn Museum is doing research about the role of independence and influence in participatory experiences. The genesis of Click derived from James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds. In the book, James asserts that "diversity and independence" are two of the most important factors that make crowds intelligent. If you can see how others have responded to something, that impacts your behavior, thereby making you less independent and minimizing your diversity (and, according to Surowiecki, less able to contribute to collective wisdom).

This makes sense. When you are in a mob, heavily influenced by others, you are not smarter. This is true whether you are tromping around the Dallas airport with thousands of other panicked stranded travelers, as I was last week, or watching the dramatic prairie dog video your friend sent you from YouTube. The fact that 4.3 million people have watched the prairie dog video does not make it a great video or an intelligent use of time.

What it does signal is that you have been highly influenced: to follow the crowd, to watch the video. As manager of information systems, Shelley leads a variety of community-based projects at Brooklyn that exploit this crowd influence--people friending each other on Facebook, sending Flickr favorites to each other via email. For this project, she wanted to see if it was possible to go another way. As she put it:

As we started planning for this phase of the exhibition, I started to recognize that many of the features we see on successful websites today are designed to foster community, but they also create a great deal of influence. The view counts, comments, favorites, most e-mailed, and leader boards of sites we all love (Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, NetFlix, The New York Times, etc.) are built on the influence of others, so when thinking about the online components of this exhibition, we wanted to minimize influence as much as possible and re-think features that are now commonplace. Of course, there have been plenty of times I’ve wondered if anyone would take part if we didn’t include some of these features that everyone has come to expect, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.

How did they promote independence in judging? As a Click judge, you can't view other peoples' comments or ratings, even after you've scored a particular image. You can't set photos as favorites for others to see. You don't see the highest ranked photos first. You see the photos in random order, and the direct URLs are suppressed so you can't mail or save any one photo to share with friends (and encourage them to vote for it).

In other words, you can't have a networked, social experience--the experience we've come to expect from Web 2.0 sites. But in Click's case, that prohibition is deliberate. Museum 2.0 concepts and Web 2.0 technologies are still a major part of the Click experience, but they are more narrowly focused on conferring authority to the public rather than providing a social experience. This allows Brooklyn to study the relationship of curation interface to exhibition output specifically, and to therefore perform some research in the basic question of how participatory experiences work.


Research Potential

Unlike most commercial Web 2.0 sites, the Brooklyn Museum's bottom line is not about making money. It's about making intelligent decisions about how to engage visitor/participants with their institution. To that end, they are blogging their process openly and have scheduled a slate of self-reflective programming to coincide with the Click exhibition.

There are many compelling research questions that can extend from Click. How would you design a crowd-sourced exhibition whose goal is to garner the highest participation (as opposed to the wisest participation)? How would the selections of a group with "social influence" tools available to them differ from the forced independence of Click judges? How do these experiments impact the quality of museum exhibitions for visitors who were not involved in the participatory process? Do those visitors notice, or care about, the difference?

This research, especially when it comes to participatory experiences in public spaces (like museums), is not already happening somewhere else. The Web moves quickly and self-reflection has little value in a young field with a "what's hot this second?" mentality. Museums are uniquely positioned to be these reflective "live research" spaces. We have great content. We have established, trusted platforms. We have qualified researchers. We have a bottom line that's about visitors rather than advertising dollars (hopefully).

In short, museums have the assets to assume a new value proposition as leading participatory institutions, places you go to have the most content-rich, compelling, networked user experiences. But we'll only get there if we join Brooklyn in the lab and start our own experiments to test the hypotheses, measure the results, and find out what clicks.