Visitors in Focus

As I said, last week, I’ve been to a travelin’ girl for the last couple of years. Not quite a troubadour, as my karaoke skills are more humorous than sonorous, I’ve enjoyed being on the road. In writing this post, I couldn’t help but think of that old Johnny Cash song, made famous again in hotel ads. The song’s lyrics are basically a litany of places he sang. And, I could do something similar, though that would help no one.

So, instead, I am offering 3 posts this month about what I learned from visiting more than 300 museums. Last week, I talked about what I learned about museum workers. This week I wanted to think about visitors.

What did I learn?

1. People are there on their time off. 

We know this, perhaps, but I think this point is important to underscore.

Most full-time museum staffers are there on the weekdays. When they leave their offices to grab a coffee or unthaw themselves after working in freezing offices, they might notice galleries filled with seniors, school children, and people pushing strollers. Thinking about museum hours, we are most open when other people work. People who are able to come during these hours, therefore, become important audience segments. That said, other than school children, people who come during the day are there as part of their leisure time. Now, before you think, wait, but they want to learn something. Yes, that can be true. Leisure time encompasses many different behaviors. Some people want to learn or feel enriched during some of their leisure time. (I graphed leisure, fun, and museums for an old post, if you want to think more about the relationship between those concepts).

But there are other reasons people go to museums on their leisure time. Many go to socialize. It’s a great date spot, I’ve noticed. Some go because they feel like they should, like parents attending with their children. Some go because there is air conditioning. Some go because it’s too inclement outside to do anything else. Now, I am not going to keep going through the possible reasons for museum visitation, as others like Susie Wilkening does it better.

But, what I would say, anecdotally, is that almost every visitor walking in the door at the museum is there on their time off. Think about your time off. Do you want to be spoken down to? Do you want to feel stupid? Do you want to be lost? Do you want to be frustrated? People are giving us their time off. We need to make them feel like we value this precious gift.  

2. They look a bit nervous. 

Our spaces can be very subtle.

No one wants to get yelled at. So, people are often visiting our spaces in high alert mode. The fear of being yelled at is a particularly good way of turning off future visitation. And, you might say, I’ve never seen anyone yelled at in my museum galleries. But, visitors often see museums as lump sum prospect. So, bad experiences in one museum become connected to their concept of “museum” in general.

Add to that, we aren’t always all that human-centered. I have dragged my kids, museum kids mind you, through many a museum gallery. I know which of you don’t have seating. I have sat on the floor with my children. Now, I will say, I’ve never been yelled at for sitting on the floor. And, as an old school gallery teacher, it’s a pretty comfortable behavior for me. But most visitors wouldn’t even think to sit on the floor. Instead, they’d walk out of that museum deciding these are not spaces for them.

Add to this, our designers are careful to pick seats that work with the aesthetic of the art. I’m a snob, so I get that. But our visitors are worried about getting yelled at, and then we put in seats that sort of vaguely look like art. This is like leveling up the discomfort levels for our visitors.

Finally, we like to hide the goods. Galleries are often up some stairs, bathrooms behind a wall. We make our signs appealing to us, not instructive to our visitors. Basically, we create spaces for the power users and the people who know our unwritten rules. These are behaviors that foster the inaccessible nature of our institutions. If we are committed to diversifying audiences, we need to think hard about the behaviors that feel exclusionary and change them.

3. They read labels. They really watch videos. 

Oh, another week talking about labels.

I remember doing an observation study when I was very pregnant with my daughter. I sat on a bench pretending to draw while I watched behaviors. It was a bit demoralizing to see people avoiding the panels we’d worked so hard to create. But people sure did read labels.

More than a decade later, I still saw people reading labels. I ached to ask people why they read the labels they did. But I’d have mortified my family. I did notice many people were scanning down the label quickly as if reading on a phone. Studies indicate people are reading more text, but more quickly, often skimming for specific information. I wonder if they are doing this with the labels.

I was most surprised at how much time people spent watching videos. Many of these videos were without captions (work on that y'all), and some were really boring. And, yet, everywhere I went people sat through the videos. Why? Well, I would guess in part because watching moving images is a regular practice for most people. Rarely, outside of museums, do people stand and ponder something static. But, almost every day, you get information from a movie image. I also think many people understand videos to be a type of orientation. So, the video feels like a common mode of communication and a lifeline to help you get a handle on what you will see. 

4. Selfies aren’t the reason they are pulling out their cameras.

Any behavior shift can feel uncomfortable or suspect. Cell phones in the galleries often get a bad rap. Alli Burness, Meagen Eastep, Jenny Kidd, and Chad Weinard gave a great talk ages ago about cell phone photography/ social photography. They discussed how personal photography wasn’t just about selfies (and in fact often wasn’t). In my visits, I noticed very few people taking selfies. But many were using the camera as a note-taking device. Capturing favorites and even photographing the label to remember the name of the artwork. 

As a museum educator, I've spent a career cajoling, inviting, dreaming that people will be engaging with collections. With cell phones, they are. People were using the phone to take “artsy” images. Our collections were, in essence, sparking creativity day in and day out through cell phone photography. 

We need to rethink cell phones as distracting to the experience. Visitor's experiences are often heightened by cell phones. They are able to do something, and they get to use paradigms they already use in their everyday life. They might be a different way of experiencing collections than before the advent of the cell phone, but different isn't wrong. (And, registrars out there, I do say all this about phones with the caveat that cell phone photography cannot put collections at risk.) 

The issue about cell phones boils down to allowing people to enjoy our galleries in ways that work for them, not in the ways we decide. There is not one way to enjoy museums. You don't need to read the labels (I often don't). You don't need to listen to the audiotour. You don't need to agree with the curator giving the talk. When we allow for multiplicity in engagement, we open the doors to more people being engaged. And, finding new audiences is a numbers game. (I wrote more about this recently). 

5. Interactivity is the best way to get intra-group social experiences.

I’d talk to anyone anywhere. But most people don’t speak so readily to strangers. I noticed when I was at a station doing something, people would talk to me. For example, at the Museum of the City of New York, there was an interactive about sewing (which I’ll discuss more next week). The interactive was about piece work. Two people talked to me about how terribly hard the seamstresses must have worked for their meager wages. In other words, that interactive made strangers discuss the point of the exhibition and relate it to their lives. Holy grail of museum engagement right there. It wouldn’t have happened beside a panel, and I don’t think it would have happened around a collection object. But, the position around a shared physical engagement allowed the shared moment of conversation.

Next week, I’ll write more about interactivity in the galleries, so I’ll leave it here.

To conclude, I’d like to ask you all a question. Do you think museums act like they like their visitors?

In all my observations of visitors in galleries, I sometimes wondered if some museum professionals liked the visitors they were serving.

Museums sometimes are so focused on scholarship and scholars they lose sight of their visitors and their visitors' needs. Now, before your hackles go up, I acknowledge we serve many masters. Scholarship is not an insignificant part of our work. But, scholars and visitors have different, often opposing needs. For many museum professionals, scholars are easy to serve. It's basically like planning party for people exactly like yourself.

But visitors needs require stepping outside ourselves and our desires. This issue can be compounded by our motivations. Many people go into this field because of the collections, myself included. There is something quite different intellectually in connecting objects to people vs connecting people to objects. Centering people is not natural for many museum professionals. They focus on Educating (with a healthy dose of talking down to) and they forget you can’t educate people who aren’t there. Spaces often project an attitude of superiority or disinterest in the visitor's engagement; no one wants to be talked down to.

Knowing more information doesn’t make you smarter, it makes you more knowledgeable. This difference is essential to our work. It is not intelligence that separates museum workers and visitors, it is facts, ideas, concepts. To paraphrase a fellow museum worker, it’s just that we read different books. Keeping this in mind, our spaces and our actions should be about sharing ideas without making people feel dumb. Above all, we should show people that we like them and we should express that we like that they are in our spaces.

At the end of the month, I'd love to have a compilation of people's answers to the question if they think museums show they like their visitors and how. Share here in the comments or on social.

---

And, if you really just wanted to read my song, try this section. Feel free to sing it with a Johnny Cash roughness…

I've been everywhere, man.

I've been everywhere, man.

Many a collection rare, man.

Programs and interactives to spare, man.

Of museums, I've a-had my share, man.

I've been everywhere.

I've been to

Akron, Chicago, St. Paul, Minnesota,

Salem, Cincy, Toronto, Iona,

Santa Cruz, Philly, Glasgow, Ottawa,

London, Jersey, Miami, Tacoma,

Phoenix, NYC, Orca, LA,

Manchester, Lancaster, Worcester, and, I'm a killer.

As always find me at @artlust on Twitter and @_art_lust_ on IG.

Hello Museum World!

Hello World! Or maybe hello museum world! I feel a bit like a child walking around in someone else’s, slightly bigger shoes taking over this wonderful blog. The metaphor certainly works in terms of filling big shoes. But, I like that metaphor for another reason. Children see play and imagination as their job. Filling big shoes isn’t scary; it’s something to enjoy and pursue with zeal. I am taking this challenge in that way—a wonderful, playful exploration. I hope you join me on this romp (and pick me up if I wobble). This month, I wanted to share some stories from my last two years as a strategy and content consultant. (Previously, I had worked at the same museum for 17 years.) I went from lots of change in one place to help many places with their change. And, while over the next few months, I'll share things about me, I wanted to write today about the field.

So, when you visit more than 300 museums, parks, and historic sites, what do you learn? I thought I would kick off my tenure around here by sharing stories and reflections about my visits. This week, I wanted to start with us, museum and cultural workers. In these last two years, I have spoken to hundreds of colleagues around the world, both in person and on social. I’ve learned so much from all of you, and a little about us as a field. Here are my top five reflections:

1. We Care: I know this might seem obvious, but it is worth calling this out. We are a field of people who truly care about our work. We are not in this for the 9-5, and most of us work well beyond the average work week. This is a hard point to illustrate with a story because every story I will share for the next few weeks is about the care we put into the work. Each label, I assure you, is a testament to the care of scores of museum workers. Each time a front walk is plowed in the snow, each time someone helps a visitor find their way to a gallery, each time you see a funny social media post. The care we put into our work is the fabric of this field. It makes me immensely proud to be one of you at every one of my visits.

2. Front of House is Hard Work: While I did gallery teaching for many years, for most of my career, I’ve had a desk and a phone in non-public space. A portion of our sector lives their work lives in the public realm. These front of house workers, including visitor experience staff and security guards, are often the ones taking our missions to the people.

I was so impressed by the front of house workers. On a very hot day last month, I tromped into the Dyckman Farm House in Manhattan, glistening from the heat and the trek, to see a smiling gardener invite me to sit down in the shade. Another time, I walked into MASS MOCA with my two elementary-age daughters. A guard knelt down to tell my daughters there were some interesting works in this gallery that could be touched (and he pointed out everything else is look only). He spoke to them as humans (not with a baby voice), and he seemed like he was happy to see us. I attempted to do some of the interactives in the National Museum of Scotland with wonderful encouragement from the education staff there. Let’s just say my pedal power is not so powerful, but I felt supported and encouraged. Overall, our front of house workers very often put our field’s best face forward.

3. Some of Our Staff are Listening: It’s hard to remember a time before Museum 2.0, and Nina’s advocacy for interactivity in our gallery spaces. So many museums have taken up the charge to make their spaces engaging on different levels. And while interactivity is up in general, I was particularly impressed by the number of museums who are proactive about visitor feedback and prototyping.

I saw places where museums were being transparent about how they do their work. My favorite, perhaps, was the prototype space at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle. As they were readying for a huge revamp of their spaces, they turned a gallery into a prototype space. My favorite little section was a place where people could vote on the styles of labels. My children particularly loved watching a technician/ scientist work on processing an avian taxidermy sample. Different strokes, perhaps. But, both of these sections were drawing back the curtain, if you will, on the work of museums. I wholeheartedly believe museums seem more vital to visitors when they know we are a changing, evolving field. When we show we are growing, we invite people to see our changes.

4. Some of our Staff still Needs to Listen: As a field, we still have so much growth. Take labels, for example. Many of our labels seem like the text that time forgot. They are written for a populace that is largely non-existent, people without Google on their phones and infinite attention spans. Now, I say this as someone who has written scores of labels and taught others to write them. I have definitely written some poor labels in my life. (And I will be writing much more deeply about labels in an upcoming post).

But for the sake of this list, I use labels as an example of a place where we as a field have not done a good job of evolving. There is nothing in our work that is so sacred as to be above scrutiny. Being critical of every element of our work, and every expectation, can only improve our practices.

5. Our Staff is Taxed: I wrote a book ages ago now about Self-Care. It started as an act of self-care myself. I was tired intellectually, and I needed to find a better way of being in this field. I was so glad other people liked the book. But, in writing that book, I also found people came to me about their problems. I was happy to listen (still am), but I realized something was fundamentally wrong in our field. My book was an individual helping other individuals. Certainly, caring for yourself is important.

But I think we as a field need to think about why so many of our professionals are feeling taxed. As I said above, our visitors might not see this exhaustion when they walk in. But burnout leads to job turnover. Losing trained people is like throwing away money. I don’t have the answer, but I have been trying to find systemic ways to embed wellness into the ways we run our museums.

In conclusion for this week, we are doing good work--you are doing good work. It can be hard, and often underappreciated, but it makes a difference. Next week, I'll talk about my reflections on how visitors seem to feel in our galleries.

N.B. In an upcoming post, I'd love to think about guards. If you have been a guard, ever, consider taking this survey. I'll make anonymized data available to anyone who asks.

I'll be checking comments, obviously. But, I'm easy to find on social @artlust on twitter and @_art_lust_ on IG.

Guest Post by Martin Djupdraet: Let the Decision Makers Do the Audience Research

This guest post is written by Martin Brandt Djupdræt, Head of research and presentation and a member of the management at the Danish open-air museum Den Gamle By (The Old Town). I met Martin last year at the MuseumNext conference. I was impressed by his commitment to putting visitors first - and his technique for inviting more of his colleagues to do so as well. In this post, Martin shares a simple yet effective way to involve staff at all levels in conducting visitor research to drive new perspectives and decisions. Note that Martin uses the word "survey" in a slightly more expansive way than is typical in the United States.

At Den Gamle By we have set ourselves a goal to broaden the perspective of those in responsibility and to ensure the management will take our audience seriously. Den Gamle By (“The Old Town” in Danish) is an open-air museum about urban life and the local museum of the city of Aarhus. It is the second most visited museum in Denmark. What we have done is quite simple, but it works: we require decision makers to do audience research themselves.

Learning experts have pointed out that when people are involved in a subject and actually experiencing it, they are likely to learn more. Interacting with visitors and engaging their emotions is a method used by many museums. But direct involvement with the audience is not necessarily a method used by museum management. Good museums listen to their audiences and the public before they make changes, but my guess is that most museum managers let others do the visitor research. Our experience now is that different lessons are learned when the management participate in collecting the data themselves.

Our new type of research was developed last year though workshops with museum researchers John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking. We wanted to understand the decisions visitors make while visiting and the impact of the visit. There are two elements of the research: tracking and interviewing.

Here’s how it works: a staff member from the museum meets a randomly selected person at the entrance. With the visitor’s consent, we follow and observe them during the entire, noting what parts of the museum they visit and when. The same staff member then interviews the visitor three weeks later.

Visitors are asked:

• why they chose this museum,
• what they noticed especially during the visit,
• whether they interacted with anyone, and
• whether they had talked to anyone about the museum after the visit, and what about

To make sure this knowledge is put to use in developing the museum, the management and curators are part of the team who carry out the survey. Managers have to leave their desks, and track and interview ordinary people they never would meet in their daily work or at the meetings they normally spend time on.

Before doing the survey, most of the management and curators felt they knew the museum and how visitors use it quite well, but it was an eye opener for us to spend an entire visit with one of the guests and interviewing them some weeks later.

What surprised us? The curators were surprised by how important other parts of the museum besides the historical content were for the visitor. The F&B manager and the head of HR were surprised by how many objects and stories the visitors were absorbed in. This has also given us insights into the work of our colleagues and made us appreciate their work to a larger extent. Now we all have useful and inspiring stories about visitors’ choices and the impact the museum had on them.

Another observation was the importance of food and drink. In our trackings we could see how much time the visitors spent on the museum’s eating places and the great social importance these breaks had. Something we learned about food through the interviews was that the guests consider the food at the museum as part of the museum's storytelling. This insight has encouraged us to focus on food and food history as a priority topic at the museum, and a colleague is going to work particularly with that subject.

This research has also given us confidence in choosing the core stories of the museum. For example, a woman in her 20s said that Aarhus Story, a new permanent exhibition about the city of Aarhus, had made her proud of being a citizen of Aarhus and that she developed a stronger sense of belonging to the city, because the exhibition showed her parts of the history that she could connect with. We were pleased and humbled that such an impact was possible. This observation along with other similar observations has already led to new decisions. They were part of the reason why we chose to skip the easy and light crowd-pleasers in our planning of new elements for 2019, and instead went for activities where the museum had a deeper knowledge, good exhibitions and good stories to tell. Through the research, we gained the courage to go for more difficult and ambitious activities and more profound stories.

Visitors have always been a focus for the management, but the research have personalized our audience and they are discussed differently now. As the head of finance described it: “I normally look at whether a task is well done, financially possible and efficient, but now I also consider more seriously how a visitor would feel and react to the changes we plan.”

Does it take time to do this research? Yes it does. Time which could be spent meeting with important people and dealing with important strategic considerations. But none of these worthy activities is more important that meeting the audience and taking their thoughts and actions seriously. Not one.

Is an individual observed in this way representative for all the guests? No, but the reflection shows that it gives new insight, and it certainly ignites the decision makers’ imaginations. Those who have tracked visitors up to now have spent maximum a whole working day altogether on tracking the visitor, the interview and gathering the information. That single day has been an eye-opener for the curators and other decision makers. In addition, we have made it easier for all of our staff to gain insight by meeting our visitors face-to-face by doing a half-hour shift as a welcoming host at the museum entrance. More than 20 staff member working at the offices tried this new practice last December. Most of them were thrilled about the talks they had with the visitors and back at the desk their experiences were discussed with colleagues. These efforts have taught us all through simple involvement that there are many different ways of understanding and using our museum. We have not just learned it, we have felt it.

Four other Nordic museums are now doing the same type of tracking and interviewing. In the year to come we will compare our observations, and will also be happy to share the result with you and others who might be interested. But we know already, before even looking at the collected data, that the project has been a success in Den Gamle By. It has broadened the decision makers’ perspective and made our audience even more important when new exhibitions and goals are planned.

How Hello Museum Builds Intimate Community in one of the Biggest Cities in the World

When I tell stories about how the MAH builds community, I emphasize the importance of deep partnerships and relationship-building. We connect with people both professionally and personally, at the museum and on the street. Colleagues from bigger cities often ask: is this approach relevant to us? Can this kind of intimacy and informality work in a sprawling metropolis? This weekend, I got my answer in Seoul--the 18th biggest city in the world--at Hello Museum.

Nestled in a forest of high-rise apartment buildings, this small museum connects children and families with contemporary art. Like the New Children's Museum in San Diego, Hello Museum creates building-wide interactive exhibitions with artists, on themes like nature and #NoWar. But while Hello Museum originally opened as a "children's contemporary art museum," that's not the tagline they use today. Now, they call themselves a "small neighborhood museum"--in the middle of a city of 9.8 million people.

Hello Museum embeds neighborliness in every aspect of its work, starting with its name. I assumed the name was an invitation for children to say hello to contemporary art. But director and founder Ysaac Kim explained that it's not about people connecting to the museum. It's about them connecting with each other. As she said, "I noticed that children these days are taught not to talk to strangers, not to say hello to them. So we made this museum as a place where you can say hello."

Walk into Hello Museum, and you'll encounter a million touches that create a sense of intimacy and community. Everyone takes off their shoes on entry, which creates a homey feel. As we padded in, the front desk was manned by a visiting artist. In a warren of small rooms without doors, parents sat chatting on the floor as their children swirled through art installations made from everyday objects. There were plants and books everywhere.

We wandered up the stairs, slipped on slippers and sunhats (provided on a friendly shelf), and enjoyed a small rooftop garden with waterplay and painting areas. Up on that roof, our world of paints and plants felt tiny in contrast to the skyscrapers looming all around. It felt like a place to be human in a concrete and steel world.

While Seoul is very different from Santa Cruz, Hello Museum felt like a sister to the MAH. The warm, sociable spirit felt the same. Visitors easily and happily collided and said hello to one another. Staff members and teenage volunteers brokered conversations and play. At one point, Ysaac effusively greeted a woman visiting with her child. As they hugged and laughed, they explained to me that the mother was a friend - and part of a company that had sponsored this exhibition opening. It reminded me of every time I've given a tour of the MAH and run into a friend or partner along the way.

Like the MAH, Hello Museum brokers new "hellos" through local partnerships and visitor participation. They try to be of, by, and for their community (which is why I was visiting). For example, on our way into the museum, Ysaac pointed out tiny textile factories dotting the neighborhood run by "grandmothers." In Hello Museum's maker space, children worked with scraps donated by these seamstresses. On the floor, children sat and slid on denim cushions, sewed by the grandmothers out of cast-off jeans donated by museum visitors. After the exhibition closes, these community-made denim cushions will keep doing good in the community. Hello Museum is donating them to a local animal shelter that needs warm cushions to insulate dogs and cats from cold concrete floors.

Ysaac and her team at Hello Museum have created something small, beautiful, and powerful. Seeing this hive of creativity and human kindness made me realize that this kind of museum may even be more valuable in a big city than a small one. In a city that is rapidly growing and changing, they've created a place to come together and play and create things and make friends. A place to slow down and say hello.

Hello Museum taught me that intimacy and community-building is a choice. It's a choice to keep things simple. To work with neighbors. To design spaces that feel human and warm. A choice that any small museum, no matter how big the city, can make.

Want to Co-Create an Exhibition on a Hot Issue? Introducing the Community Issue Exhibition Toolkit

Two years ago, our team at the MAH embarked on our most challenging co-creation project ever. We partnered with foster youth, former foster youth, artists, and community advocates to create an exhibition that used art to spark action on issues facing foster youth.

Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. You can download it for free right now.

What did we learn? This project wove together many different participatory threads. We co-created it from start to finish with community partners. There were over 100 partners. We commissioned new collaborative artwork. We invited visitors to take real action in response to what they saw. The exhibition evolved after it opened. The lead partners were youth who had been marginalized and exploited by institutions. There were trust issues. Complex power dynamics. The facilitation was as chaotic and fragile as a spiderweb.

The result was the best exhibition I've had the honor of working on (check out these outcomes). It empowered our partners, deeply touched our visitors, and catalyzed real community change.

The lessons I learned from Lost Childhoods are at the heart of the OF/BY/FOR ALL project we're building now. This project deepened our commitment to creating platforms that empower partners. This project taught me that co-creative projects must be OF and BY the communities they purport to be FOR. It taught me that exhibitions can make a real and measurable difference in how a community tackles its biggest issues. Through Lost Childhoods, we saw youth step into their power. We saw casual visitors volunteer to become foster parents. We saw politicians, foster youth, and advocates come together to talk about how we can build a community where all youth can thrive.

Since that first project, we've made a commitment to create a "community issue exhibition" every other year at the MAH. We're working now on the next one, on seniors and social isolation. It's just as messy and complicated as the first one. But now, we have a format to manage the process. And we see the magic working again.

Today, I'm thrilled to share that format with you. You can now download the Community Issue Exhibition Toolkit, a guide to this co-creation process. I wrote it with Lauren Benetua, Dialogue Catalyst, and Stacey Marie Garcia, Director of Community Engagement and the architect of this approach. Lauren's now bringing her community organizing skills to the OF/BY/FOR ALL project--here are her thoughts on the toolkit and its impact on her work.

In the toolkit, you'll find:

• the how and why of community issue exhibitions 
• templates for timelines, budgets, and community partner communication 
• tools for empowering partners to take the lead in the co-creation of complex projects 
• tools for empowering visitors to take action on the issue you are exhibiting

We don't expect you will use the toolkit to do exactly what we've done. We hope it's a useful set of recipes you can riff off of to co-create your own project on a local issue that matters to you.

Please let us know what questions come up, and most of all, how you can imagine using this toolkit in your work. We'd love to see this model evolve and grow.

The Art of Gathering: A Fabulous Book to Help You Host Better Meetings and Events

I remember the first staff meeting I ever ran. I had just started at the MAH as the new executive director. The museum was in huge financial trouble. I wasn't sure we were going to make payroll that week. But I also had a more immediate problem: I had no idea how to lead a staff meeting. I felt like a new teacher on the first day of school. Everyone's eyes on me, expecting something. I had no idea what to do.

I didn't know how to open a meeting. I didn't know how hold power and share it. I didn't know how to kick off a productive conversation, make group decisions, or close a meeting with energy. I knew that I didn't want to replicate the droning report-fests I'd encountered in other jobs... but I felt like I didn't have any alternative formats to draw on.

The weird thing is that that wasn't true. I'd spent years leading workshops around the world as a consultant. My expertise was on inviting strangers to participate in public settings like museums. I had lots of creative formats for drawing people out, sharing stories, and working collaboratively. I had tools to achieve everything I wanted to achieve in that staff meeting. But for some reason, I applied none of those lessons to my new situation. It was as if I had bought a new car and lost all memory of how to drive.

Priya Parker's wonderful book The Art of Gathering shares the core principles of how to drive. Whether you dream of better meetings or you're planning a community festival, I urge you to read this book. Parker argues that all events--from team meetings and picnics to conferences and weddings--are opportunities to come together with purpose. The book explains how to host events with purpose, drawing lessons from intimate parties, mass happenings, and international summits. This is one of those rare non-fiction books with the killer trifecta: strong stories, specific takeaways, powerful vision. It made me feel more confident about what I already know and eager to push myself further. It's an easy read, and if you're like me, you'll want to put it into practice right away.

Here are my three big takeaways from The Art of Gathering:

1. Hosting is an exercise in courageous leadership. When you host an event, you have the power to define what happens. It takes courage to assume that power. If you shrug it off, you hurt the event. Too often, a conference moderator will tell each panelist they have exactly five minutes, and then do nothing when a speaker heads into his 18th minute at the podium. Too often, a dinner party host will airily encourage guests to "get to know each other," without providing fuel for connection. When we abdicate hosting responsibility in an attempt to practice humility or democracy, all we do is let someone else take over. Instead, Parker encourages all event hosts to adopt a stance of "generous authority." Take the lead. Set the table. Invite people into participation. Redirect when needed, even if it feels uncomfortable. You'll end up doing more work than usual--and getting the results you want.
2. When participants are diverse, explicit rules help. I admit: I've never been a fan of events that start with the group writing rules for the day. It always feels contrived and dreary to me. Of course we know not to look at our phones, or to listen with respect. But Parker makes the point that the more diverse the participants at an event, the less likely that they have shared expectations about etiquette or ground rules. Creating event-specific rules can level the playing field, make the implicit explicit, and create a specific culture for the event. Parker calls these event rules "pop up rules," and they can be as silly or serious as desired. First names only. Everyone must wear a hat. Sit next to a stranger. These kinds of rules have the surprising dual effect of helping people know what to expect AND making events more memorable.
3. Strong events deserve strong endings. Many events close with a whimper when we yearn for a bang. The end of an event is one of those moments when the host has to actively practice leadership (and often abdicates). The host has to decide to close the discussion. To clear the plates. If you don't decide as host, people will straggle away, some exhausted, some feeling guilty, all missing out on the opportunity for a shared closing moment. At work and at conferences, we're often "saved by the bell" of the clock telling us the time is up. But why are we letting the clock close our meetings for us? If we open meetings with purpose, we should close them that way too. Closing rituals seal the shared experience of the event and launch us back into the real world with the event's imprint on our hearts.

The Art of Gathering expanded my understanding of what it means to build a powerful culture of participation. Events are not all logistics and content. The way you welcome, the way you host, the rules you make, the way you say goodbye--all these play major roles as well. As Parker writes in the introduction: "Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try." Sounds like great participation to me.

Guest Post by Jasper Visser: Storytelling for Social Cohesion at Story House Belvédère

I first read about Story House Belvédère on Jasper Visser’s excellent blog, The Museum of the Future. This small, startup cultural project in Rotterdam works directly and intimately with community members to share their stories. It is a platform for social bridging and cultural exchange. Jasper enhanced his original post to share with you here. I hope you’ll be as charmed and inspired by Story House Belvédère as I am.

Story House Belvédère in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is a magical place. On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. They do so by making the stories of individuals and communities visible, and encouraging new encounters. In its short existence (it opened in 2013), the place has made a name for itself as a successful community-driven, innovative cultural initiative.

I visited Story House Belvédère as part of the new Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museum Projects I am involved in. I had heard a lot about Belvédère before my visit, so my expectations were high. The place surpassed them. I spoke with some of the people working there, especially founder Linda Malherbe.

What makes Story House Belvédère so special?

It is rooted in its diverse neighborhood and the people who live there.

Story House Belvédère is in Katendrecht, in southern Rotterdam. Katendrecht is a part of town that for over 125 years has been a home for migrants and newcomers to the city. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history. Currently, the neighborhood is being gentrified and its development, which tells a wider story about the city, is ongoing. The team found the current home of Belvédère almost by chance when they were looking for a temporary working space. But the location proved perfect. According to Linda, the project could not have been imagined and developed anywhere else in the city. A diversity of people and stories is the reason it exists.

It started as a community project rooted in relationship-building.

Before there was a house, the team behind Belvédère organised a community-focused social photography exhibition outdoors on one of the quais in the south of Rotterdam. It was an exhibition of group portraits of the many communities in the area. City officials doubted the idea of an exhibition in the public space in a part of town they considered dangerous. They said, "you will get shot at, and in two weeks everything will be destroyed." But they were wrong. The exhibition was up for a year and a half. When it ended, the portrayed communities took their portraits home, starting relationships with Belvédère which in some cases still persist.

After the photography show, the team was encouraged to continue their work. They focused on one of the key events in Rotterdam history: the bombing of the city at the beginning of the Second World War. Inspired by Story Corps, they toured the neighborhood with a mobile recording studio and captured memories of the bombing. They created storytelling events and shows, which prompted other communities to start telling their own stories. As Linda says, “Every story inspires a new story.”

The success of the storytelling events encouraged the team to look for a permanent location. They found it in the old jazz club/boxing gym/neighborhood museum Belvédère, a building which dates back to 1894. Together with the communities they had worked with before, they are now renovating the building. In 2018 it will officially reopen. But currently you can visit when the door is unlocked - which is almost daily. After the formal reopening, they still expect to evolve. As Linda says, the process will never be finished, as people will always continue to add and make changes to the building to reflect new stories and ideas.

The community values of the team permeate the space and their projects.

Already you can feel Story House Belvédère is a special place. You feel it the moment you step into their warm and welcoming space. It feels like a living room, where everybody can be a friend. Even the coffee cups and the cookies are in style. The magic, of course, goes beyond aesthetics and is deeply embedded in the organization.

A small team is the driving force behind all projects. It is a committed, dynamic group of freelancers who care about the mission and magic of the place. The place they created is warm and welcoming, and yet it is their energy and enthusiasm that stuck with me most after my visit. I asked Linda to describe what defines the team, and received over a dozen characteristics:

• A shared love for people 
• They are good listeners 
• Positively curious, and always asking new questions 
• Actively looking for (a diversity of) people 
• Etc. etc.

The approach the team takes to connect with communities and then connecting communities is straightforward. In projects, they build a profound relationship with one specific community, such as the Chinese, Bulgarians, or football hooligans. This relationship is based on a genuine interest and includes a long-term commitment to stay involved with each other. When I visited, a community member had made our delicious Bulgarian lunch. Such profound ties make it possible that when a new project focuses on another community, the team can personally invite people from other communities to join. In that way, they build bridges between communities. Everything starts with listening and being curious about the other, and then inviting people, as guests, to take part.

This approach permeates all activities of Story House Belvédère. If you rent the place for a private event such as a wedding, some spots at the event are reserved for people from other communities. So, if you’re interested in joining a Syrian wedding or Jewish Bar Mitzvah, you can. The reason this works is because of the personal ties between the team and the communities. The aim of Linda and her team is to create relationships with people that are everlasting.

Platform Power: Scaling Impact

Last month, I sat in the back of a meeting room at the MAH and watched something extraordinary happen. Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. They were off-site for the first time in years, holding a special study session sparked by an exhibition about foster youth, Lost Childhoods. The supervisors toured the exhibition with some of the 100+ local partners who helped create it. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. They shared their hopes. They urged the politicians to fix a broken system. It felt like something opened up, right in that room, between the flag and the tissues and the microphones. It felt like change was breaking through.

This was not an event orchestrated by the MAH. It happened because two of our Lost Childhood partners urged it into being. They negotiated with the County. They set the table. They made something real and meaningful happen.

They did it because the exhibition belonged to them. They helped conceive it, plan it, and build it. The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events.

Nine years ago, I wrote a post called The Future of Authority: Platform Power. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum.

Nine years later, I still believe this. Now that I run a museum, I experience the variety of ways we can create platforms that empower community members to do certain things, in certain ways, that amplify the institution. The power IN the platform is real. But I've also become reenergized about the power OF the platform for those community members who participate. I value platforms for their power to scale impact.

Traditionally, museums and cultural organizations offer programs. Staff produce them for, and sometimes with, visitors. Each program has a fixed cost, and expanding that program means expanding that cost. If it takes a staff member 5 hours to run a screen-printing workshop, it takes her ten hours to run it twice. Even a smash hit program is hard to scale up in this model.

At the MAH, we've tried wherever possible to break out of unidirectional program models. We believe that we can most effectively empower and bridge community members (our strategic goal) if we invite them to share their skills with each other. This is the participatory platform model. Instead of staff running workshops, our staff connect with local printmaking collectives. We ask them what their goals are for outreach and community connection. And then we support and empower them to lead workshops and festivals and projects on our site. Instead of "doing the thing" directly, our staff make space for community members to do the thing--and to do so beautifully, proudly, with and for diverse audiences.

Does this work scale better than programs? It's not always obvious from the start whether it will. This work is relationship-heavy, and those relationships take time to build. When we created an exhibition with 100 community members impacted by the foster care system, it took almost a year to recruit, convene, open up, explore, and create the products and the trust to build those products well. But that investment in building a platform paid off.

When you build relationships in a platform, you build participants' power. Platforms can accommodate lots of partners and support them taking the projects in new directions. Since opening in July, exhibition partners haven't just planned a County supervisors' meeting. They've led over 50 exhibition-related community events at and beyond the MAH. They've created powerful learning experiences, diverse audiences, and new program formats. Our staff could never produce all this activity on our own. We put our energy into empowering partners, which ignited their passion and ability to extend the exhibition to new people and places.

Whereas a program is a closed system, a platform is an open one. In a platform model, more is not more staff time and cost. More is more use of the platform, more participants empowered to use it to full potential.

As our organization grows, we are looking for more ways to adopt a platform mindset. Now that we've opened Abbott Square, we have a goal to offer free cultural programming almost every day of the week. This means a huge shift for the MAH (previously we offered 2 monthly festivals plus a few scattered events). How will we increase our event offerings so aggressively? We're not planning to do it by adding a lot of staff to programming the space. We're planning to do it by building new platforms. We are learning from our "monthly festival" platform and building a lightweight, more flexible version. We want to make it easier for community groups to plug in, offering their own workshops and festivals and events, with our support. If we can create the right platform for daily events, it serves our community, by giving them the support, space, and frequent events they desire. It advances our theory of change, by empowering locals and bridging their diverse communities. And it puts the MAH at the center of the web of activity, as a valued partner and platform provider.

Building platforms is not the same as building programs. It flexes new muscles, requires different skill sets. But to me, the benefit is clear. In a platform model, our community takes us further than we could ever go on our own.

How Do You Inspire Visitors to Take Action After They Leave?

This month, we opened a new exhibition at the MAH, Lost Childhoods: Voices of Santa Cruz County Foster Youth and Foster Youth Museum (brief video clip from opening night here).

This exhibition is a big accomplishment for us because it incorporates multiple ways we push boundaries at the MAH:

• we co-designed it with 100+ community partners (C3), including artists, foster youth, and youth advocates, with youth voices driving the project from big idea to install to programming.
• we commissioned original artwork that was co-produced with youth.
• it uses art, history, artifacts, and storytelling to illuminate a big human story and an urgent social issue.
• it encourages visitors to participate both in the exhibition and beyond it by taking action to expand opportunities for foster youth and youth transitioning out of foster care.

There's lots to explore about this project, but today I want to dive into this last element: inspiring visitors to take action. 

When we developed the big ideas for this exhibition, MAH staff and C3 partners agreed: we wanted visitors to "feel empowered to take action and know how to do so."

This big idea excited us all. But at the very next C3 meeting with our partners, we ran into two big questions of content and design:

1. The issues facing foster youth are huge and complex. How could visitors take actions that are both meaningful and achievable?
2. How could we develop a clear, explicit, and appealing way for visitors to take action?

We addressed the first question with guidance from one of the former foster youth who helped develop the exhibition. She pointed out that while big things like becoming a foster parent are super-important, there are also a lot of little things people can do to help foster youth succeed. We decided to hone in on the little things - from baking a birthday cake to donating clean socks to volunteering - in our TAKE ACTION center. 

The TAKE ACTION center has two components - a woven artwork (left)
and a set of business cards visitors can take home with them.

We crowd-sourced "little things" from our C3 partners. Then, we worked with one of the commissioned exhibition artists, Melody Overstreet, to create an artwork that weaves all these little things into one tapestry. Youth handwrote the little things on the woven strips, in English and Spanish. The artwork metaphorically suggests that we need to do all these little things to build a supportive social fabric for foster youth.

Closeup of the woven artwork by Melody Overstreet and C3 partners.

While the artwork is beautiful and inspiring, it's not a clear, explicit call to action. In C3 meetings, we experimented with different activities related to the weaving. We tried making bracelets to remember an action you want to take, or weaving your action into the artwork. But we decided that these were too conceptual. We wanted to live up to that big idea that visitors would feel empowered to take action and how how to do so. 

So we took the actions in the weaving and translated them into business cards. The front of each card shares the action, and the back shares the contact info for the person/organization to make it happen. We discussed creating a single "take action" postcard instead and pushing all the action/contact info to a website, but that felt like it added too many steps for visitors from inspiration to action. We wanted visitors to have all the information they need to do a given action on the card itself. The cards are clear, brief, bilingual, and granular. You can take it and use it right away.

A few of the TAKE ACTION cards.

Front/back closeup of one card.

We opened the exhibition with 40 different action cards. We had debated whether to pare the number down so as not to overwhelm visitors, but ultimately, we felt that more was more. We've even held a few extra slots open to add new cards in the future in case our partners' needs change over the 6-month run of the exhibition.

How will we measure if people take the actions on the cards? We're tracking this in two ways:

1. We are counting how many cards of each type get taken. Already in the first few days of the exhibition, we've had to replenish some cards multiple times. 
2. We are asking C3 partners to report to us on the extent to which people take action. We started a simple google doc to catalogue these reports. We've already heard from partners who have had new volunteers sign up based on the cards.

I'm really curious to see how the TAKE ACTION center evolves over the run of the exhibition. I'm cautiously optimistic that we may have found a system that works for Lost Childhoods - and may work for other projects as well.

What's your take on this approach? How have you inspired visitors to take action in your projects? How have you measured it?

Think Like a (Real Estate) Developer: Introducing Abbott Square, Part 9

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square, a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz.

Studying engineering taught me to think like a designer: state the problem, brainstorm, test, iterate.
Working with creative people taught me to think like an artist: observe, explore, dive in, look out.
Partnering in community taught me to think like an organizer: listen, connect, build shared purpose.
Building the Abbott Square project taught me a whole new mindset: that of the real estate developer.

Real estate developers have two distinctive qualities I’m learning to adopt: they think from the outside in, and they balance flexible optimism with clear criteria for success.

OUTSIDE IN

Before the Abbott Square project, I approached planning from an internally-driven perspective. We develop the ideas. We explore the possible programs. We develop the projects. The “we” isn’t always staff; in most cases, our staff work with community partners in a participatory, co-creative model. But we mostly start projects from the dreams and challenges of the partners in the room.

Real estate developers don’t think this way. They approach planning from the outside in, starting with the external conditions of the land around them. Each site provides its own set of opportunities and constraints. The question is not, “what do I want to do?” but “what can I do with this?”

This mindset expands my world. Even as we talk about “abundance thinking” in nonprofits, we tend to restrict ourselves to a limited landscape of opportunities. We don’t look too far beyond our existing programs, sites, and partners. We don’t scan every new encounter for its potential. Because we want control, we start by controlling ourselves, pre-selecting a narrow window of possibilities based on the frames we’ve already installed.

Real estate developers taught me to stop focusing on my own locus of control. Now I look outside the window and wonder what opportunities different sites and partners could unlock. It’s like Pokemon Go for professional opportunities; that site has some gold sparkles, that park is hopping with party animals, that collaboration request has a rainbow guarded by trolls.

FLEXIBLE OPTIMISM + HARD CRITERIA

Real estate developers blend optimism and flexibility with clear-eyed assessment of what external conditions make a project go. Developers will move mountains to make a project they believe in work—but they’ll also drop a project in an instant if the external conditions make it untenable. If a project doesn’t pencil out or meet the criteria they feel spell success, developers walk away. There will always be another site, another project, another opportunity for a better fit.

This approach requires being explicit and honest about criteria for success or failure. Every developer I’ve talked with can list specific things that will make them pursue or drop a project—at any stage. One guy will only work in specific municipalities. Another has to own the building. It doesn’t matter how attractive the project is if they can’t have what they feel they need to make it succeed.

In my nonprofit world, I’m neither required nor challenged to develop such clear criteria. My general nonprofit MO is to pursue a project and to keep adjusting and learning our way to the finish line. There are some projects that go on too long before they get axed. We identify flaws emergently rather than starting with clear “go/no go” criteria.”

Thinking like a developer has made me more comfortable pursuing many early-stage possibilities in parallel instead of marching forward in sequence. I assume most early-stage opportunities won’t end up lining up, but I won’t know which ones are viable until we get further down the road. I want the “deal flow” of opportunities—and I’m working to hone my own mental checklist of necessary criteria.

***

An engineer says: “I’ll try this and learn something, then I’ll try that and learn something, and eventually I’ll get it right.”

An artist says: “I’ll explore the world, pull ideas from it, and craft a response.”

A nonprofit manager says: “Based on what we’ve learned and the partnerships we’ve built, we’ll move forward like this, together.”

A developer says: “I’ll open many conversations, and when I find the one that meets all my criteria, I’ll go full steam ahead on that one and drop the others that don’t.”

All of these are valid ways to approach the world. Which will you use for your next project?


If you are reading this via email and would like to share a response or question, you can join the conversation here.

Thou Shall Not Paint the Concrete: Guest Revelations by Don Hughes

I started my museum career as an exhibit designer. There are many heroes I look up to in that field. But I reserve for Don Hughes that particular blend of admiration and fear that comes when encountering uncompromised brilliance. Don has been the head of exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for thirty years. He is a genius designer out of central casting: an artist, mercurial, funny, emphatic, honest, unflinching, with a disarming weakness for babies.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a giant in our field, just as Don himself is a giant in the world of museum design. While I don't always agree with the Aquarium team's work, I always learn from them. Don is leaving the Aquarium, and he wrote this list of revelations on design to pass on to the next generation at that organization. He shared it with me, and he agreed that I could share it with you.


Thou Shall Not Paint the Concrete 
The Monterey Gray Revelations, as revealed to Don Hughes over three decades

One: Thou shall protect the original architectural design. 
The building and the exhibitions have a unique and historically successful relationship. Maintain this success by replacing worn or failing elements with materials as similar to the original as possible. Uphold the Aquarium’s overall industrial vernacular aesthetic.

Two: Thou shall provide negative space to rest the eye. 
Well-meaning staff want to fill empty walls with important and meaningful messages. Prevent this. Our enduring design is simple and clean. It embraces the modernist philosophies of Less Is More and Form Follows Function.

Three: Thou shall not restrict views of the bay. 
The building’s exterior is understated Cannery Row. The interior is polished industrial with rich appointments and allows for many views of Monterey Bay. Our building does not compete with the bay; it complements its natural beauty and power.

Four: Thou shall keep the regional focus. 
The greatest stories ever told are always about place. The Aquarium is the most recent tenant of a location that humankind has used for thousands of years. Visitors flock to us to see live plants and animals from this place. Departing from this holy vision leads to damnation.

Five: Thou shall have no greater god than visitors. 
Thou shall treat visitors like royalty, but thou shall not overestimate their interest or attention span. Visitors are not as interested as we like to think they are. Like life, communications with visitors is short, but staff’s list of meaningful, critically important topics to share is long—too long. Edit them. 

Six: Thou shall look like a museum and behave like an attraction. 
The Aquarium is confident. It doesn’t need to shout or brag. Our visitor experience is subtle, elegant and understated, not bold and in-your-face. We look more museum-like than Disney-like, and that makes us unique in a world of attractions. Like Disney in the world of theme parks, we set the standard for the world of public aquariums. Here, every visitor deserves a perfect visit, without out-of-order signs or beta-test experiences in the public space. We learn from our visitors, but not at the expense of their onsite experience.

Seven: Thou shall beware of tacky idolatry. 
No penny crushers, flashy sales signs in the bookstores or cafe, no anthropomorphism or theme park-like costumed characters, no photo booths or other fads posing as content. Cast out those who want to squeeze more and more money from visitors. Dwell in the straightforward and honest presentation of nature. But don’t take thyself too seriously—use humor, and do not preach.

Eight: Thou shall heed the words of the prophets. 
The Aquarium is on a peninsula not an island. Embrace the wisdom of Mickey’s Ten Commandments and Judy’s Visitors’ Bill of Rights.

Nine: Thou shall remember the words of our father. 
“The objective is not to maximize attendance and revenue, but to do the best possible exhibits. Have the highest quality program you can have; spend the money it takes to do that; everything else will follow.” —David Packard, September 25, 1989

Ten: Thou shall know all rules and revelations are created to be broken. 
The garden will change; it must. But resist the temptation of self-esteem. You are but a caretaker. Amen.


p.s. from Nina: Do check out Judy Rand's Visitors' Bill of Rights and the accompanying speech that goes with it. Judy is a tremendous exhibit developer, writer, comedian, teacher, and champion for museum visitors everywhere.

What Does a Great Distributed Digital Museum Experience Look Like?

Museum technology nerds: this post is for you.

I've been thinking recently about distributed content experiences--ways for people to interact with museum content (art, history, science, etc.) as they make their way through the world outside the museum. There are a zillion apps for making your own tours, podcasts, maps, or QR code-infested games... but none of them are great.

Distributed mobile content experiences seem to suffer from two basic problems:

1. Underwhelming entry points. It's extremely hard to get people to download a new app. Where and when does an institution ask you to do so? At the museum? At the historic site? While walking down the street? The impulse to download an app is driven by curiosity or an urgent perceived need. While museums may cultivate curiosity, they rarely offer sufficiently clear, urgent use cases to encourage you to go through the drudgery of downloading an app.  
2. Unlikely reentry points. Once you download an app, are you really going to remember to (re)open it to find an interesting historical fact tagged to your geolocation? Are you going to use it to scan for public art near you? Most of these apps seem so niche, so useless for anything other than accessing semi-interesting content in a clunky interface, that they end up languishing in the Siberian outback of your phone.

In contrast, successful distributed projects seem to have one of two characteristics:

1. Compelling and/or versatile mobile experience. What do we use our phones for most? Communicating, playing, exploring. Quality content experiences tend to piggyback on massive social media platforms apps that are already well-used (i.e. facebook) or create very compelling whole worlds unto themselves (i.e. Pokemon Go). 
2. Prominent real world presence. One of the simplest, effective distributed projects I've seen recently is Walk [Your City]. It's a system for creating signs, zip-tied to existing traffic/lightpoles, that direct people to points of interest, special experiences, and surprising encounters. Some cities use them for straightforward wayfinding, but in many towns, the signs have a whimsical or poetic nature. It's amazing how much impact simple signs can have. I'd choose repeated physical presence over a fancy digital interface any day.

Thinking about these two characteristics, here are some highly speculative ideas and questions:

• What is the most effective way to have lots of physical presence in the built environment? Working with cities and public property involves a lot of regulation (though if you can push through the red tape, a lot of potential impact). It's often easier to make deals with private property owners than to lobby the government for use of public space/sidewalks/streets. Projects like Little Free Library and the Peace Pole Project work this way; individuals choose to build them on their own land. How can we activate movements for people to participate in producing and sharing content on the land they already control?
• What's the cheapest advertising money can buy? I generally assume nonprofits can't afford to compete in the advertising world, but there's so much advertising in our visual landscape, some of it in very odd (and affordable) forms. Could you give out free coasters at bars? Make beautiful bike racks? Provide your local coffee shop with thousands of sleeves for paper cups? Is there a distributed layer to life (in the form of advertising) that is hackable for good?
• How can we creatively hack into mobile apps that lots of people already use? Of course you can create content for podcasts, twitter, instagram, etc. But what about apps where you don't have to build a whole media presence? What about creating geo-fenced Snapchat filters connecting people to art nearby, or making Tindr profiles for historical figures in the area? Are there other ways to piggyback on popular apps for content experiences?
• Who's going to build the killer app for distributed learning experiences? Part of me feels like learning is just so low on people's priority lists that distributed museum experiences will always be niche... but then I think of the huge success of online learning platforms like Khan's Academy. I wonder if we just need one (or a few) powerhouse app to take the lead on facilitating quality distributed learning/augmented reality experiences. I think it's possible an institution could do this... but only if it was more focused on building an industry-wide solution than building something custom for their own museum or historic site.

I know that there are very smart people working on these problems. Who's tackling them? What are some of the most interesting approaches underway?

If you are reading this via email and would like to share a comment or question, you can join the conversation here. 

And a note to readers in the Boston area: I'll be participating in a MuseumHive real world / Google hangout on these topics (and others) on October 26. Register today.

Temple Contemporary and the Puzzle of Sharing Powerful Processes

The first thing I noticed about Temple Contemporary were the chairs. Desk chairs and theater seats, sleek modsters and dilapidated stuffed things, a motley crew lined up on hooks around the room. They were charming, but puzzling. Looking closer, I saw that each seat had its own handwritten label, telling the story of the Philadelphia cultural institution from which it originated. The chairs were cast-off art, reclaimed as art, available for people to take off the hooks and use. They were there for artist talks. They were there for project brainstorming. They were there for chair races.

What kind of an art institution is this? That's what I found myself wondering again and again in the too-short hour I spent with the director of Temple Contemporary, Rob Blackson. Temple Contemporary makes strange objects and gorgeous documentation. It encourages process-driven performances and art projects. It is unfinished, unassuming, and whimsical, and at the same time, deadly serious. It takes the kind of risks that a university art gallery should take. It opens up new conversations about the work of art in our communities.

Temple Contemporary’s mission is to creatively re-imagine the social function of art through questions of local relevance and international significance. They live their mission, working in questions and projects rather than exhibitions and programs. Every other year, they convene TUPAC, a group of 35 outside advisors, including teens, college students, Temple University professors, artists, philanthropists, and community leaders. TUPAC advisors come together for one meeting, each bringing a question of local relevance and international significance--a question they don't know the answer to. The advisors share their questions, vote on the ones that they think have the most power, and set the direction of Temple Contemporary.

For example, right now, Temple Contemporary's offices are packed floor to ceiling with broken musical instruments from classrooms across the city of Philadelphia. One of TUPAC's current questions is about the state of art education. In Philadelphia, the budget for arts education has been slashed to pieces. The cuts were so deep that school music rooms are full of unplayable instruments. There's no money to fix them. And so, sparked by TUPAC's big question, Temple Contemporary decided to collect these silenced instruments - 1,500 in all - and commission a Symphony for a Broken Orchestra by a famous composer, David Lang. After the symphony premieres in 2017, Temple Contemporary will have all the instruments restored and will return them to their schools, new repair kits tucked inside the cases.

I left Temple Contemporary energized and inspired by their work. The work that Temple Contemporary is doing with their community is radical and impressive. Temple Contemporary is truly community-led. There is no formula. The community drives the question. The question drives the work. And the work takes the form or forms to which it is best suited. This makes Temple Contemporary excel at responsive, relevant projects. But it also makes their "front-end" experience incoherent. As a visitor, I'm not sure what I left with. My positive experience was 95% rooted in the tour that Rob Blackson gave me. Without him as my guide, all I had was fragments. A bunch of chairs hanging on the wall. Some students folding clothes. Empty pegboards. Half a car attached to the ceiling. Artsy journals. I saw slices of something interesting, but I had no idea how to piece them together.

I would never have learned about the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra if I hadn't been invited into the back office. I would never have known that TUPAC exists, who they are, or what they do. I wouldn't have drunk from the cup made from Pennsylvania oil field shale or read the book about the funeral they held for a row house. I would have walked in, puzzled at the white box's mysteries, and walked out.

This problem isn't unique to Temple Contemporary. It's a challenge in all process-driven work. Often the most powerful community work lives behind the scenes, in the brainstorming and prototyping and trying things out. The same is true of much artwork--the juice is often in the work's development, which dies a little bit when the work is "done." But that juice is fickle. It is powerful when you can experience it directly. It loses its flavor--or is completely imperceptible--when people don't understand what they are drinking.

How do we resolve this? The standard answer is to let the process stay behind the curtain and the product live onstage. Give people the exhibition but not the debates about content development. Give people the symphony but not the stacks of patient, injured cellos. This approach is straightforward. Leave the process to the collaborators and give the product to the audience. But there are two big problems with this approach:

1. It's easy to get caught in the hamster wheel of delivering products to audiences. You start systematizing to deliver a program every week, an exhibition every quarter. You promise your audience quality and you hone your process to deliver it. You don't have time to convene the community. You don't have flexibility to imagine whether their questions are better answered with a symphony or a storybook. You don't have space to take the instruments. You can't open yourself fully to the possibilities. 
2. It denies audiences the powerful opportunity to tap into the process. In most of these kinds of projects, the number of collaborators is finite. The collaborators themselves are often hand-selected or nominated. Visitors can't walk off the street with their own big question and join the scrum. While that's sensible, it's also limiting. How could Temple Contemporary (or any institution) invite each person who walks in the door into the biggest, meatiest work currently underway?

How can we invite people into the processes that drive our most powerful work?

I don't have the answers. I'm curious if you do--and what big questions this sparks for you.

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