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Let’s say you wanted to find a model museum using Web 2.0 to support programs and exhibits. A place that blogs, that engages in social networking sites, that tries experiments, and reports about all of it honestly. A place that truly sees these initiatives as part of their mission to serve their local community. A place that does all this in the context of a fairly traditional collections-based museum. A place that makes it all pretty darn cool.
Is there such a place? You bet. It’s the Brooklyn Museum. They've played with Twitter. They just finished a YouTube video contest. They even created a Facebook application. Today, an interview with Shelley Bernstein, the Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum, and the engine behind that museum’s fabulous forays into Web 2.0.
Tell me about the background for the Brooklyn Museum’s community web component. How did this all start?
We started in earnest a year and a half ago. Everything here is mission-driven, and we have a mission that’s very much about the visitor experience and community. And we looked around and said: what does community mean on the web? And it was so clear at the time.
We started slowly with the MySpace page, and we started in earnest with Flickr. We did this graffiti interactive via Flickr. The real show in the museum was a series of canvasses showing tags--graffiti--and the curator and education department installed a wall in the middle of the gallery so that visitors could tag (we provided colored pencils, and people brought their own markers and stickers). We let it layer to a point and then cleared sections for reuse. We were taking photos of the wall every week and the changes that were taking place. We were finding that so many people were coming to the exhibition just to tag the wall. The Flickr site became this vital thing to get that information about the changes back out to them.
Did you find that people who had been to the exhibition were commenting on the Flickr page? Were they really using it as a post-visit resource?
Oh yeah. We learned a lot about graffiti from Flickr. They would comment on the photos we'd taken and add notes with links to their own profiles. We saw that these artists were using the wall, then telling us about it on Flickr. We also had a thing where you could email photos of graffiti in Brooklyn and we put them on our Flickr wall. We also created the Brooklyn Graffiti Group.
How hard is it for you and your team to manage the work flow of all of these projects?
The great thing about any really strong community on the net—we’ve never ever had to remove a comment on Flickr or even worry about it. Even criticism has been very contructive. Spam, obscenity--they just aren't an issue at all.
I keep telling people, I’m really honest that these are communities, not marketing opportunities. MySpace is, but Facebook isn’t. It’s a long term commitment. Once you start you can’t stop. It’s a community-level thing that you’re doing. It’s not about marketing or advertising. If you post interesting content, the word of mouth aspects will follow.
We get so much spam on MySpace, whereas on Flickr and Facebook and the blog we never get spam.
One thing that can make it more manageable is the use of third party systems. We use Wordpress to power our blogs. It's great to see so many museums using 3rd party systems, like SFMOMA or LA MOCA's Wack!. You don’t know it’s a blog. Using existing tools to run your site allows for plug-ins. Because we want to keep up with new software, and we’re never going to have the programmers to keep up.
Do you think of your efforts as trying to draw new audiences into the museum or reach out to meet them where they are?
I think about it as going to them rather than the audience coming to us. Just as we might go to Prospect Heights or Crown Heights. We know that the actual statistics of people coming through the door is not quantifiable yet—we haven’t done a visitor survey in a couple years. Within the museum, we have a big initiative to tie together comment books electronically, so that gallery comments go on the web and web comments go in the galleries.
How you do decide what experiments to do?
It depends. If it’s connected with an exhibition, I work with our interpretative materials person really closely on the goals and we have a discussion. She’s really great at responding flexibly. There’s a lot of discussion about what would be appropriate when it comes from an exhibition standpoint. But other things--the twitter thing, the video contest was my idea. We’d received a video PSA from Pratt students, and I proposed the contest.
There’s a lot of communication in the building about what we could do. For us it always goes back to mission, so we’re a kind of unique case. For us, it’s not about targeting or marketing--it's about serving the community.
We try to be really really careful here. That’s why we’re not in Second Life. #1, it would be a lot of work. And #2 it doesn’t fit our accessibility mission. Flickr photos and Youtube videos are open and available to all. We look at the equation and say maybe Second Life isn’t the right fit for us. You have to have a really good computer and internet connection. And I’m not sure that our visitors would really benefit from it. One of the things I think about is capturing video in SL to share with others. Any time you see an interactive on our site—we have a plaintext version of that wherever possible. It’s really fabulous when Flickr or YouTube or Blip.tv can really provide content for audiences who use those sites—AND it provides a way to broadcast on your own site.
One of the best services you provide the museum community is your honest post-mortems on projects. Do you ever run into institutional challenges for being so honest?
Not really. Even when it’s kind of a disaster, I try to be methodical about it instead of just ranting. So it’s a calmer discussion, and the people here appreciate that. With the blog, we really try to own up to what blogging is about. It’s a multi-author approach, and the authors are not edited. We have a policy, but for the most part, I think all of the authors have been pretty good at keeping it personal and trying to be transparent.
Do you have any dream projects in the near future?
We really try and go on a case by case basis, fitting things into the context of the larger museum. I read a lot and I look at a lot, and I just sort of keep things in the back of my head. Oh, we could do this. The facebook thing was very organic. I read an article by the founder in Wired about how that platform was so different in terms of application development. My developer had wanted to do an app on it for his own curiousity. We checked with a few people around here and we tried it out. We’d been using Facebook for awhile for groups, but then I happened to read about apps, file it away, and then a week later it came up in conversation.
All of these communities require a real commitment—that you’re there, that you’re updating. It’s funny; I think it’s something we do really well on Flickr, because we’ve been there so long and we know the audience there. If you look at the IMA (Indianapolis Museum of Art), they’ve got that going on in YouTube. Maybe the Tech will have that with your new project in Second Life.
Jim Spadaccini often talks about how you have to learn about and respect the native community on these sites.
Exactly. You want to concentrate on something and make it fabulous. The Walker has it with their blogs. Us on Facebook. IMA on YouTube.
For a museum new to this scene, that isn't ready to make a full commitment, how would you recommend getting started? Programmatically, I think there are some individual projects--like the video contest--that could allow you to dip your foot in the water.
I think you could easily do it on Flickr—the Tate did that with How We Are Now. I don’t know what their commitment is now, but they had a great commitment during that project, which had a beginning and an end. And that was such a fabulous project, and a great experience.
I hesitate though a bit because I don’t think that people should necessarily go do a one-off because I think it doesn’t really build the community. I worry about that. There was a museum that put a series of photos up on Flickr for one project. They did that one thing, and it was clear to me that they were not interested in being there.
We were on Blip.tv before Youtube—it allows longer vids. Blip doesn’t expose the views, but some of these videos have 100,000s of hits. We’ve been there longer (than YouTube) and the audience is responding to our content. One of the reasons we did the video competition was because YouTube is a space that shouldn't be about us pushing content out—it’s YouTube—it’s what they produce, not what we do.
Do you have any image rights issues?
Most of the stuff in our museum is public domain, and we have a very good policy that non-commerical photography is okay. We’re very clear about our photography policy everywhere.
Any special projects you'd like to highlight?
Well, we have electronic, web-connected comment books coming soon to all exhibit spaces. The comment architecture is going to get a lot bigger in the next several months. And then there's the Facebook application, Artshare—the Walker and the Powerhouse are going to come on board with that. My hope is that ArtShare becomes an app not just for the facebook community but for the museum community as well.
Amen! If you're on Facebook, check out the Artshare application. Browse the Brooklyn community site. Check out the links above from the projects Shelley mentioned. And leave your comments and questions (for Shelley, me, or other readers) here!
This week, a look at the third section of Visitor Voices, the excellent book coedited by Kathy McLean and Wendy Pollock. The essays in this section, on “Expressing and Co-Creating,” present projects in which visitors create exhibition content, contribute to its creation, or get a heavy done of meaning-making in their experience of museum content. If talkbacks are analogous to discussions, contributing personal experiences analogous to gifts, then co-creation is about inclusion and control.
Who controls the content in the museum? Who controls the meaning making? Who controls the museum experience? How do we transition to co-ownership with visitors?
Each of the projects profiled in this section offers visitors partial ownership in at least one of these categories. Let's examine each of these questions, and the related projects, more closely.First, museum content. Several of the projects profiled allowed visitors a hand in creating museum content. There is the Art Gallery of Ontario's portrait exhibition In Your Face, for which the museum solicited and displayed thousands of visitor-created self-portraits. The Exploratorium's Nanoscape project, in which visitors and volunteers built giant walk-through models of nanoscale structures, had a different kind of impact; instead of displaying visitors' unique expressions of self, it displayed the power of collective action by visitors, harnessed by an institution.
What's the control difference between Nanoscapes and In Your Face? In both cases, visitors felt as though they were part of the final result, yet In Your Face offered visitors more control. In Nanoscapes, visitors own the experience of production, whereas In Your Face participants own the content itself. It's like the difference between helping to paint a community mural and writing your own name on the wall. At the Exploratorium, people felt connected to the museum by their involvement in a group event; At AGO, they connected through personal expression.Is one of these better than the other? Of course not. But they may attract different people. One of the things that made In Your Face so overwhelmingly successful is people's natural self-interest. People like to talk about and show themselves--that's why MySpace is so popular. In his piece about interaction design for StoryCorps, Jake Barton comments that "for most people the value of the experience will be in making and submitting a story, not seeing it shared with everyone else."
In the above examples visitors were responding to a call by the museum for a specific type of content. More experimental are the projects where the museum sets up a platform for visitor co-creation and then lets the visitors run with it. At Liberty Science Center, exhibits are designed with support for visitor-created "hacks" and improvements in mind. On the Ontario Science Center's 2.0 site RedShiftNow, visitor content not only populates but steers the experience. And at the Ontario Science Center's Weston Innovation Center, the exhibits are designed with visitors--not just tested by them.
In these and other examples (the Walker Art Center's new teen site comes to mind), the museum specifically sets up a site in a way that is not most comfortable, useful, or familiar to the museum staff. They allow visitors, often acknowledged to have different backgrounds from staff, to set the tone.
This is what I'd call visitors "controlling the experience." This is hard and painful work, often requiring exhibit designers to intentionally create platforms that allow ugly and chaotic things to happen. The intentionality is necessary; giving control to visitors without giving them a supportive platform is just laziness, and visitors respond with non-participation. These challenges are complicated by legitimate questions about the value of the output of such experiences. If only 1% of our audience wants to participate as creators (a generous estimate by Web 2.0 standards), does the experience created better serve the other 99%?
This relates to an interesting question: are museum FOR visitors or are they BY visitors? Some people talk about creating "with visitors," which is good tactically, but strategically, I'd argue that "for" is the key. If you lose sight of the "for," then the end result is not compelling. Honest delving into what makes a good experience "for visitors" certainly means doing some "by" and "with." But it also means accomodating those who prefer to receive rather than generate content. To me, involving visitors means getting them on the bus, not handing them the keys and deserting them. We need a spot for everyone, not just drivers.
Which leads to the third kind of co-creation discussed in this section, meaning-making. In some ways, these experiences are the least revolutionary. The two examples in the book, the installation Explore a Painting in Depth at AGO and Question at the Cantor Arts Center, give visitors the chance to insert their own voice--personally or as a broadcast--in the understanding of art.
How is this different from the talkbacks discussed in section 1? Rather than just giving people a chance to give feedback on museum content, both of these installations represented new platforms for visitors to interact with and interpret content. It wasn't the visitor part that changed; it was the museum part. The exhibits supported questions people had about art--what it meant, how it was valued--and allowed visitors to explore art from their own points of reference rather than those of the curators.
These projects may not be as sexy as Exhibit Commons or other visitor-generated experiences. The idea that visitors make their own meaning is hardly new. What makes these examples special is the fact that these exhibitions supported rather than fought that fact. Instead of throwing curators' expertise out the window, the curators in these examples tried to find new ways to welcome and open themselves to visitors' specific interests. In that way, these projects are no different than RedShiftNow. Both seek to meet and support visitors at their own level. The difference is that these meaning-making experiences serve a different audience--the large percentage who prefer a consumptive to a generative museum experience.Being successful with visitor co-creation requires a great deal of selflessness--a willingness on the part of museum staff to see ourselves as support staff, rather than content providers, for visitors. We have to manage the back end and let the visitors do all the fun stuff. Imagine the Art Gallery of Ontario staff, sorting, hanging, and managing the 17,000 self-portraits they received for In Your Face. They weren't curating. They weren't interpreting. They were just carrying out the will and enthusiasm of their visitors (and I'm sure that was both exhiliarating and dull). Hopefully, we can make the mental transition that makes the reception and management of visitor content as satisfying as the creation of the content on our own. Because ultimately, loving, supporting, and encouraging our visitors is what makes these institutions for them. Not for us.
Next week, some comments on the final section of the book and the book overall.
One of my mentors, Michael Brown, told me, “The only way to get better is to change.” He was talking poetry, but over time I’ve found it to be one of the most useful, challenging ways to approach a range of situations. So now, after almost a year of Game Fridays, it’s time for a change. Not that I won’t still occasionally write about games, but they will no longer have a weekly presence on this blog (though you can always find lots of them by clicking the "game" tag in the topic list to the right).
Why the change? In this case, it has less to do with getting better than choosing a new direction. My interest in gaming in museums was ignited by working on Operation Spy, an immersive, narrative, live-action game experience at the International Spy Museum, and fueled by the CSI:NY virtual experience. But last week, I took a new job with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, working on a very different kind of project involving collaborative distributed exhibit design. So where visions of Flash games used to dance in my head, I’m now starting to fantasize about team-building, inclusion, and, of all things, Second Life.The Open Source Museum project at The Tech is a grant-funded grand experiment. The concept is practical: cut the time and expense of exhibit development by creating a social space where exhibit developers from many museums—along with scientists, artists, visitors—can collaborate to design concepts for exhibits. These virtual, polyglot teams will devise experiences that are not hindered by the cultural predilections of any single institution, and hopefully, will reflect a more diverse, inclusive voice and design. The Tech (and other museums down the road) will be able to offer up themes for upcoming major exhibitions, and the best of the concepts developed by the collaborative crew will be realized in the physical institution.So what does this collaborative platform look like? We’re using a combination of a wiki-style website and a Second Life presence to make it happen. On the website, participants can propose exhibit projects, join teams, and maintain presences for themselves and their exhibits in progress. Those exhibits will be prototyped, discussed, and explored by visitors in virtual form in Second Life. All of the project ideas and virtual creations will be shared under a Creative Commons license, so the content truly is open to all. This is happening very, very quickly. The project will launch in December, and we are planning to have our first exhibits developed by this process on the floor at The Tech in summer of 2008. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re playing it fast and loose. Of course, the good news about all of this haste is that it forces us to be honest to the spirit of the project, which is about openness, sharing, releasing things before their done for feedback and redesign by a cast of thousands.All of this is sweeping many new questions into my mind. Will exhibit developers really use (and derive any value from) Second Life? How much structure is motivating and how much becomes a chore? What will incentivize different kinds of people to participate? How do we make this a growing social space and not a one-hit wonder? Will this project thrive or fall flat?
Ultimately, the biggest question in my mind is about value propositions. How can we design this project to give value to participants throughout the process? We’re trying to construe this as a professional development opportunity—to work with others, design for different kinds of museums, learn about Second Life and collaboration tools—as much as an exhibit design process.What are the questions in your mind about team exhibit design? What would you want a project of this nature to include? I look forward to discussing these and many other questions about this experiment in the months to come. Viva the distributed conversation!
Last week, we looked at the first section of Visitor Voices, on Talk-backs, and came to the conclusion that comment boards and the like are functionally conversations, and that their design, therefore, should focus on encouraging positive, lively, thoughtful, engaged discussion. This week, we look at the second section, Contributing Personal Experiences.
What makes this section distinct? Contributing personal experience is less about discussion and more about gifts--gifts our visitors give to us in the form of their stories and observations. These gifts may be emotional, analytical, even activist. They are not boisterous dinner parties. They are personal, sometimes private. And rather than forming a sequential narrative via responses and counter-responses, they form a collective narrative, a dataset of primary experiences from which meaning (and exhibitions) can be created.
What better example of this distinction than the Love Tapes? Created by video artist Wendy Clarke, and eventually part of the Exploratorium's collection, the Love Tapes project features visitors of all kinds sharing their personal experiences of love. Again, this is not a discussion about what love is or isn't. People aren't responding to each other. Yes, most visitors are encouraged to watch other videos before submitting their own, but the video creation process is set up as wholy about you and your experiences.
Wendy has a very specific set of ground rules about how someone is supposed to approach the Love Tapes: first, by watching others to get the feel for it, then, recording their own (to background music of their choice), then, deciding whether to include it in the total collection, and finally, viewing their own tape as part of that collection.
The "view, then record, then review" model is not surprising, but there are other elements here that are. First, the music. Rather than sit a person in a room in front of a camera with no context, creators speak over a song. In the beginning, everyone had the same song; later, people could choose preferred background songs. The songs serve a few functions: they set expectations about the time duration of the video, they set a relaxing mood, and finally, they offer accompaniment.
The accompaniment is a strange one. Robert Garfinkle of the Science Museum of Minnesota commented at ASTC that the cacophony of voices from videos in the exhibition RACE make people feel more comfortable talking about the issues the exhibition raises, since they are in the environment of other people's words. I think the musical accompaniment to the Love Tapes may play the same role--giving people something to sink into and become part of, rather than being cognizant of the stark aloneness of their own voice.
Another unusual element of the Love Tapes is the positioning of the subject, who faces a screen hooked directly to the camera. The effect is to let you watch yourself as you speak. At first I thought this might be terribly distracting, but what are the alternatives? To look at a blank wall? Label text? An evocative image? Ultimately, looking at yourself may keep the creator focused on what he or she is saying, on the extent to which the video is a mirror of his or her true expression.
The Love Tapes stand out for their power. Even just reading about them, I was moved and wanted desperately to see them. Part of their power, like that of the PostSecret project, is their originator's love for them and desire to see them grow. Wendy Clarke's reaction after recording hundreds of these wasn't, "thank goodness that's over." It was, "I wish I could do these with every single person in the whole world." The Love Tapes weren't a sideshow to a bigger exhibition--they were worth working for on their own. The content was serious, important, and deeply cared for. And clearly, that showed in what came out.
Supporting safe spaces for personal expression isn't all about empowering visitors--it can create new opportunities for staff as well. In some cases, those expressions aren't even the visitors' own. The Darkened Waters story--of an Exxon-Valdez spill exhibition at a tiny museum that became their first ever traveling exhibition based on visitor demand--is a heartening example where that expression was "show this to others." The Pratt Museum in AK should be extremely proud of the fact that they created something their visitors thought was so valuable it had to be seen by others. The visitors adopted the content and empowered the museum to go further. It's nice to see visitors and museums switch roles like that.
To me, these projects are successful when the museum is willing to do something with visitor contributions--to base an exhibit on them (as in the Love Tapes) or to act on them (as in Darkened Waters). In the examples where the visitor contribution was seen as a limited, non-essential component of the exhibit experience, the impact seemed minimal. So if last week's core lesson was about supporting engaging discussion, this week's is about caring for visitors, and thinking of them as integral to the exhibition content or direction. Again, a universal theme, easy to imagine, hard to implement honestly.
It's also hard to implement when the content is not deeply personal--as in the Love Tapes, Exxon-Valdez, or the Vietnam War (in an Oakland Museum exhibition). I don't think the question should be: how can we get people to share deep personal expression about topic X? The question should be: does topic X evoke deep personal expression? For whom? If not for our visitors, how can we share it? If we can't share it, what are we doing?
I did some digging and found this link, where you can watch a half hour of the Love Tapes from 1982. Share the love.
Museum 2.0 is celebrating one year in the blogosphere. I started blogging in 2006 after ASTC as a way to continue exploring the intersections between Web 2.0 and museums discussed at the “Hot Topics in Exhibit Design” session. A year later, and it’s been an incredible learning experience for me (and hopefully has had some benefit for you, too). I offer a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has read, commented on, and supported this highly non-academic researching, poking, and wandering.
As you know, Museum 2.0 isn't as focused on late-breaking news as most blogs are. There's a lot of useful content in the archives. But there are now 177 posts on this blog. Sheesh. That's a lot. And Museum 2.0 is still drawing a large number of new readers. Where should you start? Which is the good stuff?
To aid you in your search, I'd like to point out a few tools.
First, at the very top left corner of this page, there's a search box. You can enter any term or phrase there, and Blogger will return any posts that include that term in the title or body of the post.
Second, there's the topic list on the right, which allows you to see posts tagged with a certain subject keyword, like design or virtual worlds. I've added four new tags that are more general: Core Museum 2.0 Theories, Technology Tools Worth Checking Out, Museums Engaging in 2.0 Projects, and Unusual Projects and Influences. Let me know if there are other groupings or tags that might be useful to you (I wish I could let you tag the posts... sigh).
Finally, there are the most popular posts, as well as a chronological list of posts.
And I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize a few posts made better by your challenging and thoughtful comments:
Warning: Museum Graduate Prograns Spawn Legions of Zombies! The Most Contentious Post (and Most Commented Upon). This post spawned intense debate, a few friendships, and teaching engagements at JFKU, where the debate, thankfully, continues.Talking Through Objects 2: The Rollercoaster Conundrum The Most Educational Post. Wherein I learned from you all kinds of theories about why people slap each other's hands on rollercoasters, including a particularly gross one involving saliva. Participation Through Collaboration: Making Visitors Feel Needed The Most Religious Post. In which rabbis, biblical archaeologists, and laity take their seats at the commenting table and get to the core of whether 2.0 is good or not. PostSecret: Lessons in Meaningful User-Generated Content The Most Famous Post. In which Frank Warren, originator of PostSecret, made a comment.
Finally, two good posts worth catching: one on the Creation Museum, and another on the value of floor staff.
Again, I thank you for your comments, critiques, questions, and lively discussion. You make this a wonderful experience--hopefully for other readers, and certainly for me. Please leave a comment if there are any ways that I--and we--could make this a better blog. In particular, I'd love any suggestions on how to make the site more user-friendly as a resource.
Here's to the next year!
A quickie today, a quirky little wandering game in the Things Came up to my brain museum. Feed apples to frogs, spin the Victorian ladies round, and come upon a variety of bizarre delights in this factory of oddity. It's a point-and-click, so start opening doors and moving things around.These kinds of flash games are like a slice of theater; with a few sketched lines and simple interaction, you're immersed in a world. A shadow box of stories, an attic to colonize. How wondrous and under-utilized in museums, the design strokes that do more with (distinctive) less.
Enjoy!
I've been doing some reading recently about 2.0 on the library side of the fence. It's fascinating: the term "Library 2.0" was coined in 2005 and has a Wikipedia page and several bloggers, conferences, and active debates surrounding it.
Are the debates about what applications to use and which are a waste of time? Sometimes. But the most heated battles seem to be focused on the perceived divide between those obsessed with Web 2.0 and its power for good (2.0topians) and those alienated by and against it (luddites). Even the ones who are trying to make sense of it all come out swinging. Consider, for example, the above image, created by David Lee King, which describes less a spectrum than an ascension to 2.0topia. The image below, created by Meredith Farkas, is more balanced, providing a "cultural landscape" of fear, loathing, and obsession with Web 2.0. 
Why are people religious about technology? Or rather, why do people group themselves religiously around technology?
Technology isn't supposed to be religious. It's supposed to be about practical application of scientific knowledge, not fear, dependence, or belief. And yet we all get caught up in it--addicted to XM radio, extolling the value of real wrench sets over adjustables, fuming at the jerk who takes a call during dinner--because it affects and relates to culture.
To many people, the culture of Web 2.0 is threatening, overwhelming, and generally unappealing. If we want to work with directors, trustees, and other skeptics to evolve museums and other content providers alongside Web 2.0, we have to work first on establishing a culture that makes Web 2.0 non-threatening and inviting.
What are the perceived negative aspects of Web 2.0 culture that need to be addressed?
Churn rate. Web 2.0 thrives on a constant stream of new applications and products. These products are entirely virtual and are distributed virtually, so the time from launch to editorial review is instantaneous. The result is a rapid boom and bust cycle that conveys the worst of "next big thing" mania. Toy stores have their toy of the year; Web 2.0 has its hot app of the moment. Why waste your time learning how to use something that will be out the door tomorrow?
In-crowds. The people who keep on top of Web 2.0 literally speak a different language from the rest of us. They don't just keep bookmarks, they Digg things and save them to del.icio.us. They don't call a friend to share news; they blog, twitter, facebook, and myspace it. It's not unlike a hippie commune; everyone on the inside is ecstatic, whereas people on the outside wish they'd shower more. But unlike the commune, the insiders are constantly, ruthlessly spearing each other on blogs and message boards. Outsiders fear that they will be derided or discounted for their lack of savviness.
General Web skepticism. There are still many people out there who don't think it's a good thing to spend lots of time in front of a computer, who are perturbed by the idea of virtual social networks and online communities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the constant question, "If your first life is good, why do you need a Second Life?"
Unclear application. Why should I use Facebook? Does my virtual pet really need a social network? While there are some sites, like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, that are fairly easy to understand, there are hundreds of others with no clear differentiated value. And even if you understand what a site does, what can it do for your museum? Can it generate revenue? Can it attract more visitors? "It's cool" is not a winning board room argument. The term "killer app" is only meaningful if it is "killer" for the audience at hand.
Addressing the Challenges
So if you're someone (like me) who cares about sharing Web 2.0 with others, where do you start? The first part of ending this war between luddites and 2.0topians is acknowledging and separating the cultural issues from the technology.
If you're an insider, defy expectations. Be thoughtful about why you recommend an application to others. Think of it like giving gifts; it's more important to give someone something they will like than something you like. Laugh with them about how crazy the volume of stuff out there is. Admit to them that you only really follow a few things. Tell them why you think a particular application does or doesn't have legs. Help them login and get started the first time.
If you are trying to convince your institution/boss/board that something is useful, justify it in terms of their goals. Talk resources and impact. If it's an experiment, say so. There are resources out there--experts, leaders of projects already underway--who can furnish you with stats to serve as arsenal.
Most of all, you have to identify with the folks you are talking with and give up your insider status. Pull back the curtain constantly. Be an ambassador (as cheesy as that sounds), validate fears, and then assuage them.
Once the culture war is over, we can start talking technology, looking for the applications that provide methods or content that help solve practical problems. Bridging the culture gap doesn't mean the technology will be any less exciting, useful, or impractical. What it means is that we can share that excitement without vitriol or fear. We can start making things happen. Together.
Welcome to the first installment of the Visitor Voices book club. This week, we're looking at the first section, Talking Back and Talking Together, which features comment boards, talk-back walls, and discussion forums at a variety of museums. Rather than rehash each of the projects (hint: read the book!), I'm offering a bit of analysis through the lessons I learned from this section. I invite you to do the same in the comments. A bit of business before we get started: next Tuesday, we'll cover section 2, Contributing Personal Experience.
And now onto the show.
Lesson 1: People want to talk, but not necessarily about the topics you suggest.
At the Boston Museum of Science's video kiosk on wind power, 3/4 of people were most interested in making their own video (as opposed to watching others). Both the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) and the London Science Museum (LSM) provide quantitative data about the ways visitors engaged with comment cards in selected exhibitions. Over three exhibitions at the LSM, 20-35% of visitor comment cards were deemed "relevant" to the exhibition. At an exhibition at the OSC, 68% of cards received were deemed useful, of which about 25% were relevant to the exhibition. In the OSC study, only 1.4% of comments directly addressed questions posed by the curators, whereas 2.4% responded to other visitors' comments.
In both places, the majority of cards received were "not relevant" to the exhibition. What were they about? Some were nonsensical, graffiti, or obscenities, but many were comments on the quality and content of the museum generally. People had opinions to offer and corrections to make. This hijacking of exhibition comment cards for more general use suggests that museums might benefit from more open-ended talk-back areas in common spaces--as long as those common areas can preserve the spirit of respect and encouragement that elicited the visitors' participation in exhibition talk-backs.
Lesson 2: Anger is good.
Several authors commented on the utility of visitor comment boards as a place for visitors to vent--about the exhibition or the institution. In cases where the topic was controversial or the exhibition style risky, including a space for visitor talk-back ameliorated visitor anger about perceived biased portrayal of content. In this way, exhibit designers were sometimes able to rely on visitors to determine the balance and spectrum of the exhibition.
This may seem like a sloppy, "leave it to visitors" way to deal with controversy. In the best examples, visitor comments were not only displayed but integrated back into the exhibitions themselves to make the "museum voice" more inclusive. One such example was at the New York Historical Society's exhibition Slavery in New York. The show was the society's most popular ever, and about 3% (6,000 of 175,000 visitors) offered their own video commentary about the exhibition's topics, and, by extension, the institution itself. Both authors commented that reviewing and editing the videos for use in the exhibition made them more aware of the Society's perceived image, particularly in the eyes of nontraditional (African-american) visitors. Chris Lawrence writes about one group of teens who addressed the Society directly as a "you" embodying white privilege. How often does your enemy acknowledge you? Chris and others saw the videos as special, personal, instructive resources
for their own staff about current and potential visitors.
Lesson 3: Indifference is bad.
Receiving angry responses from visitors isn't just educational; it also indicates that the visitors' reactions are strong enough, and their perception of the comment area as valued enough, to accommodate their voice. An old married couple once told me, "fighting is good. When you get disinterested in each other, the relationship is on the rocks." While our relationship with visitors, as with lovers, shouldn't be adversarial, getting a reaction means visitors care--and think we will as well.
How do we ask visitors to give comments in a way that conveys this spirit of care and respect? Janet Kamien gives an honest insight into a talk-back that didn't succeed:
One important lesson learned at the Field Museum was in Animal Kingdom. An early talk-back in that conservation-minded exhibition asked, 'What can you do to help the environment?' and provided some prompts, such as recycling, or saving gas or electricity. To this, visitors responded with observations like 'Charlie loves Sally' and a variety of four-letter words. Why? Because they knew they were being set up. We weren't really asking them what they thought, we just wanted them to parrot something back to us, and they refused. We took it out.
Interestingly, the Monterey Bay Aquarium took the same basic visitor question ("what can you do?") and transformed it into legitimate visitor talk-backs in a series of campaigns to provoke personal and political action to protect ocean life. Jenny Sayre Ramberg writes about their evolution, from a basic question (which elicited generic comments like "I like the ocean") to requests for visitors to make personal pledges ("I will stop eating shrimp"), to a letter-writing campaign to the governor ("Please sign this bill to save marine protected areas").
What made these solicitations meaningful? The pledge talk-back was in the context of an exhibition explicitly about conservation controversies (and many visitors responded emotionally to the exhibit rather than making pledges). Also, the Aquarium posted pledges made by staff about changing their own everyday behaviors. This approach, using staff as peers instead of experts, conveyed respect and "we-ness" for visitor contributions.
The letter-writing campaign didn't provide a forum for a variety of visitor comments; instead, it focused visitors on a specific advocacy action. Rather than challenging people (with a wink) to write about what "they" will do, the letter-writing campaign offered a framework for what "we" will do, including visitors in the we with the Aquarium. This is the key to any respectful solicitation for visitor input--that we think of them as part of us, rather than a class or group to be pandered to and dealt with.
Lesson 4: The unique properties of different implementations have yet to be defined.
Throughout this whole book, I would have liked more direct analysis of the merits of different platforms for visitor contribution. When is a video kiosk most effective? When a comment book? Janet Kamien makes an argument for comment cards over books because cards can be filled out and reviewed socially and in parallel, rather than sequentially. Similarly, some might argue that some uniquely social outcomes of talk-backs--discussion, debate, even protest--can only happen in an environment that supports emergent interaction among users.
Video is a whole other animal. It's compelling, but not as browsable as text. It feels special, but that also encourages people to use it for other purposes ("Hi, mom!"). The browsing problem is exacerbated by the fact that staff rarely actively monitor and curate videos as they do comment cards--moving the gems to the front and removing the duds. Browsing visitor-created videos often means suffering through the most recent, rather than the most interesting, content.
Finally, there were a few examples of programmatic rather than exhibition-based projects. These primarily were about "talking together" and required a serious time investment on the part of participants. The Boston MOS forums and the DeCiDe program in Europe have both been quite successful engaging visitors with one another in deep, literally "mind-changing" interactions. The challenge is distributing these programs either to mass audiences or without heavy facilitation.
Lesson 5: Talk-backs are discussions.
When I first read the book, I wondered how Wendy and Kathy (the editors) decided which essays to put where. Many essays in other sections also deal with comment cards, videos, and visitor feedback. But all of the essays in this section deal with these talk-backs not as opportunities for visitors to uniquely express themselves (next week!) but as ways to converse with the museum and each other.
And in some ways, that makes imagining the best implementations less daunting. What makes a good discussion? Interesting topics. Engaged and lively participants. Respect for different viewpoints. Energy. Think of the great debates and dinner parties in your life. What would you put on the list?
This past Wednesday (October 24), CBS aired an episode of CSI: NY in which a killer uses Second Life to attract and hunt down her victims. The episode was a cliff-hanger, and viewers were invited to log on to a special CSI:NY-themed island in Second Life to continue the hunt for the murderer. The mysteries—and killings—will continue in Second Life until players find the murderer, at which point she will be “turned over” to Gary Sinise and the rest of the “real” CSI:NY cast for resolution on air.
I’m one of many people associated with The Electric Sheep Company who have worked on this (free, still available) cross-platform experience, and I was lucky enough to write the narrative games that weave through the Second Life experience. As we designed virtual CSI:NY, the constant mantra was to address the “What do I do now?” question that plagues many newcomers to Second Life. Second Life, and virtual worlds in general, with their infinite opportunities for exploration, socializing, and creation, can be overwhelming and unappealing to people who are not specifically seeking a “liberating” experience. Most of us get stressed out by total freedom. We’re in a consumer culture. We want schedules and missions and assignments and grade breakdowns. We want the lights to go down, the music to swell, and the experience to sweep us away.
For that reason, virtual CSI:NY is an intentionally atypical Second Life experience. Everything from orientation to the downloadable toolbar/HUD gives you clear suggestions for what to do and where to go. Rather than “liberating” people to the whole virtual world, we constrain them to a world of directed content and clear goals. Operation Spy, the narrative immersion experience at the International Spy Museum, does the same thing. There, we combined the constraints of highly themed, intimate environments, timed challenges, and specific missions with a sense that “you control the experience.” It’s not surprising that the ad campaign for Operation Spy: “like the most intense movie you’ve ever seen, except you’re in it” is similar to that for virtual CSI:NY: “you’ve seen the show… now BE the show.” In both cases, the focus is on taking a more active role in what is typically a very directed experience, not as a creator, but as an actor.
There are many Second Life and museum purists who bristle at these kinds of projects. If the whole point of Second Life (or a museum visit) is for people to have an exploratory experience free of consumer B.S., why push them into a didactic mode of interaction? The answer is that in most cases, it makes for a less stressful user experience. We didn’t create the virtual CSI:NY games to limit people; we did it to offer clear activities with clear rewards. Over time, we hope that people will use virtual CSI:NY, and virtual worlds in general, in a more experimental, freeform way—but some people aren’t ready for instant liberation. They need to work their way in from interactions that make them feel comfortable and successful.
Similarly, one might argue that a simple museum game, such as a scavenger hunt, could be an entrance to museum-going that takes the stress out of meaning-making by transferring visitors’ energy to the game. But here the tension rises. Won’t we cheapen and distort the wonder of museums by shepherding visitors into fill-in-the-blanks, crossword puzzles and bingo cards?
Maybe not. Ultimately, this is about overcoming threshold fear. I don’t have threshold fear when entering museums, but I do when it comes to Second Life. Still a newbie, I’m uncomfortable jumping in-world without a clear destination. Working on virtual CSI:NY was deeply satisfying because we were always focused on that new user (with whom I identify), on answering the question, “What do I do now?”
The barriers to entry in Second Life are perceived as huge, so they have to be addressed in design (and games are considered an acceptable approach). But the barriers to entry in museums are also significant: we museum professionals have just grown inured to them. While we advocate for visitors, we rarely advocate for newbies to the museum experience. We expect a certain level of interest in the open-ended interaction offered, and if people don’t have previous experience with such interactions, we expect them to rise to our level.
Imagine a museum dealing with the same skepticism and fear that accompanies virtual worlds Second Life. Imagine news reporters probing unpopulated galleries or castigating science centers as places for hordes of zooming campers. Imagine if every article about a museum was written from the perspective: “Why would you ever go there?”
It’s been a privilege and a challenge to tackle these questions with virtual CSI:NY. We used games as one way to provide a gateway across a vast and confusing threshold. But the games are just an entrance. We can’t hide forever behind directed experiences, nor do the core users (either of museums or virtual worlds) want people to. At their best, these games and other tricks are early steps on the path towards understanding and appreciating the essential openness of virtual worlds (and museums).
What other games or non-gaming techniques could be used to usher museum “newbies” across the museum threshold? And how can these techniques help reveal the essential, delightful nature of exploration rather than masking it?
One of my most exciting moments of ASTC this year was picking up a copy of the newly released Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, a collection of essays ten years in the making, edited by Kathy McLean and Wendy Pollock.
This book provides a plethora of case studies and reflections on visitor contributions, co-expression, and creations in museum exhibitions over the last thirty years. It’s an inspiring and varied collection.
The book opens with a list of reasons why museums might use "visitor-response elements in exhibitions." The list is so darn good I'm reproducing it here. As Kathy and Wendy write, visitor-response elements can:
-validate visitors' experiences, knowledge and emotions
-support visitors in personalizing and integrating their exhibition experiences
-redress a perceived imbalance in the content of an exhibition
-enable the institution to engage with a wider audience
-expose visitors and museum staff to diverse perspectives
-open up possibilities for dialogue and exchange
-extend participation beyond a programmatic event
-reinforce visitors' intentions to take action
-help people find others with common interests
-provide a constructive way for a community to respond to a contentious or emotional issue
-deepen museum staff's understanding of visitors' experiences
-honor public creativity
To me, incorporating visitor-generated content into exhibitions is a natural extension of the reality that visitors "make their own meaning" in museums--and therefore, the design of such components must be meaningful. And while all of these outcomes are positive, visitor-response elements are not always successful or valuable components of every exhibition. The examples in this book are a great starting point for dialogue about the bigger questions about how, when, and why of visitor-generated content.
So let's start talking! Over the next few weeks (starting next Tuesday), I’ll be leading a book club on pieces from this book. I encourage you to get the book, and add comments to this post if there are particular projects or authors you’d like to see covered. I will try to track down as many of the “real” authors or participants as possible for interviews so these can be follow-up discussions answering my and your burning questions brought about by these brief and enticing essays.
The book is split into four sections: Talking Back and Talking Together, Contributing Personal Experience, Expressing and Co-Creating, and Starting to Listen. Each week, we'll cover a different section, starting with the first one on talk-backs next Tuesday.
But until then, in the spirit of the book, I invite you to add your comments here about how you perceive the value of visitor-generated content, or descriptions of successful or unsuccessful examples of exhibitions where you’ve seen incorporation of visitors’ expression.
From 2006-2019, Museum 2.0 was authored by Nina Simon. Nina is the founder/CEO of 