One Simple Question to Make Your Work More Participatory

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern

We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes, on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. In a recent meeting about the exhibition process, Wes asked me: what am I not thinking of that I should be doing?

I said to him: I can't really answer that question. I'm sure you're thinking of a lot of steps to make this process work, and many more tasks will arise. The key question is, every step of the way: how can you invite people beyond yourself to help make this step better?

This is the question I ask myself anytime I'm working on something with a participatory intent. How can people--staff, volunteers, community members--help make this project better?   

In the case of the exhibition process that Wes is leading, we talked about how others could be involved in an experimental exhibition/residency in which artists work with visitors in the gallery. The obvious start was to think about how we recruit the artists--using an open call to invite anyone, anywhere to participate. But even developing that open call was a participatory process:

• Wes worked with other staff to think through how the residencies could work. Their input helped shape the entire project, which in turn shaped the call.
• He asked staff and artist friends for feedback on the concept. Their input helped shape the messaging of the project and the key questions to be answered in the call.
• Once the call was 95% ready, Wes circulated it to a small group of existing museum partners and artists for feedback. Their input helped us get to 100%, and it created a group of invested collaborators who were ready to help spread the word once the call was live.
• Once the call was ready, Wes circulated it to even more museum partners, as well as to artist listservs and our general membership. These people were both potential participants and promoters of the call, helping it continue to spread.

All of these steps helped make for a better call to artists, one that has gotten way more response than I ever expected.

This open call project may sound like one that is uniquely suited for participatory input. But I find that the more I live with that question of how others can make something better, the more naturally it infuses all kinds of work at our museum. Developing new staff policies. Prototyping all gender bathrooms. Creating an event or exhibit. All of these activities involve ongoing collaboration and co-creation with people beyond the staff member(s) responsible.

How can people help make your project better? Here are a few tips to asking this question successfully:

• ask the whole question. It's not just a question of how people could get involved or participate. It's a question of how they can make it BETTER. You can always come up with ways people could participate. But if those approaches require a lot of time or effort and don't improve the result, they're a waste. Be generous and creative about what "better" could look like, but hold onto that goal. That way, you'll build a virtuous cycle where you keep wanting to find opportunities for participation to continue improving your work.
• share your work. It's impossible to ask this question if you work so close to the chest that no one can even see what you are doing, let alone get involved. Inviting starts with sharing. Share what you are doing, the questions you have, the things you're unsure of, and you'll naturally encounter people who want to help make it better. This takes confidence in sharing half-baked ideas, and also the time to type them out, circulate them, have a meeting, etc. It's part of a culture of learning and curiosity--something I hope that museums can embody.
• define "people" in the way that works for you. At my museum, the people who participate may be staff, volunteers, community members, organizational partners, Facebook folk... it depends on the project or task at hand. It's always good to start closest to home. Ask your colleagues. Ask your friends. And then as you build confidence in their ability to help make your work better, you can start inviting participants who are further from your comfort zone.

How are you inviting other people to help make your work better?

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Where's the Community in the Crowd? Framing and the Wall Street Journal's "Everybody's a Curator"

Two weeks ago, my museum was featured in a Wall Street Journal article by Ellen Gamerman, Everybody's a Curator. I'm thrilled that our small community museum is on the map with many big institutions around the country. I'm proud we were cast as innovators. I'm appreciative of the time Ellen Gamerman spent researching the article. I'm glad to see coverage about art museums involving visitors in exhibitions.

But I also struggled with this article. There was something at the heart of it that bothered me. It took Ed Rodley's excellent response for me to realize what felt frustrating: the framing.

Community is not a commodity. We don't involve people in content development to "boost ticket sales." It's neither "quick" nor "inexpensive" to mount exhibitions that include diverse community stories. Yes, community involvement is at the heart of our shifted, successful business model. But that business model requires experienced staff who know how to empower people, facilitate meaningful participation, respond to community issues and interests, and ignite learning. It's not cheap. It's not easy. It's the work we feel driven to do to build a museum that is of and for our community.

Where is the community in this article? There are many curator and museum director voices in the article, but not a single quote from a visitor who engaged in one of these community projects. The curators are the humans in the story. The "crowd" is a mechanized mob. I had to imagine the deep conversations visitors had as they deliberated on which painting to vote for. The sense of pride at being part of something bigger than themselves. The curiosity about the work of professional curators and the assigning of aesthetic value.

I know these people exist. I meet them everyday in our museum. I meet them doing research in the archives, collaborating on cultural festivals, and contributing stories to exhibitions. They aren't here to make our work easier or cheaper. They are here to be inspired, to get connected, to learn, to dream, to share.

Despite the implication in the article, they are not all young. Our museum attracts participants who are roughly as age- and income-diverse as our County (or a little older). Our prototypical participant is a 49-year old Santa Cruz County woman with a story to share. She's proud to be part of a community. Not a crowd.

The whole process of being interviewed for the story made me question the stories we tell and words we use to describe participatory work. It was easy to want to be helpful to Ellen Gamerman and fit into her context ("crowdsourcing"). I struggled to present my own alternative frame ("community involvement"). What's better: to stay on message and potentially get written out of exposure like this? Or to fit in and accept a slant you can't control?

These questions don't just apply to press coverage. They apply to any situation in which we are describing our work to others. This article made me wish I had some kind of political training in framing the argument. It sent me back to the work of George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, who traces how we use metaphors to understand the world.

The metaphor for traditional art museums is the temple. Beautiful. Sanctified. Managed and protected by a league of committed, anointed ones.

What is the metaphor for participatory arts? Is it the agora? The town square? The circus? The living room? The web?

I don't want to be judged by metaphors of crowdsourcing or "the selfie generation." But if we want a different frame, we have to work for it. Phrases like “community engagement” or “participatory” or “social practice” are not strong enough. We need a broad and basic metaphor, one that we can repeat with clarity and confidence, across many institutions and genres and projects, to build our frame. 

What do you think the metaphor is for this work? What can we do to put that framing forward?

But What About Quality?

Image courtesy Museum Quality Dance. Photo by Carrie Meyer.

Scene: a regional workshop on arts engagement. A funder is speaking with conviction about the fact that her foundation is focusing their arts grantmaking strategy on engagement. Engaging new people. Engaging more diverse people. Engaging people actively in the arts. Any questions?

One, from a museum director. The question that comes up every time, the question so big it deserves the impropriety of all caps: BUT WHAT ABOUT QUALITY?

No one wants to do crappy work. Everyone wants quality, in one way or another.

The word "quality" is often code for aesthetic quality, as judged by a specific set of cultural expectations and preferences.

But just as its definition suggests, quality is itself a quality. Quality Shakespearian theater is different from quality contemporary dance. Quality is mutable and multitudinous. It is not code for one idea. It can unlock several.

Here, in no particular order, are ten different kinds of quality in arts experiences:

1. AESTHETIC: is it beautiful?
2. TECHNICAL: is it masterful?
3. INNOVATIVE: is it cutting edge?
4. INTERPRETATIVE: can people understand it?
5. EDUCATIONAL: can people learn from it?
6. RELEVANT: can people relate to it? 
7. PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it?
8. ACADEMIC: does it produce new research or knowledge?
9. BRIDGING: does it spark unexpected connections?
10. IGNITING: does it inspire people to action?

No arts experience hits them all. Heck, no museum exhibition hits them all. Consider:

• A dry exhibition, diving into an arcane topic. High academic quality, low igniting quality.
• A community-based exhibition, full of life but rife with amateur design and poor editing. High participatory quality, low technical quality.
• An edgy contemporary art show that alienates and confuses many visitors. High innovative quality, low relevant quality.

The next time someone asks you, "But what about quality?," ask them: "What do you mean by that?"
Invite the conversation about forms of quality, and the different outcomes of different forms. Define what quality means for your goals, for your project, for your institution. And then proceed with the confidence that you are going to do the best damn job you can to achieve the kind of quality you seek.

Making Meaningful Connections: Inspiring New Report from Irvine and Helicon

Our work to transform the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History into a participatory and community-centered place has been heavily supported by the James Irvine Foundation. I've learned a lot from Irvine Foundation staff and partners directly. But one of my favorite things they do is remarkably unpersonalized: they produce killer reports.

Their newest one, Making Meaningful Connections, was written by Holly Sidford, Alexis Frasz, and Marcy Hinand at Helicon. The report is a slim 12 pages on the common characteristics of arts organizations that successfully and continuously engage diverse audiences. It is paired with a thoughtful infographic (part of which is shown at the top here) that summarizes their findings.

Making Meaningful Connections is not riddled with jargon and academic theory. Nor is it packed with juicy examples and case studies. Instead, it's a tight, inspiring, and reasonably original brief on the strategies that lead to sustained involvement of diverse people with arts organizations. It's the first report in a long time that I am sharing with my board. (The last one was on arts innovation and change, also from Irvine.)

Here are three aspects of Making Meaningful Connections that I like most:

• New participant relationships are like new friendships. They take time, curiosity, respect and the willingness to be changed by the relationship. The report starts with an elegant friendship analogy (see the box on page 4) that breaks down the challenges of genuine arts engagement in a clear, relatable, and motivating way.
• Targeted programming is not enough. The authors name the reality that one-off programs, exhibits, or shows for specific groups do little to change the mix of participants longterm. Interestingly, they argue instead that structural change--including but not exclusively programmatic change--is what makes the difference in participant makeup. They also acknowledge that some organizations are happy with their participant makeup, and that these multi-faceted organizational shifts are voluntary for those who want them.
• The characteristics of successful organizations involve deepening, not adding. So often, these kinds of reports recommend a long list of changes and new things to add to your work. It can feel defeating or downright impossible to integrate them into already-strapped schedules. But this report was developed based on existing organizations and practices, looking for common characteristics as opposed to new directions. The recommendations read less like "thou shalt do this new thing" and more like "deepen and embed in this thing you already have." We all have missions. We all have leaders. We all have business models. We can all shift within our existing worlds. 

And here are two things I wonder about:

• Universalist tone. This report could come from--and go--anywhere. I assume that's intentional, and for the most part, it's a good thing. The report is brief, clear, and open. If you are reading this report in Manchester or Malaysia or Memphis, you will find meaningful and useful content. On the other hand, the Irvine Foundation makes grants specifically in California. When Josephine Ramirez, Program Director for the Arts, introduced the report on the Irvine blog, she did so in the context of a state that is now 55% Latino and Asian. Nowhere in the report itself is there a comparable framing statement about why it is urgent to consider this work now, in California and around the world. Perhaps it's self-evident. But especially for organizations where cultural competency is in its infancy, those starting points and case statements are still necessary. Then again, Irvine made that statement pretty clearly in a previous report. 
• Recommendation to bring practices "into balance." I didn't find it meaningful to imagine an institutional "balance" of the five recommended practices (welcoming spaces, relevant programming, respectful relationships, analysis for improvement, business model). I agree that all are important, and that they are interrelated, but I didn't see a rationale in going for parity. I'd like to understand more about the basis for that recommendation.

What did you get out of Making Meaningful Connections?

Participation, Contemplation, and the Complexity of "And"

"The words we use in attempting to change museum directions matter. We need translators within each cultural context. We do not yet have precise words or even uniform understanding of the words we use. But we do have 'and.' And a good thing, too." 

--Elaine Heumann Gurian, The Importance of "And"

Recently, I've been embroiled in local and national conversations about the relationship between active participation and quiet contemplation in museums. Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. It has been championed as a site of courageous experimentation. It has been challenged for our community-centered approach. I joined the dialogue this weekend with an op-ed echoing Elaine Heumann Gurian's powerful call for the "museum of 'and'" - a museum that includes and values multiple experiences and approaches.

Each of these articles--and the comments around them--are fascinating artifacts of a debate that has been behind the scenes for too long. I am glad this conversation is happening and that both museum professionals and local Santa Cruzans are engaged. We always knew that the inclusion of participatory and community-centered practices in arts institutions was controversial. But this is a rare moment when that controversy has come directly to the surface. It's a unique opportunity to learn from people with different perspectives.

To me, the backlash against participatory and community-centered experiences is not surprising. I've always understood that participatory experiences are not for everyone. I've always known that some people feel that social work means mission creep for museums. What surprises me is the argument that participatory and community-centered initiatives, offered alongside many other interpretative strategies, program types, and projects, can erode the value of an institution and the experiences it provides.

Like many of our supporters, I am perplexed as to why critics claim we have thrown tradition out the window when, from my perspective, we have simply added new opportunities alongside a strong commitment to traditional practice. We know most visitors use only a small percentage of the programming and interpretative elements that museums provide. Some people commune with the art. Some visit the archives. Some come to family festivals. Why should a comment wall in an exhibition be more threatening than a label? Why is a crowded Friday night event in conflict with a quiet Saturday in the galleries? Why should any one type of experience in the museum have veto power over others?

I have wrestled with these questions over the past six weeks. In doing so, I've come to believe that the fundamental issue here has little to do with participation. It's about the complexity of "and."

My whole museum career has been predicated on the "museum of 'and'" premise, as championed by Elaine Heumann Gurian and the museum professionals who crafted the seminal publication Excellence and Equity in 1989. I believe the strongest museums fearlessly seek out, test, and iterate many ways to achieve their missions. I believe that the diversity of the human experience necessitates an approach that values multiple forms of learning and making-meaning. As I wrote in my op-ed:

The more "and" we integrate into the MAH, the more people value the museum as a catalyst for meaning-making, creative expression, and civic participation. Value is reflected in the diversity of the people who participate, the power of the experiences we offer, and their ripple effects throughout the county. The stronger our value, the stronger our finances, the stronger our ability to expand all our offerings -- the contemplative AND the participatory.

But "and" is not an easy mandate to carry out. It requires balancing priorities, embracing creative tension, including diverse voices, and staying true to our mission as we explore new opportunities.

Here are the three big tensions we're confronting as we navigate being a museum of "and":

Defining the limits. One could imagine applying the principle of "and" willy-nilly to justify any outgrowth. One commenter on my op-ed, referencing the idea of our organization as museum "and" community center, asked: "If diversity is the goal, why not also make MAH part skate board park and off leash dog area?" The answer to this question comes back to the strategic vision for the organization. Our museum's vision statement begins with the phrase, "The Museum of Art & History is a thriving central gathering place...". This framing suggests a community-centered approach in which the museum brings people together around art and history. If our vision statement started with a phrase like " The Museum is a cutting-edge research facility..." that would imply a different set of appropriate activities, approaches, and limits.

We are rigorous internally about tying our mission and vision to specific programmatic strategies and goals for different program areas. Those goals form the constraints for our approach to "and," allowing us to say yes with confidence to some opportunities and reject others.

Resource balancing. With infinite resources, "and" can exist without friction or conflict. But in reality, every organization has to decide where to put time, money, and attention. It's not possible to perfectly balance resources across areas, and it's probably not useful to do so. Let's take the one example of active participation and quiet contemplation. Here are several different ways to look at the balance of these two forms of visitor engagement:

• Time: 90% of our open hours are daytime hours when people can explore exhibitions in peace and quiet. The other 10% are primarily Friday nights when we offer hands-on, social event-based programming that tend to be crowded and lively.
• Attendance: 25% of our visitors attend during daytime hours. 65% attend during community programs. This means we devote 90% of our time to 25% of our general visitors, and 10% of our time to 65% of them. (UPDATED on Nov. 8 to reflect onsite visits only. The unaccounted for 10% attend on school tours. Thanks to those who wrote in seeking clarification.)
• Space: During daytime hours, approximately 15% of our exhibition galleries offer participatory experiences. During community programs, that number jumps to 95%. Our building is about half galleries, half public spaces. The public areas include both participatory and traditional content but are dominated by open space and seating.
• Staffing: We have 2.25 full-time equivalent staff members devoted to exhibitions and collections, 2.5 devoted to community programs.
• Money: We spent $287,000 last year on exhibitions and collections, $179,000 on community programs. Both of these figures represent increases over the previous year.

Looking at all of these bullets, how would you assess the relative number of resources devoted to participation and contemplation? How would you decide where to put more resources? How would you decide who is underserved and who is overserved?

Our strategy is not to try to perfectly balance the teeter-totter of resources but to develop the most generative combination. We do that through a structure that emphasizes cross-functional job descriptions, a program development strategy in which exhibitions and events build on each other, and an evaluative eye on how our mission and goals are manifest across diverse projects.

Messaging. Perhaps the biggest challenge to "and" thinking is the way that our organization presents itself and is presented in the media. We have a big banner outside our building that says PARTICIPATE. We do not have a comparable one that says CONTEMPLATE. Almost every article about our museum casts the institution as one that has gone through radical change. We issue press releases for everything we do, but the stories that get picked up tend to be about new programs and approaches. People talk about the museum in terms of then and now, old versus new.

In some ways, this makes sense. We want to welcome in people who may have felt excluded by traditional museums, so we over-communicate a sense of openness, inclusion, and active participation. The press loves novelty. People who get involved are passionate about what's new. People who feel less connected focus on what they lost.

A detractor says our museum has "gone to hell." A supporter responds, "Gone to hell? More like back from the dead." Both of these perspectives represent "or" thinking. The reality is that we have made the museum more vibrant by adding, not replacing. But it can feel like more dramatic change because the new additions get the lion's share of the ink and the oxygen.

Is it possible to have a brand that represents the totality of the diverse experiences offered by one institution? Probably not. It's both impractical and strategically undesirable to try to present a museum as all things to all people. Each visit is a single data point in a constellation of diverse experiences and offerings. While our staff and our most engaged participants perceive the diversity of the blend over the course of the year, most people only attend once or twice and form an impression based on those singular experiences--or on what they read in the paper. To teachers we are an educational facility. To historians we are a research facility. To art-lovers we are an exhibiting facility. To crafters we are a making facility. And so on.

As a museum with a mission to "ignite shared experiences and unexpected connections," it is our challenge to make the "and" more overt, to help people see the bridges between the experiences they currently enjoy and unfamiliar ones that might open up new opportunities for them. In the same way that we focus on social bridging--bringing people together across difference--we are also increasingly focused on programmatic bridging--bringing museum experiences together across program areas and audiences. We may never be seen entirely as a museum of "and." But we can do our best to be that kind of institution and hope that the message shines through.

Memo from the Revolution: Six Things I've Learned from our Institutional Transformation

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to give one of the closing talks at the Theater Communications Group annual conference in Dallas. TCG is the industry association for non-profit theaters, the way AAM is for museums. Given TCG's multi-year Audience (R)evolution initiative, I took the opportunity to write a new talk about what revolution has looked like at our small museum in Santa Cruz.

This is not a transcript of the talk - just the highlights that I hope will be useful for you. You can download all the slides here.

First, a quick recap on our revolution. Over the past two years, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has undergone a significant transformation of program, audience, and resources. When I came to the museum in May of 2011, we were on the brink of closure financially. At the same time, our community relevance was limited. There was a small, dedicated group of people who knew and loved the museum, and then a larger community that barely knew we existed.

With our backs against the wall and a new vision statement positioning the museum as a "thriving, central gathering place," we started a revolution. Our revolution is predicated on three big ideas:

1. Art and history are something you do, not just something you learn about. By inviting people to actively participate with us in co-creating programming, we empower them as creative agents, cultural producers, and people for whom the museum is a relevant, compelling partner.
2. Being a strong community hub requires bringing people together across difference, encouraging bridging experiences instead of targeting a specific audience. When we work with diverse collaborators, from opera singers and ukelele players to knitters and graffiti artists, we catalyze new partnerships and relationships that make our community stronger and more cohesive.
3. We believe in fearless experimentation. It is only by trying things out, challenging our assumptions, and analyzing the results that we can adapt and thrive in a changing world.

In our first year of this new approach, we had extraordinary results. Our attendance more than doubled. Our busiest day more than tripled. And we went from five years in the red to running a generous surplus that got us on the path to financial stability. Best of all, the response from our community was incredible--a diverse range of individuals and local press is effusive about the new vitality, public value, and engagement in the museum.

Here are six things I've learned from this transformation that might be helpful to other would-be revolutionaries.

A revolution is not an exercise in concentric circles. Imagine you run an organization with a small set of resources (purple circle) and you want to expand to a larger pool of resources (yellow circle). When an organization grows in an evolutionary way, it primarily focuses on expanding its resources. More audience. More money. This kind of work is not risky because the center of it--the programmatic core--doesn't necessarily have to shift. You just get bigger. In contrast, in a revolution, the center of the circle shifts, often quite dramatically. Even if your new resource pool includes most of the people and funds that you originally had, the programmatic core of the transformed organization is likely way outside of the original purple circle. You have to be willing to jump off the ledge and recenter your programming where you believe your future audience and resources will reside. This is often the hardest part of institutional transformation--being willing and able to listen to the voices that are NOT inside your organization. If someone has been turned off by your organization or is not engaged, incrementalism won't reach them. You have to start where they are, with a whole new premise, to get them involved.

Focus on what matters. Why do political activists hammer on singular, simple messages? Because focus wins the day. If you are starting a revolution to make your facility more welcoming, your programming more edgy, or your audience more diverse, you have to focus JUST on that. Pick one or two goals and repeat them ad nauseum with your team. Don't let secondary concerns delay you from moving forward aggressively to make these things happen. A simple example at our institution had to do with making the facility more welcoming. We heard again and again that the museum was cold and uncomfortable. So we started getting couches donated. The couches didn't match. They looked junky. But they gave visitors a comfortable place to sit, and we started hearing that people felt welcomed in a way they hadn't before. Over time, we are getting more attractive couches that reflect a unified design aesthetic. But we weren't going to wait to solve people's comfort problem until we had the money or the design. We started with couches.

Be rigorous. Especially when working in an experimental or unorthodox way, it can be easy for it to look like you don't have a coherent strategy behind the work you do. Why are there these ugly couches? Why are you holding a pop up museum in a bar? In our case, we've gotten very focused on developing strategic frameworks to back up our approach to community participation, social bridging, and experimentation. We use a clear logic model to relate our activities to their intended outcomes and impacts (here's more about what a logic model is). This allows us both to explain ourselves to external funders and to have clear internal criteria for how we plan and evaluate our projects to ensure that we are moving towards our big institutional goals and vision.

Exploit your size. There are unique advantages to every budget level. Big organizations seem comfortable with this--they make big plays based on their scale. But many small organizations seem to spend too much time trying to emulate big organizations rather than exploiting the opportunity to be more personal, more idiosyncratic, and less bureaucratic. No one opens a small coffeeshop and thinks, "we'll really be successful if we are just like Starbucks." The whole point is to not be Starbucks. Instead of apologizing for the "lack of professionalism" of small institutions, we should celebrate the ways that our programming can lead to stronger engagement on an individual level. My first year at the MAH, I would often say that we are a "no money, no bullshit" operation. We may not have funding for your project, but we won't tie it up in red tape either. You want to have an artist collective sleepover at the museum? Sure. Want to give visitors sledgehammers and invite them to help make a giant metal sculpture? Sounds great. Want to give free admission spontaneously as a gift to visitors who need it? No problem. Just as a large organization can exploit its resources, we can do the same in a different way as a small organization.

Help it spread. At some point, you may personally feel like you no longer want to be a revolutionary, that your time as a risk-taker is over. That's fine. At that point, consider becoming a "space-maker" who provides other people in your organization with the support and the cover to be able to take risks to further the work. I occasionally meet creative directors who note that "all the new ideas have to come from my desk." When I hear that, I realize that those are leaders who are not ready to make space for other risk-takers on their team. The only way that a revolution can shift from a personal goal to a movement is by making space for lots of people to get involved. I first learned about this paradigm of risk-takers and space-makers from Beck Tench, and it has helped me as a manager ever since.

Remember why you got into this. The reason that we do this revolutionary work is in service of a bigger mission--in my case, to help people transform their lives and our community through active participation with art, history, creativity, and culture. Whatever your personal focus, it's worth thinking about whether you are working on a problem that you consider to be truly important. I have been inspired in this thinking by a brilliant speech by mathematician Dick Hamming about what it takes to be a great scientist. Hamming commented that, "The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems." Selling tickets is not an important problem. Building a building is not an important problem. Find a problem that is truly important, and you will find a revolution worth fighting for.

Opening Up Museums: My TEDxSantaCruz Talk

I'm just home from a whirlwind of speaking engagements--Oslo, Denver, Charlotte, Roanoke. So it seems fitting to share my TEDx talk this week, one that was filmed here in Santa Cruz and which I have since taken around the world. The theme of TEDxSantaCruz was "Open." It gave me a chance to really think about how we have been opening up our museum and what it means for our community. Doing this talk was an incredible experience, both because of the warm and energized response I received at the event and because the format forced me to hone in on what's most important to me these days and share it in a succinct way.

It's only 15 minutes, so I encourage you to watch it, but here are the crib notes for the video-adverse without the hilarious stories and charming photographs.


Museums can be incredible catalysts for social change. But they're not there yet. Right now, they're often seen as elitist organizations serving an diminishing percentage of our population. We can change that by embracing participatory culture and opening up to the active, social ways that people engage with art, history, science, and ideas today. We're doing it in Santa Cruz and it has absolutely transformed our museum into a thriving community institution.

The first way we open up is by inviting active participation. We see every visitor who walks in the door as a contributor who can make our museum better. We seek and encourage collaboration with diverse groups and individuals in our community, and we develop ways for people to contribute in both immediate and long-term ways.

I know that not all public participation is substantive. I believe that everyone has the ability to contribute something powerful, and everyone also has the ability to be an idiot. The difference in what we contribute is in the design of the invitation conferred onto us. At the MAH, we carefully design invitations to participate to convey a high level of respect and value for what visitors bring to the table. They sense that respect and respond by bringing their best selves forward, sharing powerful creative work and personal stories. The result makes our museum more vibrant and multi-vocal, and it creates a powerful sense of ownership in our community.

The second way we open up is by treating our artifacts as social objects that can mediate interactions among people from different backgrounds. We've all seen how a pet dog can connect two strangers despite the social barriers that abound. How can we make museum objects more like dogs? How can we use our artifacts to activate important conversations about the future of our communities? At the MAH, we do this by designing thoughtful opportunities for interaction around artifacts, so that visitors see them less as holy objects and more as starting points for dialogue. And when we do it right, this approach brings people together across social division towards something approaching understanding and mutual respect.

This combination--inviting active participation, treating museum objects as locuses of important conversations--makes our museum a more relevant, essential community space. This isn't just happening in Santa Cruz. There are museums all over the world that are reinventing themselves as spaces for making and sharing, and in doing so, are fulfilling their public missions.

For me, the mission that is most compelling is the goal to build social cohesion by bringing people together across differences. We live in such a divided world. It is increasingly difficult to find opportunities to engage with people who are truly different from us in a positive way. If museums can build those social bridges, then we're not just doing great work for our institutions. We're doing great work for our communities, too.


Thanks to everyone who I met in the past weeks who has inspired and challenged me based on this talk. And thanks especially to the folks at TEDxSantaCruz who got it going and made this fabulous video. On that note, if you're interested in open data, I highly recommend Martha Mendoza's talk from that same event on FOIA requests and journalism--very powerful stuff.

Dreaming of Perpetual Beta: Making Museums More Incremental

When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" based on Tim O'Reilly's four key elements of Web 2.0:

1. Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information.
2. Architecture of participation with network effects: each person who participates contributes something meaningful and lasting. Visitors' interactions allow them both to personalize their museum experiences and to engage with other visitors through their shared interests. The museum gets better the more people use it.
3. Perpetual beta: the museum is always in flux, incrementally releasing new versions, refining procedures, and responding to audience desires.
4. Flexible, modular support for distributed products: inviting people to plug-in their own creations, whether those be DIY audio tours, pop up events, or co-created exhibitions.

From 2006-2011, I focused almost entirely on #1 and #2, playing with ways to invite visitors to actively participate with professionals to co-create powerful experiences around museum objects. 

But in the past year and a half as a museum director, I find myself increasingly interested in #3 and #4. In a lot of ways, our successful turnaround at the MAH has been driven by both embracing incremental change and opening up clear opportunities for community organizations and individuals to "plug" their cultural brilliance into our space. We're using #3 and #4 to achieve #1 and #2 in the Museum 2.0 playbook.

At first, our enthusiasm for incremental change and flexibility was a reaction to a tough financial position. When I started at the MAH last May, we had absolutely no money. We also had a vision to be a thriving, central gathering place for our community. The only way to reconcile our resources with our goals was to start doing whatever we could to start nudging in the direction of our dreams. We scrounged for free couches. We invited local artists and community groups to perform. We designed events and interactive exhibits on ten dollar budgets. We experimented with everything--hours, front desk staffing structure, community programs. We knew we weren't doing everything at the desired quality level. But we got it going anyway.

A year and a half later, we are in a much more stable financial position... and we've tried to internalize a mindset of perpetual beta and modular support for community collaboration. As things got better financially, as we learned more about what worked and didn't, we replaced furniture and enhanced our exhibitions. We upped the budgets and the scale of the projects while maintaining an iterative approach that relies on prototyping and low-tech experiments.

I feel strongly that as long as we have a social mission and a strong desire to fulfill that mission, we should do everything we can every step of the way to attack it, even if that means starting with something simplistic, messy, or uncertain. We make room for interns and artists and people who walk in the door with crazy ideas. There are plenty of times I have silenced the exhibit designer in my brain who wanted everything just so, or the museum director who wanted to make our visitors happy all the time. If we're going to move forward, we have to be able to try things in a risk-tolerant environment.

One of the things that often made me uncomfortable as a consultant was the extent to which museums, and their funding vehicles, often make perpetual beta an impossibility. The exhibit is planned for years and must open perfect on day 1. The grant is for a three-year educational program whose curriculum has to be locked in from the start. If we can't have a perfect couch designed by Frank Gehry, we won't give visitors couches at all.

The result is damaging for museum professionals and visitors alike. For museum professionals, it creates a falsely elevated sense of risk and stress around projects that, let's face it, don't have to be perfect out of the gate. No one is going to die if you change a label a few days after opening. No one will be seriously injured if you invite a dance company in and they do something strange. No one will suffer if you put out a prototype--or two, or ten--before finalizing a design. We need to build experimentation into our work processes if we want our work to evolve over time.

For museum visitors, the damage is even worse. How many brilliant sparks of ideas never get to the public because we falsely assume it will take too many resources to get them off the ground? How can we show people that we truly care about making our institutions welcoming, or challenging, or fun, or creative, if we need two years and eight approvals to put out some couches and paintbrushes?

I'm not suggesting that museum professionals shouldn't strive for excellence. What I've seen--in Web 2.0 and elsewhere--is that real excellence comes from incrementally pushing towards a big audacious goal. If you can get it right on the first try or with the resources you have, then your dreams may not be big enough.

What are you working towards, and how you are iterating and experimenting to get there?

Answers to the Ten Questions I am Most Often Asked

Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian's excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title.

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. I like to use half of any allotted time slot to talk and half for Q&A, so we usually have time to get into meaty discussions. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments!

BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

1. Have you seen attitudes in our field about visitor participation shifting over time?

Yes. Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog.

The Museum 2.0 blog has been going for almost five years now, and I've seen people's concerns and questions evolve over that time in the following way:

• For the first couple of years--2006-2007--most of the questions were about the "why" of participation. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? How could staff members justify these approaches to their managers? I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad).
• In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what." In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions. I wrote The Participatory Museum in response to this energy--to put together case studies in the context of a design framework so we could talk as a field about what works and why.
• In the past year, I've seen the conversation shift to talking about impact and sustainability of these projects--how we evaluate audience participation and how we can shift from experimental pilots to more day-to-day implementation.

2. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?

Yes and no. I honestly think the only kind of cultural institution that cannot support audience participation is one in which staff members don't respect visitors or what they have to contribute. I've never heard people say they don't care about visitors, but I've seen it in how they pay attention to visitors' needs and contributions. This anti-participatory behavior is also sometimes manifest within staffs where only certain employees' ideas are recognized and solicited, floor staff are ignored, etc.

But for institutions with a genuine interest and respect for visitors, participation is always possible. It looks different in different types of institutions. Small organizations are often best at forming long-term relationships with community members, whereas large organizations can rally lots of participants for a contributory project. Art museums are the least likely to empower their own staff to initiate participatory projects but the most likely to work with artists whose approach to participation might be quite extreme. For more on the differences among different types of museums (with examples), check out this post.

3. A lot of these projects are about getting people to be more social and active in museums. What about traditional visitors and supporters who may not want to participate?

In my experience, staff members are more sensitive to this issue than visitors and members are. I've met beautifully-coiffed ladies in their 70's who are hungry for conversation, and I've met pierced teenagers who prefer a contemplative experience. Most people who really love and support a museum want it to be loved and well-used by the larger community, and many of these folks are thrilled by techniques that engage new people with the organization.

That said, I think it's really important for all these engagement strategies to be "opt-in." It's common in many museums to offer cart-based activities that invite visitors (mostly families) to play a game, try an experiment, or make art. Just as those kinds of activities offer opt-in deeper engagement for some visitors, participatory techniques can offer opt-in social or active techniques for those who want them.

Sometimes, staff will claim that certain engagement techniques are so distracting for non-participants that they should not be offered even on an opt-in basis. I frankly think this is ridiculous. We know from research that people like to engage with content in different ways, and many museums tout the fact that they offer multi-faceted learning experiences. If we accept that sometimes people want to read the long label, sometimes people want to discuss things, sometimes people want to touch, and so on, then we have to offer a diversity of options. If we prescriptively decide you can only talk over here and you can only read the long label over there, we limit the quality and impact of the visitor experience.

4. Do you see any cultural differences in whether and how people like to participate around the world?

This is a really interesting question, and if I had any friends who were international social psychologists I would probably spend all my free time pestering them about this. My limited experience and research has led me to believe that people in every culture want to express themselves and connect with each other--the differences are how they prefer to do so.

Sometimes the difference comes down to preferred tools. In Taiwan, I noted that many more visitors and staff members were enthusiastic about taking and sharing photos than they were writing on a talkback board. In Denmark and Amsterdam, I experienced radical dialogue programs like Human Library, but also a strict formalism as to what happens in galleries.

Other times, the differences come down to social conventions. Some cultures value individual expression, whereas others prioritize the group. At the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (search "Vietnam" here), staff have told me that participatory projects work best when a community of participants is engaged in a group process where they can come to consensus and defer to the group. In contrast, processes that engage individual participants as creators might work in a more individualistic culture like Australia or the US.

I'd love to hear more peoples' reflections on this. In every country I've visited, I've heard a version of this question that starts, "Maybe this works for Americans, but here in X..." After seeing so many varied and inspiring participatory projects from around the world, I can firmly state that this is not an American phenomenon, nor is participatory work even necessarily best-suited to U.S. culture. There are long histories of highly-engaged participatory governance and cultural work around the world, and in many ways, America's obsession with the individual may be more of a hindrance than a help to projects here.

QUESTIONS ABOUT RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

5. Where do you see the biggest resistance to incorporating participatory techniques? What's the biggest obstacle to more of these projects happening?

The first thing you have to tackle is fear of change. This isn't unique to audience participation; it's a reality that any new project or course of action stirs up all kinds of anxieties about organizational change.

Once you get past the fear of change to the specifics of audience participation, you have to separate people's expressed resistance from the actual obstacles. Resistance to audience participation is often expressed as fear of losing control. There's a worry, mostly on the part of content experts and brand managers, that their voices won't be as dominant as they once were when visitors are invited to participate. These fears are well-justified, but they're often predicated on the false conflation of control with expertise. You can be an expert and have a strong voice--a voice visitors want to hear--without being the only voice in the room. That's what it means to live in a democracy, and it's something we're comfortable with in news, politics, and other venues... why not museums?

And ultimately, loss of control is not the biggest obstacle to implementing participatory projects. I would suggest that the biggest challenge is the fact that they require fundamentally different ways of operating. If a traditional exhibition project is one in which a team "puts on a show," a participatory project is one in which a team "plants a garden" and then must tend and cultivate it over time. Participatory projects require sustained engagement between staff and community members, and that is not baked into our traditional job descriptions, staffing plans, and project budgets.

6. How do you evaluate participatory engagement strategies?

My simple answer is: evaluate these projects as you would evaluate any new technique or program. If your institution cares about numbers, count participants and impacted visitors. If your institution cares about deep engagement, measure dwell time and survey people about their experiences. If your institution cares about delivering on mission, measure indicators that reflect your core values. This sounds flip, but the reality as I've seen it is that every institution has its own criteria for what makes a project a success. If you evaluate your project by something other than those criteria, you won't be able to make a convincing argument about whether to continue with these efforts or not.

Many evaluations of participatory projects focus solely on the experience for participants. I have yet to see a participatory project in which the direct participants who co-designed an exhibition or contributed their own stories to a program did not have an incredible, often transformative, experience. The problem is that these participants are often tiny in number compared to your organization's overall audience. To effectively and completely evaluate the impact of a participatory project, you have to look at how it affects not only participants but also the broader audience... and staff.

This question of evaluation is still very open. I wrote a chapter in The Participatory Museum about it, but I continue to seek out really good examples of participatory project evaluation. I strongly believe it is through shared evaluations and documentation that we will advance as a field overall in these efforts.

7. What kind of changes do you think have to happen for museums to really be able to embrace and support audience participation, not just in one-off experiments, but for the long term?

This comes back to the idea that participation happens fundamentally in operating, not in designing or developing programs. After a phase of experimentation and pilot projects, I think any organization that is serious about audience participation has to examine how it recruits staff and what their tasks and roles are.

We also have to become more flexible about how we engage visitors as partners on an ongoing basis. For example, I recently learned about the Science Gallery's approach to involving community members. They have a pretty explicit engagement ladder in which someone starts as a visitor, becomes a member, then an "ambassador" who is empowered to put on some programs in collaboration with the institution, and finally a member of the "Leonardo Group" -- an advisory group that meets a few times a year to tackle upcoming creative challenges the organization faces. Rather than having standing advisory committees representing various constituencies, the Leonardo Group is a nimble, diverse crowd of engaged participants who contribute significantly to the Science Gallery's programming and resources through one-off events. This kind of engagement ladder provides a structured framework for participation without overly constraining how people get involved.

QUESTIONS ABOUT WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES

8. When you are creating programming explicitly to engage new communities, how do you still satisfy your base?

I wrote a blog post on this topic last year, but it's one that still comes up frequently in discussions with colleagues. I've come to feel that the "parallel to pipeline" strategy is a solid approach. You start by offering a custom, distinct program for new audiences and then find ways to integrate what works for them into your core offerings. The important part of making this work is acknowledging that you do have to make some real changes to the pipeline when you ask that new audience to transition into it. The parallel programs are not a "bait and switch" used to hook new audiences into your traditional offerings. They are a starting point, and a testing ground, from which you should be learning new ways of working that can be applied more broadly and fundamentally to how the organization operates.

9. If so much of this work is about creating personal relationships with visitors, how do we sustain it beyond individual staff members?

This question comes up most frequently when talking about social media. There's a fear that if an individual staff member becomes the voice of the organization on the Web, and then that person leaves, the relationships she built will disappear. Interestingly, I never hear colleagues express the same fear when it comes to individuals who run specific key programs for an organization (even though those membership managers, educators, volunteer coordinators, and others have very personal relationships with many important constituencies).

When it comes to online community engagement, I always turn to Shelley Bernstein and Beck Tench as my luminary teachers. Both of them are very clear about the need to be personal AND to distribute the relationships throughout staff as much as possible. Beck in particular has done an amazing job of working as a partner to other staff members at the Museum of Life and Science to help them develop social media projects that they can manage on their own with only light involvement from Beck. The animal keepers run their blog. The Butterfly House manager shares photos on Flickr. And so on. In this way, engaging with visitors through social media becomes something that many staff members are involved with based on their content and programmatic skills. This leads to diverse projects and relationships--and a better safety net for the institution overall.

10. When you build a relationship with a community for a project and then that project ends, how do you keep those people involved?

This is one of the toughest questions I've been grappling with lately, and I'd love to hear your reflections on it. It's a question that tends to come up only for organizations that have committed to audience participation over the long term. You invite a group of people to co-design an exhibit or co-produce a program, it happens, it's fabulous... and then what? In most cases, those partners were solicited for specific skills or attributes related to those specific projects, and it's not easy to naturally translate those same people to another participatory opportunity. In my experience, many of these people become a special class of members or volunteers, but that doesn't mean they're satisfied with a standard membership arrangement. These folks have had a taste of higher engagement and many of them want more. I'm not sure what the most sustainable way is to keep them actively involved as the organization shifts over time.

What are your answers to these questions? What are your questions that should be on this list?

A Revised Theory of Social Participation via "Me-to-We" Design

For three years, I've been using a "hierarchy of participation" diagram to talk about the ways that cultural institutions and platforms can scaffold social experiences among users. It's been problematic for several reasons - a bit confusing, hideous colors, and most of all, a pyramid shape that suggested that some kinds of social participation were better than others.

I've finally completed a redesign of the five stages of social participation, as shown above. The basic concept remains the same: if you want to support social engagement among people, especially in an unfacilitated setting (i.e. no tour guides or game masters), you need to start by designing personal services for users, then linking up users through shared interests or objects to promote interpersonal connections. You don't start by designing "for the crowd." Instead, you design ways for each person to feel acknowledged and valued as an individual. You make them comfortable interacting on their own, and then start providing opportunities to connect with others.

This new diagram is meant to imply progression while treating the stages more democratically. No stage is better than another, and each has something to offer visitors in the context of a cultural institution. Stage one provides people with access to the content that they seek. Stage two provides an opportunity for inquiry and for visitors to take action and ask questions. Stage three lets people see where their interests and actions fit in the wider community of visitors to the institution. Stage four helps visitors connect with particular people—staff members and other visitors—who share their content and activity interests. Stage five makes the entire institution feel like a social place, full of potentially interesting, challenging, enriching encounters with other people.

A simple example: the cocktail party

The best place to start conceptualizing structures for social participation is via familiar social experiences. Consider a cocktail party. There are some parties where hosts go out of their way to welcome guests individually and to introduce them to others via shared interests - making sure Susie the winemaker meets George the restauranteur and so on. At the best parties, each guest feels like his contributions to the conversation are desired, and everyone feels complicit in creating a wonderful social experience. People meet strangers comfortably and confidently, based on their sense of personal worth and welcome.

And then there are the less pleasant parties, the ones where guests arrive to be welcomed by someone with a vacant stare who waves them in and doesn't ask (or know) their names. Guests may feel isolated or unacknowledged, lonely in the crowd.

The difference between the first and second party is the extent to which guests can move from "me to we" instead of being expected to plunge headfirst into interpersonal engagement. In cultural institutions, this can be applied to motivate dialogue around the core focus of the organization. By introducing individuals through the content they love, hate, or have a personal connection to, you motivate relationship-building around the objects and stories on display.

What do unfacilitated me-to-we experiences look like?

Not every cultural experience requires a party host (though they are always useful). The me-to-we design stages become even more important when facilitation is not possible. Designing stage three and four experiences can lay the groundwork to support and encourage unfacilitated social experiences. These frameworks enable visitors to do it for themselves whenever they like.

The social Web provides some of the most powerful examples of unfacilitated me-to-we participation. Consider Flickr, the photo-sharing community site. Many people engage directly with strangers on stage five to discuss images, the stories behind photos, and photographic technique. But most of them start with a stage one experience: looking at photographs.

Here's how the Flickr experience maps to me-to-we design:

For a museum example, consider the Walters Art Museum's Heroes exhibition. Visitors were invited to wear tags indicating their personal connection to one of eight characters in Greek mythology and to use those tags to navigate the exhibition (see longer explanation here). The tags were incredibly low-tech, but they successfully set the stage for some surprising and powerful social dialogue among friends and strangers alike who compared their tags and discussed related exhibits. The tags allowed some visitors to go from a typical stage one experience--looking at artworks singly--to stage five experiences--discussing the artworks with strangers.

Here's how the Heroes experience maps to me-to-we design:


In both these examples, the institution provided tools at stages three and four to encourage people to make the leap from their own personal experience to a collective one without staff intervention. Whether applied in a low-tech or high-tech platform, me-to-we design can help people feel welcome, confident, and eager to participate socially.

What do you think? Does this new diagram work for you? It's a big part of my forthcoming book, and I'd love your thoughts about its use, what it communicates visually, and how it helps you think about designing for social participation.

Six Steps to Making Risky Projects Possible

Last month, I gave the closing keynote at the National Digital Forum in New Zealand. The end of a conference is often a time of great enthusiasm quickly followed by a gaping maw of inability to act on that enthusiasm back at work. For this reason, I spoke specifically about how to make dream projects possible at real institutions. You can see or download my slides and you can watch the video of the talk. Or you can read this condensed version of the talk.

***

Elaine Gurian once told me there are two ways for institutions to innovate: they can be so small that no one notices them, or they can have a director who is willing to put his/her neck on the line for the innovation. It’s nice to have both. Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters.

So if you’re not at one of those weird little institutions, how do you make innovation happen? How do you overcome institutional resistance to change and uncertainty to do something wild and hopeful?

It takes six steps.

First, you have to connect your idea to the institutional mission. I’ve written about this before, and it’s particularly relevant if your idea falls outside the traditional products or services of your organization. Pick apart your mission statement, and look for the words and phrases you can connect your project to. Ask leaders to be accountable to the mission. I used the example of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which has a mission statement that includes unusual words like “bold” and “fearless.” If your institution says it is bold and fearless, how do your programs support that? What new projects might allow you to better reflect those aspirations? When you speak in the language of the institutional mission, executives will understand you better and be attentive to the new connections you draw from the mission to proposed projects.

Second, you need to find the right tool to implement your idea. Especially when working with technology, leading with tools instead of mission-driven projects is a mistake. If you say, “we need a blog,” others in your organization won’t know how to contextualize that within the programs and mission of the institution. If you say, “being transparent is part of our mission, so we need a way to share more of the behind-the-scenes everyday work we do here, and since people here are comfortable writing and taking pictures, the best way to do that is via a blog,” then people will come onboard.

Third, you need to align your idea with institutional culture. There are some ideas that will never fly where you work. Maybe the director is obsessed with “company secrets” and you’ll never be able to share behind-the-scenes work. Or maybe education staff are not willing to engage real-time visitors in dialogue around controversial issues. That’s fine. If your idea is mission-relevant, you will be able to find a way to make it palatable within the context of your institution. I used the example of two very different exhibitions that solicited visitor-contributed content: Playing with Science at the London Science Museum, and MN150 at the Minnesota History Center. The London Science Museum team designed an entire exhibition and then left a few open vitrines at the end for visitors to contribute their own toys during the run of the exhibition. The Minnesota History Center team solicited visitor nominations for exhibition topics and then built an exhibition out of those contributions. Both resulting exhibitions featured visitor-submitted content, but each institution did so in a way that felt comfortable to their work processes and abilities.

This may sound obvious and natural, but it’s easy to underestimate the power of institutional culture. Sometimes staff are unaware of their own cultural biases and requirements even as they manage new projects. I worked on one project in which the client institution thought they wanted unfettered teen expression. When they saw the results of that expression, they struggled with the content and eventually integrated it into their project in a way that diminished the teens’ involvement and hard work. In the end, this generated a substandard product for the client, and disappointment for the teens.

Fourth, you need to find a way to evaluate what visitors do – and more importantly, to evaluate using criteria that are understood and appreciated by everyone in your institution. It’s not helpful to just measure outputs (number of visitor comments, length of stay) if those don’t translate to something that staff understand as useful outcomes. There are several good resources on evaluating participation. There is a preponderance of reports about the value of new media literacies towards educating productive citizens of the 21st century. Assessment tools like the Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills report can help you couch both your goals and evaluation in contexts that are well-understood by funders and executives alike. Another source of resources comes from the growing body of social media evaluation tools. I’m particularly enamored of this simple diagnostic used at the Museum of Life and Science in North Carolina to articulate the types of institutional goals they are trying to achieve with forays into participation. They use these explicit goals as measuring sticks for the projects and experiments they pursue.

Fifth and most challengingly, you need to reserve resources (dollars and staff) for project operation. Unlike most traditional cultural products, projects that encourage visitor participation require staff to “tend the garden” of contributions long after the launch date. I consider this the greatest obstacle to the inclusion of participatory practice in cultural institutions because it fundamentally changes the way organizations staff and fund projects. Many museums are making this shift as they hire “community managers” who communicate with users on an ongoing basis. But institutions that incorporate dynamic content and participatory engagement throughout struggle to prove every day that they need to continue providing consumable materials and floor staff to sustain engagement.

Sixth, you need other people to help you. Pushing forward new projects in your own institution can be a tiring and thankless task. If you have friends and colleagues—whether internal or external—who can help you get to the next step or just commiserate and cheer with you, you’ll feel less lonely in your endeavor. I believe you need to find specific people—not just social networks—who can help you in this effort. When you meet someone who can help you, ask her. When you meet someone you can help, make an offer. These transactions will make change possible.

***

To help jumpstart these relationships, we did one of my favorite activities. People took out two business cards. On the back of one, they wrote something they need. On the back of the other, they wrote something they could offer someone else professionally. We unveiled a giant gong in the front of the room. If you found a "match" - someone you could help or could help you - you got to come up and hit the gong. People bonded over all kinds of skills, from helping digitize collections to performing outcome assessments to strategizing about new programs. And despite the exhaustion of the end of a long conference, everyone got up and moving in their quest to hit the gong (as evidenced by photos like this one).

As a brief design digression, I'd like to suggest that the gong is essential to this activity working. It's a motivator that has no intrinsic value - certainly less value than the outcome of the activity of finding a helpmeet in your work. But it helps focus WHY people will participate in something a bit silly by coupling it with a silly win condition. It invites people to play. It's another example of how scaffolding participation with design objects can make interpersonal exchange more desirable.

Participatory Design Vs. Design for Participation: Exploring the Difference

Pop quiz! Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice?

1. Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. The exhibit opens. It looks like a traditional exhibit.
2. Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation. The exhibit is dynamic and changes somewhat in response to visitors' actions.

The answer (for me) is both. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation." In the first case, you are making the design process participatory. In the second, you make the product participatory. My burning question is whether these should remain exclusive from each other. Is an exhibit participatory if no visitor sees a place for her own contribution? Is it participatory if the contributory experience was designed without her input?

Participatory Design means Innovating the Process

There are museums pursuing participatory design for a variety of reasons: to increase the diversity of voices represented in exhibits, to cast wider nets for great ideas on program topics, to engage particular partners in the exhibit design process. I once worked on a project where the main goal behind our community-based participatory model was to make our exhibit process faster and cheaper. Some projects engage a very small, well-defined segment of the community as partners in the process (such as the Wing Luke Asian Museum's well-documented community process), whereas others invite open participation (such as MN150, Tech Virtual, and Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition) from across the world.

But the visitor experience of these exhibits isn't necessarily altered by the innovative process that created it. For some museum professionals and projects, this is a good thing--it "proves" that participatory design can yield products that meet institutional standards. But if the goal is to change as many peoples' perception of the institutional relationship to community members as possible, then limiting yourself to a hidden participatory process is problematic.

The simplest way to demonstrate the participatory process is to expose it, to transparently show off the people and process involved. But that might not make for a better exhibit. Do people really care to learn the intricacies of how the exhibit was made? Does knowing that individuals from their neighborhoods were involved change their perspective of the institution?

Design for Participation means Innovating the Product

Transparency may tell the story, but it won't make drop-in visitors feel that the institution invites their participation. The less simple but more effective way is to create participatory experiences on the floor, to offer every drop-in visitor a legitimate way to contribute to the museum and see their contribution respected and responded to. This is incredibly hard, and very different than changing your exhibit design process. The Ontario Science Centre is doing some of this in their Weston Family Innovation Centre, where visitors every day make and augment physical and virtual objects that are displayed in the museum. The Innovation Centre is an entirely responsive space, designed for people to use each other's work as inspiration and generally to see themselves as co-creators of the space.

But the Innovation Centre is a struggle to manage. It's messy and it always changes. It consumes stuff. There are some people who'd prefer to just stop the action, put the participation-to-date on display, and call it "done." But it's never done. And that's a major monkey wrench in the standard models for how museums operate, staff, and fund their work.

Do you Need Participatory Design for Participatory Experiences?

One of the other unusual--and challenging--aspects of the Weston Family Innovation Centre is that it was designed by a lengthy, expensive participatory process that involved hundreds of prototypes and exploratory activities. It was co-designed by staff across the Ontario Science Centre, teen co-conspirators, and visitors via a series of ingenious brainstorming and making exercises developed by Julie Bowen and her brilliant team. Julie has commented that without this intense, exhaustive participatory process, they could not have designed such a successful, authentic-feeling participatory public space. Engaging in the participatory process also helped the staff transition to imagining their new roles in the eventual visitor experience.

But do you really need a participatory process to produce a platform for participation? Not always. There are fabulous participatory platforms--from community murals to StoryCorps to PostSecret--that are designed without a lick of user involvement. I've written often about the art of designing platforms for participation, and the extent to which designers need to constrain and control the experience to structure comfortable, successful venues for participation.

But an interesting problem arises when a participatory platform feels unresponsive, and users don't feel that their contributions are being respected or valued. Consider the user reactions (ranging from enthusiasm to uproar) to the evolving design of Facebook over time. Users, who see themselves as co-creators (if not owners) of the Facebook experience, reacted negatively and protested when they felt that their interests were not taken into account. From Facebook's perspective, the company was in control of the designed experience and had the right to roll out changes without consulting users. Users disagreed. Facebook is learning how to negotiate this relationship. They need to treat respect users as design collaborators (to some extent) if they want to keep them as contributors.

But how far does that go? Do true participatory platforms need participatory design processes behind them? Or do designers just need to be transparent about how the platform works and how users' contributions feed into the experience?

This question isn't rhetorical; it's something I'm really grappling with as I work with museums that are trying to be more "participatory" overall. To me, a participatory museum is one in which visitors perceive the institution as actively inviting and incorporating contributions from non-professionals. Does that require participatory design, design for participation, or both?

Becoming Generous Thieves: Notes from the Museums in Conversation Keynote

On Monday, I gave the keynote at the Museums in Conversation conference in Tarrytown, NY. It happened at 7:45 in the morning, and I know that many of you were not there, let alone awake, at that time. So I want to share the thoughts that I offered to that intrepid early crew on Monday. You can also see the images I used, which were constructed with an extremely cool presentation software called Prezi, here. (For those who start drooling, Prezi will be launched publicly on April 5 and is pretty easy to use.)

I focused on two attributes that I think we should all be cultivating: greed and generosity. Greed, because creative greediness motivates us to hunt down and steal the best design techniques the world has to offer, and generosity, because giving those great ideas and applications away is the only way to change the larger cultural landscape.

I learned to cultivate creative greed while working on Operation Spy at the International Spy Museum, where I was lucky to be working on a project that was so new to us that we didn't have any pre-established models or structures for doing it. I spent a lot of research time learning how designers in related fields solve the problems we had developing Operation Spy: how screenwriters craft plot twists, how game designers build instructions into the game, how theme park designers deliver consistent, high-impact multi-sensory experiences. I approached all of these fields with one question in mind: "What can I steal?" What amazing thing is this designer or author or game creator doing that I can take a slice of and stick into my museum?

The question stuck with me, after Operation Spy, after leaving the Spy Museum. I started to apply it more broadly, to look around at my lived experience, find the great stuff and ask myself, “how can I steal that to make museums more amazing?” This is not to say that I don’t have confidence in museums’ core value or services. But I also recognize where we’re falling short. We aren’t reaching all the audiences we’d like to. We’re not essential parts of every community. We’re not even getting the finanacial and politicial support we’d like.

So my response is to be greedy, to look for the models I can steal from to try to tackle some of the challenges museums face. In 2006, I honed in on a particular cookie jar I love to steal from: the social Web. In the beginning, the Web was a lot like a museum. It had a lot of interesting, sometimes esoteric information. You could poke around and read things and click things. But then, just in this last decade, the Web 2.0 revolution came along, and the Web became a social environment where people could share their own content with others, discuss it, and redistribute it.

Whether you think this was a good development or not, the fact is that it changed the Web from a nice to have to a must have for a lot of people. There are college students who cannot make it through the day without checking Facebook multiple times. There are people using the social Web to organize protests, discuss deep issues, and build lasting relationships. There was a study published earlier this month by Neilson Research about the astronomical growth of social networks from Dec 2007 to Dec 2008. The fastest growing demographics are over 35. One third of Facebook users are 35-49 and one quarter are 50 plus. This isn’t just a change in youth culture. It’s a change that affects everyone.

I see this change and I want it for museums, so I study the models of how the social Web works and apply them as greedily as possible to my own work as an exhibit designer. I want museums to be like the Web. I want a college student to feel like her week is not complete if she didn’t make it to the museum. I want guys like my dad, boomers who are seeking meaningful connections online, to see museums as the physical place that support their needs.

Why are museums the right place to become the physical substantiation of the social Web? Because we’re all about niche content! We’ve got that wrapped up! There’s a technology thinker named Cory Doctorow who once said: "Content is just something to have a conversation about." This is a pretty threatening quote on one level. I think when lots of museum people express concern about Web 2.0, their fear is this—that the museum’s carefully created and protected content and expertise will be drowned out by the conversation. But I see this quote in a different way. Sure, content is something to have a conversation about… but it’s the ONLY thing to have a conversation about!

And museums have really good content--content related to the core interests of niche groups who aggregate online. And they don't just meet virtually. One of the interesting things about the social Web is that it has increased the ability for people to affiliate with strangers and meet up in person. This is what online dating is all about, but it’s also what sites like Meetup are for. There are groups of knitters and genealogists and airplane nuts meeting in coffee shops and bars to talk about the niche content they love. This drives me crazy. Bars and coffeeshops are taking our market share! Museums should be the place for that (more on this here)--for people to meet and share their love of culture, science, and history.

And this is where the generosity comes in. In the same breath with which we need to greedily steal all the ways that social conversation around content works on the web, we need to generously provide the real-world platforms for those conversations.

What does this kind of generosity look like? It could be offering a space in your museum for local meetups. It could be instituting a community process like the one the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle uses to invite community groups to propose and co-design exhibits on topics of extreme relevance to them in the museum. It could be doing something as simple as providing a blog about topics of value to your audience. That’s how I got here today. In 2006 I started to chronicle my adventures in greediness. In a small act of generosity, I made my learning a public act via a blog called Museum 2.0. And in about a million ways, that generosity has been paid back to me in spades. It was easy for me to be generous – I was already doing that learning anyway! In the same way, there are some easy ways for you and your institution to be generous. Think about what you have that your target community needs, and I’m sure you can find a match.

Two of my favorite examples of museums that found strategic ways to be generous are COSI in Columbus, OH, and the Wild Center in the Adirondacks of New York.

I've written about COSI before, but on Monday I focused on their strategic partnership with WOSU, the local public broadcasting station. By 2005, a bond measure had failed and COSI was struggling financially. COSI has a big building, and they had closed some galleries to reduce their operating costs. So partly as a financial measure and partly as a community development measure, they started leasing space to simpatico organizations. One of the most important of these is WOSU, the local public radio station. I don’t have to tell you how much news organizations are struggling to remain relevant—and solvent—in today’s economy. So COSI rents 12,000 sq ft of space to WOSU, which then has a digital studio and some public space to hold events and stage exhibits. WOSU programs happen at the museum, and they collaborate as partners to host other events for the growing Columbus non-profit and media fields.

You may not think of Columbus as the next Silicon Valley, but there are a lot of energetic tech startups and entrepreneurs there who are ready to convince you. COSI has become a literal, physical hub for the growth of these new businesses, and their partnership with WOSU makes them a powerhouse on the airwaves, with the mayor, and with the future engineers of Columbus.

Looking at it now, it may seem obvious. But this is a museum that just a few years ago was seen by voters as irrelevant to life in Columbus. COSI had a desperate need to raise money. The team saw that the only way to get that money was to be relevant to the community. So they were generous with something they already had, something that was plaguing them—extra space—and used that as the basis of a new fruitful collaboration. Now, they are relevant not only to their core family and school audiences but to a much wider audience of young professionals as well.

I don’t think of Columbus as a huge cosmopolitan place. But I understand that the majority of museums are nowhere near as big as COSI and do not have 12,000 sq ft of space just lying around. So the other example I want to share is from a small institution in the Adirondacks called The Wild Center.

The Wild Center has a small indoor exhibit and 31 acres of trails with interpretative material. They are open seasonally and have small visitation. But the Wild Center staff feel pretty strongly about the fact that the Adirondacks are a rare place in our country where there is a history of serious action to protect and preserve the natural environment. And they noticed that not enough people in the Adirondacks were concerned about climate change and its effect on both the natural environment and local businesses.

So they started a climate conference that focused on economic models for local businesses and governments not just to survive but to succeed in a world of climate change. Sure, they talked about the gloom and doom, but they focused it very locally on the Adirondacks and worked with local builders, politicians, and business owners to help them understand how reducing their carbon footprints could improve their towns and businesses. It was a generous action that was seen as neighborly. A local blogger celebrated:

Two years ago I was lamenting that no local public leaders were stepping up to the plate on trying to understand what global climate change would mean for the Adirondacks (and its ski-tourism industry) - thankfully, that has changed. The Wild Center in Tupper Lake has taken on the lead role of informing their neighbors about the potential impacts of global warming (such as the impact on amphibians), showing local builders what they can do to mitigate those affects, and organizing scientific meetings to discuss and assess the progress of climate change in the Adirondacks.

What’s greedy and generous in both of these examples? In both cases, the museums had a need—for COSI, to avoid bankruptcy, for the Wild Center, to be relevant to their neighbors. They looked around and found something to steal—a business model here, a free advertising channel there—and coupled it with something they could give—space and information. The things they gave were things that were needed by the communities they serve—really needed, not just nice-to-haves. And by providing a community service that was seen as highly valuable, both museums positioned themselves more securely in their local environments.

I encourage you to take these two ideas--greed and generosity--and use them throughout your work and life. When you listen to someone share their experience, think to yourself, “What can I steal from this story?” When you hear someone express a need, think to yourself, “What can I offer that would support this person?”

And if you find yourself sitting at a conference eating breakfast next to someone you don’t know, maybe you don’t want to go through the small talk and find out what their job title is and where they’re from. That’s ok. Cut to the chase. Ask them, “what's the most amazing thing you’ve seen recently that we could steal to improve museums?”

My dream is that this starts right now, this morning, with all of us. Form a crime ring with the people sitting next to you. It’s like Robin Hood. Start planning heists on the best thing the world has to offer, and start giving away everything you’re hanging onto for no good reason.

Make a list. Become a generous, greedy thief. Find the good stuff, use it like crazy, and tell everyone about it. I live a life governed by these two questions. I love being a creativity thief and giving my best ideas away. And I hope somebody will use them.

I sometimes think of museums as a kind of thrift store, preserving cast-off bits of material culture for new audiences to fall in love with. I buy my clothes from the thrift store. I like the idea that something that became extraneous for someone else can become the jacket or pants that I depend on. I want that for museums. That’s why they call it goodwill.