What Are the Most Important Problems in Our Field?

I'm working on a keynote address for next week's Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum thinking--a radical in a bowtie who strove to "make museums matter."

As I think about what can and might make museums matter today, I keep rereading a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician who made major research contributions to the fields of computer science and information technology. In 1986, Hamming made an incredible speech, "You and Your Research," about the question of what makes some scientists achieve great things and others, not so much. The crux of his argument is this: make sure you are working on the most important problems in your field. He explains:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

This last sentence, I fear, describes the average worker, not just the average scientist. Most of us spend most of our time working on problems that are not important. That's somewhat reasonable--we all have to make payroll and run our programs and keep things going. My bigger concern is that when we DO make time for the bigger picture, the problems we choose to tackle are not the most important ones.

What are the most important problems in the cultural sector? The two hot problems seem to be:

1. finding new business models to sustain funding and support operations
2. making offerings relevant and appealing to shifting audiences

These topics may flood the blogosphere and conference circuit, but I don't think they're ultimately the most important. These problems are fundamentally self-serving; they come from the root question "how can we survive?" These questions could just as easily apply to any struggling industry (postal service, cigarettes) as to cultural institutions.

I suspect there are other problems we can work on that are more about culture and learning and less about institutional survival. When we think about "making museums matter," the important parts are the "making" and the "mattering"--not the museums. The goal is not to justify museums' existence but to make them as useful as possible.

So what are the important problems we need to tackle to become more meaningful institutions? I'm trying to mull a few for this talk next week, and I'd love your thoughts on what you see as the most important problems in our field. Here's what I've come up with:

1. How can we make cultural knowledge--content, context, and experience--as widely, freely, and equitably accessible as possible?
2. How can our institutions and programs improve quality of life for individuals and communities?
3. How should we structure our institutions and funding programs to do 1 and 2?

What would you add to this list?

Public Service, Advocacy, and Institutional Transformation

Yesterday, I had lunch with Monica Martinez, the ED of Homeless Services for Santa Cruz county. I was amazed not only by her energy and intelligence but by her simple, transformative goal: to end homelessness. As she said (and I'm paraphrasing):

We're not in the business of giving people food or a bed in perpetuity. We're in the business of finding a solution to this problem. Our goal is to tackle the root causes of this issue and provide people with services that help them transition out of homelessness. Sure, sometimes that involves a bed or a meal for awhile, but not forever.

Talking to Monica, we found that we have a lot in common in trying to transform how our respective institutions serve and interface with the community. Monica is trying to reposition her organization as a social justice organization working on solutions to end homelessness. I'm trying to reposition our museum as a cultural hub supporting creative and intellectual community growth. Both of our organizations are classically seen as insular organizations that serve specific, closed audiences--homeless people in her case, cultural elites and students in mine--and we're both trying to demonstrate that our institutions not only have value for the whole community but also opportunities for everyone to get involved in a meaningful way.

Our conversation made me reflect on the museums that most inspire me from a public service perspective--institutions with missions that stretch far beyond their walls. This isn't so much about expanding outreach services as it is about fundamentally repositioning what the institution is there to do. A few personal favorites include:

• the Pittsburgh Children's Museum, whose vision is to make the Northside the best place to raise a child in the city by supporting diverse programs (not all museum-led) throughout the troubled neighborhood
• the American Visionary Art Museum, whose mission is simply to "expand the definition of a worthwhile life" by presenting and encouraging creativity in untraditional venues
• the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has grown into a full-scale advocacy operation with a clear mission to save the oceans and inspire conservation
• the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, which strives to be a cultural instigator that changes the way people throughout the city engage with each other

I know that every museum has these ambitions to some extent and that the rhetoric of many crosses these boundaries. But how many institutions are really aggressively transforming their work away from service to a narrow band of audiences to community-wide advocacy work? These museums work differently. They have different goals they are shooting for.

I know my museum is very far from these goals--we're still just laying the groundwork to be able to provide consistent cultural services to the community. But even as we do so, we're thinking about it in terms of changing and supporting how culture and learning happens in the County, not just at or via our programs. That's why I'm talking with people like Monica, to understand how the museum can be a partner in how we make progress throughout the community--not just at 705 Front Street.

I want our museum to be the host for dialogue--not just through panel discussions, but through exhibitions and events and commissions and community experiences that both invite and challenge people to engage with each other around the issues that matter most. And I think that requires us to be an advocacy organization--not for homelessness or oceans or children--but for the power of art to transform, the power of history to enlighten, and the power of a welcoming host to spark new ideas and change.

Does this sound like director-ish bloviating to you, or is it useful? How do you see institutions living up to--or falling short of--these kinds of goals?

Pranksters in the Museum

Two recent events have got me thinking about pranks and unauthorized activities in museums.

1. Improv Everywhere staged an event at the Metropolitan Museum in which an actor posing as King Philip IV of Spain signed autographs in front of his portrait, as painted by Diego Velazquez in the 1620s. After some silliness, engagement, and confusion, they were instructed to leave.
2. Two students, Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler, created an unauthorized ad campaign for the Smithsonian as part of a school project. These "historically hardcore" images attracted a lot of attention on the internet, and when Jenny contacted the Smithsonian about it, she was instructed to remove the Smithsonian logo.

In both cases, outsiders co-opted the museum for their own devices. These unauthorized projects were engaging and attractive. Neither harmed the museums in question, though they both had questionable qualities. The Improv Everywhere actors gleefully passed themselves off as authorities and told visitors that yes, this young man in front of them was in fact 400 years old. The students' ads made unauthorized use of the Smithsonian logo and could be argued to dilute or misrepresent the institutional brand.

So here's the question: what's the right response to this kind of activity? There are two knee-jerk camps--one that says this is all unacceptable and another that says museums should loosen up and embrace the deviance. I feel like it's more complicated than that.

When assessing these kinds of unauthorized activities, here are the three things I'd consider:

1. What's the quality of the project? Many of the people arguing for the fake Smithsonian ads mentioned how great they are, and that the museum should be pleased to thrilled to get such creative ad work for free. While the ads are indeed funny, engaging, and lovely, not every unauthorized use is. A museum would do better to evaluate this on a case-by-case basis--so the institution can say yes to the gems and no to the duds--rather than having an ironclad rule either way.
2. Is it a project that would be improved with institutional support? Watching the Improv Everywhere video, I'm struck by the fact that it is the deviant nature of the activity that makes it fun. You watch the action expecting to see the guards intervene, and they become part of the drama. I'm not sure the activity would be as surprising or engaging if it were sanctioned by the museum, and I certainly think it would be a bizarre use of staff time to conduct such an event. Mark Allen of Machine Project talks a lot about the benefits of artists creating "shadow organizations" within museums to comment on and respond to their peccadilloes. Without the formal institution, there can be no deviance. That said, there are some projects that are best conducted with institutional support--Machine Project typically works in this fashion. And some truly outsider projects, like the fabulous Vital 5 unauthorized podcast tour of the Portland Art Museum, create products that I'd love to see museums adopt and champion.
3. By shutting down the unauthorized project, are you working against your core values or mission? In many cases, the reasons these projects get rejected is to protect the institutional brand against interlopers. But brand is not as important as mission--and both contribute to public image. In the Improv Everywhere situation, I only see a loose connection between the Met's mission and the unauthorized activity insofar as the museum wants to engage people with the art. But the Smithsonian ads are a different story. The Smithsonian is a public institution that is actively seeking to make itself more open and pursuing a vision that positions the Smithsonian as belonging to everyone. By shutting down a high-quality deviance that was garnering enthusiasm for the institution, the Smithsonian may have done more harm to its image than good. Any organization's public image is shaped by lots of material and commentary in the marketplace--not just that institution's press releases and logo. It's worth remembering that when evaluating any given deviance.

What do you think about these kinds of pranks and unauthorized uses of the institution? How do you think museums should respond to or engage with the pranksters?

Welcome to Pine Point: A Multimedia Exploration of Nostalgia, History, and What it Means to be Human

In 1990, educator and cultural critic Neil Postman described a museum as "an answer to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be a human being?"

I must admit that I've never found this definition very helpful. While I understand Postman's argument that every museum portrays a perspective on the nature of humanity, in most cases, I find that portrayal so abstract, so stripped of personhood, that it's hard to see the human in the institution. Without an explicit "I" voice, the museum's perspective on humanity is oblique to say the least.

But I came back to Postman's quote when viewing Welcome to Pine Point, a multimedia documentary about a small mining town in the Northwest Territories. Pine Point was a single-industry town, and when the mine closed in 1988, the town closed along with it. Welcome to Pine Point is a kind of virtual museum exhibition about the town, told from the perspective of Michael Simons, an artist who grew up in the nearby town of Yellowknife and visited Pine Point as a boy.

Welcome to Pine Point is not a museum project. It is an incredible narrative work that incorporates text, music, videos, and images into a lightly interactive, utterly engrossing digital story. (When you check it out, make sure to put your browser on fullscreen mode.) It is, in short, the best multimedia history project I've ever seen, and I wish more museums were pursuing projects like it.

What makes Welcome to Pine Point so amazing?

• It's nostalgic in the best sense of the word. In 2009, Dan Spock wrote a beautiful essay, In Defense of Nostalgia, arguing that history museums should embrace the emotional power of loss, memory, and personal connection that comes with nostalgia. By interweaving images, artifacts, sounds, and the human stories of the town, Welcome to Pine Point invites people with no prior connection to the Northwest Territories to care deeply about its story.
• It uses multimedia beautifully. I was really impressed by the diversity of artifacts in Welcome to Pine Point--from yearbook photos to VFW badges to video and photos from the 1980s and today. The variance and effective use of different media types reminded me of any great exhibition design, and it also highlighted how rarely museum professionals apply creative, surprising design techniques in online or media-based exhibits.
• It tells layered personal stories. The subjective "I" voice of Michael drives the whole story. Because he cares about Pine Point, you care, or at least you're up for the adventure. Michael's strong narrative voice makes jumps in location or story manageable (even if I did spend some time confused about the connection between Cosmos 954 and Pine Point). Michael also interviews former Pine Pointers, and the highly personal "then and now" features on Kim Feodoroff and Richard Cloutier are highlights of the whole project.
• It makes you contemplate your own connection to history. The first-person narration allows the project to directly address the audience with deep questions without sounding unnatural. When Michael wonders what it would be like to have your hometown disappear, he doesn't sound pretentious. He's a real person trying to figure it out, and that makes you as a viewer want to join him in figuring it out too. Some of the artifacts--government documents explaining that Pine Point will be taken off the map, videos from the final week of the town's existence--are devastating. It's impossible to watch people toasting the end of their town and not think about how you would feel in the same situation.
• It makes you think about what it means to be human. Coming back to Neil Postman's quote, and Postman's related concerns about people blindly allowing themselves to be controlled by technology, Welcome to Pine Point is an arresting exploration of the conflicts between technological progress and humanity. If a mine makes a town exist, is that good? If a mine closes and it makes the town cease to exist, is that bad? What happens to the people? How do we make these decisions, individually and collectively? These are big juicy questions that few exhibitions really force me to grapple with the way I did as I watched Welcome to Pine Point.

Welcome to Pine Point has a lot to teach all of us who strive to design exhibitions and experiences that explore history in a meaningful way. It also, in my opinion, has something to learn from the museum model. The one negative reaction I had to Welcome to Pine Point was its insistence on a linear presentation of the story. While I appreciate the benefits of a straight narrative, in this case, I think the content could have been just as powerfully presented in a hub and spoke model with freer user navigation. The "chapters" of the project were loose, and I didn't necessarily feel I needed to see them in order. Some I wanted to return to, and some I wanted to skip. I would love to see an exhibition version of Welcome to Pine Point, in a gallery where I can flit in and out of various alcoves of memory... and then talk about it with others in the cafe. This is a project that begs conversation.

I hope we can start that conversation here. Experience the project, share a comment, and let's talk.

Quick Hit: How Do You Follow Up with Participants?

When someone leaves a comment, makes a sculpture, or writes a poem at your institution, is that the end of their participation? This email from TripAdvisor is a great example of the simple power of getting back in touch with participants--to thank them, and more importantly, to demonstrate that their participation mattered to other visitors.

There are great examples of this kind of thing focusing solely on the participant--for example, the Chicago Children's Museum practice of inviting kids to write postcards home to themselves from the museum. But a lot of participation extends beyond the individual, and we should celebrate that. Too often, we treat participation as a one-on-one transaction between participant and institution, when in reality visitors are always making things for each other as well. These kinds of messages help people be more aware of how their actions impact others, helping them move from "me" to "we."

Imagine sending someone a simple email to say that "fifty visitors have played with your toy/enjoyed your video/responded to your comment." This kind of message does three things:

• it validates participation in the eyes not just of the institution but other "people like you"
• it reminds visitors that they participated and that their work lives on at the institution
• it may inspire them to come back again to see how their work has evolved and what others have shared

Of course, this requires capturing an email address at the point of participation, which isn't always easy, especially for low-tech projects. But in a few recent projects where I've offered visitors the option to have something emailed home, I've gotten 95-100% participation. People are eager to continue their relationship with an institution after having a creative, social interaction onsite. Why not use messages like this one to help those relationships along?

Six Museum-Related Blogs You Might Not Know About That Are Really Good

Need some new inspiration in your feed reader? Here are six little-known blogs I've enjoyed reading this year. I believe that the museum blogosphere is still underdeveloped and there's lots of room for people to share their inspiration, experience, and ideas. I hope next year at this time, all six on this list will still be going strong and accompanied by a chorus of new voices.

1. Asking Audiences. For a year now, Peter Linett and his friends at Slover-Linett Strategies have been blogging thoughtfully about connecting with arts audiences in new ways. While this blog started by focusing on audience research, topics include subjectivity, participation, innovation, and culture shifts. Peter is a fabulous writer, and this blog has become one of my favorites. It's a pleasure to read and it always gives me something to think about.
2. Jumper. This is a new blog written by Diane Ragsdale as part of the Arts Journal suite. Diane is still getting her "blog legs" and the posts are a bit haphazard, but she's one of the most brilliant minds in arts innovation, and I can't wait to see where this blog goes. If you need a good reason to read her blog, sit down for an afternoon with this incredible talk she gave in 2008 at an arts marketing summit and prepare to be blown away.
3. Useum. Want something a little geekier? When anyone asks me who's doing great work blending online and onsite experiences in museums, I send them to Beck Tench at the Museum of Life and Science. When anyone asks me who's being thoughtful and analytical about social media in museums, I send them to Beck Tench. When any wants to learn how to draw great stick figures... you get the idea. The Useum blog is more of an idea-dump than a public exposition, so it can be a bit confusing to read. But it's worth it for the opportunity to get inside the brain of a phenomenally creative person.
4. The Museum of the Future. Across the Atlantic in the Netherlands, Jasper Visser has been chronicling some of the truly exciting experiments he and his colleagues have been doing as they develop the national history museum for their country. The posts are infrequent, but where else are you going to learn about history vending machines?
5. Thinking about Exhibits. A new blog from an experienced developer, Ed Rodley at the Boston Museum of Science. There have only been a few posts thus far, but his humorous writing style, knowledge of the craft, and far-reaching influences will appeal to anyone interested in the exhibit development process.
6. Poesy-Praxis. One last new blog, this time from Jaime Kopke, the smart cookie behind the Denver Community Museum. Jaime's been pointing to intriguing design projects in museums and on the Web with short, informative posts. I hope she keeps it up--I know I'll keep coming back for a dose of the unusual.

What blogs would you recommend? I'm especially interested in those that might be under-the-radar or a bit out of the mainstream.

The Johnny Cash Project: A Participatory Music Video That Sings

One of the questions that comes up most frequently when I talk with folks about participation is: what should we do with the things that visitors create? What should we do with their post-its and stories and drawings and poems?

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. What's the "use" of visitors' comments? If you don't have a sense of an outcome--whether that be internal research, community conversation, or something else--you can't decide how or whether contributions should be documented or archived. When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it.

But the best participatory projects don't suffer from this problem, because they solicit visitors' contributions toward a very specific outcome. Whether visitors' work will be used to create an artwork, a dataset, or an exhibit, the solicitation is directly tied to an intended product. This works best when:

1. Visitors have a clear understanding of the overall goal for the project. When everyone knows how their work will collectively build toward something greater, it increases motivation to participate and encourages participants to contribute high-quality work. It's not just a personal activity; it's an opportunity to be part of something.
2. The project is designed to scale. Ideally, it can absorb lots of repetitive or voluminous visitor contributions and deploy this additional material in a thoughtful way. The project never gets "full" and is always open to new contributors.

I was reminded of these two design principles when exploring the Johnny Cash Project, a crowd-created music video for a posthumous recording of Cash singing "Ain't No Grave." To construct the video, artist Chris Milk assembled images and footage of Johnny Cash in a sequence along with the song. That's hardly revolutionary. But what happened next is: Milk created a simple tool to invite visitors to augment the frames of the video with digital brushstrokes. The result is a beautiful animated video that composites together alternative frames created by participants all over the world.

There are two basic ways to participate on the website: you can contribute your own augmented frame to the video, or you can assemble a video by selecting frames from the huge volume produced by the crowd. The first activity is creative, the second editorial. You can also rate frames, which changes their likelihood of being displayed in the default video, which features the highest-ranked frames submitted by participants.

The result is a video that changes dynamically based on what people contribute and rank on the site. It's not a waste to have multiple participants contribute versions of the same original frame: at any time, any version could be more popular, or more appealing to a specific subset of viewers, than the others. Some viewers might enjoy populating a video with frames that feature references to Christ; others might prefer highly photorealistic images. The additional frames add volumes of data that make the user experience more personalized, diverse, and powerful.

There are a few other things that make the Johnny Cash Project compelling:

• The creative activity is well-scaffolded. If you want to make a frame, you don't have to start from scratch; instead, you get to draw over a pre-existing reference frame. While the drawing tools could be more intuitive, remixing a reference image is likely less scary for non-artists than other more involved ways to produce a frame. You can also watch time lapse video of any frame being created. These videos inspire and instruct would-be participants while stroking the egos of past contributors.
• The collective outcome (a cool music video) is clear. The video is a cohesive, beautiful story, and it's obvious to any user how her frame might be integrated into the whole. This is not just an opportunity to venerate Johnny Cash or perform a personal creative act but to contribute to an understandable and compelling product.
• There are lots of ways to participate. Even if you don't want to submit a frame, you can vote on frames or compose your own custom video based on the frames submitted thus far. You can even explore the submitted frames by artistic style ("pointillism," "sketchy," "abstract").
• The site gives credit to contributors. Every frame is labeled with the name of its creator, and the Credits section also lists the contributors by name. The terms of serviceare reasonable and thoughtfully written (though the underlying terms are full of draconian legalese that seems somewhat contradictory to other language on the site).

Design-wise, there are some lousy aspects of the site, especially when it comes to accessibility. The color contrast is poor, the instructions are somewhat mysterious, and everything's in Flash.

But overall, this is a model project that starts with an outcome, not an activity. Chris Milk didn't say, "How about we let people draw pictures of Johnny Cash and then we'll have a huge collection of portraits we don't know what to do with?" He said: "Let's make a dynamic music video--and let's set up a tool so fans can help us do it."

Are you making that shift in your thinking about participatory project design?

Guest Post: World Maker Faire and the New York Hall of Science: Radical Trust

I’ve long been interested in the intersection between maker culture and museums. On September 25 and 26, the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) hosted the first East Coast Maker Faire. Maker Faire is a massive public event, hosted by Make Magazine annually in San Mateo, that brings together hackers, crafters, and do-it-yourself scientists for a weekend of demonstrations and explosions. In this guest post, Eric Siegel, Director and Chief Content Officer of NYSCI, describes the partnership to develop and manage the World Maker Faire and its impact on his science center. Eric will check in to respond to any questions in the comments and is also available by email at esiegel@nyscience.org. It’s worth mentioning that the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit also hosted a Maker Faire at their facility this year.

Why at NYSCI?

It wasn’t obvious to the Maker Faire team that Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, where the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) is located, was the ideal location for an East Coast Maker Faire. The park is among the largest and most heavily used in New York, but it’s not glamorous. Remnants of two World’s Fairs, both impressive and neglected, are scattered around the park. NYSCI, which was founded during the 1964 World’s Fair, occupies approximately 20 acres of the 1,255 acre park. Every year, sections of the park are spruced up for the US Open tennis tournament that takes place in a stadium within the park, but large sections of the park are rather threadbare. We toured Flushing Meadows Park with the Maker team on a grey day and even I had to admit it looked a bit desolate. It was frankly hard to imagine how it would come alive for Maker Faire. At the same time, others in New York were pitching for a more urban setting on Governors Island or a more suburban setting in New Jersey.

After the tour, the group came back to NYSCI and we had a brainstorm… let’s just do it in the museum. We could clear out some exhibitions, dedicate some large dramatic venues and workshop spaces, and devote NYSCI’s 15 acre “backyard” to pavilions and large scale outdoor exhibits. Rather than NYSCI hosting Maker Faire within Flushing Meadows Park, we would make a partnership and really collaborate on the Faire.

One of the attractions for this collaboration was NYSCI’s diverse audience, many of whom were not part of the current Maker Faire community. If you do something great and exciting for families in Queens, you are going to get a virtual United Nations of visitors. Museum people think of New York City as Manhattan and the hipster communities of Brooklyn, but it is in the great immigrant communities that New York City really distinguishes itself and Queens is the epicenter of immigration to the City.

Building the Partnership

So now we had the critical task of constituency building among museum staff, most of whom had no idea what Maker Faire was, and in the maker community, many of whom had no idea what NYSCI was. We scheduled a series of “getting acquainted” meetings between the Maker Faire team, including Dale Dougherty and Sherry Huss, and senior staff and trustees at NYSCI. These turned out to be essential. As anarchic and unhinged as Maker Faire in San Mateo seems at one level, it is also clear that the logistics are handled expertly by a very experienced and dedicated crew. Sherry and Dale represented both “go with the flow” spirit and a sense of complete competence, calm, and conviction. Virtually every NYSCI staffer who met with them agreed that these are people that can pull this off and we all had a great feeling about working with them.

We also met with key members of the maker community in New York and nationally. This was the beginning of what I think was one of the primary benefits of Maker Faire to NYSCI. There is a whole range of recyclers, hackers, metalworkers, weavers, builders, circuit benders, and artists up and down the East Coast that NYSCI connected with through the Maker Faire planning. The indefatigable Nick Normal, who works with a makerspace/gallery called Flux Factory in Queens, was Maker Faire’s local maker community coordinator. Martha Stewart hosted a reception at their amazing loft/work space in Manhattan for local makers. We set up a website and gathered several hundred applications, from which about 400 were selected for participation.

Most of the makers came at their own expense, paid no money to Maker Faire, and were pretty independent. This is one of the fascinating and risky things about World Maker Faire: the whole experience is pretty emergent with a very low barrier to entry. Decisions about who could participate were made on the basis of sparse information from the online application, a lot of intuition, and a lot of self-organizing community support. If you are a hacker known to other hackers, your participation is more likely; if you are outside the existing community, the likelihood of your participation is a bit sketchier.

About a week before the event itself, the morning after a tornado touched down in Queens and tore up a dozen trees on the NYSCI site by the roots, the Maker Faire team arrived and turned our conference room into their operations center. Pavilions went up. Makers arrived with their equipment. On the evening of the event Red Bull sponsored a maker party featuring drinks made of Red Bull and vodka. It was probably a high water mark for NYSCI’s hipster credibility.

The event went pretty much flawlessly. The weather cooperated, the crowds showed up, our transportation arrangements went smoothly, most of the exhibitors things worked nicely, everybody looked engaged. We had over 400 makers at the Faire and 25,000 visitors in two days. The makers ranged from Eepy Bird doing their Mentos and Coke crowd pleaser to a really loud and terrifying ramjet powered ride by the Brooklyn-based Madagascar Institute (whose motto is “Safety Third”). There were scheduled speakers including Steven Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica software, who talked about coding as making. There was a secret noodle restaurant in an anonymous panel truck in the operations yard created by performance artists, serving delicious free noodle soup for those who discovered it. A large “maker shed” pavilion sold hundreds of books and kits for do-it-yourselfers. An open source 3D printer kit was a clear hit, supported by 3D printing workshops. A third of the outside area was devoted to crafts, with free knitting lessons, paintable soft circuitry. The phrase I heard most often was “something for everyone.” I can’t imagine someone coming who wouldn’t find something fascinating and engaging.

So What?

It’s hard to draw generalizable “Museum 2.0” insights from World Maker Faire. NYSCI has a previously untapped capacity for change, trust, and flexibility that turned out to be a vital resource for this undertaking. But none of that would have come to pass without the very specific conditions of timing, location, and above all the goodwill and expertise of the Maker Faire team.

The risk in this approach is frankly completely at odds with the typical meticulous care with which science museum exhibitions are planned. Science center exhibitions are planned by teams who thoughtfully consider content, visitor impact, and learning outcomes. We hire designers with expertise in human factors and visitor flow, engage PhD researchers, experts in learning sciences, and content advisors. The makers, on the other hand, are solo operators or artists/hacker collectives who are principally concerned with self-expression, experimentation, and excitement. The NYSCI staff all were amazed at how seamlessly visitors went from our carefully crafted exhibitions to the occasionally funky Maker Faire work without missing a beat. At least for the one weekend of Maker Faire, excitement and experimentation with touch of danger and anarchy trumped the careful and intentional approach of NYSCI’s exhibits. It also helped that the creators themselves were at each of the Maker Faire exhibits, engaging visitors and answering questions. Very thought provoking for the museum exhibition community.

The World Maker Faire was bracketed by two related events. The first was the Open Hardware Summit on the Thursday before Maker Faire, which brought 300 young open source hackers to NYSCI to discuss the technology, philosophy, social context, and practical issues surrounding the creation of an open source community. As I said in my greeting to the group, seeing them makes NYSCI’s goal clear: we want to encourage our very diverse audience, many of whom are first generation immigrants, to acquire the confidence and competence to engage the world the way the open source community has. Not only do the open source hardware people have technical skills, but they also have the courage to work outside of normal commercial frameworks to create social value. We want that for our visitors.

The National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy sponsored a conference on the Monday following the workshop at NYSCI. We invited about 70 educators, technologists, thinkers, and makers to come to the Faire on Sunday and spend a day talking about the potential impact of the maker movement on education in general. There were great discussions which we are assembling into a report I will be glad to share as soon as it is completed. [UPDATE - here is the report as a downloadable PDF.]

The NYSCI staff fell in love with Maker Faire. I didn’t hear a single cross-grained comment through the haze of exhaustion we all experienced. For me, it was among the highest points of my 30 years of museum work. And I am proud to say that I think the feeling was entirely mutual with the Maker Faire staff. They were amazed at the diversity of our audiences, the museum’s flexibility and willingness to collaborate as true partners, the incredible efforts put in by our staff, led by our COO Bob Logan and VP for External Affairs Dan Wempa, and our willingness to allow the event to emerge and to trust in the maker community and the process.

Since World Maker Faire, I have had dozens of comments from makers who were unfamiliar with NYSCI, and from the “People In Black” community of young artists and activists in New York. These people are now eager to collaborate on projects and participate in our community maker activities. So our universe of potential audiences and collaborators has opened up as a result of World Maker Faire 2010.

At this point, a few weeks after the event, it appears that World Maker Faire will significantly transform NYSCI’s programming and identity. We had already been moving toward more open-ended, design-based exhibit and program experiences, but this lit one of Madagascar Institute’s jet rockets under that process. We are refocusing our public program staff on maker activities and maker weekends with open-ended design challenges. We are working to fund partnerships with makers in the local communities to bring them into new maker clubs which will work to culminate in a large community maker presence at World Maker Faire 2011.

Getting People In the Door: Design Tips from the Retail World

Are museum visitors "customers?" Are library patrons "shopping?"

The retail analogy falls in and out of fashion in cultural institutions. Some swear by it. Some eschew it. Last week, I learned to think about it in a new way. I don't think cultural institutions should be more like retailers in how we treat visitors who are already in the door. But we have a lot to learn from how retailers attract and encourage people to enter in the first place.

I attended a workshop by Bob Gibbs, an urban planner who designs malls and shopping districts around the US. He started by saying "In the next three hours, I will show you how to increase sales in your store. I'm going to talk about the theory and practical techniques for doing so. We're not talking about values or how to make your city better or how to change the world. The focus here is on increasing sales."

What followed was a fascinating assortment of statistics and tidbits about how design influences how people shop. Some bits were familiar from my experience in exhibit design (i.e. people like to travel counterclockwise, don't over-clutter displays) but a lot was new to me. Some particularly useful ideas:

• It takes eight seconds to walk by a typical storefront. Once someone is two seconds past the door, they will not turn around. You have to grab them in the first four seconds while they are approaching.
• Within two seconds of entering a store, 70% of people know whether they will buy something. Stores use simple window displays and a "front and center" table to clearly and quickly convey what's hot, and most train a staff member to welcome customers immediately upon entry.
• An open door generates 35% more business than a closed door. Doors that are flush to the sidewalk are more inviting than recessed doors. Outdoor planters and a lot of downlight can make a recessed entry more welcoming. How many museum and library entrances are hard to find, dark, and require opening a heavy door?
• The highest-performing malls and shopping districts (in terms of sales) have lots of clear sight lines from one storefront to another. People like to be able to see the fronts of other stores and are more likely to browse a high volume of stores if they can see store windows from multiple locations. In a museum or library, this translates well to being able to see across to other exhibits or areas (especially when visiting in a family group that frequently splits and recombines).
• People like to walk in a loop. They avoid "cul de sacs" that they can see are dead-ends, because they don't want to get bored walking through the same merchandise twice.
• People really care about the cleanliness of doors and windows, especially at entrance. This is most important to parents; some people will not visit a store with children if the door looks too dirty. If there are public fixtures in front of your storefront (trashcan, hydrant), you should spruce those up to maintain a clean, friendly image of your store.
• 75% of American spending occurs after 5:30pm and on Sunday. Stores should be open when people want to shop.
• The average shopper in America does not like shopping. She's a single mom with very limited time. She wants to get in and out quickly, with a good deal on the thing she needs. The only time she likes shopping is when on vacation. Shopping is one of the most popular vacation activities, and many Americans plan their trips in part around shopping.

Where Cultural Institutions and Retailers Fall Short and What We Can Learn from Each Other

Both museums and stores sometimes commit the sin of not respecting people's intelligence, but they do it in different ways. Museum staff tend to treat visitors as people who want to be there, who need a little help, who might be a bit confused or overwhelmed by the experience. We talk about trying to break down "threshold fear"--the uncertainty some people might feel about whether they are qualified to enter the museum at all. Museums may deter potential visitors by treating them as not smart enough or worthy enough to enter.

In contrast, most retailers treat potential customers as imminently smart and worthy but once inside, grant respect only for their purchasing power. The customer is always right, but if she doesn't buy anything, she's a waste of time. Bob talked about eradicating "threshold resistance," not threshold fear. People aren't afraid to enter a store, but sometimes they don't want to. Retailers use all kinds of tricks used to get people to buy and buy more, to boost their confidence and positive feeling about shopping.

Retail stores are good at dealing with potential customers. Their design and staff approach focuses on attracting people in the door and making them feel confident and happy once inside. Cultural institutions, on the other hand, are good at dealing with customers who are already in the door. Their design and approach offers people a wide variety of ways to experience the content and encourages them to do so in whatever path works best for them. You're not just as good as what you buy, but what you learn, what you share with others, and what you contribute.

Museums and libraries don't need to be more like retail stores inside. We don't need to offer sneaky sales or push impulse purchases at the register. But we do need to find better ways to communicate what's available inside from the outside. If your institution was a store, would you walk in?

Artprize: An Extraordinary Social Experience around Art

Want to experience art in a populist, energized, industrial/urban setting? Want to see it in soup kitchens and record stores and bars? Want to talk about it? Want to be surrounded by thousands of people who are doing the same?

Then get yourself to Grand Rapids for Artprize.

Artprize, now in its second year, is a city-wide art festival with a $250,000 top prize to be awarded to the work that receives the most public votes. The artists come from all over (though many are based in the Midwest), and anyone can enter. Works are chosen and hung throughout the city using a unique venue matching system whereby local businesses, galleries, and organizations select the artworks they want to host.

Before I went, Artprize intrigued but did not fascinate me. Now, after attending with museum friends from around the country, I'm hooked. The extraordinary thing about Artprize isn't the voting, the money, or even the huge variety of works shown in a huge variety of venues. It's the social experience. Artprize invited me to talk about art with artists, families, security guards, friends, people old and young, sophisticated and novice, drunk and sober. It was the best experience I've ever had talking and learning about art. Period.

What makes the social experience at Artprize so special? Unlike many other social events in art venues that feature similar crowds and diversity, Artprize stood out in a simple way: people were entirely focused on and engrossed by the work. There was never the sense that the art was a backdrop for a party. Instead, people crowded around works, pointing things out, exclaiming about their preferences, sharing their discoveries. Not all the art was good, but it all spurred conversation.

What People Talked About

The conversations ranged in topic, but we most frequently heard people talk about:

• Preferences. People readily exclaimed "I like this one!" or "ugh. This is terrible," though their volume was tempered depending on whether the artist was nearby. Unlike most museum experiences, where people quietly absorb the work in a room, people were very comfortable pulling each other to specific pieces and extolling their merits or less inspiring qualities.
• Process. Some of the most popular pieces were those that featured familiar materials taken to the extreme. A mermaid made of thousands of toothpicks. A giant penny made out of pennies. One popular piece, a huge drawing of a calvary (see image above), spurred people to comically repeat the phrase, "this was done with a number 2 pencil!" again and again. It was as if people were remembering every standardized form they'd ever filled out with a #2 pencil elevated into a creative act. This focus on process also bore out in lots of the conversations I had and overheard with artists. It felt natural and easy for people ask "how did you make this?"
• Narrative. Other very popular works came with a great story or had a puzzle that had to be "figured out" and could then be explained to others. One of the things I found most delightful and surprising about Artprize was the huge variety of artists' statements about their work. Very few wrote in typical museum or even gallery-speak. Many wrote personally about their reasons for making the work, sharing challenges along the way and evocative stories about their meaning. Some were downright wacky (see image). While the content was highly varied in tone and style, I felt that it taught me more about how artists think about their work than most interpretative materials do.
• Confusion and tension. It was extremely strange to move from formal gallery settings featuring what appeared to be professional art to venues that showed amateur art in nontraditional settings. While some pieces were clearly bad even to my highly untrained eye, my overwhelming response was confusion about what to think. Do I like this piece because it reminds me of the kinds of things I'm used to seeing in fancy museums? How does my experience of a piece change based on its context? When you see a set of larger than life drawings of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a record store (image), or a mist and projection installation in a loading dock, how do you interpret the experience? For me, the most interesting internal and interpersonal dialogue at Artprize was about these questions, which pushed me to more deeply consider how I make aesthetic judgements and experience art.

Deconstructing the Social Experience

As a designer of participatory experiences, my biggest question about Artprize is what made all these conversations and experiences happen in the first place. Was it the gritty urban setting? The prizes? The extreme variety of works? The crowds of friendly Midwesterners? The free and accessible venues? I'm not exactly sure, but I have a theory. Have your own idea on this? Please add it in the comments.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't the voting that made the conversations happen. I saw very few people voting at the festival, and my friends who tried to vote with their (fancy) cellphones found it to be a frustrating experience at best. Strangely, I heard many people say, "this is in the top 25"--indicating their awareness of the voting and its significance--but I only saw a couple people actually vote. The common knowledge about the voting and the prize, as well as the constantly reinforced point that you COULD vote artworks up and down, may have been more important than the voting itself. I personally never felt the impulse to vote. I was too enamored of the social experience to care about expressing preferences in a technological, non-conversational way.

My idea about what makes the social experience of Artprize tick is based on Jyri Engestrom's theory of how objects are used in a social network. He argued that specific, discrete objects--not generalized topics or experiences--invite the most powerful shared experiences among people online (see chapter 4 of The Participatory Museum for a museum-focused version of this theory). This bore out at Artprize. Even in venues that featured many pieces of art, people tended to cluster and talk about specific ones. In some venues that offered maps of their hosted works, I saw visitors checking off works on their maps as they saw them--a kind of collecting behavior I never see in museums. There was a sense that there are X pieces in this venue or on this street, and I want to see them all or most or the ones that are important for some reason.

This means that people were NOT doing what usually happens in art museums for many folks: taking in whole galleries at a time, immersing themselves in art generally instead of in specific works. There was no "show" or overriding theme of each venue or gallery, no sameness of technique or content. Because the Artprize pieces were so varied and were not curated by the venues with any kind of consistent approach to aesthetic or art historical significance, there was a strong sense that it was ok to express preferences and make relative distinctions among the work. It was up to you to make your own meaning from the experience, piece by piece, venue by venue.

That led to people having specific conversations about specific artworks. This experience was greatly reinforced by the presence of artists, who naturally were there to talk about THEIR work, not the art hanging alongside it. Volunteers, venue staff, and security guards also cheerfully offered up their own preferences and interpretations. There was no guided tour of the whole thing. There were individual pieces. Some were extraordinary. Some were provocative. Some were laughable. Each was a social object that brought together specific subsets of people, drawn to it for specific reasons that they often shared. It was the best example I've seen of a physical environment operating like the kind of successful social platforms Engestrom described in 2005.

I strongly believe that other institutions could foster this kind of social engagement if they can find ways to help people focus on specific works or exhibits as discrete objects. It's not "my day at the museum," but my day to find the things that are most special to me. Highly subjective tours, single object presentations, and more presentation of work by artists (or scientists, or historians) in the galleries can help facilitate this kind of social experience. Of course, you also have to help people feel that they have permission to be social--that, as at Artprize, this is a time for expressing yourself, being loud, pointing at things, sharing what's important to you.

Finally, on a personal note, Artprize highlighted the way that expressing personal preference can help novices start to understand and enjoy art. I have an Australian friend who once said, "the problem with Americans is you all think you have the right to your own opinion." Artprize glorifies this right, and in the case of aesthetic preference, liberates it from the self-doubt that often makes us walk through art galleries with our mouths shut. Artprize focuses peoples' attention not on the authoritative view of art but on their own perspectives. And for someone like me, someone whose vocabulary and confidence related to art is woefully lacking, it was an incredible learning experience that personalized art, immersed me in its pleasures and frustrations, and made me want to learn more.

Guest Post: Considering a Commons in Collection at the Elsewhere Collaborative

For years, I've been fascinated and a bit perplexed by the Elsewhere Collaborative, a thrift store turned artists' studio/living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. In this post, co-founder George Scheer explains the conceptual underpinnings of this vibrant and eclectic artspace. George will respond to comments on this post and is also reachable here.

Consider a store, filled to the brink with consumables, one day decides that its inventories are collections, its merchandise is no longer for purchase, and instead it will practice as a museum. Everything else remains the same; visitors may browse, touch, and play, but they just can’t take things with them. What values change in that not so subtle shift between people, things, and the common space shared between them? Since 2003, Elsewhere Collaborative has been exploring the role that collaboration plays at the intersection of the store and museum through its living museum and international residency program set in a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.

My grandmother, Sylvia Gray, was both proprietress and collector, amassing a vast inventory of things at her store from 1939-1997. Her business, and ours, has always been about surplus. The business began with Sylvia and her husband buying repossessed furniture from NY during the Great Depression. They sold army surplus in catalog sales to boy scouts. After her husband’s sudden death in 1955, and with three children to raise, my grandmother grew the store, purchasing the ends of fabric bolts and ribbons from local mills, secondhand clothing, toys, dishwares, books, and an assortment of knickknacks to sell. After her passing in 1997 the building remained shut, filled to the brim with things knotted, tied, and bagged in chaotic organization.

In 2003, my collaborator Stephanie and I began an excavation, declaring nothing for sale. Our archeology did not aim to uncover the hidden voice of my grandmother, but instead to begin an ongoing practice of recreation. Over the past seven years, this exploration has been undertaken by a staff of artists and more than 35 creators each year participating in our residency program. Over time the movement and arrangement of things trails a layered aesthetic that convey histories and narratives of changing communities passing through this unfolding three-story artwork. Elsewhere’s Living Museum, open daily, offers audiences (average 300/week) an exploratory environment to play within and a site where creative practice is made public and the artwork and museum are themselves in a constant state of flux. By calling ourselves a museum, we respond to those cultural institutions that have separated practice from production, exhibition from process, and work from play.

Elsewhere’s story is written in attics across the country, pieced together bit-by-bit in distribution centers—thrift/antique/junk shops—and holed up in buildings ready to be dispersed. America’s overabundance, a diagnosed case of cultural hoarding, has left us all in possession of stuff, collections with no other future but to watch them decompose, critically or materially. At Elsewhere, however, the intervention of things into daily life has a profound effect on creative practice of both artists and publics. Resource, production, and exhibition meld within this site-specific environment, and cultural and personal histories intersect with those of a changing artist community to form a layered aesthetic of social and creative exchanges over time.

One of the first discoveries audiences make at Elsewhere is a giant toy bin, chest height, with mounds of plastic toys that extend beyond the fingers like an oversized sandbox. People dig in, exchanging treasures with one another like tactile memories, constituting the personal as part of a public commons. Often people exclaim, “I had this,” laying claim to a personal memory contained in a mass-produced object while relating the infinitely distributable value of storytelling. Whenever we show and tell, we pass things between us, and in this model of sharing values we may begin to understand how museums are trusted with public commons as much as they are with public meaning.

Elsewhere’s challenge today is how to continue modeling the public commons by practicing social exchanges through our set of things. A back alley garden and performances in our storefront are just a few ways we are reaching publics that might not otherwise adventure into a thrift store-turned-museum. With a large refugee population in Greensboro’s outskirts and a quickly gentrifying downtown environment, the challenge persists to determine how our site, concept, and collection can produce both artwork and cultural transformation. Our most recent model for exploring outreach possibilities surrounded the recently commissioned project of textile artist Frau Fiber. Drawing from her interest in materials and textile histories, we brought together third generation mill village families, textile industry professionals, and Latina women seeking basic sewing and mending skills. Through interactive quilting, skill share workshops, and the creation of a new sewing facility we were able to create a network of individuals that brought historical, economic, social service, and artistic interests to bare on Elsewhere’s textile collection.

Through the generative potential for use and re-use of things, Elsewhere has arranged a public commons in the form of a shared resource. By positing ourselves as a museum, the resource becomes part of a collection and therefore must express forms of care and generosity in its handling. The great challenge is how to build reciprocity in all social relations and ensure that we are both serving and developing the values of our community of artists and publics. Time and again we discover that in the collection of things, with their inherent array of perspectives, interest and references, we have both the source and resource to continually arrange and re-model the museum as a public commons between people.

Guest Post: Nell Taylor on the Chicago Underground Library

Last month, I got a chance to talk with Nell Taylor, founder of the Chicago Underground Library. I was fascinated by the project’s innovative approach to collecting, sharing, and connecting people through locally-produced media. Nell will be responding to comments on this blog and can also be reached here.

A typical Chicago Underground Library (CUL) volunteer meeting starts something like this: New volunteers arrive for orientation at 6:30pm, some a little late because they got lost in the 100-year old parish house where we occupy the lobby of a fringe theater company on the second floor. When we have a critical mass of new people, anywhere from 3-7 a month, I try to explain the project as briefly as possible.

A Community-Based Approach to Collecting and Cataloging

CUL is a replicable model for community archives that accepts every piece of print media from a certain area without making quality or importance judgments, going back as far in history as possible. That means we collect university press, handmade artist books, zines made by sixth graders, poetry chapbooks from big names published in tiny local presses, and self-published poetry chapbooks sold for a dollar on the street. We have neighborhood newspapers, internationally-renowned magazines of political commentary, and three View-Master reels of Chicago hot dog stands, neon signs, and motor inns, respectively.

We catalog items by everyone who contributed—writers, editors, typesetters, photographers, interns—and link those people together in our catalog so that users can trace the connections between contributors as they move from one publication to the next. We’re building new cataloging software that we eventually hope to provide free of charge to jumpstart other collections. When other cities replicate the model, we’ll be able to track the origin and migration of these ideas from city to city through individuals. Our new catalog and website will be up within the next two months.

We’ve been doing this for close to five years and have accumulated over 2,000 publications. We consider anything intended for public consumption to be “published,” so while our collection is very broad, we draw the line at correspondence or personal journals. Geography is fluid, though. Connections between the publications are more important than strict regional boundaries. Someday we want to collect audio and video, too, but we’d need a pretty serious operating budget to do that and at least one full-time employee. Having only been incorporated for a year and receiving just last week an anonymous donation to cover our 501c3 filing, we still have a little way to go before we get there. Our volunteers are the heart and soul and brains and heavy lifters (figuratively and-- when you have boxes of books involved-- literally) of our organization.

Growing a Strong Volunteer Culture

Every year, thousands of new librarians and archivists graduate from MLS programs. That’s a lot of people who possess a rare set of skills like the ability to conceptually organize complex information, build and maintain databases and web applications, and passionately defend and promote universal access to knowledge (including knowledge that’s controversial or that they themselves may not believe in). This combination of technical ability, neutrality, and fierce belief in freedom of expression is undervalued in society and by many existing library systems. We’re not even talking about “radical librarians.” These are the baseline characteristics of most new grads. Many come work with us because they can’t find work in the field or they’re underemployed in library systems where it will literally take years before they’re allowed to apply their skills toward any innovation.

I’ve been repeatedly told that we’re the only library in Chicago that provides volunteers hands-on experience in collection development, cataloging, community outreach and creating public programs, let alone trusting volunteers to take the lead in these areas. While this is partly a matter of need given our relative youth as an organization and present lack of paid positions, we intend to maintain a strong culture of supporting volunteers (not just volunteers supporting us) no matter how much infrastructure we build. Our volunteers use our 90-person public discussion group for sharing job listings, networking events, and other professional development resources in addition to CUL-related topics. Only about half of our volunteers have direct experience in libraries, but all are enthusiastic about experimenting with what a library could be. The more we ask of them, the more committed they are because they have a stake in seeing their initiatives through and bringing up new folks to help them.

Four years ago while meeting on my living room floor, a group of volunteers devised our cataloging system. It’s based on non-hierarchical keywords instead of nested subject headings and it’s designed to interface with search engines rather than other library databases (for now—some of our librarians are working on making it do both). It’s so intuitive that anyone can learn it, and I encourage the new volunteers, whether or not they have a background in library science (I don’t), to come to our Cataloging Socials that meet every Tuesday ‘til 10pm. This week, they’re only cataloging until 9pm because that’s when the sun goes down and all of our lights have mysteriously stopped working. These evenings are also known as “Worklucks” for anyone to drop in and use the library as an open, communal workspace, a free coffeeshop, complete with free coffee and Wi-Fi. Because he has impeccable timing, our cataloging manager (who does have his MLS) might wander in for the regular meeting. Before he walks the new folks through the catalog, though, he’ll probably recount the boxing match he just finished and show off the halfway-melted outline of a future tattoo drawn in ballpoint pen on his arm.

We start each official meeting with introductions. Never mind your work experience, what do you really want to be doing that the library can help you accomplish?

Some of the new volunteers are high school students, others are college professors. A lot of them are new to the city and looking to make friends. Our inexhaustible assistant director, the web services librarian at a local university who is also spearheading the rebuild of our website and online catalog, managing our interns and keeping track of our paperwork and minutes, arrives with her husband, CUL’s podcast manager and an aspiring comedian who we refer to as The Castmaster. Our programming director will arrive at 7pm on the dot from a six-hour rehearsal of a collaborative devised theater piece seven months in development and will leave early to go to an experimental movement workshop. There will always be volunteers who consistently show up, work hard, and never say a word, let alone about their outside lives, and we’re happy to have them, too.

This week, some of the regular catalogers are re-shelving material from this weekend’s Pop Up Library, our temporary reading room that travels around town providing supplemental local perspective for cultural events and classes. This Pop Up Library just returned from a folk music festival. Participating in events that have little to do directly with books helps develop CUL’s audience, but it also increases the visibility and relevance of the materials in our collection by placing the publications themselves in new contexts.

The shelvers tonight come from the ranks of the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Public Schools’ libraries. One lives a double life as a soul music collector and DJ. An editor of science journals at one of Chicago’s top universities developed our regular writing workshop, an “alternative MFA” that puts an emphasis on the importance of being a good reader, not just a good writer, and is called Pan Dulces because she supplies the workshop with sweets from her neighborhood bakery.

Why This Matters (to the Public, and hopefully, to You)

A public library can grant you access to all kinds of knowledge, but where do you go to add to that knowledge base and stake your claim as an expert? You go online, and that’s why physical culture is at risk. While more and more people are creating their own media thanks to the internet, there’s an unfortunate paradox in media creation in the physical, local world. I hear writers bemoan the fact that no one but other writers come to their readings. They blame it on the general public reading less. But people who don’t go to readings believe that the readings are only for other writers and that they wouldn’t be welcome. From CUL’s perspective, if you’re reading to other writers, that’s not a problem, it’s a community. If that community is too small for comfort, the trick is not to stress about the lack of passive listeners, but to create and recruit more writers. CUL strives to preserve media, but it’s equally important to us that we encourage existing media cultures and create new access points.

In order for physical media to remain relevant, institutions like libraries and museums have to start looking at the inclusive and collaborative community-building models present in digital media culture. Our collection has a home that people can visit, but we’ll also bring it to them and share it on their platforms: their classrooms, performance spaces, galleries. The collection is history, but it’s also inspiration, example, and a guide to what’s out there for people who want to be actively involved. It’s open to reinterpretation, which we encourage through a series called Orphan Works that asks non-writers to create a derivative work based on our assortment of anonymous publications. CUL helps people who are just starting out or who may have assumed their words didn’t count to get a foothold and not only places them in a collection that values their work, but through our catalog instantly locates them within an interconnected map of the city’s history. Fostering new connections is also why we prefer collaborative programming with other arts and education groups as opposed to developing everything internally.

The Underground Library isn’t just a community archive of things past. We are constantly reaching out, connecting with new people and their work, and providing a home for what they do.

Six Alternative (U.S.) Cultural Venues to Keep an Eye On

I've been spending time recently interviewing people who run unusual cultural and learning venues. Skill-sharing free schools. Community science workshops. Art spaces masquerading as laundromats and letterpresses. I'm fascinated by these places because of their ability to attract diverse audiences to idiosyncratic experiences, and I'm curious how they stay afloat.

From a museum perspective, I think there's a lot to learn from these venues' business models, approach to collecting and exhibiting work, and connection with their audiences. In the past, I've highlighted a few--like 826 Valencia and the Denver Community Museum--that I think have already influenced the way many traditional cultural organization do business. I haven't found a centralized resource that is presenting information about these institutions, so I'm going to start writing more about them.

In the next month, this blog will feature guest posts from a few of the people behind these innovative, quirky institutions, but in the meantime, here's a short list of six of my favorites to explore. This list is by no means exhaustive: please add your favorites (especially non-American ones) in the comments.

1. Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA). One of my favorite places for a long time now. Machine Project is a non-profit storefront arts venue that hosts a dizzying array of eclectic classes, workshops, events, and occasional exhibits. It was started in 2003 and is run by Mark Allen and a collective of artists, many of whom have also been applying their talents by performing "interventions" at formal art institutions including LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. What makes Machine special is its brand of humor and accessibility, combined with a real dedication to experimenting on the borders of art, science, and ideas. In other words, they're not pretentious. At AAM, Mark and his compatriot Emily Lacy enthralled a packed room with a five minute song about Machine's hijinks. You feel like you could be a part of something awesome there (check out their FAQ for copious examples of this).
2. Waffle Shop (Pittsburgh, PA). Want some waffles with your art? The Waffle Shop is a cafe and live streaming TV channel that serves a diverse audience of late night club-goers and locals in an urban neighborhood. It's run by Jon Rubin, an artist and professor of social practice at Carnegie Mellon, and his students. It's a fascinating experiment in connecting with "nontraditional" arts audiences and encouraging strangers to dialogue about diverse topics in a performative environment. Both staff and visitors host TV programs in the space that range from interviews to game shows to salon chair ministries. The Waffle Shop team also run other projects out of the space, including the Conflict Kitchen--a take-out place that serves food from countries that the U.S. is in conflict with (currently, Iran).
3. Chicago Underground Library (Chicago, IL). If you're looking for inspiration with a collections focus, the Underground Library is a compelling experimental space dedicated to archiving all media produced in Chicago. They have an open collections policy, and they see media artifacts as objects that connect people--to art, to history, to politics, and to each other. The library is run in the lobby of a theater company by a group of volunteers led by Nell Taylor. Nell and the Underground Librarians are passionate about helping people see the relationships between media artifacts and lived experience in the city, and they spend a lot of their time soliciting artworks and publications from unlikely corners to flesh out their collection and honor the diversity of content production around Chicago. Whether a teen zine about punk music or a university journal, the Underground Library will collect it, catalog it, and share it in ways designed to help people learn more about their city and each other.
4. Elsewhere Collaborative (Greensboro, NC). Elsewhere is another collection-based project, but in this case, the collection is the basis for artwork rather than the other way around. In 2003, writer George Scheer inherited his grandmother's thrift store and decided to turn it into an artists' center and museum. Elsewhere engages artists in residence who reinterpret elements of the thrift store into new works, which are then shared with the public. Their projects are an inspiration for anyone interested in looking at new ways to reinterpret a collection (especially a weird and overflowing one) and in doing so, bring together a community of artists and locals.
5. PieLab (Greensboro, AL). A newer kid on the block, PieLab is a community center and pie shop in rural Alabama, started by a group of designers who believe that design can improve the world one small community at a time. PieLab resembles other community development projects: it employs struggling teens, provides local entrepreneurs and organizations with space and support, and brings together diverse folks. But it is also a symbol of a movement for third places that combine commerce, design and community. There are sites like this popping up all over the country, and some of the same young, creative, civically-minded people who might typically work in museums or libraries are the ones in charge. The amount of press and support PieLab has received from the design, business, and non-profit industries is worth noting for any cultural institution interested in truly putting forward a "community first" proposition (or for any individual ready to start her own mission-driven cafe).
6. Streb Labs (Brooklyn, NY). If you are looking for experiments in taking a formal, traditional art venue and reconceiving it as a community space that attracts a diverse audience, look no further than Streb Labs. In 2003 Elizabeth Streb, a very successful choreographer, moved into a huge warehouse space in Brooklyn on a busy street and threw the doors open to locals, 24/7. As Streb explains, "SLAM is an open-access venue that models a new kind of artist-driven community institution. The doors of SLAM are never closed. Performances at SLAM are not stiff, class-coded, regimented affairs; they are neighborhood happenings where the company's longtime fans from the high-art crowd mingle with the at-risk kids from the local public schools and their parents. At the heart of this machine is the driving force of art and action, and the belief that art can provide a service to a community such that voters, taxpayers, and consumers will consider it indispensable." Check out their site and if you're inspired, listen to this fabulous 20 minute interview with Elizabeth on The Artful Manager blog.

What non-traditional arts venues inspire you?

One Million Giraffes (and small "c" collaboration)

This morning, I gave the keynote address for the Washington Museums Association annual conference. Their theme was “Building Community through Collaboration.” While lots of sessions described formal partnerships between organizations, I chose to focus on informal ways that institutions can partner with community members and visitors on an ongoing basis--collaboration with a small "c."

Collaborations with community members often can't get off the ground because they are seen as too unwieldy to be worthwhile. Again and again, I've been inspired by projects that invite collaboration in informal, ongoing, flexible ways. While all kinds of collaborations can be useful--and long-term, deep collaborations are often the most transformative--informal, low-cost projects can often make community participation possible.

You can download the slides and see my whole presentation here. It features lots of museum-based examples. But in this post, I wanted to highlight a goofy little (non-museum) project that inspires me in its simplicity and openness to mass collaboration. It's called One Million Giraffes.

One Million Giraffes is pretty much what it sounds like--a project to collect artistic renderings of one million giraffes. It's run by a young Norwegian man named Ola Helland who made a fateful bet with a friend named Jorgen last year. As Ola explains:

We were discussing the internet and how amazing it is, when I said: "There really are no limits anymore. Anything is possible! I could easily collect one million giraffes if I wanted to." I wasn't really thinking about what I was saying and Jørgen wouldn't let that sentence go. He refused to believe it was possible to collect that many giraffes, so we made a bet. The wager is, as it always is with our silly bets, a case of beer.

The One Million Giraffes project has very simple rules: make a giraffe (not using a computer). Upload an image of it to the site along with your name, age, and location. That's it. The constraints are clear and arbitrary. The language is personal, enthusiastic, and inclusive. Ola presents the giraffes in several ways--as individual images, statistically, on a map, even via a goofy game where you can view giraffes and guess the age of the people who made them. His explanation about the project acknowledges both the insignificance of the project and its power to demonstrate the collaborative potential of the Web. As he puts it:

It doesn't matter if I make to a million. I really, really want to, and I'm still working hard towards that goal, but at this point it's just fun to see people all over the world turning off their TVs, putting their computers away and sitting down to creating giraffes. Old school style. People spend too much time being digital. They should try be analog, being human and creating something real for a change. Most people love it when they try it. I get emails from people all over the world saying that they've rediscovered drawing! Families are sitting down in the living room and acting like families. I have hundred of emails from mums and dads saying that they sat down with their kids and had a blast drawing giraffes. People are actually having giraffe parties! Do you realize how cool that is? Please join in on the fun.

One Million Giraffes is charming and delightful and exciting because it demonstrates the power of collaborative platforms to bring communities together--even around silly things like drawing giraffes. To some people, this project may be indicative of the vapidity of the web, but I don't see it that way. When Ola talks about "how amazing the internet is," he's talking about its ability to support mass collaboration. And while his project doesn't have a lot of depth in terms of content or meaning, it's a signal for what else is possible.

When museums invite participation as generously and enthusiastically as One Million Giraffes does, they situate themselves as places that are open to all the emergent benefits of collaboration. I see this happening in the overflowing visitor comments on the walls of the Oakland Museum of California, the lines snaking through the Minneapolis Institute of Art to submit to Foot in the Door--so many places. I can't wait until there's a young Ola somewhere else in the world starting a project of this kind in a cultural institution with the tagline, "let's show everyone how amazing museums are."

Adventures in Participatory Journalism: An Interview with Sarah Rich about 48 Hour Magazine

A few weeks ago, a group of San Francisco-based writers had a crazy idea: they would make a magazine in 48 hours. And not just any magazine—they wanted to produce something of high quality, in keeping with their day jobs with Wired, Dwell, and other journalistic outfits. Oh, and they wanted it to be participatory. They put out a worldwide call for submissions on a Friday, and put the magazine to bed on Sunday.

That Sunday was this past Sunday, May 9, and by May 10, the magazine was available for sale. It looks great—60 pages on the theme of “hustle” culled from 1502 submissions (all of which were created, received, selected, edited, and laid out in 48 hours). I talked with Sarah Rich, one of the project’s instigators and staff members, to learn more about 48 Hour Magazine and its implications for other participatory media projects.

You had a huge response to this project. People were talking about it all over Twitter, and I was amazed to see how many submissions you received. What generated all the buzz?

The momentum was almost exclusively Twitter-based. None of us is a huge celebrity, but between the six of us who ran the project we have several thousand Twitter followers. We also have contacts with a lot of nodes in the Twitter network who have really big reach. It was almost entirely the reason this happened the way it did – we’re all pretty involved in the new media space.

We launched the Twitter feed and the website on April 29, and a little under 8000 people signed up to get an alert when the theme was announced. And then we had 1502 submissions when we finally announced the theme and the clock started.

That’s a lot of submissions. How did you read them and cull down the list in the time you had?

We had a really great custom content management system (CMS) built for us by one of our teammates, Dylan Fareed. He set up an infrastructure for people to evaluate submissions by giving it a yes, no, or maybe, with comments. We called upon our personal networks of trusted San Francisco-based editors to come in and read onsite during the weekend (with everyone working on their own laptops using the CMS). The CMS tabulated how many times each submission was read. We made sure everything was read three to five times. We didn’t have explicit criteria for selection—it came down to whether a piece was outstanding and reflected the theme.

What did you do when people disagreed—when you got a yes, a no, and a maybe on the same piece?

The three primary editors read all the contentious ones and all the ones that got more than two yes votes. Even after starting from ones with two yeses, we still had way more than we could use, and our core editorial team of three made the decisions about what would be included.

Once we figured out a final approval, we gave each piece to an editor for a more intense edit. There wasn’t any time to go back to the contributors for an okay, but that was part of the deal we outlined at the start. There were a couple instances when we cut something so dramatically (for example, from a 1,500 word essay to a two-line quote) that we did send an email to someone explaining the plan and we got their blessing to include it in the reduced form.

How did you work out the narrative flow of the final magazine?

That’s one of the phases for which we had the least amount of time, and something we’d like to give more hours to in the next issue. When each piece was edited, it went to Derek Powazek, who was doing layout and design, and he made the executive decision about where to put everything for the most part. The narrative arc of the whole magazine could probably have been more calculated but it actually came together well considering the speed.

How did you choose the theme of the magazine—hustle?

We talked about debt as a theme but

it wasn’t perfect. Then one night we were talking about our own careers and lives and how we had to hustle to make money as journalists. We liked that it wasn’t too prescriptive a theme—there’s the swindle side, the speed side—lots of ways to look at it.

Were the submissions really variable? Did you get some stuff that was just a mess?

The content was all over the map. We got something from a 9 year old blogger about Justin Bieber which was probably the most surprising. We got a lot of fiction and poetry, people in the literary magazine vein, people who write for themselves personally. Because the magazine theme was “hustle”, we received lots of personal narrative about sex and drugs. That represented a bulk of things we didn’t put in.

Beyond the excitement and buzz factor, what’s the value of doing this project so fast?

Magazines don’t have money to pay anyone anymore. A lot of people are expected to invest a lot of time to get published but then don’t get paid very much for their efforts. This was a way for us to get super-talented writers and only ask for a morning of their time. And it was a sort of question in our heads: do you have a higher probability of getting great creative work from people because we made it fun and not burdensome? There was a “let’s make it happen” attitude that I think was really appealing.

We were intentionally vague about the idea that the contributions had to be entirely conceived and created during the 24-hour submission period. And that vagueness definitely did enhance the overall content. For example, we received a photo essay that featured images taken months ago in French Guyana. The photos were old but the text was new. We couldn’t have had that piece if we were super strict about the timeframe.

This project appears to have been an incredible success. In lots of situations like this, I see well-intentioned people or institutions launch something like this and it bombs—the participation is not strong enough. You clearly had a lot going for you as a team, but do you think this kind of participation is replicable for people who are less tech-focused and connected than you?

I think there’s some truth to the fact that we’re in San Francisco, we’re media people, we can have great editors because we know them, we know great programmers – those are results of our specific circumstances. But I think this is definitely doable on a local level. The Internet is obviously a key tool for organizing. And then it’s about getting the people together and energized and ready to go.

You made contribution to the magazine participatory. Could you imagine making the editorial experience more participatory as well—crowd-sourcing the curation of the final magazine?

In terms of my vision, internal curation by trusted editors is a key piece. I really wanted it to be a refined and curated product in the end. We will work with different sets of editors on the next issue, and I’m excited about having a new group of staff members, but it really helps that they are professionals.

We considered putting up every single submission on the website and we decided not to in the end. It would have created a weird separation between the people in the community who were selected and those who weren’t. What I’m really excited about is that a lot of people who didn’t get in are posting their work on their own blogs, etc.

For the most part, the vast majority of the feedback from people whose work wasn’t selected was “I’m so excited I got to be creative this weekend, it was really great to do this thing.” And then there’s a smaller faction who said, “Why did you make all these people waste their time?” which to me is not the point at all. There’s some value in doing creative work, whether it’s included in the magazine or not.

What do you want people to say when they see the magazine? Sometimes participatory projects are seen as creating inferior products—projects that are “nice for the community” but not as high-quality as professionally-produced work.

I hope that people look at the magazine as a great magazine with great content and art. I don’t want people to say, “this is great for something they did in 48 hours.” I hope that they just think it’s great.

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I haven’t received my copy yet, but it looks great online. I bought two; if you’d like me to mail my second one to you, leave a brilliant comment and I’ll pick a winner at random (US only for this one).