Try This! Experiment in the Museum 2.0 coLAB

This week, with the gracious help of Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science, Museum 2.0 is launching an experiment in collaborative exhibition design. This one-week test will hopefully be followed by many more progressively ambitious projects to develop new tools for museums, scientists, artists, experience designers, visitors, and all kinds of folks to work together to create high-quality exhibitions.

I (and probably many of you) have always wondered about the basic challenge of deriving quality from mass participation. When is the wisdom of crowds really successful? In the spirit of that question, Museum 2.0 will be sponsoring a number of test projects in collaboration under the banner of coLAB.

The first of these is up now and will be active for the next week. In it, Eric Siegel shares some of the planning concepts for a proposed traveling exhibition, Human +, about human enhancement technologies. We are soliciting your feedback and thoughts on these concepts, using VoiceThread, a very cool application that allows you to literally add your voice to the conversation.

To participate, you need about 10 minutes. A microphone (most laptops and newer computers have them embedded) is highly recommended, as is a photo of you so people have a face to put to the voice. If you don't have a microphone, you can contribute text, but the voice component is pretty powerful.

This conversation will only be active until Oct 17. On October 18, I'll publish a post-mortem with some of your comments about what worked and didn't in this experiment.

Go to the coLAB site to get started now!