ExhibitFiles: Interviews with Initiators Jim Spadaccini and Wendy Pollock

What happens to an exhibit when it closes? The artifacts are reaccessioned, the labels (hopefully) recycled, but what happens to the knowledge? What happens to the surprises designers encountered, the interactive that visitors loved, the bits that never seemed to work quite right?

If we were scientists, we'd have documentation of each experiment, each publishable result, each improved-upon discovery. If we were musicians, we'd have the recordings and the sheet music. But exhibit design is transient and its documentation spotty. We live in a cyclical Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Design. That may be fine for people who want the exercise of reinventing the wheel, but it's a disaster if our goal is to grow and improve what we offer to visitors.

As a poet, I know how a wide range of poets over a few hundred years have influenced my work. I know where to go when I want more data from a particular style or poet. I know that it's not acceptable for me to recreate something that's already been done; I have to do something new. But as an exhibit designer, I'm in the dark. Even if I WANT to learn from the exhibits that have come before and are coming up around the world, there's no obvious place to start studying.

Enter ExhibitFiles. ExhibitFiles is a community-based site launched last month to encourage the documentation, sharing, and exploration of exhibits and the exhibit design process. Last week, I spoke with Jim Spadaccini (Ideum) and Wendy Pollock (ASTC) about their experiences creating this site. I spoke to them on different days, so I've taken some liberty with structure here, but their words are maintained intact.

What was the basis for this project?

Jim: It came out of a book that Kathy Maclean did with Wendy's help, Are We There Yet?, which was a series of case studies about the exhibit design process. There was a need recognized and that need was that exhibits and exhibitions were being redesigned over and over again without that sense of history. The whole process of developing an exhibition tends to get stuck behind a museum's doors. There's no sharing of that information. Well, if we can come up with an open structure where anyone who works at any level of the process could share that process-that would be very unique and add very high value. A community site in its truest sense, where anyone can post a review or case study.


How did this come to be an ASTC (Association of Science and Technology Centers) project?

Wendy: Part of the thinking was that NSF supported the book Are We There Yet?, and they are concerned that they are supporting the development of exhibitions, and once the exhibits travel, the knowledge really disappears. Where do you found out about these things? NSF requires grant applicants to build on prior knowledge--where do you get it?

ASTC's mission is really to help raise the level of the field as a whole. We've published and done professional development in the area of exhibits from the very beginning. And with NSF's support, some of the very first things we did were around people developing traveling exhibits. Everything we've done in the arena of traveling exhibitions has professional development as a key component. I've found that our motivation has always involved improving the field.


So if NSF is funding it, is it only for science exhibitions?

Wendy: Of course, NSF is supporting this, and science exhibitions are the core of what we do, but even before ExhibitFiles, ASTC published in the area of exhibitions generally. Why is that? In the past two decades, science centers have been in the lead in the exhibits arena, and we think we have a lot to share--and learn--with other museums. Then there was the additional realization: if we're going to build a true community on ExhibitFiles, we need to have a critical mass, so we need to open this up to all museum exhibit designers. We see this as part of the network of sites that NSF is funding for informal science education.

We did promise NSF very specifically 40 case studies of exhibitions, and we listed a number of NSF-funded exhibitions that people who are part of our core community group will hopefully write about. By then, I hope we have enough good models and people who want to be a part of this that it will have a life of its own. The way real people work online is much broader. NSF seems to be perfectly happy with that.


I'm very impressed with the design of the site. It's clean, easy to use, and gives feedback quickly. What are the key design elements in your mind?

Jim: It started with the idea of case studies, because that's what the book was about-very detailed, fairly formal case studies. But the chances that you'd go through the book and find an exhibit on the same subject matter you're working on is very rare. But ideally on the site, if it takes off, people could find things in the areas they're interested in. Reviews followed closely after. There are people who have a lot to say about museums around the world--to have some outlet there seemed useful.

The profiles were the last thing added, when we were getting into the nature of the site itself. I'm a big advocate of the profile part, and want to see it used in other ways for members to contact each other.

Wendy: Time is the big barrier for learning. Our design is very consciously deliberate to make it seem easy and quick. So I hope that means people will at least say something.


One of the biggest questions in my mind is about honesty. I love that you include "Lessons learned" and "Mistakes we made" in the case study forms, but I'm not sure if I believe that people will really communicate openly about these things.

Jim: We're hoping that we'll get different points of view on the same projects. We're not under the illusion that some fields like "what went wrong" and "lessons learned" will be places where we get 100% honesty. We know that that's a difficult thing to share. Though to a certain extent, we don't expect all of the conversations to take place here. If I'm developing an exhibition, I may start at ExhibitFiles and then contact the person directly.

There were many discussions about whether this should be an open or a closed community-should we allow the whole world to see what's here, or lock down the whole site? We decided that the openness was more of a benefit than a detriment. People might have felt more comfortable in a closed community, but that privacy is sort of an illusion when you're talking about hundreds of people in your same field.

Authenticity of authorship and ownership is really important. We considered a multi-authoring platform, but in the end we ditched that, thinking that individual authorship, multiple perspectives are better and more sustainable.

Wendy: Part of the basis of trust is the fact that your name and your face is associated with your words. But we have functions so you can send a draft on to others. These forms are very accommodating. It's quite amazing the different perceptions once something is over; everyone's memories are different. It will be really interesting to see how the human side evolves--when you see something you question, do you write a comment, call up the person, or...?

There's an example up there right now about Wild Music, which I posted, and there have been a lot of people involved with this project, and the designers are at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and I talked to them about it, and realized that I hadn't updated the case study to reflect everyone involved. So I keep updating it.


I like the idea that this can be a place both for people who are collaborating and know each other well and for new relationships to form. It would be great to see the co-PIs' names hyperlinked to their own case studies and reviews so everything can connect via the people.

Wendy: I'm not sure whether the system is going to automatically make those connections, but the plan is to link all of this up.

Jim: We are really trying to make this into a strong social site. We looked at LinkedIn as a model. I think a cool thing is that we took a fair amount of push on the personal profiles. Originally we had the ability to go in and add favorites and they get listed on the page; now, you can also go in and add contacts in a del.ici.ous sense. You can also click from people's profiles to send them an email.

The other thing we found early on is that the profiles pop up very high on a google search for a person's name. That's all very deliberate. The pretty URLs we added in the last week should allow the site to do really well.

To a certain extent we don't want to lose sight of the fact that this is primarily about the exhibits and the exhibitions, but we know that the people are important.

Wendy: We were also very concious about not wanting ExhibitFiles to interfere the ASTC/ISEN listserv. The listerv has been out there for over 13 years and it has a certain kind of energy, and it gets its energy partly from its size. And I can already tell that the nature of the discussion has changed in recent times because people are going to other places, other web sources. We don't want to overload by offering duplicate services on ExhibitFiles.

I talked with Kathy Kraft, a fairly frequent participant in the listserv, and she is anticipating that when things come up on the listserv, being able to say, "well, look here on the ExhibitFiles," so it can be complementary.


I'm really excited about the idea that this information will now be captured and available. I'm constantly trying to figure out where the resources are out there to learn from.

Jim: Part of the motivation is that at least in the science center world, you have a generation that were developing exhibits in the 70s and 80s who are retiring. And since that was pre-web, there isn't a home for that information. Going through the old exhibit files at ASTC, the file folders, the idea that those might make their way into here is really exciting.

Wendy: The legacy aspect of it is huge. I do know people--Gretchen Jennings just retired--I think it's very very important that their knowledge doesn't die. We need an archive for exhibitions. And I am personally going out and recruiting people I know who are in that state of their lives. It was only 15 years ago we at ASTC did a global warming exhibition. And younger people have no clue. And frankly we have a responsibility to the funders too to make sure we're not going over the same ground over and over again, that we are learning something.


Ready to learn something? Sign up, browse, and contribute. Still wondering how useful it can be? I challenge you to model the kind of content you'd like to see. Write something honest, something surprising, and share some information that otherwise will be lost to the exhibit design ether.

Game Friday: Lessons in Environmental Storytelling from an Imagineer

There's a game design source I used extensively at the beginning of development for Operation Spy: Gamasutra. If anyone out there is considering creating an industry catch-all site for museum-related content, I highly recommend Gamasutra as a model. It combines a job bank with news about developments in the gaming world and, my favorite, an impressive collection of feature articles on the art, business, and production of games.

Two of the articles that most influenced me were written by Don Carson, Disney imagineer turned video game designer, about "environmental storytelling." (You may need to create a free Gamasutra account to read part 1 and part 2.) The first one opens with these comments:

If I have an all encompassing desire for any computer game I play or themed attraction I visit, it is this:

Take me to a place that:

• Lets me go somewhere I could never go.
• Lets me be someone I could never be.
• Lets me do things I could never do!

When I read this list, my mind leaps to fantasy. The “imagined world” Carson talks about can be highly themed (as at Disneyland) or abstract and minimal (as in board games). In both cases, there is a strong unifying theme that orients and surrounds the user. But it’s not just the immersion that makes the experience entertaining and compelling to users; it’s the roles and actions the users get to take.

When you play a good game, you don’t think of yourself as a player manipulating objects. You aren’t moving Pacman around; you are Pacman. You aren’t telling Link where to go; you are Link. You aren’t on a rollercoaster that is themed to look like a Wild West train ride; you are on a Wild West train ride that happens to be implemented as a rollercoaster.

Can museums afford to indulge in this kind of fantasy? The Spy Museum has been both lauded and criticized for “Disneyfying” the museum experience by designing in a hefty dose of narrative, themed immersion. The unifying story is espionage, and the game-like question: “Do you have what it takes to be a spy?” is explicitly posed to the guests at the beginning of the experience. One of the things I think guests enjoy about the Spy Museum is this invitation to play spy, to get a taste of seeing/being/doing something fantastical.

Getting people to play scientist or art historian may be a tougher sell than getting them to play James Bond. But incorporating good environmental storytelling techniques from the game world doesn't mean you have to put on mouse ears (or a trenchcoat). What makes a great immersive experience? Here are some lessons I've learned from Carson...

Orient People to the Unifying Story or Theme. Hanging a sign that says JUNGLE LAND is not enough to sell people on the idea that they are entering a jungle. Carson argues that environments have to answer two user questions immediately: “Where am I?” and “What is my relationship to this place?” If a person can confidently answer both these questions, he or she is ready and open to experience the environment without constantly wondering how they are supposed to feel or what they are supposed to do.

The answers to these two questions define what Carson calls the "story" of the experience. This story doesn't have to be a narrative he said she said; it can be as simple as "we are monkeys swinging through the jungle" or "I am Pacman. I eat dots and avoid monsters." Little kids are excellent at coming up with these kinds of open-ended, non-linear story spaces ("I'm the teacher, you're the student," "we're in the circus," etc.) that combine strict rules with a wide range of possible actions.

It drives me nuts when I’m in a museum that has made a half-hearted attempt to thematically connected galleries or exhibits. If a museum makes a choice (as many science and some art museums have) to disaggregate and somewhat randomly (from a guest perspective) distribute exhibits, okay. When I’m in MOMA, at least I know that as I go from room to room of the main collection, I’m not “missing” any particular era, genre, or artist. In my head, I say, “I am in a museum. My job is to float around and experience things.”

But when a museum exhibition makes a weak or partial attempt at aggregation, I start to get confused. Where am I? Am I in the red wing or the blue wing? The Human Cell or The Beginning of Life? Did I miss a period in history by skipping a room or did the exhibition just gloss over that decade?

Similarly, exhibitions that are unclear about my relationship to the space are confusing. Am I supposed to look respectfully or explore exuberantly? Can I touch? Am I supposed to do something? Confusion over the “rules” of visitor relationship to museum content has led me to have many humorous experiences with museum guards. In most situations, I didn’t willfully “cross the line” of museum acceptability; I just had no idea where that line was. I want a little kid's designation: this is a bunch of art you can touch. This is a human heart you can explore like a little red blood cell. Which leads to the second requirement...

Reinforce and Uphold the Story and "Rules" of the Environment. Obviously it’s much easier to answer these questions about place and role when you are playing within the “rules” of a game or ride. When you are strapped into a roller coaster car, you are fairly confident of your role and relationship to the space. When you play chess, you have a good idea about what’s acceptable and what’s possible.

We usually think of rules as confining the realm of possibility, but Carson argues that strong structure and adherence to rules enhances guest comfort to "play" within the imagined environment. As he puts it:

Most important of all is once you have created this story, or the rules by which your imagined universe exists, you do not break them! These rules can be broad, but if they are broken your visitors will feel cheated. They will be slapped in the face with the contradiction and never again allow themselves to be as lost in your world as they might have been at the onset.

Many exhibit designers are already familiar with situations in which rules work in our favor. Keeping exhibit labels consistent throughout a gallery supports visitor expectations about the type of information to be found on those labels. Consistent light levels, spacing of artifacts or exhibits, size of exhibitions, can all contribute to visitor comfort and familiarity.

But games don't try to make you comfortable in a baseline situation; they try to make you comfortable in a typically uncomfortable situation. Dance Dance Revolution is a fabulous example of this. Would you dance in front of strangers in a public space? Couching that experience within the rules and construct of a game system turns wallflowers toward boogie fever.

Some of my favorite museums and museum exhibitions take serious risks with their basic story but do a fabulous job of reinforcing that story and using it to encourage visitors to test out new, potentially uncomfortable experiences. The Museum of Jurassic Technology combines puzzling content, low light levels, winding passageways, and mysterious labels to create an environment of ambiguity that supports curiousity tinged with apprehension. The City Museum of St. Louis throws open every nook and cranny to be crawled through and explored. The Holocaust Museum immerses you in a dangerous history and uses the design to reinforce the threat and horror of the situation.

When experimenting with these kinds of immersive stories, it's important to think about the limitations and opportunities of different presententation media. For that reason, it's worth remembering to...


Design for believable interactions within the context of the story. In his second article, Carson comments on the paradoxical fact that we will accept a wide range of "leaps"--of plot, location, and time--in stories when we passively receive them (books, film, plays) but not when we experience them as active agents. He gives the example of the problem of reoccuring characters. In a movie or play, we expect to see the same character again and again, in different locations, at different ages. But if there's a Rocky the Raccoon graphic that welcomes you to the tree exhibit, and other graphics throughout the exhibit feature Rocky, you don't think it's the same character moving through the exhibit with you. You think there are lots of copies of that same graphic.

In museums, more broadly, there's a problem with the way we often characterize visitor roles when we invite people to "play." There are many interactives of the "YOU BE THE X" type, in which visitors are invited to play art critic, historian, or scientist. But often these feel contrived. From a museum perspective, the general consensus is that they seem contrived because they are not the "real" thing. But from a game design perspective, they aren't contrived because we can't perfectly simulate reality; they are contrived because we don't couch them in the context of a strong, structured story or rule set. The rule set doesn't have to be complex. When you play the board game Operation, you feel like a surgeon--in the context of the rules for being a surgeon (i.e. don't touch the borders) the game creates.

In support of making it "as real as possible," museums often have a tough time setting up legitimate rule sets and accompanying stories. When designing Operation Spy, we constantly slammed up against this problem: how do you let an untrained visitor feel what it's like to be an expert at something? If cracking a safe, unearthing a fossil, or tracing genealogy is incredibly complicated, how do we let people try it without them feeling like what they are doing is fake?


I'd like to see more museum exhibitions that satisfy Carson's three desires to go, be, and do things that are outside the realm of normal or even physically possible experiences. Museum exhibits allow you to explore the inside of human cells, the extremes of space, the deep past and the possible future. But there's a big difference between experiencing these wild and unusual things through fantasy games and through exhibited reportage. I believe that experiencing content as an active agent, as a player, makes the experience clearer, more personally connective, entertaining, and, dare I say, educational.

Museum 2.0 Turns 1/2!

Well, folks, we've reached that point. Museum 2.0 was launched on November 2, 2006, after a rousing experience at ASTC when the words "wiki" and "2.0" were tossed around more often than free pens and chocolate.

I've been tracking the blog with Google Analytics for the past five months, and it's had 5,062 total visitors, 8,337 total pageviews, and 3,236 unique visitors. This blog has been linked to 94 times by 58 blogs.

The top posts by viewing are: Why You Should Use Flickr, What is Twitter, Really?, Hierarchy of Social Participation, and Institutional Blogs: Different Voices, Different Views

The top posts by comments are: Warning: Graduate School Spawns Legions of Zombies!, Best Practices in Innovation from the Tech World, and What's My Score?: Gaming in Museums

And a few of my favorites you might have missed are: Better by the Dozen? Exhibits that Require Multiple People, Mapping Experiences: Rethinking Wayfinding in Museums, Issues Exhibitions: Questions as a Basis for Design, and Professional Associations that Don't Suck

I think it's interesting that the most viewed (and linked) posts are about technology, but the most commented-upon posts are about the museum field. My guess is that reflects the difference between some of the gamer/tech users of this blog, who are probably using a high volume of blogs regularly, and the museum folks, who are most passionate about things that affect their own lives and work. I'm not planning to take the blog down a more tech path to attract more readers; I'm most interested in supporting a core community of museum designers and innovators.

Towards that end, some planned additions in the near future include a regular series on projects that display innovation in museums, guest posts from professionals, experts, and visionaries, and opportunities for blog users to collaborate on user-generated content projects. As some of you know, I am leaving the Spy Museum in the beginning of June and am looking forward to taking myself and Museum 2.0 on some wild adventures from coast to coast.

But today we're talking what's already happened. Please help me celebrate these past six months. If you enjoy this blog, consider recommending it to a friend or colleague. Click through the tag cloud and find a post you might have missed. If there is any content or features you'd like to see more (or less) of, leave a comment. This has been a great learning and relationship-building experience for me; I hope it has been positive for you, too.

Backwards Interview: My Advice for Incorporation of Web 2.0 into Museums

Most of the time this blog focuses on individual aspects of 2.0 thinking or applications. But every once in a while, it's nice to go back to the big picture. James Yasko is writing an article for an upcoming issue of Museum News on museums and Web 2.0. He got in touch with me last week to discuss some ideas for the article and asked me to respond to a few questions. One of these was a general question that I thought might be of interest to you.


Here's the question:
What advice do you have, as one who keeps up with technology as it relates to museums, to a group looking to incorporate Web 2.0 into their repertoire?

And my response...

1. Set your high-concept goals and find a Web 2.0 technique/application that will fit those goals. Are you trying to establish yourself as an up-to-the-minute news source on topics related to your museum’s content? Blog. Do you want to offer audio or video programming to an international audience for free? Pod or Vodcast. Do you want to become a community nexus? Start working the social network sites. Do you want visitors to contribute to the classification and presentation of your artifacts? Start thinking about tagging and folksonomies.

It’s not acceptable to say “we want to do it all.” If you had one youth educator, would you expect them to develop and run overnights AND scout programs AND teen programs AND toddler programs AND outreach AND… of course not. You would set a strategy that best serves the mission of the institution.

2. Start conservative and build from there. There’s a term in podcasting, “podfading,” that describes podcasts that are launched with vigor but fade into non-existence as its producers become overwhelmed or lose interest. Blogfading is rampant as well; casual clicking on museumblogs.org reveals more than a few blogs that have dropped off the face of the internet (and according to Technorati, there are over 1 million blogs that exist only long enough to sustain a single post). While this trend might be acceptable (though annoying) when the blogs are personal, it's unprofessional--and unacceptable--when the blogs are institutional. Museums need to develop sustainable models for projects that require frequent content updates.

How can you avoid getting burned in this way? Some museums start with internal projects (blogs, wikis, tagging experiments) that are then released to the public once the kinks have been worked out and the quality level is adequate. Others set the bar low by being clear from the start about the frequency of content. At the Spy Museum, for example, we launched podcasting in the fall and committed to monthly half-hour episodes. The production value is high, the content is enjoyed by thousands of listeners, and the work required to produce each episode is manageable. You can always be a hero by increasing the frequency of your content later; it doesn’t work so smoothly the other way around.

3. Get all the departments on-board. Executive, marketing, content, and IT/web folks all have a stake in these projects. While the driving force (and the bulk of the work) may fall on one team, everyone’s concerns and needs have to be addressed. Who will be impacted resource-wise? How will the endeavor reflect on the museum’s brand image?

Web 2.0 projects can also be a great way to connect staff across the institution and empower people in non-creative positions to contribute content. At my museum, our COO often talks about how different museum projects fill three “buckets”—staff, visitors, and financials. While there’s a lot of focus in most museums on financial and visitor success, I think there’s room for improvement in terms of educating and supporting staff. You don’t have to be a curator or a marketing person to be involved in your museum’s blog or social network. And the more people get involved, the more diverse voices are reflected and the more staff feel connected to and empowered by the institution.

4. Keep statistics. Once you are rolling with a project, set metrics for success and keep everyone apprised of the impact the project is having on the institution in general. Has your tagging system increased overall google hits for the museum? Do your MySpace friends come to museum programs? Keep the overall museum mission in mind and report on the ways your Web 2.0 activities support that mission.

5. Be flexible and open to irreverence. Web 2.0 encourages non-authorities to participate in content creation and interpretation. For museums, this means we cannot continue to be stingy with the stories in our galleries, to hold interpretation of objects and history in a clenched fist. A good way to test your personal comfort with this openness is to start by encouraging irreverence in yourselves. How does your institution react to forum-style programming, risqué marketing tactics, or opening exhibits in prototype? How tightly held is messaging about the museum and its content?

6. Don’t wuss out. Many museums are using Web 2.0 in a very cursory way as another distribution pipeline for the same messages and content presented throughout the institution. While you may get some buzz just for using the technology platforms, the real power comes when you use Web 2.0 to offer programs and opportunities that are new to the museum. This can mean presenting new content rapidly, without going through the long exhibit or program development and implementation cycles. It can mean supporting staff and visitor opinions about the museum. It can mean encouraging social participation with other museum supporters. It can mean using visitor content and comments to adapt and grow the core museum content.

We’ve known for a long time that visitors define their own museum experiences. There’s a lot of fear around that reality. Web 2.0 sites take the radical stance that it is DESIRABLE to have users define not just their own experience but everyone’s experience. Can you grin and bear it?

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What am I missing here? What advice would you give? What kind of advice are you looking for?

Game Friday: Games for Lurkers

fresh+new has had a couple great posts recently about the primacy of lurkers on web 2.0 sites. Seb Chan ended one with this comment:

One user contribution should spark the interest of one thousand lurkers, rather than requiring one thousand contributions from other users.

In the spirit of this sentiment, this week we look at games for lurkers, that is, games people watch. Games people watch? Isn’t the point to play games? Why would I want to watch you pass Go? I’d guess, in this country at least, more people watch games than play them. The majority of people who participate in football, golf and poker do it through their TVs, not on the field/table/course. The audience for games is gigantic, and sports fans are some of the most obsessed, energized, and involved lurkers on the planet. In museums, we always assume that everyone wants to get their hands dirty and “do it.” But are there ways to create games in museums that are as exciting to watch as they are to play? What distinguishes games people watch from those they play?

People watch games that have high stakes. Whether it’s soccer or Survivor, games on TV are more intense than games at home. What makes them more intense? It can be the expertise of the players (sports), the shame of failure (reality games), or the extremity of success (game shows).

I was in a bar recently and found myself captivated by “Deal or No Deal,” a show that features the simplest game in the world: a contestant opens suitcases with dollar amounts (up to $1M) behind them. She decides whether to stop or continue. That’s it! That’s the whole game! But the combination of the pressure on the contestant, the personality of the host, and the dollars involved make it an enthralling half hour.

In museums, we’re not going to hand out thousands of dollars or vote people off the island. And the higher the stakes, the fewer qualified contestants exist (qualified either in expertise or fearlessness). But most game-like interactives in museums have NO stakes. I think there could be ways to humorously (and publicly) share the outcome of these activities with others. Even just putting the players in a position where an audience is possible ups the stakes of the game and makes for a more exciting experience for all involved.

People watch games when they can emotionally connect to the players. At first, I thought that people mostly want to watch experts play games. Watching professional sports games is primarily about enjoying the participants’ level of mastery, watching experts play the game “as it should be played.” No one turns out to watch little league for love of the game; they do it for love of their (non-expert) kids.

But you don’t need experts to put on a great show. People still obsess about those little league games. And game shows and reality TV are all about the enjoyment found in watching non-experts compete. Even when the contestants are experts in another way, they are made fools of on Dancing with the Stars, Not My Job, etc. The key isn’t the expertise of the players; it’s the potential for us to feel emotionally connected to them. That’s why people root for the home team, obsess over player’s personalities, and swell with pride over our kids’ on-base hits.

How can museums tap into this cult of personality and emotional connection? We can start with pre-existing connections among visitors, developing interactives and games in which cheering and support for the player are encouraged. And in situations where the visitors are watching others “play”—whether in debate, museum theater, or otherwise—we can play up the character of the players. Most museum “players” are presented in a pretty objective light. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little more WWE-style energy and playfulness in the characterization of Sam the Energy Saving Squirrel and his compatriots.

People watch games that are made to be watched. This may sound obvious, but there are specific tricks that make games “watchable.” Poker is a great example. It’s usually an intimate game, and on the casino floor it would be extremely bizarre—not to mention dangerous to one’s personal health—to stalk around the players, scrutinizing their cards and facial expressions. But televised poker lets you do just that, and get inside a highly psychological game.

One of the best museum applications of this concept is quite a simple one. In the Connections exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, there’s an arm wrestling interactive in which you can arm wrestle with someone at another museum via a network and robotic sensing arms. You grab the robo-arm, and at the count of three, you face off against the remote person and their own robo-arm. There’s video of the other person so you can watch them struggle as they watch you struggle.

I had a fabulous time watching kids use this interactive. The Hall has two of these kiosks, so for the most part, kids were getting linked up to play against someone just ten feet from them. But watching them struggle and watch each other—both via video and by turning around, was hilarious and exciting. They were putting their all into it, and we were all having fun.

People watch games that acknowledge the lurkers’ presence and importance. Ask a fan at a soccer game if their cheering “matters” to the game. They may shrug sheepishly, but deep down, we feel like contributors—even if all we are doing is watching someone else play. Professional athletes acknowledge their fans. Game show hosts turn to the audience. I think it’s fascinating that so many reality games are now going beyond acknowledgement to incorporate at-home audiences in voting for players and determining the course of the game itself. The line between player and lurker gets hazy, and everyone gets more into the experience.

People watch games they get to play, too. There are so many museum interactives that you approach alone and use alone. If you wait to use them, you wait “in the dark”—without much understanding of what the game/activity is that you are waiting for. I love seeing popular interactives that allow for active watching by people who are waiting in line. It’s a good time to formulate strategies and get psyched up for your “at bat.”

This showcasing of the activity also encourages greater participation. If you approach an apparatus no one is using, you might be uncertain as to how fun or interesting or challenging it will be. But if you get to watch people use it beforehand, you may overcome personal barriers of comfort or readiness and jump in, too. This is what makes social games like charades and truth or dare enjoyable. You watch, you laugh, and then you step up to the plate too.

People watch games that are beautiful and awe-inspiring. This can be pro scrabble players putting down their bingos, wheelchair basketball, or computers playing chess. Games are about conflict and goal-seeking. Both of these are classic themes that we are drawn to in story and reflect our basic human questions and desires. When we can take real issues in the world and couch them gracefully in the guise of a game, they become understandable, emotional, and deeply compelling. They become something worth watching.

Warning: Museum Graduate Programs Spawn Legions of Zombies!

Okay, they don't eat people's brains. Heck, many of them are intelligent, sincere, interesting people. But someone needs to raise the red flag before it takes an MA to work the register at the admissions desk.

Summer's coming to D.C., and with it flocks of museum studies / education / exhibit planning graduate interns. I’m always curious when I meet these folks, who are about my age, choosing a different entry path into the museum world. The value proposition of museum grad programs is cloudy in my mind. Is it a credential that serves as a gateway to better jobs? Is it an education that would make me a better person?

Sure, it’s great to learn museum theory and history. But I have some big concerns about museums studies programs, namely:

Standardizing the field limits the potential for radical change. I confess I often feel this way about school in general. One of the reasons I fell in love with museums is because they support learning that is distinctly un-school-like. So I see these programs as a threat, an encroachment of schoolishness on the willfully unschooled. Following a standardized curriculum to prepare for work in the museum field homogenizes the perspectives and skills people bring to museum jobs. I think one of the things that keep museums fresh, welcoming, and non-didactic is the fact that most exhibit designers, museum educators, and conservators come from a variety of backgrounds. You were a carpenter. I was an engineer. She was a ceramicist. He wrote poetry. Sure, we may have some communication trouble getting on the same page. But that’s worth it for the wealth of different experiences we bring to the table.

And by presenting the "right way" to do things, graduate school defines and judges other options as sub-optimal. Young people who walk into class with wild ideas may walk out (and into jobs) with the perception that those unique ideas are inappropriate or impractical. But those are the ideas we need to grow. Museum people aren’t mathematicians; our work can’t be traced to an immutable set of laws. The more we teach and judge based on laws, the less students and graduates will try to break them.

But this isn't just about my personal bias against school learnin'. I support pedantic educational models when goals and outcomes are clear. But no one can list the tangible skills these programs impart. When I ask alumni about the value of museum education/studies programs, they often say, “It was a good experience. But I wouldn’t recommend it for you.” This may sound reasonable; any life choice is a personal decision. But why isn't it right for me? Because I already have those skills? Because I'm already on the way? If I've learned in a few years of experience and reading--for free--what I would have learned in graduate school, why bother?

Other graduate programs develop hard skills. Last year, my museum was a “client” for an MIT product design grad course (in mechanical engineering). The students designed and fabricated prototype pieces of an upcoming exhibition. None of these students had backgrounds in educational theory or museum studies. And yet if given the choice to have one of them as an intern or a museum studies student, I’d choose a mechanical engineer in a second. All of those students had real skills—in building and design—to bring to the drafting table.

If the programs aren't about skills, are they a professional gateway? Not in my anecdotal experience. The credential is a crapshoot. I used to work at a children’s museum with another young woman who had a graduate degree in museum education. We cut the same construction paper. We taught the same programs. The only benefit her degree got her was 25 cents more per hour. I don’t think this is an unusual circumstance—most of the museum grad students I know have the same struggle as non-grad students to find museum jobs, made worse by hefty student loans. Worse, graduate school provides a sumptuous taste of exciting museum work via substantive intern projects which makes sinking into mundane entry-level jobs disappointing. At least I knew I wasn’t using a graduate degree to cut construction paper, that I was paying my dues without also paying thousands in loans. The grad students I know who have successfully transitioned from school to job did so because of connections they made in the program—connections they could have made on the job or at conferences. Why pay for an internship when you could offer yourself to a museum for free?

The graduate programs don't just offer false promises to students. The semblance of a credential creates a red herring that employers latch onto. Over the last 10 years, “graduate degree in museum X” has snuck into many listings for entry level museum jobs. Have these jobs changed such that a graduate degree is now a necessary prerequisite?

I asked my boss about this. She’s a graduate of a museum education program, and she originally hired me for a job that listed museum graduate degree as a prerequisite. She reflected and said that she would always prefer someone with interesting, diverse real-world experience over someone who just has a graduate degree. And yet, she admitted that seeing that MA on the resume imparts a certain comfort, a known quantity, that appeals to her. But how many interesting, diverse people like me would have turned away from that job listing because of a lack of the credential? How many resumes would she examine less closely due to lack of the MA? For her at least, the degree is a crutch that makes it easy for her to not seek out the best person for a job—which creates a lose-lose for the institution and for that best person, wherever he or she might be.


This is not to say that I don’t think education and learning is essential for our field. If anything, I support MORE educational opportunities in museums. But should they happen in a classroom? And is graduate school the best entry path for people new to the field? I want the head honchos of the museum world to spend some energy enabling apprenticeships, internships, and experimental projects, so that young people can learn real skills in the open, creative environments that museums can and should be. I want to see more graduate programs (and less formal opportunities) like Bank Street's Leadership program, which is for working, mid-career educators to collaborate and learn in a high-quality, focused environment. I want access and discussion around conference sessions, journal articles, exhibit critiques, and workshops.

When it comes to museum education, we need to stop grading and start enabling. “No one ever fails a museum.” But did they get an A in the class where they first learned that?

Best Practices in Innovation from the Tech World

Last Friday, I had a discussion with Chris Catanese from the Museum of American Finance about things museum can learn from the technology (and web 2.0) world. We didn't dwell on twitter and high-speed gadgets; instead, we focused on lessons from the business side of the technology field.

On the face of it, museums are a lot more like banks than they are like dot coms. The corporate mentality is low-risk, averse to endeavors that don’t obviously support the museum’s mission statement or bottom line. And while we’ve all heard the horror stories of the excess at dot coms circa 1998, when each employee was given their own alpha-wave measuring espresso-maker, there are also the successes—the Googles and Squid Labs and iRobots—that are pioneering not only new products, but new ways to do business as well.

Here are some corporate practices I’d love to see us steal from the conference rooms of Menlo Park:

Making Time for Innovation

There’s a catch-22 about innovation: everyone wants wild and wonderful ideas, but no one wants to invest the time and space (and bad ideas) it takes for those gems to arise. In most businesses, including most museums, the corporate culture values “doing your job” to the exclusion of other endeavors that might create a huge hit for the business and the bottom line. But many technology companies don’t work that way. Google is the gold standard, encouraging each employee to spend 20% of their time (one day a week) on projects of their own devising. I’ve heard about another employer—a hotel—that offered $1000 to employees to use on self-determined projects to improve the guest experience. These initiatives are not instituted by companies to make their employees feel good (only). These companies recognize that innovation requires time and resources and that the potential reward of offering those resources is worth the risk.

Three years ago, at ASTC, I took part in the RIG (rapid idea generation) session offered by Julie Bowen and others from the Ontario Science Centre. It was an energizing three-hour activity, one that their staff uses several times a month for cross-company brainstorming. At the end of the session, Julie asked us, “how many of you see this as viable in your institution?” We all desperately wanted it to be viable and yet knew that the cultural obstacles at most museums would be insurmountable. The immediate reaction to these kinds of initiatives is fear—that people won’t do their jobs, that they’ll be wasting company time—but it’s my guess that people who have this opportunity become more passionate about their jobs, more aware of the broader goals and interests of their company, and feel more valued and respected by their employer (and therefore more likely to stick around). Those are “soft” gains, but there are hard gains too—the one in a hundred idea that turns into a hit.

Incorporating support for innovation into museum corporate culture isn’t just about people sitting in rooms dreaming of the next Bodyworlds. As much as possible, it should be about encouraging people to do—to try a program for seniors, to host a MySpace page, to build a cart activity and get it out on the floor. That way, staff are learning, stretching, and feeling supported in taking risks (which will make them more willing to take the risks that lead to the great ideas). Which leads to…

Releasing Products in Beta

Beta’s been getting more action than all the other greek letters put together these days. When I started using flickr, librarything, and grand central they were all in beta. Heck, two of them still are in beta. This isn’t a testament to my 2.0-savviness; it’s indicative of those businesses’ mentality towards finished products. When it comes to products that are user-centric (as museum products should be!), the companies that develop the products realize that they need users—not just testers, but bona fide users—to finish the job and help them determine what the final functionality of the product will be. In museums, we often talk about the fact that “visitors make their own experiences,” and yet it’s a fact we swallow begrudgingly, like pills that are too big. Instead of fighting their users for control, web 2.0 businesses court users and cross their fingers that the users WILL create their own experiences. It’s much easier to succeed by providing features that people are clamoring for than by guessing what they might appreciate.

It’s understandable that museums are uncomfortable potentially tarnishing their brand with unfinished products. But going beta, at least in part, keeps things fresh and promotes a culture of energy and action. There are some museums, like the Exploratorium, which have made “beta release” a central part of their brand image. ALWAYS IN BETA doesn’t mean stopping design when it gets too hard. It means never finishing the design process, never letting exhibits turn from active elements to dust-collectors. It means legitimately involving evaluators and educators in the design process, working with users and exhibit builders to refine the final product. Which relates to…

Staff Team Mash-ups

There are some museums so large that they resemble military encampments, each department a fortress with its own culture and governance. I often meet people from big museums who talk about staff from other departments as if they were rare birds sighted once a decade.

This is a frequent but accepted by-product of large institutions of all kinds. You start out as a small group working together in one room, development sitting next to exhibits sitting next to security. But eventually everyone has their offices and staff and walls—literal and figurative—start to harden.

Is there another way? Some media and technology companies are experimenting with new ways to put teams together for projects, trying to integrate people with different talents and experience more flexibly. Sure, there’s a logistical challenge: who’s your boss if you float from project to project with different managers? Where do you sit? Introducing ambiguity in the answers to some of these questions may be a good thing if it reduces factionalism. There was an exhibit at MOMA on the new CCTV building in Beijing that included a demonstration of the projected daily paths of different kinds of employees through the building. The design intentionally supports overlap and mixing, even though that means lots of walking (and presumably, incidental interactions with others).

There are some gentler ways to start down this path. At my museum, every department head has to work one weekend day per month on the floor. Some museums offer brown bag lunches or informal presentations by staff on projects that not everyone is aware of. Prioritizing inter-team relationships can increase effectiveness and individual connection to the company. Which brings us to…

Making Company Culture part of the Brand

The points above are all about actions that tangentially relate to company or museum brand. One of the most striking things about technology companies—and this has now had impact across American business—is the extent to which company culture often IS the brand. Google’s motto isn’t “bringing search to you.” It’s “don’t be evil.” It’s hard for me to separate IDEO from their (literally branded) creative process, or Make magazine from its DIY ethic.

The first piece of this is having and supporting a strong, energized, positive company culture. But the second part is encouraging staff—and visitors—to evangelize. There are some technology companies that have a full-time employee, high up in the corporate team, with a strange title: EVANGELIST. I remember the first time I met someone who said he was an evangelist. I told him I was Jewish. I’m not sure how useful such a person would be for museums, which are more about long-term sustainability than fueling the hype fire, but encouraging staff to blog, to speak at conferences, to grow and spread the museum word, is good for buzz and long-term image.

The great thing about all of these points is that the companies that are most aggressively pursuing them are successful for-profit businesses. The for-profit world is famous for being more bottom-line oriented and less staff development focused than the non-profit world. But now, there are for-profits that are outclassing museums with respect to innovation, and making money at the same time. Why WOULDN’T museums want to get on the trampoline and see what happens?

Where's My Comment? Differences Between Visitor-Generated Exhibitions and Discussions

I was talking recently to David Klevan, Education Manager for Technology and Distance Learning Initiatives at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (say that three times fast), about some of their awesome experiments with online discussion groups, blogs, and 2.0 content. David steered me to their most popular discussion board, on which visitors are prompted to share their memories of reading the diary of Anne Frank. Specifically, the page says:

Share Your Thoughts: Do you remember the first time you read the Diary of Anne Frank? Please share your memories of reading that book, and its impact on you. Did the information in this Web site surprise you or change your view of Anne?

In a six month period ending last month, 655 comments were submitted to this board. (For comparison, the most commented-upon museum blog, Botany Photo of the Day (according to Jim Spadaccini and Seb Chan’s recent report) received 128 comments in a one month period.) The comments largely address Anne's courage and talent and the comments have a theme—heartfelt, inspired, and personal.

But not all of the Anne Frank visitor comments make it onto the site. Of the 655 submitted over six months, only 151 were approved for display.

When I asked about the content of the rejected comments, I was surprised to hear that it was neither spam nor hate speech that kept comments off the site; it was redundancy and lack of quality. Apparently, a lot of people submit one-line comments like, “I love Anne Frank,” and those comments don’t add a lot to the conversation.

Or do they? Go onto a MySpace page and check out the postings in the “Friends Comments” section at bottom right. Many are redundant, short, and silly. But when you post a comment on MySpace, you know that your comment will appear (unless the maintainer of that page finds it offensive). You get an instant reward for participating—momentary stardom. You are motivated to write more comments because of your success at “joining the conversation” this time—even if your contribution was insignificant, it gets as much space as anyone else’s.

This isn’t a web-only phenomenon. Go downstairs and flip through the comment book at your museum’s front desk. How many comments just say, “I love this museum!” or “Johnny So-and-So is a loser!”? It would be absurd to imagine a comment book that required you to submit your comment for approval before it showed up in the book. Why do we do this on the web?

Because we can. And there are some potentially good reasons for it. The facilitator of the Anne Frank board isn’t doing anything inappropriate; he or she has made a personal decision to curate the comments, to sculpt a visitor-generated exhibition, rather than open a forum for occasionally inane and redundant commentary. But the fact that this curatorial decision isn’t immediately apparent to commenters is a problem. The visitor starts to wonder what’s going on: Why didn’t my comment get published? Did we have technical difficulties? Do they not like my comment? The lack of instant gratification translates, in the visitor’s eyes, to a lack of respect for his or her contribution, and the visitor is disincentivized from commenting again. What’s the point?

What appeared at first to be an open opportunity to join a conversation turns out to be something else entirely. If the text at the top was clear and said, “Contribute to this online exhibition of peoples’ reactions to Anne Frank’s diary,” visitors might understand that there are criteria for inclusion that their comments may or may not meet. There have been many exhibitions that employ such methods, soliciting stories and artifacts from visitors under the clear understanding that some, but not all, will be incorporated into exhibition.

Museums need to determine what role they want to play—that of MySpace and comment books, which tolerate inconsistent quality in exchange for maximal participation, or that of the Anne Frank board, which restricts participation in exchange for substantive content. And once decided, the museum needs to communicate whether visitors are contributing to an exhibition (which makes editing understandable) or participating in a conversation (which makes openness paramount).

Or would you prefer a hybrid model? Again, head into the museum galleries. There are many exhibitions that feature “talk-back walls” on which visitors can voice their impressions of the exhibition or answer questions. At the moment that you are a contributor, you know your comment is going up on the board immediately. There’s no one moderating the discussion real-time and every comment is included. But there’s not necessarily an expectation that your comment will stay up on the board for all time. As a lurker, when you walk up and look at the comments, you expect that you are looking at comments which are either very recent OR have been chosen by the curators as notable in some way. Sometimes, these “notable comments” are explicitly featured in some portion of the exhibition. This way, visitors can have open discussion real-time AND curators can choose which of those discussions to highlight and which to weed out later.

In each situation in which you solicit visitor content, ask yourself: What do you value more, giving everyone a voice or sculpting a high quality experience from their contributions? How can you make your choice clear to the visitors? And, whenever possible, how can you design for the AND instead of the OR?

Tell me a Story: Narrated Online Collections with VoiceThread

I try not to focus too heavily on web tools on this blog, but this application is too lovely to pass up. It's called VoiceThread, and it's a program that allows you to create an elegant slideshow of images with audio (and text, and scribbles) to go along. You can use it to create your own narrative experience, and you can also allow other users to comment on and add their own commentary to the images.

A quick browse reveals people who are using VoiceThread to:

• invite kids to share stories of life as refugees
• create collaborative student projects
• run bizarre and wonderful love advice call-in shows
• layer family photo collections with oral histories and commentaries

And you could easily use it to:

• create how-to or "making of" presentations on any museum content or exhibit
• integrate artists'/experts' commentary into online exhibitions
  
• encourage visitors to add their own voices and stories to museum-based images
• allow visitors to curate their own collections of museum- or user-generated images
  

If you drool over fancy Flash interfaces for online collections, quit mooning around the IT department and head over to VoiceThread. They are committed to making this technology accessible (and free!) to educators permanently... there may be some great opportunities for collaboration for museums, too.

What is Twitter, Really? And Can it Do Anything for Museums?

There’s a new 2.0 drug that’s caught on hot and heavy in the last six months: twitter. If you’ve never seen twitter, take a moment and check it out. There's the basic site. There's twittervision, twitter's most popular mashup, which shows tweets (twitter entries) real-time on a global map. And many more mashups and applications available here.

And now, the first question in everyone's head: why the heck would I EVER want to follow this 140-character tripe? There are plenty of people on the "these ADD boneheads have finally gone too far" bandwagon (see this representative sample from USA Today), as well as some legitimate concerns about how twitter is the ultimate example of the way that 2.0's focus on networks and immediate connectivity erodes any hope for flow and deep relationships. But, hopefully, most people will get to the next questions: What is this thing, really? Is this good for anything? (For me?) There's a more measured article about twitter from the MIT Technology Review that gets beyond the hype to talk about twitter's functionality.

Fundamentally, twitter is a service that "quickly matches new messages coming in from members with the followers who have signed up to receive them, then retransmits them using each follower's preferred channel: instant message, SMS, or the Twitter website."

This means that you can broadcast messages to a group of friends/followers from your phone, your IM service, or the web, and can receive messages similarly.

Which means:

1. You don't need to have the same application open as someone else to communicate with them. No more dealing with one team member on AIM, another on gchat, one who thinks IM services are evil, and the fourth on the museum floor with a cell phone. You can reach all of them from the service of your choice, to the service of their choice.
2. You can communicate easily with groups of people. Need to alert everyone on a project that the fire marshal is on his way, or that you just received the $50k grant you were hoping for? If not everyone is easily accessible by email, this is a good way to broadcast information to a group of folks.
3. There is a stored, web-based record of your (and your networks’) actions over the time that you twitter. I’ve written before about the ways that internal blogs can be used to keep team members updated in a multi-party project. Twitter may be an even easier way to do quick updates, because the messages are short and the access points diverse.

If it is adopted by a whole team, I think twitter can be quite useful internally for project management and group updates. But how could it be used uniquely for visitors in museums?

Here are some visitor experience-focused applications I can imagine:

1. Create a twitter profile for the museum and broadcast information about programs, events, and exhibits there. This is similar to initiatives where museums create MySpace accounts, in that you are going to “where the people are.” But it also can be used as a quick broadcasting system for the museum itself. My museum has a scroller on the web and in the lobby that update with information about hours, availability, and espionage facts; if we used twitter to load this information, it would be automatically archived, easy to distribute, and available to people who want to get it in other locations (i.e. to their phones or on the twitter website).
2. Use twitter for automatic updates from exhibits on status and or evaluation. One of the more interesting mashups of twitter I’ve seen is for people who have developed computerized alerts from their home (when someone is at the door, when the fridge is empty, etc.). The SMS interface makes twitter a good application for these alerts. Imagine a “smart exhibit” that sends out an SMS alert each time it is used, each time a particular vote is registered, each time a button is hit, each time someone stays for X amount of time. If each exhibit had its own twitter account, it could automatically generate a web-based archive of its use and abuse.
3. Create a twitter map mashup of the museum and combine staff, automatic, and guest tweets to generate a dynamic, real-time view of what’s happening at the museum. This can be used to do some of (1) and (2) and would convey action and excitement on a museum homepage or in the lobby. Wow! They are dropping eggs over there! Someone just made a bubble as big as their body! When I look at twittervision, I am entranced by the statements being made all over the world. If the map were just of the museum I was about to visit, I would be compelled and excited by the perception of action and interaction of folks and exhibits.
4. Encourage museum visitors to link to each other through the museum network. Debatably the most “useful” current application of twitter is at conferences, where people meet others, join their twitter networks, and then can easily broadcast and receive information about great sessions, after-parties, and meetup opportunities. Twitter becomes a technological tool that enables real-time, face-to-face interaction between people who are running around the conference. Why not do the same for people running around the museum?

There are many philosophical and emotional reasons to avoid or embrace twitter. Who really cares how the world responds to the question, “What are you doing?”? The answer is that we all do, selectively. How many phone conversations do you have that start with that question or some version thereof? When it comes to friends, family, and project team members, that question is often the glue that keeps people updated and on track with each other.

Twitter is a tool with a specific functionality—it allows short-form communication across multiple platforms between groups and individuals. I believe that this tool, or something like it, points to the direction that communication via technology will go in the next five years, from platform-specific to universal. I should be able to put the word out—whether by paper airplane or keyboard—and get it where it needs to go.

It’s each person’s individual choice as to how much emotional investment he/she puts into experiences with tools, whether those tools be the web, cell phones, or anything else. I used to hate cell phones. Now I appreciate the utility of having me be accessible rather than locations associated with me. I used to hate text messaging. Now I appreciate how much cleaner an interface it is than voice messaging. I'm trying to avoid both fear and lust with twitter. It’s worth knowing how these tools work and taking a non-emotional tack towards imagining how they might be used. Then, if the tool comes out well or poorly on balance, evangelize or slam it all you want.