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?

Book Club Part 8: Time to Change

This is the final installment of the Museum 2.0 book club on Civilizing the Museum; The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian. For me, this has been a valuable exercise in attentive reading and exploration; I hope you have enjoyed it as well. I would like to thank Elaine for her generous involvement and contributions over the summer. The whole series will be available soon via its own link if you would like a companion as you read this excellent book. I’d like to do more book clubs in the future; please let me know if there are any particular books on museum theory, design, innovation, etc. that you would recommend for Museum 2.0.

And now, on to discussion. This week, we’re looking at Chapter 8, Turning the Ocean Liner Slowly: About the process of change in larger institutions. Presented in 1990, this essay is one of Elaine’s most impassioned, written from her vantage point of deputy assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian, a sort of unwanted helmsman for a wild ship in the eye of what she saw as an international storm. The essay focuses on two points: first, that outside pressures of multi-culturalism, relativism, and global instability are forcing change in museums, and second, that change is very unpleasant for large institutions, which will push back with all their might.

I’m most interested in this second point about the change-adverse culture of museums. There will always be outside forces pushing museums in one direction or another. Where in 1990 the need to diversify staff, to reconsider ownership of cultural objects, to grapple with the end of the Cold War may have been paramount, today we have another, equally long and ponderous list of pressures for change. The need to compete with commercial businesses offering similar services as museums. The need to respond to audience desires not just to be included in the museum experience, but to help create it. The need to set a reasonable tone in a time of fiery wartime rhetoric.

The question is not what pressures currently exist, but what we are going to do about them. As Elaine states in her essay:

Change by itself is so uncomfortable that institutions do not do it voluntarily or for noble reasons alone. They change because they fear the consequences of not doing so, and only then are willing to override the cries of anguish from the discomforted.

But the "cries of anguish" are not always consistent, which exposes an underlying problem with pursuing change out of fear of consequences. In 1990, one of the outside pressures Elaine identified was a rise in global instability, ushering in a new age of uncertainty. How can museum leaders chart a certain path through uncertain waters? When the pressures change, the fears change, and change never comes. In an afterword written in 2005, Elaine comments,

The most striking thing I did not anticipate was losing… I did not predict that the pressure to change museums would waver and die down, even as the conversation would continue. I did not preduct that the changes that were made would be fundamentally small except in a few places. And I certainly did not predict that change could be eroded and stepped back from. I should have anticipated the possibility of failure.

Elaine’s honesty is both arresting and depressing. Can museums change? Perhaps the pressures being felt now—which are more financial than cultural—will spawn greater action. But I think we fundamentally need to remove ourselves from fear-based action to get anywhere meaningful. If change is a response to (changing) outside pressures, as Elaine noted in 2005, it “remains episodic and sporadic.” We need to change without pressure, continually, because it is the best way to move forward. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by the tech world is that it largely comprises institutions, small and large, that promote a culture of change. Tech businesses are constantly reinventing themselves, creating new products, reaching out to new audiences. It’s exhausting and risky and potentially wildly successful.

When I was working as a performance poet, I had a fabulous coach who told me, “The only way to improve is to change.” It was a statement I resisted at the time but have continued to attempt to integrate into my mindset. At the time, I was a successful performer. Why would I change my “signature” style away from the tried and true? Why would any museum abandon its core audience, its core way of presenting content, its signature style? We are under the erroneous (and comfortable) impression that great art comes from consistency rather than experimentation.

Elaine concludes her afterword with a nod to the future, saying, “Perhaps I must look to my younger colleagues with fire in their bellies and a mixture of naivete and idealism to take up the cause. I am ever hopeful that they will succeed, and I am ready to support them wholeheartedly.” I hope that Museum 2.0 can be a place for us to share and explore that fire. Remember that there are museum leaders like Elaine out there ready to support your quest for change.

Game Friday: Do Games Have to Be Fun To Be Good?

Two very interesting articles today by Ian Bogost, courtesy of Gamasutra, about the potential of games as a more generalized medium for interaction with content. In the first article, Why We Need More Boring Games, Ian argues for a wider application of gaming to our daily experience. He notes that film, music, visual art, and literature have evolved as media that are used in all kinds of environments, from the mundane to the profound. It's not disturbing to us that films are made for personal documentation, for training purposes, and as art--few people argue that it is some kind of cosmic distortion to use the same platform for Casablanca as that used for My Trip to Cincinatti.

Ian comments:

Very few video games set out to tackle mundane applications akin to the home movie or the airplane safety video. And really, is it very surprising? Who would set their sights on these mundane aspects of human experience, things that recede into the background, given the glitzy alternative of commercial games?

Serious games offer one example. These are games whose mission includes applications of video games outside the sphere of entertainment. These are games that train soliders and corporate employees, educate middle-schoolers and technology certification hopefuls, help diabetics manage their blood sugar, try to persuade consumers to purchase products and services.

Certainly many of these activities seem to be just as banal as pointing out the exits on a Boeing 767. Serious games thus have an important role to serve in video games’ attempts to mature as a medium—not because they train or educate or inform, but because they help make games more boring.

By becoming more "boring," Ian argues, games will become a more pervasive part of our lives. The second article continues this argument, talking about ways that games--if we let go of strict expectations about their use--can be applied in "mundane" (universal?) situations. He cites editorial-style newsgames, workplace training games, and casual mobile games as breaking into both new markets and new expectations of the concepts and content that video games can express. Talking about educational games, he discusses the way that "educational" is always pitted against "fun," as if all games must have the primary objective of providing enjoyment. That expectation, however, limits games from being a medium--like film--to being a particular kind of user experience.

Scott McCloud makes a similar argument for "sequential art" in his excellent book Understanding Comics. As Ian does with videogames, Scott argues that comics have a fundamental value as a medium that is unique and applicable to far more topics and environments than Gotham City. And there are other links between the two media--both burgeoning in the last 30 years, with tightly controlled industry leaders producing predictable content for a mostly young, male market. Both have strong indie movements pursuing other goals and uses of the form, trying to move from pigeonhole to platform.

In this week's book club post, Elaine Gurian commented on the failures of NMAI, and of many museums, to find new palettes for interpretation and presentation of museum content, especially when the intended result is an emotional, spiritual, or non object-focused experience. I was struck, reading these articles about games, by the idea that introducing games, or comics, into the museum experience does not necessarily imply dumbing down or funning up the experience. At their core, these are fairly new, interesting platforms for expression and interaction. The kinds of connections people make when playing games or looking at comics are different than those made with film, text, or any number of more traditional media used in museums.

The problem is that it's very hard to separate the expectations we have--about what games or comics are--from the blank slate potential of the media. This is true both for we the designers, who think we have to make games fun, and we the visitors, who expect the gaming experience to be fun. But what about games that are "interesting?" Or "enlightening?" Or "useful?" Those words aren't part of our gaming vocabulary, or if they are, as in the case of educational games, those games are often considered traitors to the "real" nature of games.

But who defines the traitors? As in comics, it's the big industry--which relies on the expectation that games are entertaining experiences. It's a short-sighted but familiar perspective; I can imagine early movie execs arguing that no one would go to movies if film was debased by use for mundane or unentertaining purposes. But ultimately it comes down to semantics. The same way everyone knows that a book is different from a magazine is different from a memo, someday everyone might know that a video game is different from a home game is different from a work game, etc.

Recently, some games have successfully started to open up the medium to extend beyond "fun." Mobile casual games, played by commuters, could arguably be considered "time fillers." Is it fun to read a magazine on the train? Is it fun to play Bejeweled? The goal isn't to have fun as much as to pass the time--and games can fill that role as easily as books, ipods, or dropped cell calls. Similarly, the enormously successful casual Brain Game, which is essentially a repetitive IQ test experience, isn't popular solely because it's fun. Supposedly it improves your brain function. And Wii Fit is the new hot thing--a game to help you exercise. World Without Oil, a "serious" ARG, is less about fun than about figuring out collectively how to save the world. I play my own un-fun games: beat the last tank's fuel efficiency, guess the number of eggs in the coop, bet on how long I have until the laptop power dies. Would I like a real game interface for these experiences? You bet--and I wouldn't complain if it wasn't "fun."

The trick is to find the unique ways that these newer media fit into the total palette of what a museum--or any cross-platform experience--offers. There are lots of experiences in the museum that are "boring," or, to use a less incendiary word, typical--reading text, watching film, listening to audio. It's the content and the connections that create a great experience out of those media. Which stories would best be told by games? Which by comics? Which on the web? Which through dance? Which through media we haven't yet invented?

Treasure Hunts, Tactile Domes, and Other Layered Beings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Club Part 7: NMAI and the Challenge of Cultural Storytelling

This is the penultimate installment of Museum 2.0's book club on Elaine Gurian's collection of essays, Civilizing the Museum. Next week, we'll conclude by talking about opportunities for institutional change with chapter 8, "Turning the Ocean Liner Slowly." But today, a conversation about the often sticky world of cultural interpretation with chapter 20, "A Jew Among Indians" How working outside of one's culture works."

This essay, written in 1991, reflects Elaine's experience on the planning staff for the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the Mall as an "insider/outsider"--a "hired gun" with museum know-how facilitating the creation of someone else's museum. NMAI opened to the public in fall of 2004, and has endured very mixed reviews for its presentation of the Indian experience largely from the perspective of native communities, not curators or historians. NMAI undertook a fairly radical development process in which they tried, via extensive interviews and community outreach, to create a place that represented the interests of people who, for the most part, felt that "museums are irrelevant institutions... have portrayed Indians inaccurately." The institution of museums was regarded with suspicion, and the interior museum experience was to be reconceived in line with the "multisensory spiritual aspect of the individual Indian cultures," making exhibition design (fire in galleries? active use of artifacts?) an "uncharted adventure."

Add to these challenges the particular challenge of creating a national institution. As Elaine puts it in the essay,

When I was last involved in such an endeavor, it was when the Boston Children's Museum was small, insignificant, and unselfconscious. The National Museum of the American Indian has none of these attributes, and working issues out in the full glare of media and publich funding accountability makes the task much harder.

Once she has explained the nature of the endeavor, Elaine spends the second half of the essay detailing "worries" about the NMAI development process. These worries fall roughly into three categories: the tension between the insider and outsider, the ability of standard Western exhibition and artifact techniques to adapt to a new aesthetic, and the ownership of stories.

I was curious to hear Elaine's thoughts on these worries now, fifteen years after writing the essay and three since the opening of the museum. As a visitor to NMAI, I felt few of these worries--the museum to me seemed like a place that had avoided many of these concerns by presenting something fairly benign. Many of Elaine's worries are passionate in nature; the resulting museum, to me, conveys little passion.

With regard to insider/outsider, Elaine wrote about the challenges of creating a place that is "by" and "for" a specific cultural group, while also intended for a much larger outsider visitor population. How will outsider needs for basic information (internalized by the insiders) be accomodated? When someone says, "you wouldn't understand," are they being realistic or racist? How will the museum serve both a distinct group and a more general one?

From my non-native visitor experience, NMAI felt neither foreign nor inclusionary; it felt stale. It wasn't like the experiences Elaine details being an outsider at a pow wow, where she felt both swept into and outside a unique experience. In recent email correspondence about this issue, Elaine commented:

The other problem is that there is a disconnect between what non-Native
Americans wanted to see and what the Indian people wanted to tell them.
Thia is both where the bravery of the NMAI and their lack of responsiveness
to the audience comes in. I don't know how to fix it but by beginning to
work in a dialogue with disappointed visitors and Indians with a point of
view and see if a new and exciting middle ground can be achieved.

This first issue is about cross-cultural understanding. The second issue, about presentation and care of exhibitions and objects, is about museums. Can museums successfully adapt traditional exhibition formats to subject matter and or visitors who expect or desire something spiritual or emotional? If museums radically change their interpretation styles to match the desires of a particular group, will those styles alienate other current or future visitors? Will those styles just redefine another rigid set of rules for right action? Again and again, the NMAI curatorial staff heard that Indians were not interested in the standard set of museum services. Was it possible to create new ones?

Perhaps not in this attempt. Again, Elaine comments today:

The first, where NMAI suffered, is in repetition. In talking directly with
Indian groups but synthesizing the material through a set of curatorial
eyes, the potential outcomes have a certain sameness and a timidity that
might have been avoided.

The repair for that is quite difficult. It means that when working
directly with folks for whom the museum media is not their natural forum,
the museum folks need to offer a much larger palette of physical outcomes
rather than just words, movies, material in cases, etc. And the palette is
not really invented yet. So the direct voice got straight-jacketed into a
frame of museum methods that did not exactly fit.

It also means that the museum palette needs to be stretched into areas that
the Indian community talked about -- smell, sound, spirit, language,
environments, etc. all of which are not yet comfortable exhibition
processes.

I have always wanted to get a group of Indigenous people together with the
most inventive designers in the world and have them design new museum
systems together.

Finally, the third issue is about storytelling. Who owns the Indian story, which is really the story of people from many independent sovereign nations? How the stories and aesthetics from individual groups be woven together into one coherent museum? How can the museum facilitators avoid becoming "the victims and the perpetuators of re-creationism?" When no one voice is regarded as authoritative or objective, how does the story get told?

The most fascinating commentary I've read on this is Jacki Thompson Rand's excellent article, "Why I Can't Visit the National Museum: Reflections of an accidental privileged insider 1989-1994." In many ways Jacki was Elaine's counterpart--a native member of the team, an insider where Elaine was an outsider. And yet, Jacki came out of the experience feeling like an outsider, stating that the museum and exhibion development was controlled primarily by traditional museum designers (white men) with small roles for native interpretation (Indian men). Most significantly, the story the museum finally chose to tell was not Jacki's story, which was one of history, not material culture. As she puts it:

today, the finished museum stands as a reminder of how the small-but-growing museum staff failed to find, in that tense moment of public scolding, inspiration and encouragement to tell the story that we know and the nation denies.

To Jacki, a museum that refuses to acknowledge and explore the Native past is not one that can properly reflect or illuminate the present or future. She was an intended insider--someone who NMAI was supposedly both "by" and "for." And yet she came out of it feeling that neither was true.

Elaine commented to me that she thinks exhibitions created by a single artistic vision--like the USHMM, Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, or any number of superstar cultural designs--work better. (See book club part 4 for more.) Perhaps, when one person is telling the story for many, they are free to create a new story that resonates both with its subjects and its visitors. The Holocaust Museum's permanent exhibition is not reflective of every Holocaust victim's story, nor does it claim to be. But the story created by Shaike's vision is a story that many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, connect with deeply. At NMAI, they sought to create a cultural story not just by curatorial consensus, but by mass consensus. Can a crowd tell a story as well as an individual?

Maybe not. But that doesn't mean that NMAI's experiment in museum "by" its subjects is uninteresting or not worth repeating. Most of Elaine's worries in 1991 came in the form of questions: how can we, what will happen when we, how will people...? Even if NMAI failed to answer these questions completely (or authoritatively), their attempts help us understand the answers possible. It's time to start looking at where it succeeds and fails and what we can learn to refine our question-asking and draw up new sets of worries. NMAI is just the beginning of the experiment in culturally-defined museums. I'll give Elaine the last word ("Rick" is Rick West, director of NMAI):

It can be forgiven but will now have to fix it. I think what Rick did is heroic ideologically but not totally successful visually. It will be up to the next team to look the problem straight in the eye and have courage enough to try new and untried display techniques that match its message.

Game Friday: The Aftermath of the ARG World Without Oil

There has been some fascinating coverage recently about the wrap-up of Ken Eklund and Jane McGonigal's ARG World Without Oil, a huge community game in which players roleplayed within a fictitious scenario in which gas prices are at $7 a gallon, market and weather volatility is sky-high, and the state of both the natural and man-made world are in crisis.

World Without Oil ran from April 30 until July 12, during which time the central site provided a running commentary on the reactions--personal, political, financial, ecological--to a fictitious oil shock. Thirty-two "weeks" of events were condensed into the 10-week game, and each week, both in-game characters and real people--players all over the world--documented life in the new reality and swapped stories, solutions, and possibilities for survival. Players used all manners of Web 2.0--blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and more--to share content. If you go on the site now, you can access the "WWO time machine" and travel to any of the 32 "weeks" to see the stories at that moment in the crisis. There are also "threads" on the right column that present a variety of player-created tours of the archives.

The breadth and depth of content is staggering. Yes, much was generated by the game masters, but there are now 143,000 google hits for "world without oil," the majority of which are player-generated blogs, livejournals, photo pages, videos, you name it. On an early game week, week 14, I counted over 35 player-submitted photos, stories, and missions (actions to try to address the crisis). Overall, about 60,000 interacted with WWO resources during the game, 1,871 of whom actively contributed content.

I admit that I was not one of them. I followed the World Without Oil story with great interest, but was frankly overwhelmed when I checked it out early in its release. It is a far cry from the "calculate your carbon footprint" or other casual games about resource usage. It required much higher engagement than reading news articles on the topic; it was a huge growing, twisting network of news, strategy, activism, and personal expression. I wasn't ready.

Now that it's all over, strangely enough, I am. I've spent several hours perusing the WWO time machine, finding the voices, images, and missions most interesting and applicable to my lifestyle. And while I am someone for whom massive brainstorming around likely world events was not compelling this spring, I recognize that there are many people out there for whom this is an extremely successful form of engagement. There are many players whose lives--and everyday lifestyles--were changed by participation in World Without Oil. You can still get involved. I can't wait to see the curriculum guides they release in September to get students playing the game. But the biggest question in my mind is: what lessons can museums (and game designers, and etc.) learn from WWO?

• Good game design can encourage serious visitor participation on specific topics. One way to look at the WWO resources is to consider that a small group of game masters empowered and provided a platform for 1,800 people to generate content for 60,000 consumers (and growing). The content was substantive, and arguably constituted a meaningful addition to the body of pre-existing content around the effect of a major oil event worldwide. The game masters led, but did not overshadow--they harnessed and supported player contributions to the extent that some active players were mistaken for fictitious characters.
  
• Complex, multi-faceted strategy games are possible, as long as the game design accomodates complex, multi-faceted topics and directions. The beauty of WWO's oil shock is the extent to which oil scarcity is already considered an issue that spans the personal, political, financial, and scientific, and WWO, recognizing this, allowed players to engage on the levels most compelling to them. The newly reopened Liberty Science Center was recently criticized by the New York Times for making everything "personal, urgent, and political." I wonder how the same critic would react to WWO! The more we can accomodate visitors/players who want to engage in any of a number of ways--personal, theoretical, active--the greater the potential involvement and impact.
  
• Alternate reality can encourage players to take action in their real lives. Some people have criticized WWO as a waste of time, saying, "I explored a few links and watched a few of the videos, but stopped after a while because the real peakoil blogosphere is actually more interesting. The thing is, the oil crisis is already here, or a few months away. No need to create an alternate reality in which it's happening." But is that reader changing her lifestyle because of it? Reading articles about the real world doesn't always inspire action the way a challenge, a mission, or an immediate crisis does. As one player commented: "rather than just getting people to 'think about' the problem, it [WWO] actually gets a large and actively interested community of people to throw ideas off of each other through their in-game blog posts, and the out-of-game Alternate Reality Game community. There's some potential for innovation there, for someone to think up a brilliant lifestyle change for the better that people can start jumping on board with." The link to reality--to real news and real oil crunch experiences--furthers players' interests in the fictitious cataclysmic event, and the cataclysmic fiction spurs real world action. As another player put it, "We hope that the people who play the game will ultimately live some of what they 'pretend' if they don't already. "
  
• Gaming can create communities around specific topics. Consider the "we" in the above quote from a WWO player. This person expresses not only an interest in how WWO has impacted his own life, but also how it might impact lives of others. He considers himself part of a "we" who have aspirations about the game's reach. Imagine if a visitor made a similar comment about an exhibit, aligning her/himself with the exhibit designers and or artifacts. Powerful stuff.
• Multi-platform, multi-access: wider reach. Since I only engaged with WWO as a lurker and not as a player, am I less affected by its content? Probably. But that doesn't mean I'm not affected at all. One of the reasons I look forward to seeing the WWO school study guides is to see how they intend for people to "keep playing" now that the game is closed. There are lots of people out there for whom there are significant barriers to involvement in an online game of this type--but the same people could benefit from a "video of the day," a book collecting player journal entries, or a three-dimensional exhibit timeline of the experience. It's a little surprising to me that while WWO provided many platforms and topics on which to engage and contribute content, there were relatively few ways to receive that content outside the web. I'd also like to see a more attention paid to the "first time user" experience, so that people like me, who were overwhelmed at the onset, have a smoother path in (and are therefore more likely to play).
  
• What if? is a question everyone can answer. In museums, desire to avoid the political often creates obstacles to creating meaningful content. When I saw An Inconvenient Truth, I was struck by Gore's framing of climate change as a "moral issue." And I immediately considered that that argument is not one which museums could easily present. But by avoiding the now and focusing on a potential event, like oil shock, war with Iran, virtual consciousness, or any number of reasonable near-future events, museums can get away with a wider range of "imaginative" presentations. Even better if it comes from visitors/players and the authorative voice doesn't have to take a position.

World Without Oil was a major effort involving substantive content and platform development. While I don't necessarily recommend a museum taking on a similarly ambitious game initiative, we need to get involved in these kinds of experiments--as partners, action sites, and, occasionally, as leaders.

Museum Trails: I like... personalizing the museum experience

Last week, I spoke with Jim Richardson, managing director of SUMO Design, about their very cool new project with the North East Regional Museums Hub: I like... museums. Funded by the UK MLA and launched on July 9, i like... museums is a website on which visitors can search for museums in the North East region of England. But it's not a typical directory. i like... museums allows users to search by "museum trails," interests that range from beer to yucky things to dressing up to space.

SUMO has done an impressive job of combining clean design, quirky content, and multiple points of access in a site that is surprisingly useful. No more scanning the list of 80-odd museums in an area trying to figure out whether Lady Waterford Hall or Cragside or any number of enigmatic and not-so-enigmatic attractions are appropriate for your interests. Trails were developed by staff, community members, and are submitted on a continuous basis by visitors to the site. Each museum was asked to select three of the initial trails specifically applicable to them and wrote blurbs on how those trails relate to their content. Visitors who submit trails also add their own commentary about why certain museums were included. You can seamlessly click from trails to museums to other trails, wandering the museum landscape. And you can rate the trails and view their ratings, which presumably might help you prioiritize some trails over others.

Here's what I love about this:

1. It supports reaggregation of the museum experience. Rather than searching by name, location, or self-defined genre, you can find museums that relate to your specific interest. There are trails like i like... keeping the kids happy, with helpful content for specific audiences. And then there are the oddballs. Jim told me one of the first user-submitted trails was i like... pigs. When users get to reaggregate the experience, they base their decisions on and distinctions that most museums would be hard-pressed to come up with on their own. I'd love to see these trails crawl into museums, allowing visitors to reaggregate the exhibits within, so they can share with each other equally useful information about where the coolest stuff is for different ages, abilities, and interests.
   
2. It supports irreverence. Perhaps my favorite trail is the user-submitted I like... things to do with a hangover which offers art adventures to take your mind off the pain, religious memorials for divine intervention, and seaside castles for "big blast of fresh air!" I can't imagine a museum or museum association willing to publish such a trail (though they should consider it).
   
3. It furthers the idea of museums as multi-use venues. The North East Hub is willing to let users play with what a museum is "for"--whether it be inspiration, a good cup of tea, or meeting new people. The site subtly gives you more and more reasons to visit a museum beyond viewing the collection.
4. Combining forces is a low-risk, low resources way for museums to get involved with Web 2.0. This project was the outcome of a "marketing training programme" put on by the Hub, and all 81 museums in the North East area are participating in (and cross-marketing) the project. By functioning as a directory and advertisement for museum-going in general, i like... museums is a good way for many museums to dip their toes in the water and get a sense of their potential visitors' interests.
   

i like... museums is owned and operated by the Tyne and Wear Museums in their role as the regional hub for North East museums. It is part of a larger regional museum campaign by the Hub. As Jim explains,

this includes: Five weeks of press advertising in seven newspapers, advertising on public transport, advertising in cinema's and sports centres, beer mats in pubs, sponsorship of two radio shows in two local radio stations, a printed regional museum guide and nine printed trail leaflets which are available at the 81 museums in the region, web banners on seven websites including Facebook and a MySpace page.

In the last two weeks since launch, they've had about 10 visitor trails submitted, and are working those trails into upcoming advertising campaigns for the site. But many people are accessing the site as "lurkers," and, according to Jim, the trails are a hit.

People are browsing the website by theme rather then through the A -Z directory at a ratio of 10 - 1, so these seems to be a much more engaging way to tell people about what museums have to offer.

The goal is for i like... museum to "change perceptions of museums, to encourage people to go to Museums, and to encourage those who already go to Museums to try another venue."

Jim also commented that museums have access to the website data, and may use the information about most popular trails to develop new marketing and content strategies. This is the part I'm most curious about--to see how, if at all--museums might be changed by being involved in this campaign. It's one thing to allow visitors to create their own trails. It's quite another to follow them.

Book Club Part 6: Getting People in the Door

This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum, "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." I chose to include this chapter, despite overlaps with Chapter 11 (Function Follows Form) and Chapter 13 (Free At Last), because the term “threshold fear” is an important one—not just for visitors, but for museums as well. In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors. But there’s another kind of threshold fear I care about: the one that keeps museums from fully embracing and jumping into new ways of engaging the public, new ways of including visitors. We all have problems getting in the door—they’re just different doors.

Elaine starts by detailing a series of fears and the potential audiences who reject museums because of them. She then says,

My thesis is that when museum management becomes interested in the identification, isolation, and reduction of each of these thresholds, they will be rewarded over time by an increased and broadened pattern of use, though the reduction of these thresholds is not sufficient by itself.

What does this “not sufficient by itself’ bit mean? Later, Elaine comments:

Now, after researching the topic, I am less certain that broadening the audience for museums is achievable in general. … Cultural icons serve many important purposes, but these, I have reluctantly begun to realize, may be quite different from, and perhaps mutually exclusive with, museums focused on community well-being.

Or, as a friend of mine put it as we chatted about this over the weekend, “Do museums really want all kinds of people hanging out there? It seems like they're about objects, not people.”

He, and Elaine, have noticed the trends over the last several decades that hinder inclusion and community development, including:

• pursuance of iconic museum architecture which promotes aesthetic over community design
• lack of access by public transportation and rise in entrance fees, contributing to the perception of the museum as a special destination
• open hours not conducive to times when locals might actually use the museum
• lack of diversity among staff
• increase in security and monitoring

Some museums have done remarkable things to reduce these thresholds and have, as Elaine predicted, been rewarded for it.

• The New York Hall of Science’s Career Ladder successfully recruits and advances neighborhood teens as floor explainers, and their full-time staff includes many people who have come “up through the ranks.” These staff members are true representatives of their community, and help give the museum street cred with their local visitors as an acceptable and positive place to visit.
• The San Jose Museum of Art has drastically changed its approach to security, replacing guards with visitor services staff who provide interpretation and monitor visitor actions in a less threatening manner.
• The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had a street (and subway) facing entrance that was closed for many years; since reopening, it has increased walk-in traffic as well as relationships with the local community.
• The Brooklyn Museum of Art found that skateboarders were using their entrance plaza and invited them to continue.

All of these examples are indicative of an institution-wide approach to promoting inclusion. They aren’t isolated “first Sunday” programs; they change the face of the museum to visitors. Some are simple design choices—like at the MFA. But many are about personnel. It’s no surprise that positive in-person interactions that support a variety of languages, attitudes, and experience in museums can be the biggest factor in promoting inclusion.

How do we get there? Some of Elaine’s suggestions are highly practical. For example, she recommends that museum folks engage with architects in architecture program planning, sharing with the architects their expectations and desires with regard to how people will use and perceive the space—not just formally, but informally as well.

She encourages looking at other congregant spaces—malls, zoos, parks, mosques—and considering how they approach openness to new and potential visitors. I think the religious institution model is a particularly interesting one. Like museums, many people feel they “ought” to go to church (or synagogue, etc), but rarely set foot inside. How do we turn those curious parties into visitors and users? In religious settings, the formula is part ideology, part community. The emphasis on social experiences and relationships increases comfort and ownership of an experience that, like museum-going, starts out as something foreign and mystical.

But churches do not only seek converts among the non-visiting masses; they also redesign and restructure their services and buildings to meet people halfway. And that gets back to my friend’s question: Do museums really want this? Do they want to drop their Gehry skylines in favor of design that might bring more people in the door?

Which reflects a more basic question: who are museums serving, and how does their design support that customer? If the customer is the collector or the object, then the traditional “temple of the contemplative” model is apt. But if the customer is the everyday person, we have to reconsider our loyalties and actions. Imagine the difference between an architectural planning session for Disneyland and one for a museum. Disneyland doesn’t have big name architects; they essentially have urban planners who design little villages of fun. Imagine mall-builders talking about design goals; they probably talk less about “the presence on the cultural landscape” than the ways that they will support people browsing and buying.

If for no other reason, it's worthwhile to consider how other industries approach architecture for their unique vocabularies (and the inspirations that accompany them). Elaine concludes by mentioning a 2002 competition in which designers in LA submitted plans to fix “dead malls.”

One entrant used the following four categories when contemplating useful spaces: big box cathedral – gathering; global vortex – raving; elastic bazaar – wandering; and smart mobs – swarming. Even the words chosen for the categories intrigue me. Imagine if there were museums that wished for raving and swarming.

Indeed. The threshold fear that we experience around words like inclusion or diversity is at least as great as that felt by non-visitors. Perhaps new words will help us. There are lots of examples out there of spaces that are designed for people, not for objects or ideas. How do train station architects, restaurant designers, and park rangers talk about their designs? What can we steal from their successes crossing thresholds, and what can we learn from their shortcomings?

Next week, discussion about the National Museum of the American Indian in Chapter 20, "A Jew Among Indians."

Game Friday: Museum Mad Libs!

I read recently about an awesome project at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001, Collecting Our Thoughts, in which visitors were invited to write the labels for an art exhibition (more another time). Which made my mind go to a far more irreverent destination: Mad Libs.

Go ahead. Pick a plural noun. Then an adjective. Then a number. Then a verb in present tense. Then another plural noun. (Mine are in all caps below.)

Now construct the story of an artifact:

"This painting by Vermeer was completed in 1663. It shows a woman holding a water pitcher next to a window. Vermeer wanted to include some ZEBRAS in the image but they were too FAT. The woman who posed for this portrait had to stand for 276 hours in this exact position. She often thought, "Gee, I wish I could TANGO with PANCAKES instead of doing this."

Is this educational? Not in an obvious way. But it's a lot of fun, and it could be a great way to construct a personalized takeaway from a museum experience. It's also a way for visitors to express themselves, enjoy their own expression, and feel like they play an active role in interepretation of museum objects.

And that is educational. There's a lot of talk about training museum visitors to interpret museum content on their own, but the implementation of that desire is fuzzy. You look at the object, read the label, and then... what? Sometimes there's a proferred question to answer mentally. Sometimes school groups have scavenger hunts and they fill in blanks from the labels (arguably less educational than generating your own content). But in galleries of facts, there's often little prompting to be imaginative. And doing so is often the gateway to intrepretation.

I remember the first time an artist friend of mine took me to a museum and I watched him laugh at some of the art. I was shocked, and vaguely concerned that we might get in trouble. "Why are you laughing?" I hissed. "Because it's funny. The artist made something funny."

His training allowed him to think of artists as people with motivations and challenges, whereas I usually thought of them as names attached to objects. Games that allow visitors to imagine the mistakes, the accidents, the possibilities inherent in objects humanize them. They make them less perfect, less pedestal-y, more connectable.

Break it down and make a connection. Mad Libs seems like an ideal format for this conversion. It's both narrative and a game. And it belongs to the user. Leading questions at the end of labels, no matter how well-worded, come off as challenges from a higher power. They're owned by the museum. Holding the power to interpret in your own hand or pocket makes it yours--not the museum's--and that ownership encourages comfort and playfulness. Let visitors cheat--give them the paragraphs for each artifact with the blanks and let them put in the answers they think are funniest, most likely, or weirdest. Hold contests for the funniest submissions and put them on display at special events, or, if you're brave, alongside the objects themselves.

This kind of activity promotes spending more time with the object. One of the reasons I advocate strongly for games in museums is that games present compelling, addictive models for engagement with content. Most game content is banal, but it doesn't have to be. So often in museums, I find myself struggling to keep looking at the ancient rug or the swirling tornado after I've read the label and seen my fill. I have a hard time generating insightful questions and trying to answer them in my own head. But it would be easy for me to fill in Mad Libs. It would be easy for me to drop my own imagination into a silly story about the people who used that coin or how the museum built the xylophone. And these stories could point to hidden worlds of information--about conservation, object provenance, exhibit prototyping, the people involved--that otherwise are rarely discussed.

Creating museum Mad Libs for your institution would take about a day. Walk around, pick the objects you want to include, write the paragraphs, label the blanks with parts of speech, and take it to the copier. For about $1 apiece, you could produce 500 copies with a slick cardstock cover. Hand them out or sell them for $3 and see what happens. Offer them to school groups and families. Ask for feedback. Simple.

Or is it? The hard thing about incorporating visitor content in the museum has little to do with complexity or desire. I sincerely believe that most museums want their visitors to ask questions, give opinions, etc. The hard part is letting go of authority, telling visitors that not only do you want their thoughts about your stuff, you're willing to make a game of it. You're willing to let them laugh at the art, make up imaginary facts about the collection, and create stories about the experience. Some of the best Mad Libs are the ones where you get to change the words in famous fairy tales or nursery rhymes--where you get permission to mess with authority.

Cinderella has survived Mad Libs libel--Vermeer and your museum can too. How about it?

Jumping into Art in Second Life

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

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

1. VAN GOGH GOES EXPERIENTIAL

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

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

As one YouTube visitor commented:

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

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

2. GALLERY OPENINGS, SOCIAL OPENING

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

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

I've written before about the ways that adding a layer of technological barrier can open up people to more comfortable interaction with strangers. In the same way, virtual worlds may be a more natural venue to encourage discourse about museum content among strangers than real-world physical galleries, where social norms override desire to communicate.