Community Exhibit Development: Lessons Learned from The Tech Virtual

On June 4, we opened The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a new 2000 sq ft gallery at The Tech Museum of Innovation featuring exhibits on the theme of art, film, and music that were originally developed in Second Life by a community of creative amateurs. I was the project manager/curator for the exhibition, leading both the Second Life-based community exhibit design process and the real world translation of virtual exhibits. Now that the dust has cleared and the kids are banging on the exhibits (and showing us what we have to change next), I have the time to step back and share some of the lessons learned from this experience.

On many levels, The Tech Virtual experiment was a success. We shrunk the exhibit design process (concept to floor) from 2 years to five months. We engaged with hundreds of creative folks around the world who developed about 50 virtual exhibits, of which seven were created in real life. The resulting (real) exhibits are high-quality experiences that reflect a level of creativity that could not have resulted from our scant in-house exhibit development staff. We inspired a community and got real results.

But it wasn't all rosy, and we weren't perfect. Here are my top ten lessons from The Tech Virtual experiment with regard to design exhibits with a community of amateurs.

1. Give away the fun (and easy) part. We did not ask people to design whole exhibits and hand over CAD drawings so we could build them. Ultimately, what The Tech Virtual community contributed was great ideas for exhibits. Some museum pros have been puzzled by this. One exhibit designer told me, "we never seem to lack for good ideas. It's the execution of them as good exhibits that's the challenge." Exactly. If good ideas are easy to come by, why not let other people contribute them and focus our time on the hard work of execution? I think the reason we hold onto the idea generation part is because it's fun, not because it's the activity in which we have the most specialized expertise. This is not to say that the virtual designers didn't work hard to make their ideas in-line with our museum goals--in fact, we could have given them much clearer and stricter criteria and they would have thanked us for it. Our job was to provide a structured environment in which to develop ideas and the expertise to build the best of them. We certainly did the latter but only learned about the importance of the former late in the process.

2. Level the playing field or tip it in their favor. People who work with non-professionals on participatory projects often talk about finding "neutral" sites for meetings or meeting on their (the non-professionals') territory. In Second Life, I am not an expert--but many of our virtual exhibit designers are. Not only was Second Life a comfortable, familiar place for them to engage, it was a place where my authority as the museum exhibit designer came down a notch and we became individuals bringing different skills to the table.

3. Contests are good for raising awareness and focusing behavior, but not good for building sustainable communities or work in a flexible environment. We awarded $5000 to each exhibit design that was translated to real life. Doing so meant we could raise awareness very quickly (because everyone loves to blog about a contest), which was useful given the short time frame. It also focused the experience. People weren't coming to The Tech Virtual to muse about exhibits; they came to build exhibits on a deadline for submission to the contest. However, the contest also prevented us from legitimately fostering collaboration. People were unsure whether they should go it alone (and try to win the whole prize) or team up with others. We had several community discussions about the competition disincentivizing collaboration--the money sent a contradictory signal to all our talk about sharing. Also, because this was an experiment, parameters and criteria kept changing throughout the process. That's ok for a community project, but very frustrating (and for some, blatantly dishonest) in a contest.

4. Trust is essential, especially in a changing environment. As mentioned above, we were doing an experiment which necessitated changes and flexibility. But this was an experiment with human subjects. When we changed something, we were changing it on people. We had to be honest with them (and express our own personal frustration at changes we could not control) for this to not be a disaster. Had we held onto an authority voice rather than presenting ourselves as individuals engaged in the project, people would not have been willing to weather the storms with us.

5. It's important to have a way for folks to build their exhibit ideas. Some museum professionals asked me, "couldn't the participants have just described their exhibit in text?" While requiring people to build their virtual designs required more work (and expertise) from them, it also allowed them to clearly articulate their designs and to engage on a more professional, specific level about the exhibits. The point of Second Life is to lower the barrier to build things--things that move, things that make sounds, things you can explore (like exhibits). When you build something, it serves as a good launching point for discussion about what's missing and what the essential strengths of the exhibit are. It's easier to talk about interactivity by asking, "what can I do here?" than by talking in suppositions. It's also standard practice in community arts programs. If I ran a poetry or drawing workshop, we wouldn't critique participants' ideas for poems or drawings. We'd talk about the work itself. The same thing applies to exhibits, but Second Life is a tool that facilitates making the exhibit in a more accessible way than full-scale fabrication.

6. Second Life was a better community space for The Tech Virtual than the Web. The Tech Virtual was launched as a two-platform system: a website and a Second Life island. The website serves as a simple social network and exhibit proposal holding place, enabling people to propose projects, join exhibit teams, and comment on each other's work. But we quickly found that the website was a support platform for the exhibit workshop in Second Life, not an equal partner. I think there are three reasons for this. First, on the website we had to create any community from scratch, whereas with Second Life we entered a world of established communities. This is similar to the issue many museums deal with of whether to engage in established social spaces like Flickr, Youtube, etc. or to start their own. In our case the "start your own" component of this project was much less successful than jumping into Second Life. Second, Second Life was fundamentally a more social space, since one of its most powerful elements is live presence. We could hold workshops, meetings, and support informal conversations among participants and learned that this real-time engagement with others was a huge motivator for increased participation. Finally, as explained in #5, Second Life was the place where people could actually build their ideas, which became the key element in the development of an exhibit.

7. It's more important to have social instigators lead your community than authoritative professionals. Community management staff need not be curators or exhibit designers. They are more like floor staff or educational program staff--energetic, social communicators who are comfortable in the environment of your community space. We lacked this staff member, and made up for it with a group of wonderful volunteers and an amazing intern, Sarah Cole. In Second Life, our level of participation was directly proportional to the number of Tech staff social engaging with others via workshops, tours, and informal discussions.

8. The community provided great exhibit inspiration but their projects required heavy translation to become real exhibits. We learned early on that the elements that make for fabulous virtual exhibits are overlapping but not identical to those that make fabulous real exhibits. In the beginning of the project, The Tech's director would speak about "copying" exhibits from Second Life to real life. We quickly realized that this was unrealistic, both technically (no way to export Second Life models, different physics than in real life) and conceptually (modes of interaction are entirely different in Second Life). Once we realized that virtual exhibits would not translate directly to the real world, we transitioned to a model where the real exhibits were "inspired by" the virtual. In all cases we chose superlative virtual exhibits in which the core idea was powerful enough to transcend platforms. We maintained that core idea in the real version of the virtual design, and tried as much as possible to retain other aspects of the virtual designers' goals in recreation. The negative side of this is that no one (and it should have been a Tech staff member) was providing a heavy content overlay to the experience. We were too open in structuring the initial call for ideas, and then too rushed and focused on building them to develop a serious interpretative overlay with strong educational outcomes (something that The Tech would like to have in all exhibits).

9. There are many ways for creative amateurs to be involved in exhibit development. The above points may make it sound like the virtual designers only contributed ideas. In four of the seven real exhibits, they also contributed content and expertise. Three exhibits feature original art and music by the virtual designers, and (overlapping) three relied heavily on the technical expertise of the virtual designers. They enabled our engineering and fabrication team to push beyond our in-house capabilities to tackle some exhibit components and or content elements that we could not have produced in this timeframe. We also branched out of the virtual-to-real process to solicit amateur content. One of the exhibits features video of original paintings being created. To produce that content, I put an ad on craigslist and invited artists down to The Tech to be videotaped while creating art. One of these artists, a graffiti artist named Dan, had such a good time that he a. came back with some friends to do more graffiti for us, and b. came to the exhibit opening and was pretty overwhelmed with excitement to see his piece in this real museum.

10. There is nothing like the feeling of sharing and giving to others. I saved the hippie stuff for last. It was AMAZING to have all of the virtual exhibit designers here for the opening to see the real product of their virtual work. Dan wasn't the only one who was thrilled to see his work at The Tech; I had hallmark moments with all of the virtual designers. They made me cry with their enthusiasm and gratitude. Usually, you feel motivated to build great exhibits for your visitors. You leave the opening dazed, relieved, and happy to see people enjoying the pieces. But in this case there was the added layer of connecting with people who felt like old friends, returning the gift of their good ideas with the gift of good exhibits. I think we made a high-quality exhibition product with all of these virtual designers, and that's my number one criteria for feeling that this was a success. But just because the "feel good" stuff isn't primary doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Yes, you can build wonderful exhibits with people from all over the world. But you can also build a community at the same time, and that's pretty powerful as well. All of the exhibits in this small gallery have tentacles out to people all over the world who helped conceive them. And that makes this little experiment feel pretty big.

Event Announcement: The Tech Virtual's First Exhibition opens June 4!

Looking for something to do on Wednesday? The exhibition I'm curating for The Tech Museum of Innovation is opening and we are hosting a summit on June 4 (in real life and in Second Life) for museum professionals to discuss the process by which it was created. The summit will be held at The Tech from 1-5pm PST and will feature:

• keynote address by Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Labs (creator of Second Life)
• tour of the new exhibition with the people who designed the virtual and real versions of the interactive exhibits
  
• roundtable discussions on translating virtual exhibits into physical reality, open source models for development, marketing impact of virtual worlds for museums, community design best practices, and the future of museum collaboration
  

To give you a bit of background, the exhibition is called The Tech Virtual Test Zone, and it is an experimental gallery of interactive exhibit prototypes on the theme of technology in art, film, and music. None of the exhibits were initiated by staff; instead, they were developed online by a community of international volunteers via the web and Second Life from January-March of this year. In March, we selected the best of the virtual exhibits for translation into the real world. On June 4, the physical prototypes hit the floor of The Tech and the real fun (and analysis) begins.

While many people latch on to the Second Life aspect of this project, my primary interest is in the transformation of the exhibit process into a user-generated experience. Are community-driven design techniques viable for all kinds of exhibitions (and institutions)? Are the resulting exhibits better, worse, or in some way distinctive from exhibits developed via a more standard process? How do the community members feel about their involvement in the creative part of the exhibit process? What technologies help or hinder the success of these projects, both in terms of community satisfaction and quality of outcomes? Can you really build eight interactive exhibits based on virtual prototypes in two months without going insane?

I've been grappling with these and other questions over the last several months. And while I'm excited to engage in this discussion with other museum professionals on June 4, I'm even more thrilled to meet the real people behind the avatars who initiated these wonderful exhibits. They're coming here in person, and a few have already trickled into the construction space over the weekend. It changes the stakes when you feel accountable not just to visitors and donors but to remote community producers as well. Did we change too much? Did we honor their intentions? Did we breathe life into their aspirations?

I don't think I always made the right choices about how to respect, support, and foster the creative abilities of our community designers. I learned some surprising lessons about independence and institutional relationships with communities through this process and expect to learn a lot more in the week to come. Museum folks often sit in rooms and talk about how we can serve our communities. It will be refreshing to have some of those community representatives live and in-person to tell us what they're really getting (and where we're missing the boat).

So! Later this week, a post-mortem on the summit. In the meantime, join us Wednesday in San Jose or at The Tech in Second Life (in virtual New Venture Hall) for an afternoon of lively discussion. If you would like to join us live and in person, please send an RSVP note to summitrsvp@thetech.org

I hope to see you then!

Observations from The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, Month 3

It's been awhile since I've shared the progress of The Tech Virtual, the web and Second Life-based virtual exhibit workshop that The Tech Museum of Innovation opened in December of 2007. (You can read other posts about this project by clicking Tech Virtual in the "Past Posts By Topic" sidebar on the right.)

The goals of The Tech Virtual are:

• to create an online space for museum professionals and creative folks of all kinds to collaborate on exhibit development and design
• to codevelop the best of these virtual designs as real exhibits at The Tech Museum (and to offer that opportunity to other museums as well)

Since opening in December, 166 members have initiated 70 exhibit projects on The Tech Virtual website, and about half of those projects have been built as 3D models within the virtual world of Second Life. More excitingly (to me), in the last month we have selected 6 virtual exhibits for codevelopment at The Tech as real exhibits, and we plan to put 8 "virtual to real" exhibits on the floor in June for an exhibition to coincide with the Zero1 festival. We got a lovely bit of press on the first four exhibit selections, and I'm thrilled by the diversity of participants and novel creations that have been submitted thus far. We'll be "closing shop" on the June exhibit submissions at the end of March, but we then plan to open up to the virtual community a much broader set of exhibition themes--both from The Tech and other museums--for experimentation and creative exhibit development.

In January, I wrote about the challenges and opportunities of using Second Life as a design space. This time, I want to talk about the codevelopment process--how we are taking these virtual exhibits and transforming them into floor-ready interactive experiences. Over the last month, my job has shifted from cultivating a creative community to serving as the liaison between that community and The Tech's exhibit engineers and fabricators. Functionally, I'm now project managing a very rapid exhibition production process... with a few significant differences.

First, there's the question of creative control. The exhibits that have been selected were created by members of our virtual community. Some of these people are professional artists or exhibit designers, but most are just talented folks with an interest in museums. They aren't commissioned to create exhibits; they're invited to take part in a contest. The winners do receive prizes from The Tech, but all of their work is under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means that any museum/institution/inspired person could take a virtual exhibit and run with it as long as they credit the original creator(s) by name.

All of this means that the codevelopment process by which the exhibits are translated from virtual to real is rather fluid and different for each exhibit. We told our community from the outset that the viability of exhibits in real life largely depends on Tech staff's confidence in our ability to design/build the exhibits based on pre-existing Tech expertise. Removing the burden of knowing "how" to make your exhibit in real life opens up involvement in the virtual process, but it also means that for the most part the exhibit conceptualizers/creators have little say in the final real life result. We did have a community member who left the community in January because she felt that the real life version of her exhibit being discussed did not appropriately reflect her vision; since then, we've tried to set clearer expectations of how translation to real exhibits might happen for each exhibit and talk people through what changes might need to happen on an individual level. Frankly, most people are just excited to imagine their vision coming to life. It will be interesting to see if that "life" accomodates their vision when they come to the exhibition opening in June.

That relates to a more general question: How do virtual exhibits translate to real exhibits? Consider the Wikisonic, a beautiful collaborative instrument initiated by Jon Brouchoud, an architect from Wisconsin. In Second Life, this instrument is a cylinder of nearly invisible spheres floating in the air. People can touch individual spheres, each of which represents a musical note, to activate them, and the spheres create a song that evolves as spheres are activated and deactivated.

It's lovely. It's multiuser. It also ignores the laws of physics, and, more subjectively, is a little more precious than Tech visitors may appreciate. In this case, we discussed potential real world implementations on the project wiki for Wikisonic. Jon was able to express what was most important to him (the instrument being accessible to multiple people at once) and that has helped drive the real exhibit design, even as we have let go of other elements of the original virtual design. What in Second Life was a cylinder of floating spheres will be a wall of buttons in real life--retaining the spirit, if not the 3D shape, of Jon's virtual creation.

This is how exhibits often happen in museums--an exhibit developer comes up with a core idea, and then designers twist it into something usable. When the developer and designer are both on staff, the conversations and evolution of the exhibit can be fluid and shared, but as more of us work with contract design/build firms, more of us find ourselves in the same position as The Tech Virtual's community: forced to communicate virtually to ensure that the exhibit is being created as desired/intended. In the case of The Tech Virtual, the fact that The Tech Museum is the ultimate client lessens this tension, as we are both the designers and the client (working with external developers/conceptualizers).

Working with contractors or communities across the country--or world--isn't easy. Holding virtual meetings and prototyping things in Second Life can be a useful alternative to endless conference calls and drawings that mean different things to different people. But that's just a start. Going virtual means we've been able to include international participants, but the not-so-surprising reality is that we have the best working relationships with the exhibit winners who happen to be local (like Richard, shown here with our exhibits team, who conceptualized a panoramic photo exhibit). In those cases, we can bring the exhibit initiators to The Tech to sit down with our engineers and brainstorm real implementations that reflect the initiators' vision and museum needs. We can do face-to-face, which becomes pretty darn useful when you are drawing squiggly lines on whiteboards and jumping up and down to demonstrate how visitors will use an exhibit.

A necessary next step for this project is to evolve our exhibit production process so that we are more clearly and openly documenting our work so geography doesn't limit these virtual exhibit designers' ongoing participation in the process. Theoretically, participants anywhere in the world could come to meetings, transfer content and software to us, and really be a part of the real world creation of their exhibit. We've already seen the value (and created the infrastructure) to develop exhibit ideas in this open way. Now we've got to keep virtualizing so we can keep sharing throughout the whole, and do it without slowing up the other pieces of the exhibit creation process.

Ultimately this is about opening up the exhibition design process, and it's useful whether to improve communication with contractors, visitors, or other museum professionals. Many people complain that it's too much work, that it's bad marketing to air our missteps and debates, or that it will erode visitor confidence in our authority. As a member of this field, I am enlightened and improved every time a museum shares its processes. Yes, I can read reviews of "what we should have done" on ExhibitFiles, but the lessons learned during a project are always more concrete than those expressed after completion. It doesn't have to be a blow-by-blow on your poor decisions; I love seeing how giant paintings get moved into museums (SAAM), early concept drawings for new exhibits (COSI), even how floor staff and visitors perceive exhibits (Exploratorium). When we're honest (and positive) about our work, we look good, whether we're struggling to get a giant totem pole in the loading dock doors or debating what the best user interface for an exhibit will be.

We're already at the point where documenting projects after the fact, via conferences, papers, and sites like ExhibitFiles, is par for the professional development course. As new technologies and approaches lead us to be more open with visitors, we should also consider how these can help us be more open with each other as well. I used to think that only other museum professionals (or contractors) would be interested in watching video from exhibit meetings or checking out other institutions' shop drawings. Now, I'm working with an outside visitor community, and that emphasis on open participation highlights our own closed doors. They want in on the whole process. The Tech Virtual is breaking down a barn door in the exhibit conceptualization and development process. But there are more doors to unlock before we can truly call ourselves an open museum. It's as practical as it is philosophical. And I don't know about you, but I prefer open spaces.

Podcast Interview with Stephanie Weaver's Experienceology

This week, I did an interview for Stephanie Weaver's Experienceology podcast. In 43 minutes, we discuss what Web 2.0 means, ways museums are and can use Web 2.0 and 2.0-style design, The Tech Virtual open exhibit design project, and the challenges museums face as they try to grow into--or against--future technologies.

You can listen here using the player below, or head over to Stephanie's blog to learn more about designing for visitors to museums, stores, bathrooms... no experience is too small for Stephanie to add her thoughtful analysis.

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Observations from The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, Month 1

The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop launches today!

This is not an analytical post (primarily); it's an announcement and invitation to join the new project I've been working on with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.

The Tech Virtual is a project that allows people to conceptualize and prototype exhibits online. The online platform has two parts: a website, where all projects originate, and a Second Life presence ("The Tech" in Second Life), where participants can communicate in real-time, share ideas, and build virtual prototypes. All participation is under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means that all ideas are available for use by anyone with no financial obligation--only an obligation to credit the originators of said ideas.

For The Tech, this is a new way to conceptualize exhibits. We don't have traditional designer/developers on staff; instead, we have a team facilitating this process and liaising between project participants and fabrication staff to develop these virtual ideas into physical reality. To that end, there's an added incentive for this pilot stage (through June 2008): $5000 to any exhibit concept deemed spectacular enough to develop into a real exhibit here at The Tech. To be eligible for the prize, your exhibit must be on the theme of "Art, Film, Music & Technology."

But this is not just for The Tech; our grant mandates that this project be a service to the museum community at large. Towards that end, we encourage you to use virtual workshop for your own devices, whether to vet exhibit ideas, create, steal, and share exhibit concepts with others, or to learn more about Second Life.

We know there are lots of people out there who have been "peeking in" on Second Life for awhile now, reading the articles, seeing the videos, maybe even creating an avatar. I know that Second Life can be a clunky, frustrating experience. But it's also a new online communication tool, one that significantly improves the real-time chat experience across time zones.

I don't see Second Life as the meat of this project. The meat is people coming together to design exhibits. Second Life is just one tool we're using as a community space for museum folks to discuss and share mockups with each other. I'm planning a full slate of programming, from museum tours to build classes to design reviews with the pros. Yes, Second Life can be a useful prototyping space. But for those who don't want to go through the trouble to learn how to build, it is much more accessible as a programming space, and we hope to offer many interactive talks, workshops, and more.

All of that said, I've learned a lot setting up the Second Life component of this project. A contractor, Involve Inc., built the virtual Tech to spec, so that eventually virtual exhibits could be tested in real dimensionality relative to the building. But the museum is mostly empty right now, since the goal is to fill it with user-created exhibits. I've spent the last month building some sample exhibits, as well as a tutorial on interactive exhibit design. This little building experience was an eye-opener for me. We started with a rather long document on what makes a good interactive exhibit, intended primarily for the non-museum folks who participate in this project. But no one was going to read all that text. Casting it as a walk-through tutorial, with a bit of interaction thrown in, will hopefully turn arduous "instructions" into a fun and informative experience. While I have a good deal of Second Life experience, this was my first time building something from scratch, and I can verify that it was much easier (and somewhat intoxicating) than I expected--and definitely the simplest way I can imagine creating an online "exhibit" quickly.

It's also been a fun team development experience for staff here. This picture was taken at the end of a building class in our virtual sandbox. We were building spheres, trying out the physics engine, when someone decided to sit on one of the spheres. Then everyone piled on, someone set it rolling, and... we had moved from building to experimenting to wacky fun. The Ontario Science Centre has a wonderful brainstorming system, the RIG (rapid idea generation) that relies on building real stuff from all kinds of junk very quickly. I hope we can soon be offering similar sessions in Second Life, where we are neither limited by a lack of stuff nor space nor ways to make things interact. Being in a virtual environment lowers some barriers to social, unorthodox interactions. Hopefully, by learning together in a playful way, we can all jump to new insights and become more brilliant, fulfilled, well-endowed designers.

I hope that you can have similar learning experiences that are directly relevant to your own professional interests and goals via this project. For creative folks still dreaming of a big break, here's a chance to shine. For old pros looking for new ways to design, here's a free platform to exploit for your own exhibits. For executives considering Second Life or distributed design strategies, please learn from and with us.

All of this is a work in progress. Part of the point of this project is that it's a community space--both on the web and in Second Life--and we hope most of the suggestions and improvements that take us to the next step will come with and from you.

So come on in! You can browse, create, and participate in projects on the website. If you don't have a full-fledged exhibit concept, you can browse and submit to the idea lab, a place for one-sentence flights of fancy that might someday become brilliant exhibits.

And the Second Life grid is down at this moment for maintenance, but starting at 2pm PST today you can join us in the virtual world. We are offering museum tours every day at 11am (today at 3pm), and build and script classes each day (starting Thursday) at noon. My name in SL is Avi Marquez. I'll see you at The Tech!

Goodbye, Game Friday. Hello Open Source Museum.

One of my mentors, Michael Brown, told me, “The only way to get better is to change.” He was talking poetry, but over time I’ve found it to be one of the most useful, challenging ways to approach a range of situations. So now, after almost a year of Game Fridays, it’s time for a change. Not that I won’t still occasionally write about games, but they will no longer have a weekly presence on this blog (though you can always find lots of them by clicking the "game" tag in the topic list to the right).

Why the change? In this case, it has less to do with getting better than choosing a new direction. My interest in gaming in museums was ignited by working on Operation Spy, an immersive, narrative, live-action game experience at the International Spy Museum, and fueled by the CSI:NY virtual experience. But last week, I took a new job with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, working on a very different kind of project involving collaborative distributed exhibit design. So where visions of Flash games used to dance in my head, I’m now starting to fantasize about team-building, inclusion, and, of all things, Second Life.

The Open Source Museum project at The Tech is a grant-funded grand experiment. The concept is practical: cut the time and expense of exhibit development by creating a social space where exhibit developers from many museums—along with scientists, artists, visitors—can collaborate to design concepts for exhibits. These virtual, polyglot teams will devise experiences that are not hindered by the cultural predilections of any single institution, and hopefully, will reflect a more diverse, inclusive voice and design. The Tech (and other museums down the road) will be able to offer up themes for upcoming major exhibitions, and the best of the concepts developed by the collaborative crew will be realized in the physical institution.

So what does this collaborative platform look like? We’re using a combination of a wiki-style website and a Second Life presence to make it happen. On the website, participants can propose exhibit projects, join teams, and maintain presences for themselves and their exhibits in progress. Those exhibits will be prototyped, discussed, and explored by visitors in virtual form in Second Life. All of the project ideas and virtual creations will be shared under a Creative Commons license, so the content truly is open to all.

This is happening very, very quickly. The project will launch in December, and we are planning to have our first exhibits developed by this process on the floor at The Tech in summer of 2008. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re playing it fast and loose. Of course, the good news about all of this haste is that it forces us to be honest to the spirit of the project, which is about openness, sharing, releasing things before their done for feedback and redesign by a cast of thousands.

All of this is sweeping many new questions into my mind. Will exhibit developers really use (and derive any value from) Second Life? How much structure is motivating and how much becomes a chore? What will incentivize different kinds of people to participate? How do we make this a growing social space and not a one-hit wonder? Will this project thrive or fall flat?

Ultimately, the biggest question in my mind is about value propositions. How can we design this project to give value to participants throughout the process? We’re trying to construe this as a professional development opportunity—to work with others, design for different kinds of museums, learn about Second Life and collaboration tools—as much as an exhibit design process.

What are the questions in your mind about team exhibit design? What would you want a project of this nature to include?

I look forward to discussing these and many other questions about this experiment in the months to come. Viva the distributed conversation!