Museum 2.0 at ASTC: Come Tour the Best Tech Museum in LA!

The ASTC (the Association of Science and Technology Centers) annual meeting is coming up in LA (home of my childhood), and Museum 2.0 will be there! The fine folks at ASTC must have made a teensy oversight when they neglected to include my favorite tech museum in the conference proceedings, so I'm remedying the situation by sponsoring a conference alternative on Sunday afternoon, October 14: lunch and a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

In a world of increasingly sterile museum environments, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is a beacon of emotion, strangeness, and wonder. Created by artists David and Diana Wilson, it is an homage to the curiosity cabinet of yore, a place where the grotesque, the imaginary, and the unfamiliar intermingle. Exhibits range from oil portraits of the Soviet space program dogs to immersive stories about scientists who may have existed to failed dice to letters sent to the Mt. Wilson observatory, and are by turns exquisite and disquieting. Enjoyable and fascinating both as a designed collection and a meta-commentary on museums, the MJT is small, quirky, and DEFINITELY worth a visit. Plus, they serve free cookies and tea. What's not to like?

The logistics:
This outing will be on SUNDAY, OCT 14 from noon until 3:15; we will make it back in time for the 3:30 sessions. We will leave the convention center promptly after the morning session, zip over to Culver City, explore the MJT for an hour, grab some lunch, and scoot back. I wanted to make it a more leisurely affair but am concious of everyone's needs for heavy conference time. We'll take cabs/my car; the whole experience should cost about $30 between food, transportation, and museum donation.

Please contact me at nina@museumtwo.com to join the adventure. It's an opportunity for us to discuss some of the content that's been brought up on the blog, but more importantly a chance to visit a really weird museum. And I mean that in the best possible way.

And if you want a more traditional Museum 2.0 experience, I will be presenting on:

• SATURDAY in "I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours"
• SATURDAY in "Defining Museums 2.0"
• TUESDAY in "Web 2.0 the Sequel: What's Now? What's Next?"

See you in LA!

Labor Day Thoughts: Getting Admin Staff on the Floor

It's Labor Day, and across the country, a working dichotomy is manifest in museums. Administrative offices are dark while the galleries are packed with visitors. The floor staff are directing traffic, selling tickets, and facilitating experiences for throngs of people. If they're lucky, they've got a few good visitor services managers running the show. And if the leadership is wise, there are some admin staff among them, learning from the experience.

This post is not intended (primarily) as a salute to floor staff--though they deserve it. Few would contest their value and service to institutions that generally pay them poorly for the often monotonous work of facilitating smooth, positive guest experiences. Instead, this post is an open question: how involved should admin staff be with the floor experience? How often should educators, designers, and execs push back from their desks, throw on a nametag, and walk the floor? Is this an outdated concept or a useful business strategy?

For mostly practical reasons, museum staff offices have shifted over the last couple decades further and further from the public. As museums grow in staff and exhibits, the reshifting of space often necessitates moving people into new buildings, basements, and unused floors. In the most extreme situations, staff work several blocks from the closest visitor, and frequenting the museum floor requires an outing rather than just a bathroom break.

Is this a bad thing? Arguably, much of what happens behind the scenes at museums has little bearing on the visitor experience and vice versa. The screams of children, while invigorating, don't inspire better fundraising nor conservation. And yet I'd argue that museums are in a very special position as "product manufacturers" because staff always have direct access to their consumers. And if museums are indeed products for visitor/consumers, then that access is the most precious marketing, research, and development resource we have.

Why should admin staff spend time on the floor? It makes us better providers of visitor services. It makes us more compassionate and capable managers of floor staff. It makes us more compelling storytellers and fundraisers about the guest experience. It makes us confront the reality of the museum not from our own perspective as owners, but from that of our users.

It's easy to write these things and much harder to live them. Time on the floor often feels repetitive. You rarely gain new insights; instead, you hone your ability to give directions to the bathroom. The tangible value of the experience for you, and your impact on guests, seems minimal, and quickly you start itching to get "back to work." You get it. You know what the museum's like. Why reexperience it again and again?

Because your visitors don't. It's an interesting characteristic of museums that most visitors to them are newbies to the location and are unlikely to advance beyond that status to become frequent users. Unlike, say, people who ride the subway or people who listen to iPods, the "product experience" in museums is largely formed in a single initial visit. If the visitor returns, it's likely to be for "something new" next year, by which point they have a familiarity with the general museum experience but not the specific content experience. What this means is that as product creators and distributors, museum staff are largely dealing with people brand new to the product. Our visitors don't have the luxury we as staff have to "get to know the museum" over several visits. The museum they know is very different--and getting out on the floor helps us understand that difference.

On the floor, even as staff familiarity with the content and the layout grows ad nauseum, the visitor experience is largely uninformed. And while it's easy for non-floor staff to remember the sensations of being on the floor--the noise and quiet, the elation and confusion--it's hard to remember the sensation of being there for the first time. And that sensation is the one to which we must design, program, and sell.

For this reason, the most important place for admin staff to spend time is in front of the museum, walking the line, answering questions, selling tickets and memberships and welcoming people in the door. This is the location where visitors' prejudices and expectations are on display. This is where their questions, yet unaddressed, are most clearly expressed.

And the second most important place is alongside the newbies. Take a tour with a group of visitors. Walk in and wait on line with them--as long as it takes. Read the map. When we can dart around the lines and pop in to our favorite haunts, it's hard to remember that most visitors are not as well-informed as we, and that their experiences are limited by what we do--or don't--give them as aids.

This basic fact--that being a visitor advocate means being a newbie advocate--has become central to my work now. I'm doing some experience design within the virtual world of Second LIfe, where I am humblingly, and somewhat embarassingly, a newbie. The talented people with whom I work, who make my content come alive, are the experts of Second Life, and they navigate the world and its quirks with the confidence of experience. When I bring up issues about unclear orientations or weird freakouts when my avatar (character) gets stuck in a wall, they smile and say, "Sounds like typical Second Life." And yet for me, as a confused newcomer (like many SL users, the majority of whom don't return after their first visit), it's nothing to smile about--these challenges are barriers to me becoming an active user.

The same thing is true in museums. If, sitting upstairs in front of your computer, you hear the screams or see the lines out your window, you may smile and say, "Typical day at the museum." But for the majority of visitors, it's not typical: it's new and confusing. Floor staff know this, and their observations can be painful to designers or educators who believe they are dealing wtih more sophisticated users, people more like them. The only way admin staff can design for these real visitors with their real experiences is to understand the banalities and imperfections of that newbie experience as it exists.

I treasure the fact that I'm a Second Life newbie; I believe it makes me a more compassionate designer. I know that I can't turn back the clock and make myself a museum newbie, but I can spend as much time with them as possible, trying to remember, to appreciate, and to design for their needs. It's hard work. Walking back into the museum on Labor Day as a visitor may be the first step.

Game Friday: Playing in Real-Time

What's more important: convenience or realism? I’m working on a game design project now that involves an interesting experiment: a blend of real-time and on-demand gaming. And I mean experiment, because I don’t have a bias, or even truly, a hypothesis, as to which component will be better, more popular, more compelling.

What do I mean by on-demand and real-time? Real-time gaming is controlled by an external clock. On-demand games start and end when you choose. Of course, most on-demand games are sequential—you move your pawn, I move my rook--and the sequences form an internal real-time aspect to the game. You can’t jump from owning Baltic Avenue to winning Monopoly to debt; you progress through the game as it unfolds. Similarly, in a video game, you are controlled by the time of the game—the time you have until your energy bar goes to zero or all the aliens are killed.

But all of these examples represent time inside the game. All of these games are on-demand, since you decide when to take them off the shelf or switch on the Playstation or abandon the game for dinner. In real-time gaming, on the other hand, you have to be there, ready to play, at the time the game is available. It may be a continuous one-time experience or an episodic one. Whatever it is, it’s in someone else’s control.

On the surface, this seems incredibly limiting. You have to know when the game starts. You have to be available on someone else’s schedule. You have to keep track and not fall behind. Why would you ever want to play (or create) a real-time game? Because...

Real-time games are mass events. There's a reason murder mystery dinners are more fun when they're the real deal than when you take them out of a box. I could write a little scavenger hunt for my friends and we could do it on-demand on a Sunday afternoon at our pleasure. OR we could take part in one of the many all-night or all-weekend puzzle hunts that go on in major cities every year. Similarly, orienteering on your own isn’t as fun as taking part in an adventure race. When there’s a time and a place and an expectation, people have time to get psyched for the game ahead of time. Rarely do I think to myself, “Wow… next week I might get to actually play cribbage!” But I do think, “Wow… next week I might get to play Cruel 2 B Kind.”

This characteristic isn't just good for players who want to be part of something "big," it's also good for game sponsors/creators who are using games as a promotional device. Sponsoring a game that happens real-time captures more media attention than releasing a flash game on your product's website.

Real-time gaming is practical when you want to bring together strangers socially. Of course, sitting down to a game of poker is social. But if you want to play games with people you don’t know, there are two options. There are on-demand games, like chess, that are available in playing environments like Washington Square or Yahoo Games. Or, there are real-time games, like World of Warcraft and other MMOs. You can play WoW alone, but most players end up teaming up with others to form guilds, go on raids, etc. All of those activities need to be coordinated among the players, and the easiest way to do that is via real-time scheduling and play.

When the time pressure is real, the game gets more exciting. If a video game tells you a bomb will go off in 30 minutes unless you pass the level, it energizes you. But that energy is tempered by the fact that you know that a bomb isn’t actually going to go off, that the game won’t totally end if it happens because you can play again. In real-time gaming, that’s not necessarily the case. If you don’t pass a threshold within the allotted time, you may not be able to continue, or the game may be significantly altered. You can’t pause the game or take a break.

Real-time gaming is more realistic. The external ticking clock serves serious as well as recreational gaming. While some military, fire, and law enforcement simulations do allow time out for discussion and reflection, others require the “players” to move through exercises in real time. They do so not to raise the adrenaline but to create environments more directly related to potential real situations.

Episodic real-time gaming allows for a different kind of casual play. In most on-demand games, the decision to play is binary: either you are playing or not-playing. There aren’t many opportunities to take a break in the middle and let the game continue to flow around you. Episodic or long-term real-time games can function more like TV series: you watch a few episodes, you skip one or two, you get back up to speed and keep moving. Arguably the TV series Lost is a highly successful real-time game in which the viewers/players have the challenge of figuring out what the heck is going on. When real-time games have a long duration (weeks or months), the game designers should be thinking about the ways people can drop in and out (unless they want to restrict the game to the most hardcore players alone).


Ultimately, I’m not sure whether real-time or on-demand gaming is more compelling. On-demand gaming certainly captures a wider audience and requires a lower barrier to entry. And yet, particularly for games with strong narrative, real-time gaming can add complexity that makes the game feel more personal, more real. TV has certainly been successful spinning out stories in real-time, whereas books and movies offer a more on-demand experience. Where do you cast your vote? How do you want to play?

Where Do We Put It? Fitting the Web Into Museums

Thanks to Kyle Evans, who forwarded me the fascinating, lengthy master’s dissertation .art: Situating Internet Art in the Modern Museum by Karen Verschooren at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. In it, Karen provides a survey of the evolving relationship of Internet art to art museums. The first 150 pages give a background on Internet art projects in museums, ongoing debates about their value, and Internet art's place in traditional collections. And while there's lots of good stuff in these sections (including an introduction for me to some wild net artists), it's the last chunk that interests me most, where Karen explores the question of how and where Internet art should be exhibited.

Karen separates the exhibition of Internet art into three techniques:

1. separation (Internet art displayed solely on the web, either through museum portal or links)
2. sepragation (Internet art displayed in the physical museum, but in its own distinct viewing room/area) (and no this is not a real word)
   
3. integration (Internet art alongside the physical collection via computers, kiosks, or more innovative platforms for display and interaction)
   

These techniques and the related questions about exhibition aren't limited to the display of web-based art. They are applicable to any kind of internet- or network-based experience in the museum, whether that experience draws content from museum visitors, outside data, or the web. Citizen science programs. Networked exhibits that allow you to armwrestle people at other museums. In some cases, the medium is the message, as in globes that display real-time weather data from satellites. But other times, it's not clear where the content belongs.

Let's say you create a magic scoring device that allows visitors in the museum to rate each exhibit on a scale of 1-5. Where do you display those ratings? Alongside the exhibits? At the info desk with the maps? On the website?

How do you decide? Let's examine the case for each of Karen's techniques.

Separation. In her thesis, Karen concludes that relegating Internet art to museum websites is in most cases not sufficient and should be seen as a stepping stone to inclusion in the physical museum. She states that separation means that such art "can be called marginal in the number and broadness of public it attracts and the institution's commitment to the art form it communicates." I was a little surprised at this conclusion; after all, museum websites have arguably a broader, large audience than the physical museums themselves. Then again, many museums still think of their web visitors as second-class citizens, and may be unwilling to put on the floor what they put on the web.

Fear is never a good reason to put things (like ratings or visitor comments) on the website only. Experimentation is better, IF there's an expectation that positive web experiments might bleed onto the floor.

In my mind, the distinction of web-only is useful when:

• the content provides a personal, repeatable experience. Blogs and social networks fall in this category. Sure, it might be nice to broadcast your blog feed to a screen in the museum somewhere, but the real value is for readers who can visit again and again from the flexibility of their own environment.
• the website has a distinct enough brand to constitute its own institution. In her thesis, Karen quotes Charlie Gere of the Tate as saying "the website is the sixth Tate site, after Tate Britain, Modern, St Ives, Liverpool, and Tate Store." It's useful that he added the store as one of the Tate "sites." We're already comfortable thinking of museum stores as separate but related entities from their parent museums. Why not think of websites similarly? As web-only becomes a more viable option for all kinds of experiences, the web-only component or site for a museum may similarly grow to adulthood.
• the content is best-used in concert with other web content. One of the interesting problems Karen raises when it comes to putting internet-enabled computers in the museum is the question of whether visitors should be able to move beyond the Internet art to other websites. We could have a whole other discussion about whether people should be able to check email in the galleries. However, if the general consensus today is "no," then web-based content that encourages further exploration on other sites, links, etc. may be best suited to a web-only environment, where visitors can surf unrestrained.
  

Sepagration. To me, this is the least interesting model, in which museums provide standard computer stations for visitors to explore web-based content. Why do that at the museum when I can do it at home?

When I stretch my brain, I can imagine this being useful when:

• most of the museum-going audience does not have regular access to computers/web. Of course, in these cases, I would advocate for museums providing full computer services a la libraries. This is related to the utility of meeting visitors "where they are," that is, couching uncommon experiences in the common experience of using a computer. Again, I think this is only valid if you truly meet them "where they are" and let them email, web surf, etc. while at the computers.
  
• the content is presented programmatically. I may not spend much time at a computer in the museum perusing websites on my own. But I might enjoy a "tour" of web content facilitated by a staff member, especially if I could then take home a list of the pages we perused, or, even better, have them automatically added to my del.icio.us or other link set.
  
• the museum wants to promote its web content. If web content is new for your museum and you want people to spend a little face time with the resources, that's reasonable. I think this should follow the museum store model, where there are teasers or limited amounts of content available from the museum, with an expectation that the visitor will go to the dedicated (web) site to learn more.
  

Integration. This is where it starts to get interesting. If content is "made" for the web, what does it mean to recast it in physical space? Karen talks about a variety of methods and projects attempting to break out of the standard "put a computer on the floor" model, the most exciting of which (to me) is the Walker's "revolving door" shown in the image at the top of this post. Users push the door to "open" new pages of web art, thus experiencing both a metaphorical and virtual portal into the content.

Ultimately, I'm most interested in a sub-category of integration I'd call embedment, where the content is naturally part of rather than shoe-horned into the exhibit or museum design. This is challenging when it comes to art, where the original intent of the artist may be distorted if web-only content is squeezed into a non-web-typical interaction. But when it comes to other kinds of web-based experiences and data, embedding the content into exhibits and spaces can help realize its full interactive potential.

In particular, I think integration/embedment is useful when:

• the content is potentially social. We are conditioned to think of PCs as objects with which we have personal interactions. Any socializing is done through the computer, not around it. Embedding content into collaborative touch tables, large-scale projections, and other multi-person accessible experiences may foster social exchange.
• the content delivery is flexible. If your content HAS to be seen on a 640 by 480 window, fine. But if not, why not experiment with new ways to design it into the space? Why not devise new ways to touch it, to move it, and to see it? New technologies around web display and interaction are the darlings of Siggraph, TED, and other hipster conferences. Why not explore them in museums?
• the content requires interpretation. Particularly when it comes to collaborative projects, in which the content is drawn from thousands of data points or blogs or videos, it's useful to have an interface that prioritizes and organizes the content. The interface doesn't have to be web-based as long as it's web-capable. Sometimes, the best interfaces make the web reliance totally invisible to the guest, as in a mountain of beans that grows as the world population does (or something way better than that).
  
• the content forms the basis for a great in-museum experience. This is the most obvious, simplest reason to embed. If the content will help educate, thrill, or challenge visitors on the floor, it's worth putting it there.
  

One of the most powerful things about the web is its ability to facilitate connections among people, data, and ideas. When we intelligently harness and display those connections in museums, we can create experiences that feel personal, relational, and global. This is not to say that everything in the museum should be web-based, but its use and integration is another excellent option to keep in the design toolbox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game Friday: Lovely, Quirky Amanita

This week, Game Friday pays homage to Amanita Design, the funky game and animation design firm behind the award-winning Samorost series and several flash-based corporate games that blend lush imagery, surreal storytelling, and surprising little puzzles.

Amanita is one of the few design firms capable of creating "game other," game experiences that stretch and change expectations about what it means to play. They are leaders in the point-and-click casual game market, but their innovations stem from wild environments rather than particularly tricky puzzles.

I often treat games like this as interactive art and use the cheat sheet walkthroughs as a way to explore the world of the game. I'm not too concerned about the competitive or addictive elements of the gameplay; most is based on an other-worldly if-then relationship between toads and flowers, carrots and carriages. This willingness on my part to abandon reliance on narrative or gameplay speaks to the power of the visual design and wonder inherent in the experience Amanita creates. There's no magic formula for what games "must" be to be successful, and the Amanita games delight with experiences and pleasures from roads less traveled.

Play to win or play to explore; either way, it's a lovely Friday sort of dream.

City Museum Video Contest: Cool Idea. What Happened?

A couple months ago, I read with great excitement about the St. Louis City Museum's amateur video contest. Unfortunately, you can't read the press release I saw; it isn't on their website anymore. And therein lies an essential problem with this and other similar museum forays into Web 2.0: follow-through.

It sounded like a great project from an innovative, creative place. For those who haven't visited, the City Museum is part obstacle course, part art city, part shoelace factory. They have a two-headed snake and a bar , Beatnik Bob's, where you can drink a beer in the museum. They have some strange quirks (no wayfinding signage, for example), but lots of energy around letting their visitors define who they are.

And they've been making some movement into Web 2.0. They have a MySpace page, complete with music from the Talking Heads, and a blog (though it's not RSS-friendly). And in June, they launched a creative user-generated content contest. They invited videographers under 18 to create a 70.1 second video shot entirely within the City Museum. The videos would be submitted into a contest, and the winning submission would be posted on their MySpace page and featured in a film festival. They wrote about it (and teased it... scroll down to the June/July entries). Other St. Louis film blogs and websites picked up the story. I was waiting for this week to write about it, as they had broadcast that entries would be voted on, and the winning entries would be shown this Friday, Aug 24. And then... nothing.

Now, if you go on their MySpace page, you can see the winning video. As of today, its had 18 views (and I'm three of them). It was added a week ago, but there was no announcement on the museum's website, blog, etc. There's no mention in this week's calendar of events at the museum. And frankly, though I don't want to slam the kids who made it, the video is not quite woo-worthy. In the original announcement, the museum had solicited works of fiction, non-fiction, comedy, drama, etc., but the winner's is a very simple documentary of a toy exploring the museum. It's a promotional video as shot by visitor/fans. And while that's okay, it's not exactly about to go viral and establish the City Museum as a place for hip, edgy, irreverent, user-generated fun.

What happened? Why wasn't this a huge success like the Oreo Jingle contest? People love the City Museum for being weird and funky. Why didn't their ardor translate into a big win?

Lurking and Creating are two different animals. Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum has written convincingly about the overwhelming dominance of "lurkers" in the Web 2.0 space--people who read blogs, look at YouTube, but don't actually create anything themselves. Consider yourselves. About 1000 people will read this post this week, but maybe one of you will comment... if I'm lucky. The amount of output one can reasonably expect from a group of interested visitors is fairly low. I spoke with some museum folks recently who are tentatively launching a blog as a user-gen part of a new exhibit. They're concerned about inappropriate talk--I'm concerned about whether they'll get any comments at all. And commenting on a blog is a relatively easy action to take. The City Museum contest required a lot of their participants--not just interest and will, but a video camera and some editing equipment. Which leads to...

To inspire participation, you have to provide the tools. How many visitors were psyched about the contest but didn't have the resources to compete? Lots of people bring cameras into museums, but few bring video cameras. And even the basic setup of the City Museum, which involves slides, pokey things, and aquariums, might not really motivate parents to hand over pricey equipment to their kids. What if instead the museum had rented out cameras, or had set up a video kiosk where you could record your video and submit it? Sure, it wouldn't enable creative roaming around the museum, but it would get more people involved with the contest generally. Which relates to...

Provide different ways to participate and spread the content. I was excited to vote on the submissions. Either I read the original announcement incorrectly, or the museum decided not to allow the masses to view the submissions or the finalists. I'm not in St. Louis. I can't be there this Friday for the screening which may or may not be happening. But this is on the web. Why can't I participate? This isn't just about including more visitors in the experience; it's also about tapping them as marketers. I'd like to see a video contest in which each submission (unless truly offensive) is posted on the website and is emailable to friends. That way, if I made a video, I can post it on my MySpace page, tell my friends to vote for me, and generally spread the word. And if I'm just a long-distance vicarious viewer, I can share the event with other remote people as well. Letting people self-promote in contests generates buzz and interest. Which brings me to...

Keep up the buzz, and provide great rewards.I think the biggest mistake the City Museum made was not continuing to promote the contest once the submission deadline had passed. They did a great job encouraging people to submit, but didn't follow through with ways for people to get excited about the final decision and the big winner. Winning a spot on the City Museum MySpace page is cool, but it would be a lot more cool if either a. the museum promoted the MySpace page or b. the video was also shown in places that matter to the contestants, most significantly the museum. Is the winner being shown right now on a screen in the museum lobby? I don't know. I sure hope so.

Tech Tools: Can IMing Make Your Museum More Efficient?

LOL. np. On first glance, instant messaging (IM) seems like a teenage distraction machine, churning out bad spelling and constant interruption. Many businesses block employees from using IM clients during work under the assumption that it is used soley to spread gossip, plan lunches, and avoid work. But there are other businesses—significantly those in the tech sector—that not only allow but ENCOURAGE instant messaging. Are these businesses run by teenagers? Are they nuts? What value does IMing bring to the workplace?

Like any communication tool, IM has to be judged for its ability to do three things:
1. connect one person to another
2. transfer content between communicators
3. perform 1 and 2 in a way that minimizes disturbance to daily workflow and other
coworkers

For example, face-to-face meetings are very good for 1 and 2, but less good for 3. Twitter is great at 1, arguably good at 3, and lousy at 2. Email is bad at 1 (never sure if the other person will see your message), but good at 2 and 3.

Where does IM fall in? Let's consider each of these points separately.

Connection. Yes, IM is another thing to download, another thing to have running on your computer. It relies on people being in front of their computer most of the day. But unlike any other communication medium, IM provides a guaranteed way for the communicator to know whether the communicatee is available for discussion. Lists of contacts, with their "available," "busy," and "away" notation let you know whether the person you are trying to reach is at their computer. There's no concern that the person will never read the email or pick up the message--IM is primarily a real-time activity. And, unlike face-to-face or phone meetings, which are also real-time, you don't need to preschedule; you can find out at a glance whether the person is available or not.

The second part of "connection" has to do with platform versatility. If you call my home and I'm out with my cell, or vice versa, you might not get me. If I email you at your work address, and you don't check that one on the weekend, I'm out of luck. I may be available for discussion, but you've chosen the wrong platform/location to find me. IM shares this problem; if you don't have an IM client, I can't IM you. However, fortunately, the secondary problem associated with this (you use AIM, I use Gchat) is ameliorated if you use a global IM client like Trillian or Adium. These (free) IM clients combine your contacts from AIM, yahoo, ICQ, all kinds of clients, so you can universally IM. Of course, for IM in the workplace, it's sometimes useful to encourage staff to all sign up for the same client, so that this is a non-issue; at other, more tech-savvy institutions, universal clients allow people to connect with the usernames they already have.

Content. IM is not used for dissertations; its primary use is for short queries. Every communication medium has its own etiquette, and IMing is more permissive of curt, quick messaging that the phone or email. IM supports low-context, straightforward transfer of information. If I need to know what our visitorship was last week, I don't need to make it into a multi-sentence email or call for a chat. I can just IM you the question, and you can send me the number.

IM also has an unusual capability to transfer large files, a task that is sometimes onerous over email or FTP sites. I worked with a composer who transferred almost all of his audio files to me via IM. Yes, unlike email or FTP, it required a real-time transaction between us, but the files downloaded faster and with fewer crashes than email or FTP would allow.

Distraction. Is IM distracting? Potentially. But unlike voice-based communication, it does not distract those around you. Like email, IM is something that can paralyze your computer-based work or not, depending on how you manage it. You can set your profile as "busy" or "away" if you don't want to be disturbed. And if you are thoughtful about when to use IM and when to pick up the phone, it can save a lot of time. The same composer who sent me files would often IM me to ask a quick question. Occasionally, those quick questions turned into larger discussions, and we would immediately switch over to the phone. When IM was sufficient, it was the fastest way to make a quick decision. When it wasn't, we upgraded.

But the main distraction positive of IM has to do with regard for coworkers. Many of us work in open offices with lots of people around, and all that brainstorming and phone calling in close proximity can make focused work challenging. I had a boss with an office adjacent to a room in which 8 of us worked. When she had a question for someone, she would yell his/her name repeatedly until that person responded or someone else yelled back that that person was not around. It was efficient for her (she made the connections she needed), but a mess for the rest of us. IM could have given her a continual beat on who was and wasn't available, and a way to grab them (quietly) when she needed them.

***

All of the above arguments apply to all kinds of computer-based workplaces where the majority of employees sit at computers for most of the day. But what about the unique challenges and opportunities of museums? Are there specific ways IM could be applied in these institutions? Here are some creative ways I could imagine museums using IM:

• Direct Line to the Info Desk. Frequently, staff at the info desk have to put guests on hold while they contact the appropriate staff member to answer the guest's question. If museums use IM, info desk staff could get the answer quickly without making the guest wait too long, or could see that the staff member in question was not available (and not have to put the guest on hold at all).
  
• Visitor to Staff IMing. While this may not often be desirable, it is possible to offer guests "live chat" with a staff member via the museum website. Big retailers like IKEA offer these services as a more efficient (for them and the customers) help line. Live chat could be used as a way to ask basic questions about the museum, or the museum could offer special chat hours with experts. If the museum did not want to make such chat available to the whole world via the web, it could happen inside the galleries themselves. Visitors could type their questions into computers in exhibits and receive answers from the curators/experts during live chat hours. This could be a way (albeit less personal) for staff to do some visitor outreach while still working on other things.
• Working with contractors and remote teams. This one is not specific to museums, but to the frequent museum experience of working with remote teams. IM can be a quick way to check in, send reminders, pass photos, etc. I'm working with one company now where everyone is virtual, and everyone is constantly on IM. IM is used as a back channel to pull people into meetings, send out quick links and opinions during conference calls, and generally conduct business.

Do you use IM at work? What are your brilliant uses for it, why did you abandon it, what possibilities can you see for its use in your own institution?

Game Friday: Exhibits that Emulate Casual Games

I visited the Exploratorium a few weeks ago and saw their new exhibition Listen: Making Sense of Sound. It's summer; the museum and the exhibition were hopping. But there was one interactive in Listen that was clearly the rock star among amateurs. Over four hours, there was a steady queue of folks waiting to use it, and we didn't even get a chance to enter until the staff had started tolling the closing bell.

The hot exhibit in question is an interactive in which you play a simple game. You walk as quietly as possible across a tray of stones, towards a small screen that records your increasing "noise score." The louder you are, the higher the score.

That's it. No fancy materials or phenomena. Just a simple feedback mechanism that turns casual play into a game.

People were waiting in line to play, burning their eyes into the rising score as they stepped tentatively over the stones. Some people played to win; others played to get as high and crazy a score as possible. People waited, played, and then jumped back in line again.

Would this exhibit be as popular if there wasn't a score mechanic? Would it be more popular if your score was saved, or if the top five quiet walkers of the day were displayed? What's the balance that makes for successful integration of game mechanics into an exhibit?

I think this exhibit hits the sweet spot by emulating the simplest of casual games. Exhibits, like casual games, strive for a neglible learning phase to precede user action. No one reads the full instruction book for a board game; no one reads the full label for an exhibit. Likewise, a reliance on registration or setup turns off potential player/users who just want to jump in and have a good time. This exhibit literally only requires you to take the first step to get started. The time it takes to engage (about 15 sec to walk across the stones) is short, so replay is an attractive option. Plus, the fact that you wait in line to play creates a natural voyeuristic preparation phase in which you watch others play and plan your own strategy.

Finally, this exhibit exploits the most powerful of game mechanics: personal feedback. My highly unscientific observation is that this exhibit is much more popular than a similar scoring exhibit in which you experiment with materials to make a little car that races down a track. It's more fun to see how good YOU are than how good your invention is. And in the case of the quiet walk, the emphasis is not on how good you inherently are (as in some "test your reflexes" exhibits) but how good you can be. There's an easily identifiable skill involved, one at which most people think they can improve. And the feedback makes you feel that someone cares whether you will.

There are many exhibits, especially in science museums, that focus on encouraging visitors to develop skills. The more obvious those skills are, the more obvious the potential path to improvement, and the more immediate and simple the interface for feedback, the more likely a visitor is to keep trying. Which means getting in line. Buying a ticket. Coming back again. And isn't that the feedback we're looking for?

What’s So Funny? Humor in Museums

I’m working on a virtual museum project these days, and one question that often comes up is “What is the most fun thing we could let visitors do here that they can’t do in the real world?” Inevitably, the answer involves irreverence, whether in the form of interpretation (the comedian’s tour of the museum), instruction (how to guides for not looking stupid while talking about art), or downright destruction (smashing valuable objects). Every time one of these ideas comes up, a guilty silence spreads around the team. Can we really do this? Will the establishment support it? What risks do we run by casting our nets for humor?

After all, most of our ideas don’t require a virtual landscape; any museum could commission Kid Rock’s tour of the galleries. What they do require is a willingness to explore using humor in the museum.

There are plenty of good reasons that most museums are laugh-impaired. Some are cast as temples for objects to be revered. Others explore subject matter that is patently unfunny. Others believe any nod to becoming an “entertainment venue” is a topic for concern (though many are headed that way). But the biggest reason I think museums avoid humor is humor undermines authority. To make a joke about something, you have to feel comfortable playing with the item, with visitors, and with your own role as an “expert.” You have to be okay with the idea that someone might laugh at you.

So why do it? Because humor is a design tool that can be employed as powerfully as a skillfully placed light or a fabulous slice of audio. It can break up and lighten an oppressively intense experience. It can provide connection points among strangers. And educationally, it can be an open hand inviting novice museum-goers to have a comfortable and enjoyable museum experience.

Let’s start by talking about design. As more museums move towards narrative presentation of content, the bank of useful design tools grows to include those used by other storytellers. Consider television. I was watching an episode of CSI recently with audio commentary from the director and many times, he pointed out humorous touches designed to “lighten” the tone of the show. Amidst dead bodies and gore and weapons and test tubes, they’re telling jokes. Lots of them. The sarcastic puns, the gallows humor—it’s all over the show.

Sure, it’s entertainment. But it’s also about murder. The topic is not exactly levity-central, and yet they still find opportunities to crack jokes and try to make the audience smile. The show’s creators, like most entertainers, want to create a positive experience for their audience. And humor is a big part of that. As more museums seek to diversify beyond the intellectual experience of objects and ideas, humor should sit alongside emotion, spirituality, expression, and other newfound palettes for experience design.

But what about the fact that humor often feels silly, like a grab for something profane? Real humor isn’t about knock knock jokes (unless you’re eight). It’s an emotional release valve. Does humor lessen the impact of an intense experience? No. Humor provides comfort, whether in the face of death or potential disaster. It humanizes the experience of stress. It also can encourage people to keeping going or try again.

Consider its use in games. Game researchers have shown that humor contributes to players’ investment in the game, comfort with failure, and general enjoyment. When you see your last ten minutes of agonizing moves go up in smoke, the cosmic funniness of seeing lemmings jump off the cliff or your character get swallowed by a giant toad softens the blow.

It’s also a decent (though debatable) educational tool. Museum professionals know to lead with a joke when they speak at conferences; why not do the same in exhibitions? Punctuating serious presentations with humor keeps people engaged. One of the strangest ways I see this employed is in the ride safety videos at theme parks. These videos, about how to survive a roller coaster, used to be dull and practically unwatchable. Now, they’re full of slapstick—crash test dummies breaking the ride, crazy things you shouldn’t do—and by extension, fun to watch. The theme parks found a way to turn an onerous requirement into a useful piece of entertainment, and I imagine more people are aware of the safety restrictions now than previously.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, humor can be used as a way to connect with visitors who are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or wary of the museum experience. For that large part of the population, museums are foreign landscapes. The visitors don’t know how they should act or what to expect. Making a joke out of these overwhelming first experiences, whether by modeling silly behavior as in the theme park example or making fun of traditional models of museum-going, releases the pressure valve on uncertainty.

But it’s not as easy as throwing a couple puns on the wall. The biggest challenge inherent in the use of humor is its power to alienate. A lot of humor is about us laughing at them—and the identity of us and them are different in different situations. In museums, it’s important to be clear about who these groups are. Probably the safest way to use humor is to make jokes about ourselves, about the museum, and let them laugh at us. What jokes are you willing to tell?

So a priest, a rabbi, and a duck walk into a museum…