The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 6: Museum 2.5 by Elaine Heumann Gurian

This is a bonus installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog featured a guest post examining some aspect of the book. Then I received this commentary from Elaine Heumann Gurian, a museum hero of mine who has been following the book club--and I had to include it. Thanks to ALL the guests who have helped make this book discussion a success!

I have been using quotes from Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place in my own writings for quite a long time. I had became convinced (around 1996) that there was something important about museums as socializing spaces that should be further explored. I went off to read Jane Jacobs[i] and William Whyte[ii] who both understood and wrote about the importance of strangers interacting with each other in public outdoor spaces. Their seminal writing and research first took place in the 1960’s.

I also read books by various architects who were writing about museum buildings and their uses but they were mostly interested in the functioning of the building itself or how buildings made visitors feel. At the time I did not find any architectural writers who wanted to talk about the promulgation of stranger interaction within their spaces. Then I stumbled upon The Great Good Place while browsing in my local library. The book was a revelation and an affirmation that gave credence to the importance of strangers meeting each other inside establishments outside the home as a method of community building. I was excited.

The Great Good Place has since become treated as a mandatory museum studies touchstone. Many people use references to “third spaces” as short hand when discussing any sites that are neither home nor offices. Often they do so without reading the book. And saying the phrase “third space” has become synonymous for other phrases like “forum, meeting ground, scholar’s cafes, seating amenities, and entrance halls” none of which are synonyms at all. Because of the casual use of the “third-space” phrase I found myself believing that Oldenburg’s book was foundational. Having read it carefully the first time, I did not reread it again counting on my memory when referring to it.

Now, thanks to you, Nina, and the Book Club on your blog, I have reread The Great Good Place and am disappointed: it does not really apply to museums very much, and Oldenburg is more prescriptive and judgmental about what he thinks constitutes the third space (that he has been instrumental to getting the public to acknowledge and to value) than I would like. Oldenburg is writing about space that encourages repeated interaction between frequent customers who end up acknowledging each other so that former strangers become familiar acquaintances. Jane Jacobs would call them “regulars”.

The third space he is describing is to be found on a continuum of important civic spaces each of which accomplishes different important tasks. Let me describe one of these other spaces which I call “congregant space”. It encourages a lower threshold of human interaction and does not require overt human interaction to be effective. If well designed these inside and outside public spaces allow strangers to view the “other” as fellow humans who happen to the same location.

The importance of congregant spaces can be better understood in times of troubles when authorities intentionally or inadvertently permit their citizens access to fewer and fewer such places that are considered safe enough to freely traverse. I believe having accessible spaces seen by the public as belonging to all is essential for civic health.

In 2009, writing for a book titled One Meter Square[iv] conceived by and celebrating the art of my Argentinean friend Graciella Sacco, I wrote:

If you mark off one meter square on the ground you will see that it is a very small space. Only one person can comfortably occupy it at one time. It is clear that any human activity that takes place in a one meter space is highly dependent on where that meter is situated and what is adjacent to it. A meter set in a dense forest not only looks different from one in the airport but is peopled much less often. All this so far is obvious.

What is less apparent is that some places as small as a meter square can contribute to civic peace. Their presence makes the world a little bit better and together with other such meters help keep us collectively safer. Yet these places, which I call “congregant spaces,” are ordinary, seemingly unrelated to each other, and ubiquitous. In each, strangers can safely meet; participate in the same activity at the same time; see, and even brush past, one another; and yet need not talk to or even acknowledge each other. Most importantly, people feel safe enough to enter or walk through these spaces.

The absence of such safe places is symptomatic of a community plagued with civic disquiet, even violence and upheaval. We sense the importance of these places when they’re absent. It is easy to understand why terrorists target them to promote widespread fear. ….

When people have easy opportunities to view each other, they get accustomed to one another. And when everyone can use the same spaces and services, we signal a silent welcome to each of the strangers we meet along the way.

Even better, safe public spaces which encourage learning and debate (lecture halls, museums, libraries, etc.) can move us further -- from mere passive acceptance and civility to understanding and even empathy.

So when a meter square is situated in the midst of a safe congregant space -- where all of society can walk unimpeded -- that meter is contributing to peaceful assembly. And if that meter can be attached to another beside it, followed by another and another…

Museum congregant space might be renamed “Museum Space 2.5” in honor of Nina’s blog. 2.5 might place it midway between the second space of work and the third space described in this book. Perhaps we in museums could learn to intentionally value museums as safe 2.5 spaces where strangers can see each other without needing to interact. Space 2.5 is a precursor to Oldenburg’s third space. This lower threshold requirement for stranger interaction in space 2.5 does not lower the importance of the third space as Oldenburg conceives of it but I would contend space 2.5 is more germane to public civility than is the third space which is useful in local community building. And with a continuum of space use, I suggest that museums that create space 2.5 will be surprised to see opportunities presenting themselves for also becoming the 3^rd space of their neighborhood.

However creating functioning space 2.5 is not as simple as creating empty open space. Jane Jacobs and others would demand that the space include a set of ingredients that promote welcome, safety, usefulness and interactivity. In a paper called "Function Follows Form"[iv] I suggested that the proponents would insist that informal public spaces have:

…a sense of place, are ecologically sensitive, put reliance on foot rather than auto traffic, are utilized over many hours each day and offer a mix of activities which appeal to many. They maintain that the juxtaposition of spaces that forms mixed-use environments must be present if community building is to succeed.

Jacobs adds the acceptance of “unplanned and ad hoc use” as another necessary component.

The translation of these ingredients into museum design must be intentional. The admission’s barrier remains the single largest impediment to welcome. But assuming that the museum has free admission, the designer must consider the location, quantity and design of amenities like seating, hours of availability, encouragement of perambulation, views that encourage people watching, a multiplicity of programs and activities so that the user enters for multiple reasons not just gallery viewing.

Think train station and airport. These spaces consider the placement and variety of seating and services, the ease of using the toilets, the hours that they are open, the security they impose and the unexpected but allowable activities that can take place like card playing and sleeping. In trying to make the waiting period welcoming, safe and lucrative to the service providers they create civic space. To the extent the space feels unattractive, confusing or dangerous, or the service providers are unhelpful or discourteous, the use of their services decreases.

These and other examples of indoor spaces (malls and libraries for example) might help museum staff understand the difference between the construction of large open spaces (used for rental revenue and not much else) and space 2.5 that add to civic wellbeing.

For me, Jane Jacobs and William Whyte are heroes we should all be reading. While we thank Oldenburg for his input, we need to urge designers and administrators of museums to create more 2.5 spaces that intentionally welcome all in physical and programmatic ways. Space 2.5 is essential and the third space while nice to have can evolve down the road.

---

[i] Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York, Random House.

[ii] Whtye, William, (1979) “A Guide to Peoplewatching,” in Urban Open Spaces, Lisa Taylor (Ed.), New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

[iii] “One Meter Square” in Sacco, Graciella, M2, Museo Castagnino + MACRO, Rosario, Argentina, 2009.

[iv] Gurian, E. H. (2001). "Function Follows Form: How Mixed-Used Spaces in Museums Build Community." Curator 44(1): 87-113.

The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 5: Oldenburg on the LAM

This is the fifth installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog is featuring a guest post examining some aspect of the book. This provocative guest post was co-written by Suzanne Fischer and Eric Johnson. Suzanne Fischer is Curator of Technology at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, MI, and Eric Johnson is a librarian and New Media Specialist at Monticello in Charlottesville, VA. You can join the conversation in the blog comments and add your own voice to the debate.

We share an abiding interest in exploring the community-enhancing roles of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), especially in terms of the practice of hospitality and service within the institution. From this naturally flows our engagement in the question of "LAM convergence:" how these institutions live out their similar missions of access and preservation in daily practice and how they overlap as spaces for civic engagement. Both of us latched onto the popular notion of "third places," applying it to LAMs, and were surprised to learn how narrowly Ray Oldenburg defined the term in his original work. It is crucial that LAMs be considered public civic spaces, but Oldenburg's model leaves a lot to be desired.

Suzanne: After reading The Great Good Place, I can't see a way that a museum or library could be a third place without sacrificing its mission. The ideal of third places, that attracts we cultural heritage types, is a democratic space where civic life is built collaboratively and at a personal level. But when you read Oldenburg closely, you find that his idea of a third place is vastly more specific.

Eric: He's really focused on the merits of hanging out together with acquaintances in a relationship built up over extended repeated visits, which unfortunately doesn't much describe the way most public interacts with LAMs--though LAM staff may hope otherwise.

Suzanne: That key thing for Oldenburg is that you go to interact with people. Not to interact with artifacts, to find information, to learn something, or to have an interesting experience together with your friends and family.

Eric: Though he'd prefer that your friends--at least your close ones--and family stay away.

Suzanne: The kind of socializing that Oldenburg describes as happening in third places is deeply exclusive.

Eric: Unapologetically so. That's part of what so surprises me since, as you aptly described it, what LAMs really like is the idea of the democratic, civic-minded space.

Suzanne: There's no room for women, first of all, and he acknowledges that the third places he idealizes are male spaces. For Oldenburg, as far as I can tell, third places are for "clubbable" (p 85) types, and not really for quiet people, people who don't drink, queer people, children, old people, people of color, unmarried people, or people with any kind of visible or invisible difference. Oldenburg says that third places are democratic spaces, but his examples belie it.

Eric: His is a very undemocratic, closed-door kind of institution--which is not at all what most LAMs are interested in.

Rules

Suzanne: I think that in many ways by NOT having rules Oldenburg-style third places become exclusive. When there are no rules, policies, best practices or missions, you can SAY that your space is for everyone, but you can't enforce it. A clique can take over and drive away people who don't fit. People will not always do the right thing. We need to set up spaces in which doing the right thing--welcoming all kinds of people--is easy, facilitated and enforced. When everybody knows what your institution is for (collecting and interpreting the past of your region, for instance) then we have common ground on which to build social relationships. Nina's research keeps finding that the right kind of constraints work to produce a better participatory museum experience.

Eric: So for multiple reasons, having some rules (and focus) actually creates a better atmosphere for the kinds of social relationships that LAMs have historically desired—and still do. We are more comfortable when the shoreline is in sight. Open ocean is scary.

Suzanne: It’s also unsafe for many of us.

How LAMs Differ from Oldenburg

Eric: Then what’s the main attraction in the idea for LAM institutions?

Suzanne: The idea that our institutions become part of the fabric of visitors' lives. But LAMs want to foster different kinds of social relationships than Oldenburg-style third places do--and that's okay.

Eric: LAMs are attracted to the welcoming and open world supported by his idea of conversation, though for us it’s more the conversation about something(s). In the end, we are about our content. Whereas Oldenburg’s third places are solely about relationships, not content.

Suzanne: We want relationships, too! We want to be platforms for building relationships around a central core. I think that's why Cafe Scientifique kind of models have been successful: expertise in content and in facilitating engagement with content is moved to a more familiar place. Among Progressive Era LAM types, Gratia Countryman wanted library materials to be accessible to everyone, so she built branch libraries in hospitals and factories. And John Cotton Dana's department store model is an interesting one.

Eric: Department stores had some Oldenburgian traits, according to Dana: convenient location, open many hours, open to any who would come. There's a nice overlap to be found here blending the traits of Oldenburg’s third place with the mission of the institution. That's the sort of a "fourth place" model that LAMs want to shoot for. In the 1930s, W.E. Doubleday recommended that libraries offer lectures, dramatic readings, and wireless listening groups--but then display books related to the topics on offer. LAMs are right to want to lower barriers and make their institutions more approachable--gone are the days when the public is willing to passively receive word from the institutional mountaintop.

Alternatives?

Eric: So what do you think a good "LAM as fourth place" model might look like?

Suzanne: I like the Storefront Library in Boston. This was a pop-up library on a main street in Boston’s Chinatown that was set up as a community information space, and it was a great success, so much so that they’re planning to reprise it in a larger location for a longer duration this fall. It was a collaborative library/design/art/community-building project. One thing that impressed me was their circulation figures, and how they valued circulation (read: engagement with library materials) as a metric as important as the amount of people who came to programs.

Eric: That’s something we’re confronting with our online visitors especially, but it applies in person as well: how do we rate--how do we draw value from--the quality of their experience with the content and not simply define success as “bodies in the door”? The ideal “fourth place” for me makes the content approachable in an agreeable environment--wherever that environment may be. I'm for any practice that makes the visitor more comfortable bridging the gap between what they don't know and what the institution knows.

Suzanne: In a way, you’re transposing Oldenburg’s idea about quality of conversation onto cultural institutions with more strictly defined, content-based missions. That’s our main difference with Oldenburg. But we need to learn how to measure degree of engagement so we know when we’re doing it right! There are definitely some useful tools in The Great Good Place, but cultural institutions need to think carefully about how we can adapt these ideas to best fit our missions, visitors and communities.

Eric: As John Cotton Dana said, “The goodness of a museum is not in direct ratio to the cost of its building and the upkeep thereof, or to the rarity, auction-sale or money cost of its collections. A museum is good only in so far as it is of use.”

The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 4: Viewing the Internet as a Third Place

This is the fourth installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog will feature a guest post examining some aspect of the book. This guest post was written by Xianhang Zhang, a social designer who blogs on design issues here. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Facebook discussion board here.

Even from the beginnings of the Internet, one of the largely unacknowledged uses very much resembled the type of third place interactions Oldenberg talks about in The Great Good Place. While "social" is a buzzword that has become nauseatingly overused today, the internet was social to the core from its very beginning. From early Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) & Usenet, to the more modern blogs, forums & social networks, increasing numbers of people are relying on the internet for the types of third place interactions they're unable to get in real life.

As I read Oldenberg's book, I found the passages that explained the lack of appreciation in the US for the importance of third places to be especially resonant. Despite the 50 year legacy of online community building and an obvious yearning for people to connect in a meaningful way via the Internet, surprisingly few "great good places" exist. The rest succumb to some combination of apathy, spammers, sock puppets, flame wars & clueless idiots. In fact, it often seems that the social tools we use are actively hostile to the type of community-building activities that help support a third place. This is not an accident.

For about 4 years now, I've been working to understand how we can make our social tools better. It started, while searching around for a topic for my PhD thesis, I turned my attention to social software as a result of this excellent article by Clay Shirky entitled Group as User. I highly recommend that all of you read his essay in it's entirety but I want to pull out three quotes which left me dizzy:

"Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of mailing list practice. If you assume a piece of software is for what it does, rather than what its designer's stated goals were, then mailing list software is, among other things, a tool for creating and sustaining heated argument."

"You couldn't go through the code of the Mailman mailing list tool, say, and find the comment that reads "The next subroutine ensures that misunderstandings between users will be amplified, leading to name-calling and vitriol." Yet the software, when adopted, will frequently produce just that outcome. "

"In thirty years, the principal engineering work on mailing lists has been on the administrative experience -- the Mailman tool now offers a mailing list administrator nearly a hundred configurable options, many with multiple choices. However, the social experience of a mailing list over those three decades has hardly changed at all. "

My training was in Interaction Design and a design training gives you a very specific way of looking at the world. You start to realize that all the human artifacts in the world are designed and, what's more, most of them are designed poorly. Every frustration, every annoyance, every imperfection in the world--you become acutely aware of them and start figuring out how you would fix them if you had designed it.

When I was reading Clay Shirky's essay, the thoughts running through my head were that Mailman was bad, it had problems, I should think about how to fix it. And yet... nothing at all in my training in Interaction Design gave me any insight into how to fix social problems that occur as a result of the software. After a lot of investigation, I found out that, not only did I not know how to fix it, nobody really knew how to fix it. Social software was becoming some of the most important software we were using in our everyday lives at that point and yet nobody really understood what made them good or how to make them better. This was a deeply scary thought for me.

Oldenburg's book is important because it managed to put into words what many people only knew as a gut feeling or intuition. It dissected out this one important aspect of our public spaces and said "look, a pub is not just an economic institution for exchanging alcohol for cash, it also serves a vital social function." What's more, he demonstrated how certain social spaces either helped or hindered this social function and provided a framework to understand why certain pubs are great good places and others, lifeless drecks.

What this allowed, finally, was precise and generalizable conversation and learning. Before this, bartenders and coffee shop owners around the globe may have felt and understood the exact same things, but it could only be passed down in a personal, individualized fashion, via a kind of apprenticeship model. It was by articulating it that Oldenberg allowed a common platform of understanding through which others could develop, debate and refine these concepts.

It is this understanding and perspective which is currently missing from much of the online world. The tools that you use today are still largely built by technologists who come at the problem from a technology perspective. It's like a bar owner who obsesses over installing the latest, most advanced beer storage system rather than focusing on supporting the conversation which is why people really came. Any social elements of the system occur by accident, largely as a side effect.

Even more troubling, one the rare occasions that such tools do manage to get "struck by lightening" and achieve phenomenal success, the lack of understanding often causes the creators to mess around with precisely the factors that were so successful in the first place. Reading Oldenburg's book, I was struck by one particular passage (pg. 125):

Frank Dobie developed an abiding fondness for the clean little Anchor Pub in Cambridge. Reflecting upon the probable fate of such a place at home, he wrote: "If they operated such an establishment in America, they'd make a barrel of money. They'd enlarge it to take care of more and more customers and keep on enlarging it until it grew as big as Madison Square Garden, or else became a standardized unit in a chain. Long before either stage, however, it would have lost the character that makes the snug little public houses and inns of England veritable 'islands of the blest.'"

If this reminds you of a certain controversy that's been happening around a certain very large social network, you're not the only one.

If you accept Oldenburg's thesis, then the lack of appreciation we have in America for the importance of the third place has lead to countless social ills which we are only slowly remedying. Similarly, such pathologies also manifest themselves online and have caused the internet to be a radically worse place for social interaction than it has the potential to be.

The first step to fixing this is awareness that we have a problem. The next step, I believe, is to establish a practice around Social Design which can inform the design of social software in the same way that Interaction Design informs the design of interfaces.

This is the task I've been working on ever since I first read that Clay Shirky essay. Such a task is non-trivial and will require the contribution of thousands of people, approaching the problem from many different perspectives. But if we use Oldenburg's stories as a cautionary tale, it's a task I believe is highly worth doing if we are to preserve that Great Good Placeness and allow it to flourish on the Internet.

The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 3: Pockets of Third Places

This is the third installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog will feature a guest post examining some aspect of the book. This guest post was written by Kimberlee Kiehl, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy & Operations Officer for the COSI science center in Columbus, OH. (note: I've written about innovation at COSI before here.) You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Facebook discussion board here.

When I was in Italy several years ago I was struck by the fact that every evening, outside of my small hotel window, what seemed like the entire town gathered in the square, the piazza, to just hang out. Conversation flowed, laughter floated up to my window, people strolled and ate or drank (or both), and when I went down to the square myself people included me in all of this without hesitation. As COSI began recreating ourselves a few years ago we consciously included the idea that we would become a sort of a piazza for our community, an effort that has proven to be challenging. I was excited to read The Great Good Place and see how we could do more of this.

At first I found myself thinking and agreeing with much of what Nina stated in her first post--that there are characteristics that make it difficult, if not impossible, for us to be this kind of place. Then, as I read further, I realized that we might have some of this third place stuff already going on. I became confused. I left my office and went and walked around our building and saw that, in fact, we do have these behaviors happening in various places. And that made me start thinking all over again.

COSI has moved from being an isolated science center to being a partnership-based “center of science.” We now share our building with 6 other groups, each of them bringing science to the public in a different way. We want to be a place where the public feels like they can come together, not only to learn, but just to be… to relax, to communicate, to share. If you ask me if this effort to be a third place for people in Columbus has been successful I will tell you yes… and no. The bottom line is that PARTS of our building are very much third places. Other parts are absolutely not and our entire building is definitely not. Let me start by describing a couple of the spaces that are.

Our space for families with children under first grade, little kidspace, is the space in our building that seems to pretty consistently be a third place. Adults come with their children so regularly that we know many of them by name. Parents and caregivers spend time with people they know and strangers who they don’t know. Seating options were deliberately chosen so adults can pick them up and move them to small chat circles and converse comfortably. We don’t have any expectations that adults will interact with their children while they are in the space; instead we are perfectly comfortable with giving them a space where they know their child is safe while they interact with each other. True, some parents come, plop themselves down and read a book, but many more of them make a friend, meet the same people every week, and come to talk and drink coffee.

Some of our spaces are third places sometimes. The spot in our building that houses the studios of the local PBS station, WOSU, often is transformed into a third place. People from all walks of life come and hang out in the space, having conversations about whatever the topic for the evening or afternoon happens to be. The WOSU space is often open after the rest of the center closes and this space brings in a variety of citizens together to engage in a variety of conversations.

Some of our spaces become third places as part of certain occasions. The center of our building, the atrium, becomes one of these places every time we host a Camp-In event. Kids and adults gather in this space in the same way I saw them gather in the town squares of Italy. By the end of the evening everyone is there and we end the night with dancing in this communal space. This space definitely looked like a third place this past Wednesday night when we hosted an overnight teen event designed to help teens see how they can make a difference in the world. As I left the building I was met with over a hundred teens hanging out, laughing and talking in this space. But perhaps the best example of this is seen on Family Friday nights when people from all income levels, all walks of life, and all parts of town come together and hang out in this space with people they not only don’t know but that they would most likely never interact with in the their life outside this space.

So what’s my point here? My point is that maybe we are being too hard on ourselves as museums by trying to figure out how to convert our entire building into a third place. Maybe we should think carefully about which spaces best lend themselves because of population, event or opportunity and then spend our time and energy figuring out how to maximize these spaces and the attributes that make them third places. Maybe it is enough that parts of our building serve this purpose at certain times or for certain occasions. Maybe I should spend time and energy thinking about how to make little kidspace even more comfortable for families to be together. Maybe I need to think about how to draw people into the atrium during events so they can mingle and chat. Maybe I should more deliberately use the WOSU space. Maybe we should stop trying to make ourselves into a singular third place and think more clearly about the third places within our space.

What do you think?

The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 2: Small Rural Museums as Third Places

This is the second installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog will feature a guest post examining some aspect of the book. This guest post was written by Rebecca Lawrence, Museum Educator, Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center in Pennsylvania. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Facebook discussion board here.

As I was reading The Great Good Place I identified with Oldenburg’s description of Main Street USA, small town America, and rural life. The Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center (SLHC) is a small museum located in Pennsburg, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Our museum is in small town America. Mom and pop stores, a few chain stores, one long main street, pizza shops, and local restaurants are surrounded by a picturesque farmscape.

The SLHC is a museum that tells the story of the Schwenkfelders, a small German protestant sect who emigrated from Europe in the 1700s and settled in Montgomery County. Our visitors range from local church families, Schwenkfelder descendants, homeschoolers, charter and private school students, local historians, special interest groups such as the Questers, lifelong learning groups, and more.

Reading The Great Good Place provides an opportunity as museum professionals to identify third places in our community, reflect upon our relationship to them, and consider the ways our museum could be a third place for members in the community.

How can a local history museum connect with third places in the community?

Identify the third places in your community, learn more about the lives of the people that go to them, and have a basic understanding of the history of third places in the area. Historically, for Schwenkfelders and other Pennsylvania German sects, social gatherings take place in churches rather than taverns, pubs, or beer gardens as one may assume would be a typical third place for German American communities. Certain attitudes towards public drinking amongst some local church members still remain today, as the SLHC, unlike some urban museums, does not serve alcohol at exhibit receptions and events. It’s always been a topic for debate.

Integrate into the third places in your community and talk with owners, employees, and patrons that go to them. Talk with museum patrons, staff, and volunteers to learn about their favorite spots in the community. In general, local women’s clubs, hunting lodges/clubs, diners, fire halls, churches, coffee shops, and large stores like Walmart in function as third places to our local residents. In our small town, I run into SLHC volunteers and regular visitors at the local Strawberry House restaurant, Powderbourne (the local gun club and restaurant), and even at the local Ladies Grundsow Lodge. In a small town, you’re always going to know someone at a third place. Integrating into the third places in your community demonstrates to your patrons, volunteers, and members of the community that you take an active interest in community events that are important to them and can assist you in developing ideas on how your institution can connect to those places. In a small rural town this is simple to do.

As museum professionals we want visitors to feel akin to our institution and want them to refer to the SLHC as “their place”. Lectures take place every second Wednesday of the month as part of our Brown Bag Lecture series. Our attendance hovers around 20-25 visitors, mostly retirees. We’re on a first name basis with each attendee. I say hi, shake their hand or give a hearty wave, and let them know we’re glad to have them here. Last month, a retiree greeted me by saying “Hi Kiddo!,” gave me a knuckle bump, and we shared a short conversation about technology, the SLHC, and his personal schedule for the week.

We want visitors to feel that our collections and ideas are accessible to them and we want visitors to see our institution as a place where they visit often. We encourage individual thought and self-expression so that visitors identify with us in their own way. One of my favorite examples comes from a sister and brother who attended four separate SLHC programs. These young students submitted illustrated storybooks to a student art exhibit at the SLHC last year. Their books were constructed during a family workshop on bookbinding, the images were hand colored illustrations supplemented by block prints made during a family workshop on printing, and their books were on display as part of our student art exhibit. One book was about farm life and the other about a knight and his dragon. Their family and extended family came to the exhibit opening to celebrate their work.

Our collection is made accessible to visitors through our exhibits and programming. During the last family workshop program on portraiture, students spent time in our gallery responding to a 16^th century portrait in our gallery and to supplement the lesson our archivist pulled out a book of portraits printed from 1587 just for our small group of students. Our archivist, curator, and associate director of research will not hesitate to find supplemental material to correspond to a works in the gallery to use in education programs. We regularly feature artwork by local residents, whether they are students or professional artists/craftsman. Earlier in the year we had an exhibit featuring work by contemporary hooked rug artisans alongside Pennsylvania German folk art from our collection. Each hooked rug was designed and created by local artists who were inspired by Pennsylvania German motifs found in our collection.

We want visitors to see our place as a space where people can come together in different ways for many different reasons and we offer a wide variety of programs for various audiences. We have regular programs in a series to encourage regular visits and we’re on a first name basis and have a casual relationship with many patrons. These concepts are indifferent to the atmosphere and services third places provide.

What are some ways we can connect with a third place in the community?

Our local coffee shop shows artwork from local artists and there’s an open mic night and poetry readings. Employees at main street businesses go to the coffee shop over lunch and for an afternoon coffee. It’s a third place three blocks away from our museum. We can bring our collection to them. We can enlarge early 20^th century photographs of the Main Street community and place them on the walls of the local coffee shop as part of their rotating art displays. It’s not indifferent to the culture that already exists there. It is a relaxing, informal opportunity to encourage members of the community to reminisce about the history of the community while sipping coffee, enjoying lunch and chatting with friends.

Inside our walls, we could be a third place for self-supporting learning groups. As knitting clubs and book clubs flock to coffee shops, bookstores, and cafes, we can open our spaces to them. As a local history museum we could offer an opportunities for self-supporting groups, such as rug hookers, weavers, genealogists, and PA German craftsman guilds or informal groups to meet regularly in our exhibition spaces or classroom spaces to continue to cultivate their interests or teach others their art­. Beginning this fall the SLHC is going to offer our facility as an opportunity for members of the PA German community to enjoy coffee, traditional PA German foods, and chat in the dialect about various subjects.

The Museums, Libraries, & Archives Council in the UK has an Opening Up Spaces campaign published in May 2010. It is based upon the government’s The Learning Revolution. Opening Up Spaces calls museums, libraries, and archives to offer their sites to special interest groups. Their research has shown that self-supporting learning groups are essential to the health and well being of the community. Their campaign provides resources, websites, and strategies for encouraging self-supporting learning groups to come to your institution. (www.mla.gov.uk) It may be a source of ideas.

Reading Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place is a starting point to begin to think about your community’s third places and their relationships to your museum. Identify third places in your community by speaking to community members and find out what is unique about the environment of their third places, and brainstorm ideas on how to connect your institution’s mission to them. Your site may be a perfect venue to host self supporting learning groups or you may consider developing outreach programs to reach out to third places.

Thanks to Rebecca for this post! Tune in next week for a reflection on the book from another perspective.

The Great Good Place Book Discussion Part 1: Can Cultural Institutions Be Third Places?

This is the first installment of a book discussion about Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place. Every Tuesday in June, this blog will feature a guest post examining some aspect of the book. This is the only post written by me, Nina Simon. You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Facebook discussion board here.

Like many museum and library professionals, I am enamored of the idea of cultural institutions as “third places” – public venues for informal, peaceable, social engagement outside of home or work. But now, after a careful read of Ray Oldenburg’s book in which he defines and describes third places, I am uncertain of whether it is possible for museums and libraries to be such venues.

The Great Good Place is a book that challenged many of my preconceptions about third places—what defines them, what makes them work, and how they function. Here are four surprising things Oldenburg describes about third places—characteristics I think would be quite difficult for cultural institutions to assume:

1. The primary attraction of a third place is the patrons, not the décor, the hosts, or the activities provided by management. A good third place is one that you can walk into and be swept into lively conversation or unstructured revelry. The places themselves may be shabby; in fact; shabbiness encourages ease of participation. In contrast, museums are almost entirely focused encouraging visitors to observe and consume institutional presentations and performances. Most cultural institutions do little to promote direct engagement among visitors, except perhaps at late night parties, which are often seen as off-mission.
2. The primary activity in third places is conversation among patrons. The talk is “more spirited, less inhibited, and more eagerly pursued” than in other settings. People make fun of each other and laugh loudly. While the talk may encompass serious topics, the attitude is light and the conversation is not structured or overly guided. In contrast, cultural institutions often implicitly discourage conversation, particularly loud and boisterous talk, and when conversation is encouraged it is often highly structured around a particular topic or program.
3. The stewards of third places are regular patrons, not staff. Regulars play an essential function in managing the social life of third places. Unlike museum members, third place regulars are not focused solely on their own individual use of the institution, but rather see the venue as a starting point for social engagement with others. Regulars teach newcomers how to behave and reward other regulars with close friendship. Rather than the standard “bring your own friends” arrangement of most bars and clubs (and social museum experiences), third places invite individuals and strangers to engage. Strangers, not intact groups, form the tightest bonds in third places.
4. Third places are defined by their accessibility. They are open long hours, and they are located within a short walk of home or the office (or preferably, both). Regulars may drop in multiple times a day. Visiting a third place does not require special dress, a particular goal, prearrangement with friends, or an extra outing. Third places rarely if ever present scheduled events. The ubiquitous “plan a visit” section of a museum website would be ridiculous and unnecessary for the sociable corner store or pub that patrons visit with little forethought.

I closed this book wondering: are cultural institutions really interested in being third places? I used to think museums and libraries should be third places, but this book opened my eyes to how far they are from being so. Museums are explicitly about something, and third places are about nothing in particular. Third places facilitate engagement among patrons, whereas museums and libraries deliver services to patrons.

The cultural service model is antithetical to the third place. Third places are more participatory and offer fewer basic amenities than most cultural institutions provide. By being humble, third places make people feel more comfortable as performers, jokesters, and coconspirators. There is no chance their play will be overshadowed by more attractive objects, more well-conceived speeches, or more literate docents.

On the other hand... it’s certainly possible for people to use museums or libraries as casually as they do taverns, playing around with the art or the exhibits or magazines instead of with pints. Making this happen requires some fundamental changes to cultural institutions. More informality. Longer hours. More seating. More acceptance and encouragement of noise. More cultivation of regulars not just as docents but as social directors. Less judgment of how people use their time. Less prettification of content. Less presentation of a point of view. Cultural institutions would both gain and lose by becoming true third places.

Are these tradeoffs desirable or worthwhile? What do you think?

Museum 2.0 Book Club: The Great Good Place

While it hasn't happened here in awhile, a new Museum 2.0 book club will be starting in two weeks to read and discuss The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg is the individual to whom the term "third place" is attributed, and this well-researched 1989 book put him on the map. "Third places" are places that are neither work nor home but occupy essential positions as anchors of community life. They may be parks, cafes, bars, hair salons--any place that is conducive to informal, welcoming, creative interaction.

Many museum and library professionals use the concept of the third place to describe the idealized vision of a cultural institution as a place for community use and civic engagement. I was surprised when I first picked up Oldenburg's book to confront many ideas in it that are frankly quite challenging to my original conception of a third place. Oldenburg celebrates places that are less structured, less designed, less facilitated, and less content-rich than most museums want to be. It made me wonder if cultural professionals really want to turn their institutions into third places, and if so, what it would take. I hope we can explore those questions together in the weeks to come.

Here's how the book club will work:

1. Get your hands on a copy of the book in the next couple of weeks.
2. Read it (or a large chunk of it).
3. If you are so motivated, fill out this two-question form to let me know you want to write a guest post or do an interview with me about the book.
4. For four weeks starting June 1, each Tuesday there will be a Museum 2.0 post with a response to the book. I'd like to write one or two of these at the most. The goal is to make the blog a community space for different viewpoints. I'll be looking for guest posters who represent different types of institutions or approaches to the material. You don't need to be a museum or library professional to be eligible--just a good writer with an interesting perspective to share.

I look forward to the discussion next month!