Wanted: Your Advice (Guest Post)

This guest post was written by Nicole Robert, a graduate student in the course I’m teaching at the University of Washington on social technology. Nicole and her classmates are building a rapid-fire, user-generated online and physical exhibit which will be open June 6-8 in Seattle. This post shares some of the development story, and most importantly, issues a call to action to add your two cents to the exhibit.

Designing an exhibit, the first questions are usually: “what is this about? What’s the content? What’s the message?” As a graduate student in a museum studies program, I have learned how to develop an exhibit based on a collection of objects or a specific story. Now, I and thirteen other students are creating an exhibit designed not around content goals but social action goals. Instead of asking, “What is this exhibit about?” we are asking, “What do we want visitors to do in our exhibit?”

The University of Washington Museology Graduate Program invited Nina up to Seattle to teach a course on using social technologies in museums. Nina challenged us to create an exhibit in 6 weeks that would get strangers to talk to each other. So, instead of figuring out what collection to feature, we brainstormed themes that would guide interactions. We knew that the exhibit would run in the UW student center during the week leading up to graduation, so we wanted to develop something that would be relevant to students at the end of the year without being cheesy. The result is an exhibit about advice. Our “big idea” is:

Advice: give it, get it, flip it, fuck it.

The idea around advice is that we all experience it—some people like to give it, some get it, others pass it on and we all have occasionally gotten advice that we chose to forget. Advice necessarily involves a transfer of knowledge from one person to another—an interpersonal interaction—so both the format and the ubiquity of advice make it a great structuring concept for our goals.

In this design experiment, we are inviting individuals far and wide to give us advice. Visit our website to find out how you can contribute video, photos, voice recordings or written advice. We're taking a multi-platform approach: you can call in advice from your phone, add advice images to our Flickr pool, email advice to us, or even send advice via Twitter. And tell your friends! Your advice will literally shape the physical exhibit, which will be displayed on the University of Washington campus in the Husky Union Building from Sat. June 6 to Mon. June 8, 9 am to 6 pm.

In addition to the content collected online, the physical installation will feature an advice-giving booth where “expert” advice-givers will volunteer to share their knowledge. You might be able to ask a single mom or a physicist for a gem of advice. Then take what they tell you and pass it on in other interactives, or leave your own contribution on the “Questions of the Ages” board. Good or bad, your advice—and the interactions that advice creates—takes center stage in this exhibit.

Other interactive exhibit components include:

• ADVICE-LIBS: Visitors will create advice Mad-Lib style, by vetting requested sentence components (noun, verb, adjective) and then having these placing these into well-known adages (i.e. "always ______ before you _______" or "a ________ in the hand is worth two in the _________.") These wacky 'remixed' adages would then be pressed into buttons for visitors to wear/take home.
• THE BATHROOM WALL: Visitors will write advice to the masses onto either a real or contrived "bathroom wall." They will be encouraged by signage to share great/horrible advice and to cross-off, comment upon and remix others statements-- just about what people do on normal bathroom walls.
• QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: Visitors will write advice on glass cases in which we have posted pre-selected questions that would be relevant to a wide population including: "What should you do for a broken heart?" "How do you break the ice when talking to a stranger?" "How do you tell a friend something that might hurt their feelings?" etc.
• GIVE ME SOMETHING TO GO ON: Visitors will be able to post questions that they want responses to in available free spaces on glass cases and other visitors will be able to cluster responses around these questions. Exhibit attendants will be the only ones allowed to remove/delete questions, and this should happen once room to respond runs out. Attendants will also photo-capture images of these displays for the website. Signage should encourage people to leave questions in the free spaces and respond.
  

During the three-day installation, we will observe and evaluate the success (or failure) of our designs. We plan to modify interactives that are not working and see if we can get better results. The whole experiment will provide all of us with valuable information about how museum exhibits can become a foundation of social interactions. At the end, we will publish our evaluation report and our development wiki (where we’ve been designing the exhibit) will be open for you to peruse.

Nina has asked our class to create a project that “will help move forward museum research on developing exhibitions that serve as platforms for social engagement.” An exciting challenge! But in order to meet it, we need your help. We want your advice. Advice you love, advice you hate, the strangest advice that you ever heard—whatever you choose, tell us about it.

Design Techniques for Developing Questions for Visitor Participation

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals (slides here). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggles with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. Dennis Schatz from the Pacific Science Center contributed:

How do we find the RIGHT questions for visitor participation?

I love this question. It's a two-parter I've been puzzling over for a long time. First, what do the right questions look like? And second, what techniques can help us find more?

Part 1: What does the right question look like?

Last year, I wrote this post which offered some broad suggestions for what the "right" questions look like. Here's my current list of useful characteristics:

• questions that trigger an immediate response
• questions that induce grappling
  
• questions that motivate authentic expression
  
• questions that draw from personal experience, not abstraction
• open to anyone (minimize cultural bias)
• speculative (what if? instead of what is?)
• questions which produce answers that are interesting to consume and respond to
  

Here are some of the wrong questions:

• What is the girl in the painting doing? (too teacherly)
  
• What does freedom mean to you? (too abstract)
• How would you define nanotechnology? (too impersonal)
• What's the best song you've ever heard? (avoid superlatives - they make some people anxious)
  
• What do you think? (too general)

The "right" questions can be short or long, simple or wacky. They can require yes/no responses or lengthy paragraphs. The key is that they are genuinely interesting and that they trigger a learning response both for the person who chooses to answer and the person who chooses just to spectate. This is the golden rule of developing questions for visitor dialogue: you must be truly interested in their answers. If you don't care about the answer to the question, why on earth should anyone else?

Part 2: How do you develop the right questions?

Last year, I didn't have a great answer for this one. But I've been experimenting with visitor dialogue over several recent projects and have developed a few simple design strategies to hone in on good questions. Each of these exercises takes about five minutes, assuming you have access to a group of people who in some way approximate your target audience (colleagues, friends, visitors).

• Develop a "question of interest" that relates to your content. Make sure that the question is one that any person can answer and one for which you ACTUALLY CARE TO HEAR THE ANSWER. Ask the question to several people. Ask yourself. Listen to or read their answers. If you find yourself dreading asking the tenth person that same question, you have the wrong question. Go back and write a new one.
• Show the question to a group of people and ask them to raise their hands if they have an immediate answer to that question. Then, ask if they would be interested in perusing others' responses to the question. It's OK to have an imbalance here, as long as there are more interested spectators than interested creators.
• Gather up a bunch of answers to the question and look at them. These answers are your "exhibit." Identify how many of them are interesting. Identify how many of them motivate you to ask a followup question.
• Ask the question several different ways to different groups of people. Vary your specificity, your personal intrusiveness, your wording. Compare the responses you get. Ask people to rate how hard it was to answer different questions and whether there were some that were easier to jump into than others.

Examples

Here are some questions that I've seen work marvelously well.

Institution-to-visitor:

• The Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars exhibition opens with a simple question: "Would you go to Mars?" Visitors are forced to enter through one of two gates marked YES and NO. Their answers are tracked via a display that tallies the total number of YESes and NOs registered to date. This question is right because it is easy to answer yet induces grappling. It's personal but not consequential. It frames and personalizes the exhibit experience. And looking at other people's responses (via the number displays) is quick, easy, informative, and somewhat surprising.
• The Denver Art Museum's Side Trip poses many specific questions about visitors' experiences with psychedelic rock music, concerts, and drugs. The questions can be quite personal, and the responses--which include stories of visitors' "first trips" and "Jimi experiences"--are detailed and pretty fascinating to read. This question set is right because there are several specific questions, enough so that anyone can find one appropriate to her experience. These questions also use "first" memories rather than "best" memories, which are easier to recall and share.
• My local public library does an annual summer book recommendation wall, on which patrons can post their mini-reviews of books they've read and enjoyed. The question is, "would you recommend this book to someone?" This question is right because it is highly functional--patrons understand how it will be useful to others. It is somewhat personal but doesn't ask the respondent to be an authority in describing the book, just in sharing why he would recommend it. There's an implied interpersonal transaction in the offering of this information, which makes the experience feel valuable and personal without pushing face-to-face interaction on anyone.

I've also been playing with visitor-to-visitor questions to help me talk to strangers. The most reliable question I'm using works in art museums. My tactic is to look for the person in the gallery who is looking most intently at something, walk up to them and ask, "what are you looking at?" Even though the stranger intrusion is potentially uncomfortable, this question works because it expresses interest on the stranger's terms, not my own. I'm not challenging them to tell me why they are looking or what their reaction is, just what they are looking at. It's an innocuously descriptive question that almost always leads to very interesting insights into how different people appreciate art.

What kind of dialogue are you looking to spark? What kinds of questions do you seek, and what techniques do you use to find them?

I'm genuinely interested in your answer. That's why I asked.

Join Me for A Social Design Experiment on April 5

Spring is here and it’s time to talk to strangers. On Sunday April 5, I’ll be conducting a collaborative experiment with 15 intrepid University of Washington graduate students, and I’d like to invite you to join in from your own hometown. April 5 is the first day of a class I’m teaching called Social Technology, in which we are focusing on designing an exhibition that features social objects, that is, exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue.

To kick off the course, we’re doing a simple exercise at the Seattle zoo (but you can do it anywhere). The experiment requires you to go to a public space and do three things:

1. Talk to a stranger.
2. Get two strangers talking to each other.
3. Make and install an object or condition which motivates two strangers to talk to each other without your intervention/involvement. That is, you should be able to watch the strangers talk to each other about the designed social object you have created without being directly involved in the action.

The point of this experiment is to play with design conditions that support both facilitated and unfacilitated engagement with strangers. This is something I am obsessively curious about. And while I’ve been exploring venues, situations, and apparel that serve as social objects, I’ve found few examples of explicitly designed social objects. Most social objects that mediate conversation among strangers are incidental. For example, my dog, while a highly evolved social matchmaking device, is not deliberately designed for that task. I believe that focusing specifically on the social capacity of an object, rather than its content or interpretation, yields new design techniques for museum exhibits and other participatory spaces.

There are three reasons you might value this activity:

1. It will be fun and kind of unusual.
2. It will help you understand the challenges involved in supporting user self-expression.
3. It will help you develop ways to encourage inter-visitor dialogue and engagement around objects in your institution.

And there are three reasons I’d really value your participation:

1. I want to suck your brain and revel in your inventiveness.
2. I want to aggregate all the data, synthesize it and share it. More data means more interesting, nuanced conclusions for everyone.
3. I want to connect these students to a larger group of people interested in exploring topics around social technology in museums.

If you want to participate, please leave a comment here or send me an email at nina@museumtwo.com. You don’t have to be a museum person or have any qualifications beyond your interest in participating and documenting your experience.

I recommend performing the experiment with friends or family to enhance both the fun and safety of the activities. Don't just plunk your cute baby down in the park, walk away, and call it a social object. You have to actually design something—a sign, an incident, an object, an environment. It’s ok if you fail as long as you try. We’ll learn as much from the social objects that don’t work as from the ones that are astounding successes.

Participants will be asked to write up their experiences (photos/video enthusiastically supported!), which will all be featured on a dedicated website. We’ll also be live-twittering the experiment on April 5 using the hashtag #strangemuse.

I’ll produce a report that will be shared here on the Museum 2.0 blog. And if you happen to be in the Seattle area, I invite you to join us for a post-experiment dinner on April 5, location TBD (suggestions welcome).

So how about it? Ready for a stranger April?

The Magic Vest Phenomenon and Other Wearable Tools for Talking to Strangers

I've been thinking recently about how I originally got interested in talking to strangers in museums. I am not a person who is fundamentally good at talking to strangers. I love playing host to friends, but I clam up in big crowds, never go to happy hour, and don't know how to flirt. Working in museums as floor staff cracked open the social stranger door for me. My first museum job was working on the floor at the Acton Science Discovery Museum in Massachusetts. Like floor staff everywhere, I wore a vest that identified me as a staff person. It was blue. It was polyester. And It was a magic vest.

What made it magic? When I slipped on the vest, I was suddenly identified as someone who was safe for strangers to talk to. I could approach a kid and ask him a question or put a tuning fork to her elbow without any parents getting suspicious. I could jump in with a perplexed family and help them make the pendulum work. I was sought out and could initiate conversations. I could even tell dumb jokes or get people to sing songs about science with me. Magic.

Some days, I'd leave the museum to go grocery shopping, and I'd forget that I'd taken off my magic vest. I'd ask people questions in the produce aisle, bend down to talk to a small kid about what she was having for dinner. Sometimes this worked out, but more often, I was perceived as an intruder. Without the vest, I wasn't able to engage in the way that worked for me at the museum, and I didn't have any fall-back way to connect with strangers. So I stopped trying.

Over the years, I've learned to put on an imaginary magic vest when I go to museums, and I've gotten more comfortable starting conversations without it. But the physical vest is still better. When I told this story to a friend of mine who's a fire fighter, he immediately agreed--he feels like his uniform is also a magic social object. In uniform, he's someone who is perceived as a helpful source of information and a safe and enjoyable person to talk with. Out of uniform, he's just another guy on the street.

Of course, there's no single social object that projects a universal message of openness and willingness to engage. A person in a cop uniform may be inviting to some, threatening to others. I think of my dog as an amazing social object, but I'm also aware that for some people, dogs are scary creatures to be avoided. Every piece of apparel or physical extension of oneself invites others to pass judgment. The trick is to find the things that encourage others to judge you as welcoming and worthy of positive interaction.

I wouldn't be the person I am today, one who is genuinely interested in others' opinions and jumps into participatory museum experiences, if not for my time on the museum floor in the magic vest. I believe that everyone deserves to have a magic vest experience, and that for socially inept people like myself, having an opt-in way to signal your interest in interpersonal communication can be a great social tool to mediate the experience. There are some safety concerns--we wouldn't want people impersonating fire fighters--but there should be some "magic vests" that come laden with positive interest and intent rather than authority. Many science museums offer kids lab coats to wear during programs, which affects their self-perception and modes of expression. What if we offered all visitors coats, vests, hats, etc. to express their interest in engaging in particular ways? I've written before about the idea of offering visitors stickers or buttons that say "ASK ME WHAT I THINK" so they can have their own social experiences facilitated by apparel, and I'm looking for more options.

Why does talking to strangers matter? Every time I do it, it improves my ability to empathize and understand other people. It brings surprising and delightful experiences into my life. My default is to feel phenomenally lonely in large social venues like museums and conferences. Finding the right tools to enable social engagement lets me leave my own shell and connect with and enjoy the rest of the world.

I'm curious what "magic vest" experiences you've had--whether in museums or elsewhere--and how you think wearable social objects fit into participatory experiences with strangers. What's your magic vest? Where do you wear it, and what superpower does it have?

Lessons in Participatory Design from SFMOMA's Exhibition on (you guessed) The Art of Participation

Here are two pictures. The first one is me. The second one is George. George is a stranger I met last week at SFMOMA’s new show, The Art of Participation:1950 to Now. We didn’t need a staff member or a program to meet each other. We weren’t trying to pick each other up. We engaged in an exhibit together, making "one minute sculptures" and taking photos of each other. We talked afterwards. We connected virtually later. We were strangers, and now we are not, and we have SFMOMA to thank for it.

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process." While many of the artifacts of historical art pieces are arresting, the pieces of “now” form an exciting testbed for gallery-based participatory engagement, albeit in a meta way around the topic of participation. The participatory art pieces are physical, social objects that mediate visitor-to-visitor engagement, and the exhibition suggests a set of dos and don’ts that are transferable to any museum or institution seeking to support visitor-to-visitor social experiences.

DO message clearly. SFMOMA uses a variety of methods to make visitors aware of the opportunity to engage physically with the art. At the front of the exhibition is this simple sign (shown at right) explaining that labels written in orange are opportunities to “do, take, or touch something.” This label set up a casual game for me: look for orange, do the thing. Even if you don’t see this label on the way in, the use of a different color allows visitors to become familiar with the use of the color orange as they see it across many labels in the gallery. If the participatory instructions were integrated into the standard black labels, visitors would not be as aware of the commonalities across the interactive art pieces. The repetition of the orange may also encourage some reluctant visitors to engage, as it suggests multiple opportunities for participation.

DO train your floor staff. Staff play a major role in setting expectations about what visitors can and can not do-especially in art museums. There were several guards and gallery guides in the museum when I attended, and they seemed to serve contradictory roles. The guards interpreted the labels in strict ways and intervened anytime visitors deviated from the prescribed activities. The guides had a much more open approach, encouraging visitors to play. I was involved in one situation where a guide and a guard argued about whether a plastic orange could be placed inside a prop fridge. This kind of confusion among staff translates negatively to visitors, who lose confidence in participating for fear of being chastised.

DON’T make the participatory activity too narrow or difficult. There were a couple of exhibits that had complicated instruction sets, and participating felt more like an unpleasant IKEA flashback than an opportunity to explore art. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for challenging exhibits, but the starting point for entry into a participatory experience should always be gentle and friendly. Also, the more open-ended pieces, in which visitors could express some of our own creativity, allowed me to feel more like a participant and less like an unpaid art lackey.

DO think about visitor flow when situating participatory experiences. The Art of Participation has elements throughout the SFMOMA building, and while some are well-placed, others feel ill-suited to their environment. The quiet, less-trafficked education center is a perfect place for contemplative, individual exhibits like the 1000 Journals project, in which visitors can flip through and contribute to a set of journals launched into the world by artist Brian Singer. But a set of DIY foldable furniture, which is performative, social, and challenging to use, felt out of place in the otherwise empty education space. Similarly, the one minute sculptures, where I spent the most time and interacted with many strangers, was successful because it was positioned in an open part of the gallery that generated lots of traffic and sightlines—two key elements for drawing people in.

DON’T make the social ask too uncomfortable. There was a set of eyeglasses in the exhibition meant for two people to wear (see left, the glasses are linked so the viewers face each other). While some people traveling in groups may feel comfortable using a device to stand inches from each other, many strangers (and familiars) do not. In contrast, the exhibit in which I met George—one minute sculptures—requires a simple and non-threatening social action: taking a photo of someone else. It’s minimal enough to feel safe asking a stranger for help but leads easily to deeper interaction.

DO delineate the space, but design easy ways to disengage. George and my experience in the one-minute sculpture activity was also facilitated by the space provided. We were standing on a low platform in the middle of a large gallery. It was clear where to participate (on the platform), which enhanced the performative quality of the experience. People could watch what was happening and join in. People on the platform could turn in multiple directions to entice newcomers into the action. But it was also easy to step off the platform and out of the activity. Too often, we design participatory experiences into their own rooms, thinking we should create a dedicated space for the noise and activity. But openness is safe. I would feel less comfortable playing with strangers in a room shut off from the rest of the museum.

DO provide examples and create a valued context. This is the most obvious way that The Art of Participation succeeds. For every opportunity to engage creatively, there are many examples of how other artists have interpreted participation. This happens on a small scale (for example, the one minute sculpture platform was flanked by photos documenting sculptures created by artist Lygia Clark) as well as throughout the gallery. There is no question in my mind that the art around us encouraged me and other participants to take more risks, and to think of ourselves as making art. We were on display at a huge and powerful museum, a part of the exhibition rather than consumers of an interactive element. And that felt important. It was a feeling that was harder to access in the education center, where participation felt less transgressive and more like a “designed learning moment.”

Some of these dos and don'ts may seem generic. But without all of them, the participatory experience is diminished—and that was readily apparent as I wandered the highly active to not-at-all active exhibits. Context and framing are unbelievably important. Think of what happened to George and me: we had an opportunity to take pictures of people doing silly things with broom handles, plastic fruit, and a dorm fridge with a hole in it. That description does not scream "amazing participatory experience." And yet the setup—the platform, the gallery location, the examples, the encouragement, the low barrier to entry—made it extraordinary. It created a situation where a perfect stranger paused, looked at me, and said, “I think I’m going to take off my shirt.” It created an opportunity for each of us to do things that were individually comfortable but socially extraordinary.

It didn’t take exhaustive resources to create the one minute sculpture platform. I'd argue that it didn't even take unprecedented genius on the part of the artist and curators. But it did take a serious interest in connecting with visitors, valuing their participation, and putting their work front and center in a contextualized museum experience.

Exhibits and Artifacts as Social Objects

How can you design museum spaces so that exhibits and artifacts become social objects--things that people want to share with each other? This summer, I wrote about situations that bring strangers together in conversation by focusing their attention on a third party (the dog, the stuck elevator, the surprising event). While that post focused on conditions for talking to strangers, this one looks at the object of attention itself around which triangulation and social behavior happens.

I was intrigued by this article by Jyri Engeström about "object-centered sociality." Jyri argues that social networks that succeed are based around objects, not relationships. The objects don't have to be physical, but they do have to be distinct entities. Flickr has photos. YouTube has videos. Upcoming.com has events. Jyri suggests that more nebulous social networks, like LinkedIn or Facebook, can only succeed if and when objects are at the foundation of the experience. Facebook has a diversified object model--for some people, friend updates are the essential object, for others, it's virtual gifts. LinkedIn is now organizing the network more strongly around jobs instead of connections, which Jyri sees as a move to object-centered design:

Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

This is great news for museums. Unlike digital networks, which have to manufacture or solicit online versions of objects around which users can rally, museums are full of objects. We know that the stories and connections between visitors and objects exist--we just have to find ways to use those connections to turn the objects into triangulation points for social behavior. Rather than convincing visitors that they want to be part of "the museum club," if we can find ways to make our objects function socially, the opportunity for a useful network may emerge.

Jyri offers five key principles for the design of such a network or service:

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects.
   
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
   

Let's look at these briefly one by one. I think that the second one is the most important and potentially useful to museum work, but they're all worth considering.

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
This one is easy for museums. It's exhibits, artifacts, collections--our stuff.

2. Define the verbs your users perform on the objects.
Currently, these verbs are primarily non-social: visitors watch and interact singly or in pre-defined groups. Occasionally, if the objects are provocative enough, visitors discuss, point, and share.

Ideally, we'd identify verbs that visitors could "do" to exhibits that are more transactive--using the exhibit as a triangulation point for a social interaction. This is hard to do when exhibit interactions are not personalized. On other services, the verbs are not necessarily inherently social, but both input and output verbs are represented. On Flickr, some users post photos and others view them. On Ebay, some users sell and others buy. The roles are fluid and can be redefined each time you have an interaction on the site. How could exhibits be a vehicle for an input and output--and a social tie from in to out?

If every visitor looks, there is no social interaction. If some visitors point and others look, there's a social interaction (as demonstrated in the RACE exhibition). If some visitors create and others consume, there's a social interaction. Thus, every exhibit that aspires to be social should encourage at least two verbs--one that transmits and another that receives. The visitors involved shouldn't have to directly engage with each other to have a social experience.

3. How can people share the objects?
Every time you produce an "object" on a social website like Flickr or YouTube, there are automatically-generated ways to share it. The objects can be emailed, embedded, linked, and blogged (if the owner supports it). There are many collections-rich museums that have created ways for visitors to create their own digital collections. Some, like the Brooklyn Museum's ArtShare Facebook application, make it easy for users to share their art interests with others. But we haven't found good ways in the physical museum for people to share the objects that interest them--beyond visitors taking illicit photos on cellphones to send to friends.

Are there models out there for sharing physical objects that can't be moved? There's an ice cream store in Santa Cruz with a "gift board" where people can leave gifts of sundaes and cones for friends. It's a public gift certificate system that emphasizes the way that ice cream--something you can only get in person at the store--can be shared. Perhaps there's a way for visitors to publicly memorialize the "gift" of artifacts to friends and family in a similar way.

4. Turn invitations into gifts.
How do museums enable visitors to "invite" their friends and family to visit? Imagine creating a mechanism where visitors could tell their friends not just how great the exhibit was, but give them a gift that encourages them to visit. Gifting is a powerful participatory behavior. The gift could be something as pedestrian as a discount pass, but ideally it would be the gift of a museum object or something related to one. Since we can't have visitors giving away exhibits, the invitation can be a gift of access, a gift of a story about an exhibit, a gift of a challenge to find a particular exhibit... anything that will inspire that potential visitor to go to the museum to "cash in" his or her gift.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
Not all Web 2.0 sites work this way, and museums are (hopefully) far from it. The concept here is that the people who want to share their content--photos, blogs, audio--are the ones who are willing to pay for it. This concept is reflected in the "premium" paid version of many services, which offer you better ways to publish rather than better ways to view content. Flickr only allows you to post 200 photos for free, after which you have to pay. You never have to pay to look at photos--only to publish lots of them.

What would this mean in museums? It only makes sense if museums display visitor-generated objects (in which case the participant/creators would pay for the privilege, or for prime vitrine real estate) or if visitors could republish museum-owned content. This does happen--plenty of museums charge a fee for use of their images--but they also charge spectators to see the exhibits. And museums charge other museums to "republish" content in the form of traveling exhibits. Could museums create a viable business model based on traveling exhibits and licensing fees alone? Probably not--and I'd argue it's a bad idea. Museums should not be in the business of licensing partially publicly-funded objects to visitors. We have enough trouble encouraging the republishing and sharing of museum content without crippling it with fees.


Do you have other interpretations of how these could be applied to museum exhibits (and whether it's worth it)? What are the social verbs that visitors could "perform" on your objects?

Strange(r) Encounters: Conditions for Engagement

I've written before about techniques for talking to strangers, looking at how buttons, buses, and dogs and can all be tools for participatory design. Today, we return to that well-loved topic and look more broadly at the conditions of participation. So as you read, please consider this small assignment: think of a notable encounter you have had with a stranger.

I used that instruction recently to kick off a meeting at a museum planning a participatory education space. Around the conference table, there were stories about love, aggression, and wackiness, extraordinary objects and unusual situations. One guy talked about a mysterious cellphone caller and the twenty minute mutual "how do I know you?" conversation that followed. There was a woman who married her cab driver, another who formed a lasting friendship over the improper use of a magnet. There was a self-aggregating group who toured an art exhibition. There were two fights, both involving parking spaces. And my favorite, from a designer who was initiated into a secret world of graffiti-ed walls behind elevator doors in his art college in an entirely silent exchange.

I love these stories because they highlight unique moments in our lives. They stand out, at least in America, because of their infrequency. We spend most of our time studiously ignoring strangers, and it takes extraordinary situations to overcome those cultural mores and fears. This morning I was at a fourth of July parade swarming with people and didn't talk to a single stranger. There was no reason, no opportunity, no desire to go out of my comfort zone and do so.

What compels you to talk to strangers? So far, I've assembled the following list of conditions for non-compulsory participatory encounters with strangers:

• Desperate Need for Information or Help -- used to find bathrooms, band-aids, and the time. These interactions are motivated by overwhelming personal desire which allows the requestor to overcome cultural barriers. Also, because the information or assistance sought is specific, the expectation is that there will be no further interaction beyond its provision. This makes the interaction feel "safe" for both parties. Interestingly, at the City Museum in St. Louis, these interactions (between visitors and staff) are intentionally promoted by a lack of wayfinding signage.
  
• Unsure of the Rules -- related to the above, but with more chance for sustained interaction. These occur when you enter a situation and need help understanding how to act--how to order your food, get in line, signal the bus driver. This situation is less dire than the above, and the interaction comes not out of personal need but social interest in "doing things properly." This frequently happens in long and confusing queues at airports, where strangers will create and communicate shared stories about where they should stand, what's going on, and what their best chance is of getting on a flight. People often take on "helper" roles in these situations, rising to the occasion to assist others in the absence of professional information and to reprimand those with aberrant rule sets (i.e. people who cut in line).
  
• Unusual Rules -- as in games and other situations in which a mutually respected third party authority creates a new set of rules that encourage strangers to interact. This occurs in speed dating, social gaming, and any time you are instructed to "turn to the person sitting next to you." In the background information about the alternate reality game SF0, the author calls the game "an interface for San Francisco," that is, a new rule set in which you are represented as a character who is and is not yourself. As they put it: "... most importantly, your character is able to do things that you may be unable or unwilling to do yourself. Your character doesn't recognize the artificial boundaries that prevent non-players from doing what they want to do." In other words, you are playing, and when playing, you are operating under new rules. The picture at the top of this post comes from a Flickr group called 100 Strangers, in which people take on the challenge of photographing strangers. That simple external task, supported by a collective and mediated by a device, empowers people to meet and learn each other's stories.
  
• Intimate Observation of an Extraordinary Event -- when two strangers "share a moment" instigated by an outside spectacle. The spectacle can be as mundane as a kid picking his nose or as profound as a UFO sighting. The key is that it is shared by just a few people. If a thousand people see a kid pick his nose, it's comedy. If two people in a crowd happen to be looking at the same moment at the kid and then notice each other and smile, it's intimacy. These encounters are often non-verbal but can still be intensely personal. I once watched a baby stroller almost tip over at the same time as another man. The mother was oblivious, but the man and I had an intense moment of shared protective watchfulness. The curator at the meeting earlier this week who ended up touring an exhibition with strangers did so because of a shared moment with another person who was looking "behind the exhibit" at the same time as him. Sometimes these kinds of moments are manufactured, as in the elevator graffiti story, by one stranger who chooses to reveal a secret spectacle to another. These non-accidental moments are not always pleasant--flashers fall in this category.
• Carrying Something Visible and Strange -- this is initiated by one person who turns him or herself into a kind of spectacle, whether by holding balloons, walking a dog, or wearing a wild hat. These visible identifiers become social objects that appeal differently to different people. You might enthusiastically approach a knitter while your friend would always walk up to whittlers. No matter the physical object, there are some people who will approach you to talk about it, even objects that connote non-social focus, like books or laptops. The object must, however, be distinctive enough to entice observers of the carrier/wearer to overcome social barriers and approach. In The Game, a very strange book about hitting on women, experts suggest that men wear flamboyant, ridiculous clothes to nightclubs as conversation starters. This can go overboard, however, as demonstrated by the image at the top. Unless we're at Disneyland (and for many people, even there), furry costumes do not inspire participatory encounters.
  
• Doing Something Visible and Aberrant -- Highly related to the above, exemplified by the NYC group Improv Everywhere. These activities are not always grounds for participatory encounters. If you are doing something too weird or well-scripted, people look at you as a show or a threat, not an opportunity to engage. I had an extremely positive experience of this type once while doing pullups in the subway in DC. Someone started counting when I got close to ten, and then everyone started trying to see how many they could do and we became a big exercise encounter group for a few minutes. These encounters happen when the initial action or actor is perceived as welcoming, as having room for involvement and potentially improvement.
  

I think it's interesting that all of these conditions involve mediation by an abstract concept (rules, information), event, or object. There are lots of interactions with strangers that are unmediated, but these tend to be the ones we warn children about: encounters in which a stranger approaches you because of specific interest in YOU--your appearance, your residence, your wallet, your sexual preference. These interactions are more uncomfortable than the mediated ones because of their directness. The immediate reaction is, "Why is this person approaching me?" and there is no obvious, safe answer. With mediated interactions, the answer to the question is known, and thus the engagement feels safe.

It's also interesting that mediating conditions (at least in the real world) are not places. While the Web includes several places like chat rooms that functionally mediate interactions between strangers, there aren't many analogous places in the real world. Even bars, the cornerstone of the pickup scene, tend to primarily attract packs of friends who very occasionally venture ten steps from the pack to talk to a stranger. Creating a place for participation is not enough. To design spaces that encourage participation, you have to find ways to offer users mediating objects, rules, and events, and enough non-uniformity to allow intimate moments to slip through. And the hardest part? You have to do it in a way that feels accidental, surprising, and authentic. Otherwise you just become another guy in a bunny suit, people hurriedly passing by.

What conditions did I miss? What's your story about interacting with strangers?

Design for Social Engagement: Pointing at Exhibits

What makes an exhibit “social?” How do you design an object experience that encourages participation among visitors? This blog often analyzes how websites, designed spaces, even dogs promote participatory experiences among users. Today, we look inward for a how-to on one type of participatory design as applied to museum exhibits.

The photos above were provided by Paul Martin of the Science Museum of Minnesota from their award-winning exhibition RACE. When he speaks about these photos, Paul spends little time on the content of the exhibits. Instead, he focuses on what the visitors are doing: pointing at things. In RACE, visitors point things out to each other and start talking about them.

Paul has suggested that this metric—pointing—may be a valuable evaluation measure of a particular kind of engagement. On one level this is fuzzy. What does it mean when people point at things? Do they point because the thing is unusual or surprising? Do they point because the thing is familiar?

It’s hard to determine the pointer’s motivation for interest in the object. But there’s a simpler way to look at it: people point at things because they want other people to see them. Pointing is a measure of how viral something is. Some people point, others forward videos. The motivation behind it is the same: the body language equivalent of saying "you should look at this."

Exhibits that induce pointing are social in a couple of ways. Pointing advertises and spreads the exhibit’s impact. If nobody points, then each visitor has to approach each exhibit (or not) and find something interesting (or not). When pointing happens, the work of figuring out whether an exhibit will be worthwhile or not is circumvented. She points, he looks. The exhibit uses the initial pointing visitor as an advertisement, spreading the content virally to others in the space. You may or may not find the thing your friend pointed out interesting, but either way, you are likely to look at it.

Second, unlike viral web experiences, the in-person pointer is setting up a social interaction with the pointee. On the web, content gets distributed semi-anonymously through networks and email lists. But in the museum, the distribution method is more personal. One person points, another person looks, and a social exchange takes place. The people may talk about the exhibit, or they may just communally revel in their interest in what was pointed at. Either way, the act of pointing has changed the exhibit from one that speaks to individual visitors to one that speaks to visitors in pairs or groups.

How do you design an exhibit that people will point at? To do so, you have to focus on providing something that people will want to show other people. Here are some design elements that can improve your "pointiness":

• Make the object of interest simple enough to require little explanation. The goal is to make the barrier to pointing as low as possible. It's much easier on the pointer if all he has to do is say, "look!" and the other person/people will understand. If the pointer is then obliged to explain why she pointed, that increases the demand on her. In this way, non-interactive exhibits, objects, and text labels can all be sources for social interaction, assuming the message they have to share is clear and compelling enough to induce pointing.
  
• Make the object of interest big and or accessible enough to be seen from a distance. If the thing you are pointing at is small, you have to bring the pointee close to the exhibit (and close to you) to share it. This can be fine, and is useful for promoting intimacy among family groups who are visiting together, reading labels together, using interactives together. But if you want to point things out to strangers or to disparate members of your group, it's easier if you don't have to drag them away from their current position to come close to you. Again, the size lowers the barrier to pointing by allowing people to do it without invading each other's personal space. The ultimate example of this is an eclipse. The sun is big. Everyone can point at it and share that experience from wherever they stand.
  
• Make it easy to access and share the moment of interest. If it takes a visitor several minutes of interaction to get to the "pointable moment," and then that moment only lasts for a short time, that visitor has little incentive to point. It's too hard to explain what the other visitor will have to do to get to the good stuff, and it takes too long to want to stick around. Many of the most remarkable experiences in interactive exhibits are outcomes, so it's useful if those outcomes are long-lasting and easily experienced by several people. For me, a great example of this is the Exploratorium's Watch Water Freeze exhibit in which visitors look through polarized lenses at ice crystals forming extraordinary rainbows. The "pointable moment" is the outcome, but it's very easy to get there--you just look through the lens. When at the Exploratorium, I constantly find myself pointing this exhibit out to strangers because the barrier of explanation is so low ("look through the lens") and the payoff is high.
  
• Make the exhibit spectacular, scandalous, or totally surprising. People point at things that are aberrant. This doesn't mean you have to go for the fireworks. In RACE, one of the most pointed at exhibits is a vitrine featuring stacks of money representing the average earnings of Americans of different races. Money is somewhat exciting, but the real power in the exhibit comes in the shocking disparity among the piles. People are compelled to point out of surprise. The powerful physical metaphor of the stacks makes the information presented feel more spectacular without dumbing it down or over-dressing it.
  
• Make the exhibit break social barriers. This is an element that I'll explore in more detail in a future post. The idea here is that when an object breaks some of the social mores preventing communication among strangers, it's easier for people to take that break as an opening for their own socially aberrant behavior. This is why dogs are social objects--they don't understand societal rules against licking strangers. If the exhibit "licks you," then you may feel more comfortable and interested in sharing it with a stranger. In the example of RACE, the very topic opened up a socially locked door, which then gave "permission" for discussion. One of the accidental design elements was an overabundance of audio bleeding into the space from a large number of exhibit videos. The SMM folks found, to their delight, that the buzz from the videos creates a kind of sound landscape of people talking about race. When you hear other voices talking about race, you feel more comfortable joining or starting your own conversations. The sound bleed was a design interloper that changed the rules of engagement with RACE and may have made visitors more comfortable pointing things out to each other.
  

There are drawbacks to designing exhibits that encourage pointing. These design rules aren't for every exhibit. Encouraging "pointiness" can require letting go of design practices that encourage personal ruminating or communing with the exhibit. It doesn't work well when the exhibits involve sequential interactions or prolonged engagement. But it is useful when you want to encourage informal social interactions among visitors. You don't need to start with participatory design shooting for the deep discussion among strangers. Sometimes, all you need is someone to point you in the right direction.

Tools for Talking to Strangers

Rock climbing (safely) is a two-person activity. One person holds the rope, the other ascends the rock. For that reason, going to the climbing gym doesn't just require interest, it requires friends. My climbing gym addresses this obstacle with a wipeboard near the front that reads: “Write your name here if you need a partner.” It’s a very simple nudge towards encouraging users of the gym to meet each other. The gym staff aren’t offering instruction or serving as users’ partners; instead, they facilitate connections among the users.

I got thinking about this the other day with regard to museums. More and more museums are putting resources into floor staff who are trained to connect visitors with content, to serve as interpreters and informal teachers. But I don’t know of any programs or staff whose role is to connect visitors with each other, to instigate discussion among strangers.

And while the barriers that prevent strangers from talking to one another in museums may be high, the potential rewards of such programs are great. Floor staff are limited by time—they can’t possibly interact with all or even most of the people in the museum at any given time. While they can expand and enlighten visitor experiences with content, they also add to the perception that the museum authorities—curators, designers, and now staff—are the ones who dictate what the visitor experience is about.

Programs to encourage visitor-visitor interaction, however, don’t suffer these challenges. If they rely minimally on staff, they can be scalable to all visitors in the museum at a time. And since visitors are speaking to each other, they are less likely to feel that they have to be “right” and may feel more empowered generally to share their comment, critique, and enthusiasm—thus deepening their museum experience. If done right, it can be a financially light way to make visitors feel that the museum is an active, social place.

It’s worth mentioning the obvious: this happens on the web all the time, and if people online are willing to talk about their diseases, fears, and pets, why not in the museum? I’ve written before about ways social networking sites do this; today, some concrete ideas for how museums might as well. How could this happen?

Retrain floor staff to be party hosts. Floor staff already have the onerous task of interpreting whether a visitor is interested in being approached for discussion. It’s not too far a step from that to approaching two visitors, engaging them in discussion, and then walking away. In the same way the staff at my gym are more matchmakers than short-term matches, floor staff can get people together, and then move on.

Use simple low-tech signalers to allow visitors to “opt in” to discussion. This can be a wipeboard at the front—although it’s not entirely practical (or likely) in a winding museum space to have visitors trolling the halls, calling out the names of those listed on the board. One colleague suggested a wipeboard where people can post their cell numbers, and then call each other in the museum (potential privacy risk?). But I think the easiest way is to offer visitors a signaler at the admissions desk. Many museums require visitors to wear stickers or pins in the museum to signal that they have paid. Why not offer a second sticker that says ASK ME WHAT I THINK or WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THIS MUSEUM? Some people might look at it suspiciously, others might slap it on without a thought, and maybe someone will muster the courage to respond.

Make explicit invitations in label copy for multi-person exhibits. At the Exploratorium recently, there were a few “partner” exhibits I wanted to try in the psychology section—but my husband was lost somewhere in physics. Yes, the labels said “You will need a partner for this one.” But it might also be nice if they said, “Find a friend or ask a stranger to help you with this one.” I realize as I write this that I’m advocating for museums to explicitly encourage visitors (and children) to talk to strangers. Frankly, my experience at most children’s museums is that kids are ready to talk to and engage with all kinds of strangers; it’s the adults like me who are afraid to approach others for propriety’s sake. But the point is, if I had a label to point to and say, “Hey, excuse me, would you help me out with this exhibit?” it might help me get over my initial discomfort asking someone else to engage with me.

All of these are no-tech, dirt-cheap, and at least in the case of the stickers and floor staff, could be implemented in an experimental fashion with little planning. What other ideas are out there? When have you seen strangers engaging with each other in museums?

Don't Talk to Strangers? Safety 2.0

When you think of MySpace, what is the first thing that comes to mind? The irritating design? The bizarre obsession with "adding" friends? The recent flurry of restrictions that has sent teens fleeing? Or is it the stalkers? If your exposure is primarily through news media, your initial reaction may have more to do with child predators than long exchanges about boy bands.

What makes Web 2.0 dangerous? Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, even ExhibitFiles are tools that allows people--strangers and friends--to connect with one another. The tools aren't inherently unsafe. But their basic function--encouraging strangers to talk to each other--is potentially dangerous.

A lot of what interests me about bringing 2.0 into the museum is the potential to encourage more positive in-museum interactions among strangers. I want to see more multi-person exhibits, more prompts for discussion about content, more tools to facilitate connecting wtih other visitors whose interests are similar or in some way useful to your own. I want in-person museum experiences to be more like experiences on social sites like Flickr, where strangers connect and form relationships around content.

But are these potential interactions safe? By the standard set by a culture that judges MySpace as dangerous, perhaps these in-person interactions are even MORE dangerous. On MySpace, you are protected somewhat by the fact that you interact via a virtual rather than real identity. You are not physically exposed to harm by others the way you are when you start chatting in the galleries.

Paradoxically, the anonymity of online interactions both protects and exposes people to harm. On the web, you define your persona, which may make you feel empowered both to be more honest (and therefore potentially offer information you would not give a stranger on the street) and to engage in fantasy. The fact that you engage alone in front of your computer makes you feel in control of the situation. When you create a profile on the web, you don't think about the fact that it will be available to everyone and anyone--that you are doing the online equivalent of wearing a sandwich board around town that lists your favorite films and pet peeves.

I think it's a good thing that people, when given a forum online to individually express themselves, seize the opportunity to make their MySpace pages and post pics of their cats on their blogs. I think it's a good thing that librarything gives me a way to talk to strangers about books that feels safer than approaching the drooling guy at the public library. But I don't think it's good when people engage in these activities unwittingly; that is, when they do so without understanding the full implications of their web presence. Being on the web means being tracked, published, and spread around.

When we think of ways to extend the 2.0 social networking model to the real world, the implications of tracking, publishing, and spreading become obvious. Imagine a town where everyone wears a t-shirt that lists their age, sexual orientation, interests, job, etc. Imagine a music store where each CD lists the names of the last 20 people to pick it up, and what those people ultimately bought. It almost seems quaint to imagine that until very recently, library books listed names of actual people who had actually read the book. These could make for a fabulous world in which people express heightened interest in each other, but the immediate reaction is to assume the worst. While our online world has opened up, the physical world, at least in America, is more suspicious, more private, and more protective of personal space than ever.

Even I find myself buying into the paranoia. I talked to a museum education director recently about extending the social networking concept into museum spaces and he suggested that museums put a whiteboard in the lobby on which interested visitors could list their cell phone number for live, in-gallery chats about different parts of the museum. I wanted to cheer, but the first thought in my mind was, "Are you crazy? Use the authority of the museum to facilitate exchange of phone numbers between strangers?" I can just imagine the headline: CHILD MOLESTERS CALL ON ART, VICTIMS.

So how can we take the best of social networking and use it to create safe, welcoming spaces for interaction among strangers in the museum?

1. Structure the space with a clear story (and commensurate rules). Structure means context, and context means norms that people can easily grasp and deal with. "When in Rome" doesn't only apply to traveling--it also can apply to created spaces in a museum in your hometown. Travel is a nice analogy; when people travel abroad, they often strike a different balance of engagement with strangers than they do at home, out of a desire to learn the culture, meet "real" people, etc. The "rules" that define how strangers engage are different everywhere, but consistent in their distinctions. So imagine an exhibit space as a foreign destination. Imagine an exhibition space as a desert island, the visitors its shipwrecked inhabitants. If we can create exhibition spaces with a strong enough internal culture/story/rule set, one that reinforces and supports social, friendly, respectful, positive interactions between strangers, people will buy into those rules, even if they are not typical.

2. Use staff and volunteers as monitors/encouragers/facilitators. Almost all museums already do this, but floor staff are typically trained to monitor and support the ways visitors interact with the artifacts/objects rather than the ways they interact with each other. Children's museums are the exception; staff are on the watch for unaccompanied adults and kids alike. But this isn't just about policing. Many museums do a fabulous job training staff to engage with visitors, but those explainers are not necessarily trained to encourage visitors to talk with one another. Again, these staff are "safe" people who can facilitate a good experience between strangers, using their authority to create a space and a context that allows strangers to connect with one another. Of course, in the same way that floor staff have to balance the value of the content they deliver with the interest of the visitor they are talking to, staff would have to gauge and deal with the initial reservations people have to working with strangers.

3. Give people a clear way to buy in and identify their social interest (or lack thereof). This can be as simple (and potentially problematic) as the whiteboard phone example, can involve signing up in some way, or just entering a specially marked space. All that's required is an explicit way to physically signal that you want to be part of the social experience. We do that with staff all the time. I once worked in a children's museum once where all the floor staff wore blue vests. I remember how strange it felt after work to be in the grocery store or any other public place, say hi to strangers, and realize they were looking at me suspiciously. The vest was a magical piece of clothing that allowed me to engage with strangers, to make jokes and show them cool things and compliment and encourage them. Why should the staff have all the fun in this way? We could offer hats or stickers in the lobby that say "talk to me" or "I want to play."

4. Exclusivity helps. Many social networks that pride themselves on fostering community around specific topics--list-servs, conferences, business sites--are open to anyone. Anyone can go to the birders' conference, but the presumption is that once you're in the door, you're part of an exclusive club of people who want to engage around birding. Is it safer to engage with strangers in this faux-exclusive environment? Maybe not, but it does make people more open to doing so. It's interesting to consider the sliding scale between public spaces (mall, park, library) in which interactions with strangers seem intrusive and atypical, and other, slightly exclusive public spaces (convention, concert) where interactions between strangers are commonplace. What makes it okay to turn to your neighbor at a play to chat about Act 1 but prevents you from doing so at the movies? In most cases, I think museums fall on the side of spaces that do not encourage stranger-to-stranger interactions, even though several of the potential exclusivity gates (specialized content, entry fee) are often in place. How can going to an art museum be more like going to a convention for people who love art?


Social networks are unsafe when they are launched without oversight, facilitation, structure, or community development plans. This is by no means unachievable--museums are already great at providing safe, valuable interactions between people and precious objects. I think we can handle the semi-preciousness--and the potential--of encouraging people to talk to strangers.