The Living Library: Using Our Institutions as New Models for Civic Dialogue

Are you looking for an innovative no-tech way to engage visitors in civic dialogue? A platform for museum staff to serve as facilitators of safe spaces for difficult conversations? A way to bring people on opposite sides of an issue to a fruitful, positive meeting place? Then bow your head and say a silent "tak" (that's "thank you" in Danish) to the creators of the Living Library. What is the Living Library? According to their website:

The Living Library works exactly like a normal library – readers come and borrow a 'book' for a limited period of time. After reading it they return the Book to the library and – if they want – they can borrow another Book. There is only one difference: the Books in the Living Library are human beings, and the Books and readers enter into a personal dialogue.

The Living Library was conceived in Denmark in 2000 as a way to engage youth in dialogue about ending violence by encouraging people to meet their prejudices and fears in a safe, fun, facilitated environment. A Living Library requires three kinds of people:

• Books, who openly and honestly represent certain stereotyped groups (i.e. Feminists, Disabled People, Muslims, Police, Goths, Gays)
  
• Readers, who check out the Books for 45-minute to 2-hour discussions
  
• Librarians, who facilitate the whole process

Since 2000, Living Libraries have been produced primarily in Europe at festivals and libraries with support from the Council of Europe youth sector. They are often one-offs for events but are increasingly included in the regular slate of programming at major libraries and cultural facilities (but at my count, only one museum). While a four-hour library may only draw 100 Readers, it engages those 100 people (along with 20 or more Books) in substantive dialogue, and the spectator/lurker effect on those who just browse the catalog or take a quick glance around can be much greater. They are careful to state that the Living Library is not a publicity stunt for an organization nor an advertisement for the Books involved. Instead, “The Living Library is a tool to foster peaceful cohabitation and bring people closer together in mutual and careful respect for the human dignity of the individual. This is true for the readers, the Books and the organisers alike.”

The Living Library is inspirational. It's also well-documented so you can do it yourself. The Council of Europe youth sector has made the Living Library tool available via this 36-page pdf booklet about organizing a Living Library. The booklet features personal stories from Books, Librarians, and Readers alongside practical explanation of what it takes to coordinate a Living Library. On the Living Library website, you can also find sample catalogues, Book application forms, and marketing materials for download. It’s an enjoyable, practical, inspiring read.

It's also interesting for people thinking about the essential value of libraries and museums. One of the surprising things about the Living Library methodology is how closely it mimics traditional library experiences. The reader experience is mediated by a gate-keeping librarian and a catalogue. The Living Library spaces are often decorated to simulate libraries (except in cases where they are staged in real libraries). The design encourages browsing of the catalogue before selection of a Book, and the expectation is that you will spend a significant amount of time with any Book selected.

The creators of this project recognized an essential civic value of libraries as civil, safe places and capitalized on that value to make a risky proposition to users. By framing the whole experience in the context of a library, which has widely understood implicit rules and expectations, they turned something that could have simply been about provocation and bravado into a true learning opportunity.

This really challenged my preconceived stereotypes about libraries, museums, and the flexibility of their use and application of core concepts. I often think of the museum/library setting and standards of behavior as a hindrance, not a help, to participation. When I think about museums becoming experience facilitators rather than experience providers, I typically imagine transforming the framework of museums, not the objects. That is, I think about ways that our current collections could be reframed in more comfortable, open spaces as the triangulation points between visitors, providing conversation pieces and bonding opportunities. But the Living Library takes the opposite approach. Instead of transforming how books are used in a new setting, they transform the books and keep the setting.

Why on earth would someone set charged conversation in a place like a library, stereotyped as a space that abhors talking of any kind? Because that tension makes for a unique kind of conversation. The Living Library breathes new value into the traditional frame. The frame is what keeps things civil so the Librarians, Books, and Readers can make it civic.

Could this be applied to museums? I think so. How could visitors' stereotypes about museum behavior and the kinds of activities available in museums be exploited to provide a radically different experience? In the same way the Living Library is organized around the frame of librarians, catalogues, books, and the action of checking things out, a theoretical Living Museum could be organized around exhibits, artifacts, docents, and the action of looking at things or moving through spaces. Imagine a museum in which Artifacts of a war are veterans, family members, and former enemy combatants. Or an exhibit on immigration in which you could check out Legal and Alien Artifacts for discussion based on labels identifying their provenance and status. A museum tour in which a docent "tours" you to a variety of volunteer artists who talk about how they create their work.

I see the Living Library both as a useful tool and as an inspiration for other ways to reconceptualize traditional institutional frames. We don't have to throw out the word museum, the guards, the artifact labels. We just need to find new ways, again and again, to make them come alive.

Speaking of which, I'll be spending the rest of this week rediscovering gravity while rock climbing. So if I don't respond to your comments right away, it's because I'm between a rock and a... well, you know.

Would you use the Living Library? How else could you imagine reframing the traditional aspects of museum or library visitation towards new ends?

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?

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.

826 Valencia: Education! Humor! Pirates!

In the museum world, we often talk about lowering barriers to entry, helping people get through the door. Those barriers are as psychological as they are physical--to enter the museum, visitors must overcome unclear directions, inflexible hours, uninviting design, inability or unwillingness to pay, and above all, fear or expectation that the museum will not offer them a great experience.

And so today we look at an educational facility (not a museum) that swabs the deck with these barriers. It makes them walk the plank. By doing so, it doesn't just widen the audience for a specific educational experience--it also offers a new model for how we might design and deliver interactive, varied content experiences.

826 Valencia is a tutoring center. Along with its six sister venues across the country, 826 provides students with one-on-one tutoring, workshops with professional authors and playwrights, field trips, outreach programs, and the opportunity to publish and perform their original work. Their website looks pretty standard with smiling kids, friendly tutors, and earnest mission statements, as reflected by this homepage banner:

But the visitor experience at 826 Valencia is anything but standard, and its clientele stretches way beyond those who will ever use or volunteer to offer tutoring services. Instead of classrooms or mission statements, first time visitors enter 826 Valencia through the storefront Pirate Supply Store. Part store, part theater, part interactive experience, the Pirate Supply Store sells nothing as powerfully as it sells a vibe, one that promotes zaniness, good humor, keen observation, and imaginative play. It's not a shlock gift shop. There are mysterious objects in drawers with evocative names like "illumination" (candles). There is a vat of lard you can put your hands into, alongside a sign with helpful suggestions for uses of lard. There is a trapdoor in the ceiling that staff can open to drop a mop head on unsuspecting browsers. There is a wonderful little "fish theater" in which about 5 people can crowd into a tiny dark space to watch fish swim in a tank. In about 300 square feet, the Pirate Supply Store offers both silly and sublime in spades. Their labels are so good that they have an online gallery of signs so people like me who took lousy cellphone photos in the store can peruse the signage in better resolution at home. Whoever heard of visitors loving labels enough to put them on the website? It was, in short, the best interactive exhibit I've experienced in a long time.

But that's not why I bring it up here. If it were just an amazing pirate store, 826 Valencia would be a nice design inspiration. But 826 Valencia is a writing center for kids (remember?). And that's where it gets really interesting. Why would a tutoring center have a pirate storefront?

Because it's in a commercially-zoned area. This reason may sound like a technicality, but it has some interesting implications. If you want to offer an educational service in a high-traffic neighborhood, why not put it between the coffee shop and the bookstore? Why not theme the front to fit into the pattern of passers-by, so that they might see it as part of their shopping experience and pop in? No group of folks strolling down the street on a Sunday afternoon is going to casually walk into a tutoring center. But they might walk into a pirate store. This is a great example of locating the service "where the people are" and designing the entrance to fit in with their patterns of use in that neighborhood.

Because it brings in new audiences and funders. Put it in their neighborhood, pattern it after its neighbors, and people will come. But what good is it for people who are not actually taking part in tutoring to come to a tutoring center? Isn't that distracting from their real work? No! Think of the variety of people drawn to the pirate store:

• kids of all kinds who might be future clients of the tutoring center
• families with parents who might never have known or considered the available services of a tutoring center
• hipster adults without kids who may be potential volunteers for the center
• tourists who may then seek out 826 venues in their own cities
  
• would-be pirates who buy pirate swag that helps fund the tutoring center

So often we talk protectively about our core audience--people who are already using our services. But 826 Valencia appreciates that if you call yourself a tutoring center you will only attract people who are already using the center. A tutoring center is even more stereotyped than a museum in terms of the public's expectation about who it is "for." But 826 Valencia is for all kinds of people--especially those who have never felt that a tutoring center was "for" them before! And since "pirate store" doesn't come with a preconceived notion of an audience, it's for everyone. The traffic through the store isn't a diversion; it's an opportunity to sell people on their services. Some of their most promising students and energized volunteers may be folks who first walked in for an eye patch.

It's also a way to generate a bit of revenue. I spontaneously donated $20 because I was impressed by the experience I had and the professionalism of their tutoring services. I don't generally spontaneously walk into tutoring centers to donate money. I rarely do it while visiting museums, either, partially because the educational services museums offer (class programs, outreach, etc.) are not as clearly exhibited to me the visitor as they were at 826.

Because it gives their core audience something to share. Imagine you're a kid. Asking a fellow teenager, "Want to see my tutoring center?" is probably one of the better ways to get beaten up. But I can easily imagine kids bringing each other to the pirate store with pride to show off the books for sale that they have contributed to and to generally share the zany wonderfulness of this place of which they are a part. Yes, this happens in museums--kids who have great experiences on class field trips bring family members back to tour the exhibits. But there are also plenty of museums with image problems, where even ardent members have a hard time convincing their friends and family to attend. Being a positive place for new audiences doesn't just encourage walk-ins; it also helps your core audience become a better marketing street team.

Because it reflects their values. 826 Valencia is a really fun tutoring center. But no matter how many smiling kids they show on their brochures or how goofy their copy is, they can't evoke the energy with which they carry out their mission as well as they can when they invoke fantastical characters like pirates. Ironically, the pirate store allows 826 Valencia to be MORE sincere and direct about their tutoring offerings, because the spirit of fun is conveyed through the pirate stuff and doesn't have to be woven into the workshop announcements and materials. Kids (and adults) know when we are applying a fake veneer of fun on exhibit or program text. The pirate store allows 826 Valencia to avoid that trap by being authentically serious about their programs and authentically silly about pirates.


So what's the downside? Doing this successfully requires the ability to delicately balance the attractor/value-imparting experience (pirates) with the core mission (tutoring). It might be tempting to let the pirates take over, or to discard them as a diversion. Ultimately, it's bigger than the pirates (but don't tell them that). The 826 project is a creative way to answer a universal question: How do we marry our mission with our values and our audience goals? In 826's case, the answer didn't lie in fancying up the mission; instead, they created a partner institution that helped express the elements of their work that are commonly misrepresented in the public eye.

What parts of your mission are not easily represented by your institution's content, design, or public perception? What experiences could you add to the "storefront" of your institution to address those challenges?

I leave you with these questions. Be forewarned; failure to respond in a timely fashion could result in scurvy.

The Wildness in the Corner: A Discussion with Jason Nelson

Okay, I lied. Last week I announced the end of Game Friday. But this week, I got the opportunity to interview Jason Nelson, creator of digital art and avant garde game wonder game, game, game, and again game and how could I resist?

Jason Nelson is a lecturer in cyberstudies/digital art/digital creative writing at Griffith University in Queensland, AU. He started out as a poet, started messing around on the internet with digital media, and launched into a series of highly unusual interactive projects.

These include:

• this is how you will die, a slot machine style game that generates unique deaths as a series of sequential clauses (see example image above)
  
• Speech/Media_To_Text_Translation, in which an imperfect speech-to-text translator is applied to generate poetry from sound effects, natural disasters, and media events
• Dispersed Fiction, in which a story is doled out via the content-submission forms on a variety of public websites
  

Jason kindly stayed up until 3am to talk with me about art, poetry, and the challenges of engaging users in something really weird. The interview includes stories about some of his projects, and a delving into questions about what makes viral content compelling, how to draw people into an uncomfortable environment, and ways that art--or museum content--can become more pervasive by being hidden in the corners of life.

What do you think has made you successful?

At first, it was a surprise. game, game, has had about 5 million hits. I released it in a decentralized way—which means I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d find a blog and say you might be interested by this—and then it spread out. I’m really fascinated by the viral web. I grew up in Oklahoma. No one knows about it, no one wants to live there. But there’s a lot of unexpected beauty in Oklahoma—weird folk art with plastic deer, a beautiful house. And I think that’s kind of what happened with some of my work—people didn’t really expect it. So it felt like something they found, an experience they owned, and they wanted to share it.

I find it fascinating how on Youtube, something will get 2 million hits really quickly, and then it dies off. People don’t want to share it anymore once it’s huge. game, game, and... just won an Italian art award. As an artist and a lecturer at the university, I'm expected to put my work up in competitions as art. But then these kids blogging it on car mod sites—they’re finding it without realizing it’s an art work. That lack of expectation is kind of a wonderful thing. For institutions, which brand themselves with a consistent experience, it’s really hard to translate an unexpected find.

You're bringing up a great point--that the things that become successful on the viral web do so because they feel personal, like you found a secret to share with someone else. How could we embed these secrets, these hidden discoveries, into museums?

I think you could easily go into a physical space and hide things. Everyone else, make your exhibitions. And then we’re going to hide something underneath the exhibit about eggs. Or about gravity. And then it becomes this great thing that people discover—the surprise. That’s what I think a lot of physical spaces are lacking.

This is what I'm trying to do with dispersed fiction: to hide it all over the web. It’s this idea of taking your fiction or poetry and dispersing it out on the web in places where people can enter things—like into an Amazon book review. You make up a unique keyword and use that in all the entries. So then someone can search google and find everything out on the web via that searchable term.

It’s kind of like—let’s put our exhibitions in the corner of a grocery store, in a gas station. And I think museums would like to do that, but they don’t really have controls over what happens with the material in those public places. So when you deal with Second Life, for example, it seems like an ideal place to do that, because you don't have to worry so much about the physical materials, so you could actually go in and put bits of an exhibition in lots of different places. So as people wander around, they could find these things.

There’s a Smithsonian fellowship from Australia where you can research at the Smithsonian for 6 months. My idea is to explore the museums, find those hidden objects, and make small digital art projects based on these objects that don’t fit. Then people find those digital pieces on the web and find their way back to the institution

I also think people connect with my stuff because it flirts with failure. How do you make something that’s messy, that isn't polished, that seems almost kind of broken? A lot of the content on the net is so polished. And I think there’s something engrained in us that wants error.

The messiness of your work is definitely something that makes it really distinctive. But when we talk about hiddenness, there's this problem. Does this kind of stuff have to exist as a reaction to and on the edges of something more polished? Or do you think it can hold up on its own? How much messiness could people handle?

When I lived in Bowling Green, the museums in Ohio used to bother me with exhibitions like The Art of Star Wars. I understand why they're doing it, but it's no anti-failure that it becomes dull. And really it’s just designed to meet the centerpoint. Here in Queensland they have an Andy Warhol exhibit coming up, and it’s just plastered everywhere. And I think these shows really injure institutions by not sharing the diversity and range of work out there, by focusing on these standard things.

The blockbusters. They're safe. So where does that leave risk and messiness?

I think people want it, and they're willing to tolerate a lot of weirdness if it reaches them in some way. Uncontrollable semantics was this project I did that had a hidden page in it that I'd forgotten about. I kept getting these email messages that said "Cease Me Cease You." I thought it was spam. But then I started getting hundreds of these emails, and finally someone sent me an email address that referenced a file name. And I found this hidden page again, where you have to wait for two minutes, and then it says, “Email me at this address with the words Cease Me Cease You."

And I think people wanting to come to these sites would really be open to these kinds of things. If you’re in academia, or art, or museums, you sort of focus on the boundaries, wanting to learn where they are. And I think we could leap way outside the boundaries and people would be really accepting of it. In the case of my work, people are reacting to something highly unusual in the field, but they don't see it that way--they don't know where the boundaries are.

What they do need is some kind of foothold or entry point, something that makes them comfortable saying, "I have no idea what it means but I really enjoy it." Is that entry point a game interface? A sound? Anything that can draw them in and then the rest gets really wild and crazy. As long as you give them small rewards along the way and congratulate them when they reach some goal.

Doing something weird always comes back to comfort with failure.

How do you identify failure when you're working in an extremely strange space? Is it about numbers? Or about how you personally feel about the piece? Can you give me an example?

The most recent example would be the zombie game. When I finished it, I hated it. I was glad it was over. I think it has a lot of nuances in it, but it’s also really difficult to get through. It’s a little annoying. And I usually love art that's annoying—but it wasn’t accessible enough. But it was also a failure because I tried to reach an audience rather than approaching it from my own voice, and the result was that that audience--game people--felt that maybe I was mocking them.

One thing I think is important is making exhibitions that don’t require a lot of prefacing. I find conceptually-based art very problematic. I want to jump right into the middle of it. Maybe the experience won’t be totally obvious or opaque, but it will be enjoyable.

There's a contradiction here. You're talking about avoiding targeting a particular audience, but then also giving users an access point. In museums, we often start by thinking about the access point--how can we draw visitors in and connect with them. How do you reconcile the personal desire for wildness with a desire to support an audience?

You just need one access point. You can have eight facets of a project that are wild and one that connects to people to be accessible.

For example, I’m modifying a digital midi theremin as an alternative mouse device. It's a normal theremin with a midi output. I’m using the data sets from the midi to drive the mouse motion. It’s just an interface device, a part of a larger artwork. The theremin interface is the carrot, a performative way to interact. The idea is to draw them in that way.

Are there any other projects you are working on that you're really excited about?

I'm working with speech to text software to filter outside sound and create poems. I’ll play a movie or political speech, run it through the speech to text program, and it will spit out this crazy, very poetic stuff. I started doing it because I was playing with the program one evening and I accidentally left it on during a thunderstorm. And when I woke up the screen was full of text. At first I was afraid that someone had broken in—and then I realized the software was getting the sounds from the storm and turning them into words.

**

This conversation with Jason really inspired me to hunt out strange phenomena and find ways to slide them in under the rug in museums. But I'm left with the same question we batted about during the talk: how much of this can museums handle? Does it have to be on the periphery to be appreciated? What do you think?

Game Friday: Shuffle Your Brain

The very first game post I ever wrote was about incorporating game mechanics into museum experiences. A year later, and Amy Jo Kim's presentations about ways that personalization, feedback, collecting, points and exchanges can make all kinds of experiences more engaging and sticky still resonate with me. Amy is the Creative Director of Shufflebrain, a game design firm that has unique expertise in identifying and exploiting behavioral human predilections to make games and game-like experiences compelling in everyday contexts. In other words, Amy is the brain behind how and why we game.

Rather than occupying your attention with my own analysis, I encourage you to go straight to the source and check out her two fascinating slide presentations (from eTech 2006 and GDC 2007 respectively) on how to put "the fun into functional." While her main audience is software and game developers, I think the material translates directly to other experience providers (like museums).

The first presentation explains the five game mechanics and gives examples of how they are used to make Netflix (personalized feedback), MySpace (friending people as social exchange), Ebay (leveling up via those little colored stars!), and other software tools more appealing.

The second presentation focuses on the growth of user-generated and shared content in social media, and talks about how game mechanics are involved both in the applications that support such content (YouTube, Twitter, and others), and how such content sharing can enhance games themselves.

Enjoy, and please share your comments with others.

Master Mashup: Viral Marketing from Bob Dylan

Someone should give Bob Dylan's publicist a raise. He or she has created one of the most innovative, enjoyable mashups out of a cultural icon. Click the red box above once the video has loaded to see what I'm talking about (thanks to Jim Spadaccini for sharing).

What's a mashup? In 2.0 speak, it's a web application that combines data from more than one source to create a new tool. One fun example is overplot, a mashup that takes quotes overheard in New York City (the data) and places them on a Google map (the tool), so you can browse the quotations by address. For example, you can click on "Midtown" on the map, go to Columbus between 89th and 90th, and find a gem like this:

Chick: I have to run in here and get more ChapStick.
Guy: You just bought chapstick yesterday.
Chick: My dog steals them and eats them.
Guy: That must be why his lips are so soft.

This mashup turns a simple list of quotes into a geographically browsable conversation. And if you know New York, it's so much more delicious to "see" the quote location rather than just reading the intersection listing. (warning: many overplot quotes are decidedly less PC than the example above.)

Map-based mashups are popular because they provide a well-understood visual representation of data. They're used to chart everything from crime statistics to Craigslist postings. Other more ambitious mashups, such as We Feel Fine, pull in data passively from blogs all over the world to create stunning visual datasets.

Whether simple or complex, mashups are most successful when they create new value out of the combined content. At their worst, they feel like hack jobs--a toaster spliced to a television. At their best, they are elegant combinations whose sum is more interesting, or at least differentiated, from the parts.

The Bob Dylan video at the top of this post is an example of a mashup of particular interest to museums because it overlays user data (personal messages) onto a cultural artifact (the Subterranean Homesick Blues video). This seems like a brilliant way to advertise museum shows--to find ways to allow visitors to embed their personal messages, opinions, or content into the museum content, thus fusing the interests of the visitors with the offering of the museum.

Of course, there are potential rights issues to be ironed out, but as in most museum/2.0 tensions, it's mostly a question of control. In this case, ceding control/use of the museum content to visitors can create a powerful message that the museum content truly is "for them." In the Dylan example, a video that was push technology (giving content TO the user) transforms into pull technology (eliciting and becoming a platform for content FROM the user).

How do we convey that the exhibition is truly FOR the visitor? By allowing them to put themselves into it.

Talking Through Objects 2: The Rollercoaster Conundrum

Last week, I wrote about the ways that dogs can be useful social objects--and you had lots of good comments and input. This week, I'm hoping you can help solve a mystery on a similar topic.

You see, I've found another object that's a successful stranger-to-stranger social enabler, but this one is harder to understand. It's a rollercoaster; specifically, it's the 100 year old wooden coaster on the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the Giant Dipper. A couple months ago, I rode the Dipper for the first time. While standing on line, I noticed something surprising: when a car full of riders came back to the boarding area after their ride, people in line stuck out their hands to slap the hands of the riders in the car. I went back a couple months later to photograph it.

Step 1: people on line wait for rollercoaster.



Step 2: people see car is coming and stick out their hands.





Step 3: a successful "five" is given.













Why does this happen? It's not because the boardwalk is a social place. Sure, it's social, but people stick to their own "pods"--families, teens, adults--and don't diverge or merge. If you were to go out on the boardwalk proper, teeming with people on a summer night, and stuck your hand out, no one would give you five. So why do they do it at the rollercoaster?

Maybe it's because people are excited about the ride. Maybe it's because people waiting in line are bored and want something to break up the monotony. But the best reason I can imagine has to do with barriers and shared experience. Out on the boardwalk, or at the zoo or a museum, there's a common experience of the sights, sounds, smells, activities of the place. But since the spaces are largely open, it feels threatening to approach strangers. You'd have to do it face to face. You could be rejected, or overpursued, or any number of anxiety-inducing possibilities, and you can't hide or reasonably extract yourself from a negative situation.

On the line for the rollercoaster, on the other hand, there's a physical barrier separating the people in line from the people in the car. In fact, it's impossible for people in the car to have any kind of sustained interaction with people in line, because a. they are moving past the line-standers in a car with a restraining bar and b. they are required to leave the building when they depart the car. The interaction between strangers is necessarily short. There is a foregone conclusion that it will not be prolonged to the discomfort of either party. It's a controlled environment--and while neither individual is in control, the partially limiting barrier makes it feel okay to act atypically.

These "partially limiting barriers" are successful in other venues as well--most notably online, where it is personal anonymity rather than temporal transience that makes the interaction between strangers feel controlled. But it's the same inhibition that allows otherwise shy people to dance with strangers at clubs--for some people, loud music and a less intimate setting are opportunities for social interaction rather than limiters. It's also a reason that people will game with strangers; in that case, the games' rules form the partial barrier that facilitates social interaction.

But I'm not so sure of this. How do you interpret the Giant Dipper hand slapping? Where do you see barriers used as springboards for social behavior?

Talking Through Objects: The Dog Analogy

I'm gearing up for some conference talks next month, and one of these is part of a very cool session, Eye on Design, at the Western Museums Association conference. The coordinator asked several folks to pick a design trend from outside the museum world and discuss how they might be applied to museum design. I've been thinking about what, of all this 2.0 stuff, is most exciting to me. And right now, it's the ways that these technologies encourage social engagement among strangers.

On the web, such socializing can happen around games (MMOs), shopping (Amazon discussions), trip planning (TripAdvisor), music or book collections (Librarything)... the list goes on. But I recently stumbled back upon one of the most powerful tools for stranger-stranger socializing in the real world: dogs.

I'm in the process of adopting a dog. Doing so has brought me to shelters, dog parks, and generally a heightened awareness of dogs and their owners. Dogs are the ultimate social object. They allow for transference of attention from person-to-person to person-to-thing-to-person. It’s much less threatening to approach someone by approaching and interacting with his/her dog, which will inevitably lead to interaction with its owner. Similarly, enterprising dog owners use their dogs as social instigators, steering the pups towards people they’d like to meet.

Why does this work with dogs but not with, say, 18th century coins in museums? When you are looking at a painting, and I am looking at the painting, why don’t we transfer our interest in the painting into social exchange?

One argument might be that dogs are owned and therefore uniquely associated with their owners. In the museum, neither of us has a vested interest in the exhibit with which we are both interacting, so neither of us can extrapolate back to interest in the other person. But that’s not quite true. Often I’m standing at an exhibit, totally thrilled by the way I can use my hands to make cloud formations or listen to strange sounds or… and would LOVE to share it with strangers. I feel some ownership of the experience I’ve discovered. I’d love to flag someone down and say, “Hey! Check out this awesome thing!” But I rarely do. I’m conscious of other people’s “alone time” in the museum. When I see someone having a great experience with an exhibit in a museum, my impulse isn’t to approach him and ask what he’s enjoying. My impulse is to leave him alone to enjoy his experience, to be alone with his dog, as it were.

But leaving dogs “alone” never seems like the right choice. They have so much social energy on their own, absent of owners. Have you ever had a stray dog, a sweet and not-too-mangy one, approach you on the street? In my experience these dogs are the best social generators. Immediately, I spring into action, asking the people on the street if they know the dog, have seen it, etc. Suddenly an ad hoc gang of strangers is shepherding this dog through the neighborhood looking for its home.

Imagine an exhibit that could do this—that could approach you, express a need, and spring you into social action. An exhibit that compelled you to walk around to other visitors and ask, “Do you know this exhibit? Is it yours? Any idea where it belongs?”

What are the general characteristics of dogs that make them good objects for sparking social interaction?

They are intrinsically relational. Exhibits are things. Dogs are persons (if highly limited in their abilities as such). The expectation with a dog is that the only way to engage with it is by being social with it, which then breaks the ice for being social with those around it. The expectation with an exhibit is that one approaches it intellectually, physical, even emotionally, but that the approach is uni-directional; that is, the exhibit isn’t giving anything back. You are the only active agent with an interactive. With a dog, you are both active agents, and the “interactivity” is social.

Dogs are outwardly emotive. There are many museum exhibits that are arguably as interactive as a dog. And yet the thing that makes dogs lovable is their desire to relate emotionally, to perform and to please. It’s easier as a stranger to respond positively to an animal that expresses interest in you than an exhibit that just sits there. And dogs’ attention is not uni-directional—dogs will spread their attention to all those around them. Which means if you are having a great experience with your dog, I can perceive and access that. In a museum, I can’t necessarily tell if the ancient bowl is communicating with you or you with it. Dogs are approachers. Exhibits only receive.

Dogs are endlessly interesting to their owners. If I approach you in a museum and ask what captivates you about the sculpture in front of us, you might look at me strangely and tell me you were just spacing out. But if I ask what you love about your dog or why he does that funny thing, you will chatter on for minutes. Yes, this happens in museums, but most often when you interact with museum staff, who have vested interests, relationships, and ideas about the objects on display. Museum visitors are rarely as “close” to exhibits as they are to their pets.


In a strange way, the dog analogy leads to thinking about personalizing the museum. When the museum is full of objects, exhibits, and experiences that feel personal to visitors, visitors take ownership and have relationships with those experiences that are emotional and deep—like their relationships with dogs. I once toured an art museum with an art educator who told me that she thinks of certain pieces as “old friends” who she loves to visit and communicate with from time to time. It struck me that she was incredibly privileged to have this personal relationship with the art. But that relationship is like her own secret dog. It makes her experience more meaningful, but doesn’t necessarily induce social behavior.

Having personal relationships with museum content is a start—but that’s just the first step, when you clip the leash on the dog and call it yours. The real challenge is figuring out how to design exhibits that are “approachers,” that come up to you with interest and attention and needs and ask you to satisfy them. How do we design exhibits to be the cutest, most friendly strays on the block?

Please share your thoughts. In the meantime, I’ll be out socializing with my new friend.

The Cirque De Soleil Model: “Entertaining” Doesn’t Have to Mean Low-Brow

Last week, there was a New York Times article about the recently opened Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Madame Tussauds attractions in Times Square. The author focused on the appeal of the lurid, the sensational, and the devilishly entertaining, and there’s certainly a lot to be said for these attributes. Heck, sign me up for a ticket to the zombie museum. But when I took off my “entertainment” glasses and put on my museum eyes, my reaction wasn’t amusement. It was distaste. I imagined museum folks reading the article and snapping the paper closed with smug smiles on their faces: "See. This is why we have to avoid Disneyfication." But such arrogance is ill-advised. Ripley's is just a small symbol of the growing challenge for museums to compete for audiences in a growing experience economy.

Museums need to be thinking about the competition—and it’s much bigger and smarter than Ripley’s. It’s easy to look at something like Ripley’s and think: that’s what’s the public wants. But that argument respects our audiences too little. Sure, Ripley’s may be the Star magazine of museums, but a lot more people read Time than the tabloids. Look at the most popular shows on television: Lost, Heroes—these are complex, unusual experiences.

Ripley’s is not the ultimate manifestation of what the public wants. Ripley’s is a remake, a B-movie, most impressive for the extent to which it has reinvented itself. The real story here isn’t about Americans’ continued fascination with shriveled heads; it’s about the extent to which we’ve moved beyond them.

Ripley’s is a circus. What P. T. Barnum did for the big top, Ripley did for the public collection on display. But Barnum and Bailey don’t rule the circus world anymore. The public has moved on. The rise of avant garde performances by Stomp, the Blue Man Group, and most notably, Cirque de Soleil, have changed the landscape of the circus—and by extension, the way museum people should evaluate and judge themselves against entertainment venues.

Over the last twenty years, Cirque de Soleil has grown into arguably the most widespread live entertainment experience in the world. They bring in over 600 million dollars yearly from 13 different shows. They have permanent and traveling shows. Their shows have complex and layered stories, music, and visual effects. They take lots of risks, blending gymnastic feats with made-up languages, intensely engineered sets, sexually explicit content, and interaction with the crowd. Tickets are expensive and hard to come by.

It may be easy to discount Ripley’s as a low-brow diversion, inapplicable to the museum world. It’s much harder to do so with Cirque de Soleil. Cirque successfully draws a diverse audience into an experience that is highly visual, metaphorical, and complex. It’s Ripley’s all grown up, and, in growing up, Cirque achieved some goals that museums still struggle with. It’s an emotional, immersive experience. It’s not just eye candy; it’s art that isn’t afraid to pull punches. And yet instead of repelling people by making them feel stupid, it sucks them in.

I was talking to an investor this weekend who told me how much he hates museums. His wife drags him to the Met and all he wants to do is go to the café. When I told him about some of the things I’m working on, he initially couldn’t grasp the idea of museums as immersive experiences. The reference point that finally got him there was Cirque de Soleil. For him, Cirque means excitement, innovative design, content that makes him think—all the positive associations I want him to have with museums are there.

Maybe Ripley’s isn’t the reference point that excites you when it comes to reformation and revolution in museums. Maybe it’s the Creation Museum. Maybe it’s Cirque de Soleil, or street performance, or farmer’s markets. But the point is that all of these have valid and interesting lessons to teach us about how to reach out to audiences. Sometimes exhibit designers do site reviews when planning major building projects. It always seems most valuable when they venture outside the museum to retail venues, web venues, thinking to themselves: “How would Sephora do a museum? How would YouTube do a museum?”

How would Cirque de Soleil do a museum? Maybe it’s time to slap on some leotards and find out.

Treasure Hunts, Tactile Domes, and Other Layered Beings

Last week, I met a woman named Ellen, an orthopedic surgeon, who hunts for treasure. I'm not kidding. She was telling me the story of how she ended up in Santa Cruz. She had a high stress job in clinical trials, and finally needed a break. She found a great opportunity to join a practice here in Santa Cruz, but first, she narrowly avoided a mid-life crisis by taking four months off to go treasure hunting.

At this point in the story, like most reasonable people, I stared. She was already talking about spine surgery and I had to go back. "What do you mean, treasure hunting?" It was as if I had finally met a real pirate.

Ellen explained that in 2005, when she quit her job, she discovered A Treasure's Trove, a children's book by Michael Stadther, in which fireflies and grasshoppers coexist with layered puzzles and mysteries. At first listen, the book sounded like a childhood favorite of mine, The Eleventh Hour, a lavishly illustrated whodunit riddled with ciphers and a solution in a sealed envelope.

But A Treasure's Trove is far more than an armchair adventure. When the book was released in November 2004, Stadther announced that he had placed 12 gold tokens--one for each creature in the book--in twelve locations throughout the U.S., and that each location was indicated in some way by the puzzles in the book. Since then, Ellen and tens of thousands of other treasure-seekers have engaged with A Treasure's Trove and its sequel, gallivanting all over the states looking for various tokens and symbols hinted at in the book. A few may do it for money (the treasures, when first found, are redeemable for valuable gems), but most do it as a way to bond as a family and take their love for puzzles on the road. Ellen, for example, connected with her gruff Korean father when they went on a wild expedition that involved a car breakdown, no jackets, and a lot of snow--but they overcame all their frustrations cracking puzzles into the night in a Motel 6. Similarly, in the bulletin boards and forums that have risen up around A Treasure's Trove, people tell stories of whole families devoting evenings to puzzles instead of TV, and spending vacations on some serious adventures. It's so wholesome I half-expected Ellen to morph into a Pound Puppy.

I was enraptured by her description, not because I wanted to revisit cryptography class, but because Ellen and thousands of others had been spurred into hours and hours of engagement by a single children's book. It was the most extensive, dedicated "post-visit" to a book I can imagine. It changed the way I think about narrative game design.

Here's the problem I see with museum-based narratives and games: people don't revisit exhibits the way they revisit games. When I get a new board game, I expect to play it many times (if it's any good). I expect it to take a couple tries before I have a handle on the basic game mechanics, and then I expect to keep enjoying it on repeat experiences. If it's a computer- or web-based game, I expect that there may be a narrative that keeps me coming back again and again to progress (even if that narrative is as simple as "save the princess" in Mario). If it's a book, I expect to move on to the next one in the series, or, to glumly accept that it's over and move on to other parts of the library.

Not so with museums. If an exhibit asked visitors to come back next week for level 2, it's highly unlikely they would ever see people progress through the ranks. This is even true of museum programs--in my experience, while you can certainly attract repeat program attendees, it's hard to fill programs that progress from 101 to 201; not enough people think of museums as places where the experience evolves over time. This is also a challenge for Web 2.0-style design integrating evolving visitor content--people aren't visiting the museum with enough frequency to be part of a meaningful dialogue happening there. Sure, they can offer a comment, but it's a one-off, not a continuing relationship or engagement.

And herein lies the beauty of A Treasure's Trove. All the content and the tools to unlock it are preexisting in a book. There's no gradual rollout of more complicated levels or additional puzzles. It's all right there from the beginning, and it's up to the reader to read in deeper and deeper to access more content. And readers have created their own structures outside the book to connect with one another and "continue the story" by sharing their own adventures. It's generously, delightfully cross-platform, and the core experience is fairly concise.

What if museum exhibits were designed this way--to encourage visitors not to see the new thing but to find more things in what they already saw (and to find those things both in and outside the museum)? I had a little of that experience last month at the Exploratorium in the Tactile Dome (a pitch-black walk-through dome), where, to my initial surprise, they let you go through several times in a row. Each time, you find something attached to the walls you didn't feel before. The base experience is short and simple, but there's complexity to uncover on successive trips through. Instead of creating an hour-long program that builds up to or begins with the Dome, the Dome itself is the hour-long program, iterated over and over. It's a very efficient way to use real estate and to engage visitors for a longer time.

Every time we found something new to us in the Tactile Dome, we were excited to tell everyone around, "hey! I found a broom." And then all these people would shuffle over in the dark to feel the broom. The darkness created layers of discovery that weren't present in the well-lit, well-labeled parts of the museum, where it seemed like everything was on display for easy access (and appeared to hold no mystery nor layers).

A few years ago at ASTC, some Exploratorium exhibit designers gave a talk on dos and don'ts of interactive design. One of the things that kept coming up was the idea that you need to make the "primary" phenomenon totally achievable and self-evident so that people don't get caught up in secondary, unintended phenomena. For example, if you have a big thing that spins and moves around some water (and the water is the "important" part), you want to make sure that spinning the big thing isn't so cool that it overwhelms the water's motion. This leads to confusion and to visitors feeling let down--"why did they just make a big thing to spin? I don't get it."

One solution to this problem is to streamline design to totally focus visitors on the primary phenomenon, concept being that visitors only approach exhibits expecting to learn or interact with one thing. I do it, I get it, I move on. But it doesn't have to be that way. I think we can design exhibits with clear primary objectives/elements and equally clear secondary, or deeper layer ones.

Of course, many exhibit designers might argue that this is how all good exhibits are--there are deeper, special kernels that can only be accessed and or appreciated over many visits and much reflection. Well, there may be lots of fascinating layers to a painting or a phenomenon, but if it's not clear to me how to start unlocking that content, I'm unlikely to dig deep enough. And these revelations still have to happen at the exhibit, in the museum. How can I keep unlocking the content once I'm back at home?

Many museums are working on using technology to personalize and connect various parts of the museum experience. Self-generated webpages, emails back to you from the museum--all these things are good, but the visitor response to them is often low. What if, instead of getting to mail home the content from the exhibit, you got to take home the secret parts, the parts you couldn't figure out or get to in the museum? What if an exhibit explicitly started a story, a mystery, or a discovery that was so compelling it sent you home thinking about the solution?

This relates to the question of "who owns the museum experience." Too often, we think about exhibits and programs in terms of outcomes instead of instigations. We ask, "what did you learn at the end?" rather than "what are you going to do with this information when you leave?" It's a good question. And maybe a mystery, a set of ancient museum coins hidden out in the world somewhere, is a good place to start.

Jumping into Art in Second Life

When people talk about museum projects in Second Life and other virtual worlds, I'm often disappointed by the short-sightedness of the vision. Virtual worlds are a new, emerging technology, and like any new technology, overlaying old techniques onto new platforms is disappointing at best. So much energy is put into recreating physical spaces and their real-world limitations rather than experimenting with ways that virtual worlds create opportunity to do things that are impossible in real museums. These opportunities can be social--engaging with museum content with other visitors at their computers all over the world--as well as experiential--allowing visitors to jump into, smash, and manipulate content in ways that physics and conservators forbid in real space.

This week, a quick example of how each is possible.

1. VAN GOGH GOES EXPERIENTIAL

The video below is a gorgeous example of the possibility of substantive, emotional experiences with museum content via virtual world representations.

It's a machinima (video) by Robbie Dingo, a 3D recreation of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

As one YouTube visitor commented:

A masterpiece recreated. I watched the beauty unfolding in front of me. Maybe someone once watched Vincent creating the original and felt the same way.
I hope so.

Sadly, Robbie's goal was to use Second Life as a platform to create a 2D representation of the painting--so the 3D space of the painting is not available for visitors to explore. But imagine the possibilities for a museum to take an iconic painting or artifact and create a 3D version of it for visitors to wander. Narrative information could be embedded throughout the landscape, or an entire exhibition's worth of content could be embedded metaphorically in the space. The result is one solution to the "problem" of viewing 2D art--that it's hard to figure out how to focus and be attentive to the piece if you don't have a strong art background. Creating a 3D space to explore encourages visitors to spend more time with the piece, literally getting inside it.

2. GALLERY OPENINGS, SOCIAL OPENING

There have been many art events and openings in Second Life, perhaps most significantly Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, which was recreated in four Second Life locations for a weekend event earlier this month. Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company had some interesting observations about the unique social aspect of this event:

Was it real (a question perpetually asked by the perplexed)? Well, I ran into some people I knew, met some interesting new folks, got into the vibe of the art, and even ended up in an art conversation chatting about interesting artists like Stephen Hendee and Joshua Davis. But was I with those people in Second Life? We were certainly making mental connections, and frankly, I probably spoke to more people than I would at a real-life art opening. It is easy to feel lonely at a real art show surrounded by people who are strangers, but I bet very few people logged into that event in Second Life last night felt that way.