The Voicemail Museum: A Call-In Collection

This week, I'm launching a new site: the Voicemail Museum. It's an experiment that merges two of my greatest interests:

1. finding novel, easy ways for visitors to contribute content to museums
   
2. finding questions that draw such compelling responses that random peoples' answers would be worth browsing
   

To participate, all you need is a phone. Call 641.715.3900 ext. 60138, listen to the recorded question, and leave a message with your response. Once I have a few responses I'll start posting them and adding new questions.


Why am I doing this? There are a few reasons...

1. To explore the potential use of cellphones as feedback devices. Right now, most museums that use handhelds and cellphones use them to serve content, not to receive it. Cellphone tours are smart for a lot of reasons: they use devices visitors already own and are comfortable with, they allow museums to change content flexibly, and they allow visitors to drop in on a tour as they choose. But they only activate one side of the cellphone. How often in your everyday life do you use your cellphone to call a number and listen to someone talk at you?
   
   There are at least three reasons that cellphones may be great feedback devices. First, device familiarity. People already know how to leave voice and text messages and don't have to grapple with a comment system to do so. Second, granularity. Rather than having one talkback station per exhibition, you could have a talkback for every exhibit--a unique phone/SMS number to which visitors could address their thoughts. This may improve quality as well as quantity of comments; if visitors can comment directly on individual artifacts, there may be fewer generic "this exhibition was great!" contributions. Finally, there's diversity of comment format. Visitors can send audio, text, or even video from their phones and need not be constrained by whatever particular format the museum offers in a kiosk.
   
   
2. To learn more about the relationship between feedback format and quantity/quality of input. Last year, I did an experiment with Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science using the Voicethread technology to invite people to offer suggestions and critique on an exhibition plan. One of the surprises that arose from that experiment was the high participant-to-spectator ratio. On this blog, there's about a 0.5% comment rate. On the voicethread during the time it was active, there was a 20% comment rate. This was surprising given that participants were required to do a lot more to post a comment on the voicethread than on the blog: they had to register an account, have a microphone, and record their voice. Many uploaded a personal photo as well.
   
   Why did so many people participate? My guess is that the voicethread technology looks and feels more like a conversation than blog comments do. You can hear and see the people talking, and that's compelling. For the Voicemail Museum, I wanted to strip this down to an even simpler system to see how audio comments work in isolation, without the nice (and somewhat hindering) Voicethread interface.
   
   
3. To find questions that yield amazing visitor-created content. I've often talked about my belief that Post Secret is a model user-generated content project that hinges on a great question: what is a secret you've never told before? I believe there are other great questions out there that can draw out comparably rich, surprising responses that are worth experiencing as a spectator. I figure by trying out different questions, I can see which ones are promising and which ones are duds.
   

This could be a really simple and powerful way for visitors to share comments using their own devices. The museum would set up a bunch of unique voicemail accounts for different exhibits and then post the phone numbers on text labels. A museum without a phone system could even do this the way I did: register free phone numbers with a web-based voicemail service and receive the messages directly to your email inbox.

I'll be keeping you posted here about the direction and findings from this experiment. If you'd like to share your own questions to be used in the experiment, or would like to participate as a partner venue (and test this with your own visitors), please let me know. In the meantime, share your own compelling questions in the comments here on the blog, and give the Voicemail Museum a call! The inaugural question asks you to share an aha! moment of any kind in your life (my most recent one had to do with being an elitist jerk...).