Museum 2.0 has Moved (Sort of)!

I caved to the peer pressure and registered www.museumtwo.com. Now, you can access this blog through this much shorter, hopefully easy-to-remember URL (or you can still go the old way if you prefer). Enjoy and spread the word!

PostSecret: Lessons in Meaningful User-Generated Content

Recently, I’ve become a little disheartened by the extent to which the web has dominated my—and others’—thinking about ways that museums can integrate 2.0 into their offerings. But today I had an experience that reinvigorated my love for and belief in tangible projects that can fill museums with content that is user-generated, shared, and explored. I heard Frank Warren speak at the American Visionary Art Museum. Frank Warren has been called “the most trusted stranger in America.” In 2004, for DC’s Art-o-Matic community show, he initiated an experiment called PostSecret. He handed out 3000 self-addressed postcards to strangers that were blank on the front. On the back, they said,

You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.

Create your own 4-by-6-inch postcards out of any mailable material. But please only put one secret on a card. If you want to share two or more secrets, use multiple postcards. (Please do not e-mail your secret.)

Please put your complete secret and image on one side of the postcard.

Tips:

• Be brief - the fewer words used the better.
• Be legible - use big, clear and bold lettering.
• Be creative - let the postcard be your canvas.

Within five weeks, he had 100 postcards on display at Art-o-Matic. The cards were funny, heartwrenching, thoughtful, and beautiful. At the end of the show, he packed up and thought the secrets were over. But they had just begun.

Now, two years later, Frank has received over 100,000 postcards. He publishes 20 each Sunday on a website that gets 1 million hits per week. He has published three books of cards (500,000 copies), has two more in the works, and has put on numerous gallery and museum shows of the postcards. Today at the AVAM, there were at least 300 people in the crowd to see (and handle!) the cards, get books signed, and share their passion for this project. Frank was a wonderful speaker. I was so impressed by his humility and his love and respect for the people who send him cards. But the truly awesome thing about PostSecret is what a great community project it is. As the AVAM staff member who introduced Frank said, “We can all be a part of PostSecret… it may even include the work of people in this room, which is part of what makes this so exciting.” And indeed, when solicited, about 20 people in the room raised their hands to say yes, they had sent in postcards.

What makes this such a great community art project?

PostSecret asks the right question.
Museum designers labor over how to stimulate and evoke response from visitors. The most basic, and perhaps least interesting, question that is asked of visitors is, “What do you think?” How would you answer such a question? Frank’s question, or his entreaty—“send me your secret,” is both tantalizing and comforting. He publishes his home address for you to send your longings, fears, and desires to. People appreciate that openness and vulnerability, and take the opportunity to respond in kind.

And the responses are beautiful, both in language and composition. As Frank put it, “their courage makes the art meaningful.” The contributors are writing about something deeply important to them. They care, and so they labor to create something of value. Random people may not be able to create great works of dispassionate art. But in this project, each artist is uniquely powerful because they give voice to something vital, something easy for viewers to access emotionally.

PostSecret has a great medium.
As Frank said, 4 by 6 inches is not enough space to explain an entire story. Because of that inherent insufficiency, contributors are compelled to use images, carefully select their words, and the result is something evocative that is open to interpretation. When you read a card that says, “I’m still in love with who you used to be,” where does your mind go? There’s a rich inner story behind each of the cards, and it’s within all of our grasp to imagine it.

Also, the act of mailing something, of creating a physical thing and sending it off adds a tangible, potentially ritualistic element to “setting free” a secret. Frank told stories of postcards that came with $10 in postage, as if the author was concerned the card might somehow get returned to them. He also read emails from people who wrote cards, but then ended up giving them to others—family members, boyfriends, friends—instead of mailing them to him.

PostSecret fosters an engaged, caring community out of anonymity.
It’s extremely likely that individuals use the experience of writing a postcard to PostSecret as the stepping stone to sharing those secrets with loved ones. But perhaps more extraordinary is the extent to which PostSecret brings together strangers in support of one another. Each time Frank publishes a card that expresses insecurity or fear, dozens of caring emails come in. A boy sends a postcard with a photo of his blemished chest and asks, “who will ever love me?” The emails pour in: “I will. What’s inside counts.” In the Art-o-Matic show, one postcard read, “I’m a white guy who likes black girls.” During the show, Frank found that someone had written on this card. The stranger wrote, “That’s ok.” I heard so many stories of affirmation and caring today I felt like I was at a freaking Hallmark convention. But the stories were real, they represented interactions between stranger, and they were deeply affecting.

PostSecret motivates people to start their own communities and rituals for secret sharing.
There are PostSecret spin-off sites. There are also people getting active in their own communities in suicide hotlines and traditional support lines. And then there are the unusual stories. One woman wrote her secret on a post-it and stuck it on the bathroom mirror in her large office complex. Later that day, she returned to find 12 other post-its with secrets surrounding hers. A girl whose postcard about anorexia was not published on the website made a shirt that said, “20% of anorexics die. Here are the symptoms of anorexia…” and wore it to school to spread her message. Classmates and teachers asked her to make t-shirts for them to wear, too. PostSecret has a ripple effect that not only engages people in that project; it engages them in the idea of sharing with others in all kinds of ways.

PostSecret feels personal and immediate, as well as universal.
Frank said that each time he gets a postcard in the mail, he feels like he is holding “a living secret being experienced in real-time." There’s an urgency to the secrets—even ones that have been hidden for tens of years—because the postcard represents the moment at which it was finally let out. Each week, the website offers new secrets, and the old ones, stored in Frank's basement, disappear.

Frank commented that he thinks we love these cards not because we’re voyeurs, but because they reveal “the essence of humanity.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but there are certainly hundreds of postcards that resonate with me personally—and I imagine with everyone who views them. Across age, gender, continent, language, the PostSecret viewers see the same desires and troubles. There were many stories of personal action taken after reading others’ cards, and appreciation for no longer feeling alone in a secret or a feeling.

PostSecret is curated.
Not every postcard makes the website; these days, Frank receives 1000 per week and publishes about 20. He says that he looks for cards that are authentic, that tell a story that feels powerful and hasn’t been shared before. Each week, he tries to create a narrative tableau of secrets to publish, looking for a hopeful one, a funny one, a confused one. By culling down the submissions for presentation, Frank is reinforcing the values that motivated PostSecret in the first place—people sharing honest, creative expressions of their secrets. It keeps the project focused.

I felt mixed about this curated component originally. Enough people are looking at the website—why doesn’t he post them all and let people vote, like YouTube? Curating the cards probably helps keep exhibitionism and showboating at bay. It’s not about how many cards you create or how fabulist the tale you tell. It’s about how honest and real one person thinks they are. And the fact that the cards are only available for one week at a time--as an art piece, it evokes the immediacy of a secret, but as a new viewer I want access to all the content.

And this is where museums (could) step in. In the ideal world, Frank’s basement—where he sorts and selects all the cards—becomes an open collection storage facility at a museum. Volunteers can come and help sort and scan the cards. Different people could curate—not just one person—and everyone would have access to the core data. The project is active, continuing, bringing new content to the museum each week and motivating people to return and get involved. PostSecret is self-help through art, through community. It opens people to each other and to themselves. It pulls in creative expression from all kinds of people all over the world. It has web components, but is essentially about physical objects.

PostSecret is a model for where museums can go with 2.0.

It doesn’t have to be postcards. It doesn’t have to be about secrets. What are the deep questions museums can ask to get people motivated to contribute, to listen, and to care?

Game Friday: Tagging For Fun

Let’s play a game. It’s called Tag this Image! Here’s how it works.

You look at this picture.

Now, write down the words that you associate with the picture.

Are you having fun yet?

“Tagging,” or assigning descriptors to pictures, websites, and other content on the internet, is a huge trend in 2.0. With good reason. Whether on Flickr with photos, on del.icio.us with web pages, or on blogs with posts, tagging makes organization of items and search of them easier. Instead of searching based only on the taxonomy assigned by the authority who runs the site (i.e. the name of this site is X or the name of this artifact is Y), you can search based on the terms that users identify with the item.

It’s all about who has the authority to identify things. For example, I identify myself as Nina Simon, the government identifies me by my social security number, some guy on the street identifies me as a woman with curly hair… all of these are valid descriptors or tags for me, and the aggregation of these tags provides a fuller picture of who I am to the outside world.

Tagging is useful. But is it fun? On its own, not so much. Most of the incentives on sites for tagging are related to increased functionality (better organization of my sites on del.icio.us) or increased visibility (more searchable content). For internal web managers, tagging also improves accessibility for people who are blind by adding text descriptors to images so that site visitors understand the content of those images.

The ESP Game, and its related game, Phetch, are two games that create a framework to make tagging fun. These games were developed by Carnegie Mellon with funding from the NSF, with the goal of harnessing collective intelligence (and interest in playing games) to tag all of the images on the internet. Why would they want to do that? To increase the functionality, visibility, and accessibility of these images to web users worldwide.

The games take the game I posed in the beginning (Tag this image!) and make it fun by adding another player. Separately at your own computers, you tag images. Every time you and your partner player come up with the same tag for an image, you both get points. It ain’t Risk, but the addition of the social question (do we think alike?) and the game metric of scoring makes for a fairly compelling game. And it’s exciting to be part of an experiment that has a meaningful outcome.

There are many museums that are starting to experiment with allowing visitors to tag their online content, whether to engage them in 2.0 activities or to increase functionality, visibility, and accessibility of content (or both). But tagging is new enough, especially to museum audiences, that just giving web visitors that functionality is not necessarily enough to motivate them to start tagging. I’d love to see museums explore using games like the ESP Game to encourage people to engage with the museum’s content—and each other—and help the museum out, too. The games on the website at my museum are old. We don’t pay attention to them, and yet, they account for a high percentage of our web traffic. Wouldn’t it be nice to offer something useful on the game areas of museum websites?

My Unrequited (and Unsubstantiated) Love for Museums and the Web

I won’t be at the Museums and the Web conference next month; my exhibit at the Spy Museum is opening soon and we're in crunch time. But I’m developing a serious crush. MW does something that AAM, ASTC, and a whole slew of other acronym-rich conferences don’t: it gives non-participants substantive content from the meeting.

I’m still wading through the papers, all available for free, being presented in sessions at the conference. I’ve never been to MW, and have heard mixed things about its value anecdotally. But this simple act—requiring session presenters to write papers and then posting those papers freely online—is getting me interested.

Why?

It’s better for the attendees…

• Presenters are forced to think about their presentations in advance and develop substantive content to discuss. No strolling in blind and winging it.
• Attendees can more fully preview the content that will be presented to help them make better choices about what sessions to attend. No more showing up at “Interactive Theater” expecting improv and getting a sales pitch on IMAX domes instead.
• Attendees can find people of interest and set up meetings in advance based on content in common, not just on social contacts.

It’s better for the presenters…

• Presenters can develop more complex arguments that don’t play well as powerpoint bullets. They can expect more from their audience in terms of insightful questions and familiarity with the content.
• Presenters can get a fuller idea of what other presenters in the same session/content stream are discussing and can tailor their questions and connections to that knowledge.
• Presenters can send in their papers 10 weeks before the conference. That means things can stay relatively current to the conference, while still depending on solid research.

It’s better for folks at home…

• I can download papers ranging back to 1997. I can view information about their authors (although, strangely, contact information is not forthcoming).

It’s better for the conference…

• Buzz is generated around the papers before the conference even happens. People are blogging the papers; it extends the “event” of the conference in time.
  
• The papers serve as advertisement for the conference. People like me get a chance to “see what we’re missing” by not attending.
• People like me feel positively about an organization that makes content available digitally.

But every crush has its downside. Here are my idle concerns:

• Why are the papers and sessions only browsable by speaker name, not by title, country of origin, year of submittal, or whether there is a corresponding paper?
• Does the paper-paper-paper session format diminish the potential for interactivity among panelists? Do speakers expand beyond their papers, or mostly explain them? How much more value would I get at the actual conference, content-wise?

I look forward to hearing how the actual conference goes. Until then, I’ll keep sifting through papers all starry-eyed.

Just Looking? Lurkers, Judges, and Contributors

Today, personal ads from three kinds of museum users....
This weekend, I was working on this article about encouraging civic discourse in museums through 2.0 and looked up dizzily to realize I’ve been having too much of a collective action lovefest. As a designer, I believe that museums should strive to offer diverse networked, social experiences. But as a museum-goer, what about the times I don’t WANT to have a networked, social experience? What if I just want to look at the art and be left alone? One of the key aspects of web 2.0 experiences (which I was overlooking) is their flexibility in offering multiple ways to engage with the experience and the content.

Most 2.0 sites allow for many shades of “lurking” and “participating.” Consider YouTube. The large majority of YouTube users are lurkers—they watch videos, but do not submit them. The next group of people are users who rate, tag, and comment on videos, but do not submit videos. These people might be thought of as “judges,” or, at best, curators. They are adding metadata to videos about their value and content, which may be for their own use (for future navigation) or for collective use (to add to the larger conversation about what’s good and what isn’t). The smallest set are the “contributors” who actually upload videos they have made.

Many 2.0 sites that revolve around content, like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, behave this way. There are other sites, like Delicious and MySpace, that center around a more core personal experience (your tags, your site), and so require a minimum level of individual “contributing” to start getting value from the site.

How does this relate to the experience design in museums? Most museums offer lots of lurking, some contributing, and almost no judging/curating—and most experiences are in one of those buckets without dipping into the others as well. I can make a video, but I can’t rate them. I can touch the Van de Graff generator and have funny hair, and I can watch other people touch it, but I can’t vote on videos of the FUNNIEST Van de Graff hair experiences. I can leave a comment, and read today’s comments, but I can’t flip through the archive of comments going back X years.

There are many awesome museum interactives that are for single users that have an unintended lurker benefit (funny hair from the Van de Graff being just one example). On sites like Flickr, the role of the contributor as performer for an audience is explicit—and a source of motivation to continue contributing. Not every museum visitor wants to be a performer, but when the interactive elicits a funny or exciting or fabulous result that will be watched and enjoyed by surrounding visitors anyway, that “performance” could be captured and enjoyed in other ways, in the museum, on the museum website (live Van de Graff cam?), or on other sites like YouTube for a wider audience of lurkers and curators to enjoy. With clear signage to that effect, of course.

So that’s some perspective on experiences that already exist in museums. What about new experiences, intended to be 2.0ish, that are starting to be designed now? Here are some considerations to satisfy these different kinds of visitors:

THE CONTRIBUTOR:

• If the interaction has a performance component, make that clear and reward the active participant with a small slice of fame.
• If the interaction involves an opinion or a person-specific reaction, show the contributor how their input relates to the larger network of previous contributors.
• Allow the contributor to develop a personal profile/site/collection of data based on their interactions throughout the museum. Network these profiles at the contributor’s discretion (note: doesn’t have to be totally public… think about how cool it could be if these sites were only networked within a small community, like your class or your family).

THE JUDGE:

• Wherever comfortable, give people a way to judge and classify content. This can be physical in the museum, or virtual on the web. They can take the form of ratings, tags, or comments.
• When someone judges something, connect them to other users who have made similar (or dissimilar) judgments/comments.
• Make the judgments count. Use them to prioritize content for lurkers and other judges. At best, let the judgments drive content presentation--let the users curate.
  

THE LURKER:

• Make the content easy to access from multiple entry points (in-person, on video, web, books).
• Make the content easy to navigate, and incorporate “frictionless serendipity” (thanks, Seb!) by using automatic tracking to make educated guesses about what the lurker is searching for.
• Update the content frequently and provide multiple forms of announcement about those changes.

The point here is to develop museum experiences that are available to all of these kinds of users at the same time. We’re all each of these kinds of users at different times of the day or points in our museum experience. I’d love to climb the rock wall but I’d prefer to just watch you throw the baseball. You’d love to give that painting a piece of your mind but will peacefully listen to that installation. So let’s give users an opportunity to do, an opportunity to comment, and an opportunity to watch.

Game Friday: Massively Multiplayer Online Insanity

This week, I drank a little 2.0 koolaid and joined the new Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) put out by Justin Hall and other nuts like him who want to be tracked for all the time they spend on the web—and rewarded for their actions. You can view a video of Justin talking about his theory here, or you can take the plunge and sign up. It requires Firefox, and yes, it does track every website you go to and then gives you gamer-spoof designations based on that tracking.

Justin links to other similar passive games that reward you with points for your Outlook email traffic or track your overall application usage. Like the fuel meter I talked about last week, this is gaming by passive monitoring. The idea is that the more you “level up” in strange ways (i.e. by looking at lots of websites), the more you will want to optimize your use to achieve certain goals.

There are a couple ways to look at this. On one hand, it’s a silly and somewhat pleasurable way to report on things you are already doing. Imagine a refrigerator that gave you “cheese points” for every lasagna you make. Who cares? Well, on the other hand, perhaps doing this kind of tracking will increase your awareness of certain kinds of behaviors and encourage you to change that behavior (tofu points, anyone?). And in a game context, you can set your own goals and get cheered on by the system for your achievements.

Passive games like this also reflect the continuing breakdown of privacy on the web. I have signed up for an automated personal stalker, for my own entertainment. Worse, the data accumulated about me is (in an aggregated form) available to other players. I’m encouraged to start up relationships with folks based on the fact that we both look at a lot of DIY websites.

Explore for yourself, but before you do, enjoy this very, very funny video on the future of MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games).

Social Architecture Part 2: Hierarchy, Taxonomy, Ideology (and Comics)

Jeremy Price offered a comment on my last blog post with a link to an excellent article by Lee Shulman on the uses and abuses of taxonomies in educational theory. Dr. Shulman argues that taxonomies, which are often created to distinguish individual elements of a set, are often transformed into hardened ideologies with an implied value on the “higher” or “better” elements in the taxonomy.

As she puts it:

Taxonomies exist to classify and to clarify, but they also serve to guide and to goad. … A taxonomy’s rapid progression from analytic description to normative system—literally becoming a pedagogical conscience—warrants caution.

When I created the hierarchy of social participation shown in this diagram, I debated what shape it should take. Was it a spectrum from individual to collective experience? Could it be cyclic? The pyramid I created implies hierarchy, and it also implies that these levels need to be moved through in a sequential manner to get to the “top”—presumably the goal. Was this the right decision?

In Shulman’s article, she points out the folly of a rigid sequential theory when it comes to learning (and my case, I’ll expand that to social engagement). For example, in Bloom’s taxonomy of Educational Objectives, knowledge and comprehension of content comes before application. Narratively, this makes sense. Once you learn about something, you are ready to act on and do it. But how often, and easily, do we go in the other direction? Do you understand physics before you start skateboarding? Dr. Shulman offers the great example of doctors, relating a comment from a surgeon that, “’Internists make a diagnosis in order to act. Surgeons act in order to make a diagnosis.’” As Shulman puts out, “the directionality of the taxonomy is situational.”

Back to my diagram. I created a directional pyramid to make a point about social content in museum; namely, that museums are not offering networked, social experiences—and therefore will have a hard time jumping to initiating meaningful social discourse. I talked about leveling up, and indeed I do believe that museums should consider engaging more in levels 3 and 4—whether their goal is making it to level 5 or not.

But perhaps a hierarchy is not appropriate. After all, you don’t have to have great content to get to a networked, social experience (Twitter certainly proves that fact). And I’m not advocating that the dream museum would be all level 5 experiences, all the time. So here’s a reenvisioning of this hierarchy as a taxonomy.

Looking at the pyramid, each level is typified by an element: the content, the interaction, the network, the social benefit, and the collective action. So let’s create a taxonomy of Social Participation that's a simple list:

1. CONTENT (What is being discussed/shared/shown/explored?)
2. INTERACTION (How does the user engage? What do they do?)
3. NETWORK (How do users link to one another?)
4. SOCIAL BENEFIT (How much value does one user get from the participation of other users?)
5. COLLECTIVE ACTION (How much do people work together?)

Now. Rather than thinking of these elements as levels or experiences to move through, let’s consider them to be the building blocks of an experience. Here I’m using as a template one of the most impressive (and esoteric) taxonomies I’ve ever seen: Scott McCloud’s taxonomy of panel-to-panel transitions in comics.

Scott McCloud is the author of hands-down my favorite design book: Understanding Comics. In Chapter 3, McCloud identifies six different methods by which comic artists transition from one panel to another (for example, scene-to-scene or action-to-action). Then, he charts the incidence of each of these six for many different major comic empires (i.e. X-Men) and artists. His charts look like this:
McCloud uses these charts to demonstrate that most American and European comic artists employ only three of the six transitions (as shown in the example on the left). Some radical artists used a dramatically higher portion of the other three, but most of these, McCloud argues, are examples of comics well out of the mainstream. And yet Japanese comics—arguably the most popular in the world—consistently draw from at least five of the six transitions (example on the right).

So. Back to the new Taxonomy of Social Participation. If we number the five elements as follows:

1. Content
2. Interaction
3. Network
4. Social Benefit
5. Collective Action

then I’d argue that most museums provide something very different from Web 2.0:

Of course, there are distinctions to be made among different kinds of venues. On the 2.0 side, consider these different major venues:

A little explanation:

Wikipedia is mostly about content. The value of that content is strongly impacted by the number of active users (social benefit), and there is some collective action around the development of wikipedia articles.

Twitter is mostly about connecting to others. The content sucks, and the interaction is simple, but the feeling of empathy with others is high (if debatable).

MySpace is mostly about personal identity within networks. The interactivity in page personalization is high, but primacy is put on engaging with others from your personal profile. You are a “me” in a space of many—a perfect 3 experience.

Flickr is similar to Wikipedia in that the focus is content, but there’s a lot more emphasis on networks (groups, establishing a personal profile with your pics).

Now there’s a new judgement to be made. Is it bad to be unbalanced? Why does it matter that museums are not engaging much in 3, 4, and 5?

Web 2.0 is the reason it matters. Web 2.0 has introduced people to a new way of interacting with web content. The web used to also be heavy on 1 and 2; you go to web pages, you look at stuff, you click on stuff. But now, web usage is different. Where do I get my content? On blogs and aggregators that draw heavily from 3 and 4. How do I search? Google relies on 3 to provide me the results that are most likely to be useful to me. How do I buy stuff? I use Amazon, which provides me 3 and 4 benefits of seeing what other people bought, which then helps me make my purchasing decision.

When we lived in a 1 and 2 world, it was acceptable for museums to rely on 1 and 2. But now, people walk into museums and are aware of the dearth of 3 and 4 elements. They have come to take the experiences that emerge from those elements for granted. Level 2 used to be the hot thing, but now, pushing buttons is old hat. People want to connect, they want network benefits, and they want them in content experiences in museums.

Imbalance also matters because museums are venues that (hopefully) offer diverse experiences that attract and sustain diverse audiences (though I would argue that this is best achieved by offering a variety of powerful singular experiences.) Designers strive to make sure there is “something for everyone” when it comes to learning styles and developmental stages. Why not also for social engagement?

And there’s a third reason that imbalance matters. I created this pyramid for an article on civic discourse in museums, which depends heavily on 5. Level 5 is a question mark in my mind. How do we get there? How do we sustain it? Moving through 3 and 4 to get there may not be the answer. When the content is provocative, as in Bodyworlds or gay animals (thanks, Nik), a museum may be able to jump directly from 1 to 5. But for bread-and-butter content, 5 is a mystery. And while no one has cracked the code, there are many web-based 3 and 4 applications (like LibraryThing) that are successfully creating some 5 experiences via 3 and 4, especially 4. Level 4 experiences make you aware of, comfortable with, and appreciative of the extent to which a social experience is better than an individual one. That understanding may then lead to the application of collective action—level 5. As Shulman said, the directionality is situational. How else can we connect to 5-based experiences?

Hierarchy of Social Participation

As part of the article I’m working on for the journal Museums and Social Issues on using web 2.0 to promote civic discourse in museums, I’m developing an argument about the “hierarchy of social participation.” I believe that, as with basic human needs, experience design in museums (and for other content platforms) can occur on many levels, and that it is hard to achieve the highest level without satisfying, or at least understanding, those that come before it. One of the impediments to discourse in museums is that fact that designers want to jump straight from individuals interacting with content to interacting with each other. It’s a tall order to get strangers to talk to each other, let alone have a meaningful discussion. And so, I offer the following hierarchy of social participation.

As always, comments are encouraged—and in this case, strongly desired as I work on refining this content for the article.

Level 1: Individual Receives Content (Museum to Me)

In this model, the content provider or museum delivers content for the user to passively receive. You look at an artifact. Watch a video. Listen to a news clip. Read a label. The level of user engagement is self-determined by your interest in the content and your motivation to reflect on it, either singly or with your companions. A successful level 1 experience features content that is meaningful and interesting to viewers. If your visitors are hooked on your content, proceed to…

Level 2: Individual Interaction with Content (Museum with Me)

Most interactive content in museums falls into this category. The exhibit provides a opportunity for the user to play with the content. You press the button. You drop the balloon. The content may be responsive to you, but the interactive experience is non-networked; that is, your interactions with the content are not affected by, nor do they affect, other people’s interactions with the content. Again, the level of social engagement is self-determined. A successful level 2 experience builds on killer content (level 1), not interaction for its own sake. The interaction provided enhances the visitor’s engagement with the content. Got that covered? Then, move to…

Level 3: Individual, Networked, Interaction with Content (Me & Me & Me & Museum)

These are experiences in which your individual interaction with the content is networked so that each individual’s interaction is available, in a limited capacity, to the entire group of users. Voting, whether for American Idol, national elections, or museum kiosk surveys, falls in this category. Your action is not influenced nor influences others, but you are aware of how others have acted in the same context. This is where many museum programs lie that allow user-generated content. You can register your own opinion about X at the video kiosk, and others can view your video. A successful level 3 experience makes you feel connected to others who have used the same content; visitors start to wonder why others voted/expressed themselves as they did. And thus you are ready for…

Level 4: Individual, Networked, Social Interaction with Content (Me to We with Museum)

This is the level where web 2.0 sits. Individuals still do their interacting with the content singly, but their interactions are available for comment and connection by other users. And the architecture promotes these connections automatically. For example, on Netflix, when you rate a movie highly, you don’t just see how others have rated it; Netflix recommends other movies to you based on what like-minded viewers also rated highly. By networking the ratings, tags, or comments individuals place on content, individuals are linked to each other and form relationships around the content. A successful level 4 experience uses social interaction to enhance the individual experience; it gets better the more people use it. The social component is a natural extension of the individual actions. Which means, perhaps, users are ready for…

Level 5: Collective Social Interaction with Content (We in Museum)

This is the holy grail of social discourse, where people interact directly with each other around content. Personal discussions, healthy web bulletin boards and list-servs fall in this category. Healthy level 5 experiences promote respect among users, encourage community development, and support interaction beyond the scope of the content.

So how do we level up?

The good news is that moving up the levels does not require new content. At all levels, the interaction and participation can occur around pre-existing content. A lot of museums top out at level 2 or 3, imagining that offering people heightened opportunities to interact with content, or to create their own content, is enough. Granted, I’m not sure if social engagement is the goal for interactive designers. But with side benefits like deeper connection with the content, greater appreciation for the museum as a social venue, and heightened awareness of other visitors, it deserves a place at the drafting table.

UPDATE: I wrote a follow-up to this post based on some comments. It's here.

The Tate Tastes 2.0: The Turner Prize Exhibition

This week's New Yorker magazine features an article about the Turner Prize, "the world's best-known contemporary-art competition." The Turner Prize was launched in 1984 by the Tate Britain to reward young British artists, and has had controversial effects on both public perception of contemporary art--and the artists themselves.

The article is enjoyable and mostly focuses on the stress that the Prize competition puts on artists, but there were a couple of stand-out elements that flirted with 2.0.

First, the competition's structure. British artists under 50 can be nominated by, well, anyone (even you). A jury of experts shortlists four stand-out artists who are then in contention for the grand prize. Once they are shortlisted, each of the four is given exhibition space at the Tate. For eight weeks, their work is on view, and then the jury reconvenes to select the winner.

The exhibition of the art pre-decision exposes people to the art and creates buzz around the prize, and, more importantly, it brings museum visitors into the decision process. Nick Serota, the Tate's director, commented that "'the public display of four artists' work spurs people to reflect about art.'" The short-listed artists are frequently working in different disciplines with very different motivations. Seeing the exhibitions must inspire people to wonder how anyone--even art experts--could decide among them. How can you compare a painter to a sculpter to an installation artist? And when you feel skeptical of the benefits of expertise, you assume the shroud of the expert yourself. I can imagine people walking the halls of the Tate, passionately arguing for or against a given artist based on their own expertise--real or imagined. The judging of the competition doesn't have to be open to the public to get people involved; the mere fact that SOMEONE is judging it encourages everyone to do so.

Secondly, the Tate appears to take a populist attitude towards the Turner Prize. There's a video booth at the Prize exhibition in which people can register their thoughts, and the best of those commentors are invited to take place in a reality TV show, "The Turner Prize Challenge," in which contestants vie to explain the artists' work to the public. This is a video kiosk I can get behind--one with a (debatably) valuable goal. I imagine that the comments recorded in that booth were decidedly more thoughtful--or at least animated--than standard videos are because of the potential reward of Channel 4 airtime.

With the Turner Prize, it seems, everyone's a competitor. Artists agonize over whether the prize will help them or overexpose them to media. Visitors try to decide what's art, what's crap, and compete with each other for the chance to expound on the different on national TV. Bookies take bets on the final outcome of the competition. The final award ceremony is hosted by a major celebrity (Madonna, Yoko Ono, and Brian Eno among them).

There are two ways to look at the cult of celebrity around the Turner Prize. One can be hopeful and say that the Tate is reaching out to the public, packaging the complexities and absurdities of contemporary art in familiar, popular guises. Or, one could be cynical and say that the Tate is pandering to the celebrity-mad public, violating the sanctity of art for the American Idol generation. (Regardless of who is right, there's no question that the Turner Prize website, which explores many of these issues, is fabulous.)

I know that I would be more likely to engage with art and ask myself and my friends tough questions about what makes art good if I went to see an exhibition where I knew that the artists exhibiting were in competition with one another to be crowned as "best." As Serota said, "there's nothing sacrosanct about the status of any prize." And as another controversial modern figure once said, "If you aren't criticized, you may not be doing much."

Game Friday: Games that Make You a Better Person (Really!)

There's a lot of interesting gaming stuff going on since GDC and SXSW have just finished up, but this week, I want to focus on some gaming in the real world, with an environmental twist.

I read an article this week from Mother Jones about Wayne Gerdes, one of America's premier hypermilers, or folks who try to get really, really high mileage from their cars. In Wayne's case, it's a standard Honda Accord, in which he averages 69 miles per hour. He hasn't changed anything under the hood to accomplish this; he just drives in an extremely efficient manner.

Why does Wayne feel compelled to take 25 mph turns at 52 mph instead of hitting the brakes? He claims his initial interest was political (dependence on foreign oil), but soon enough, hypermiling became an addictive game. It all started when he drove his wife's SUV, which came with a fuel consumption display (fcd) that shows miles per gallon in real time. As the article says:

The fcd changed the driving game for Wayne. "It's a running joke," he says, "but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call them 'game gauges'"—a reference to the running score posted on video games—"because we're trying to beat our last score—our miles per gallon."

If you've ever driven a car with an fcd, you know what Wayne's talking about. Suddenly, fuel efficiency isn't just a calculation that happens at the gas station. It's the ultimate game: responsive, real-time, and the "points" you score have a real monetary--and environmental--value.

Wayne goes on:

"If the EPA would mandate fcds in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight," he says. "They're not expensive for the manufacturers to put in—10 to 20 bucks—and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25 years. All from a simple display."

This game matters. There are people posting photos of their fcd displays on the internet to brag about these high fuel efficiency scores. And the fcd phenomena is one that could easily apply to other situations. My gas bill was $600 in January. My six roommates and I put up plastic, wore sweaters, and stoked the fireplace, but we won't know until next week whether our efforts paid off on the Feb. bill. What if our "smart" thermometer, which lets us set different temperatures for morning, noon, and night, also recorded and reported how our gas use fluctuated throughout the day? Or what if our electrical devices told us how much power they consume? I'm pretty careful about unplugging my phone charger when it's not being used, but it would be a heck of a lot easier--and more exciting--if I could see my energy use report at the light switch. At my house, I'm sure it would lead to crazy competitions to see who could get the lowest usage--or, how we could spike the highest or drop the lowest. (At the place I'm moving to in CA, which is all solar power feeding DC batteries, you CAN watch the electricity usage... and play educational games as you switch on and off the lights.)

This doesn't have to be environmental in nature. In broad strokes, the fcd is just an gaming extension of life logging--passive data collection about all kinds of aspects of life. I have a friend with a GPS-enabled running watch that tracks his path, and then shows a little animation of an avatar representing him on his last run to "race" the same trail. You can sign up to track your web travels on Firefox in real time and get rated on different kinds of usage. And then there's Mindball, the competitive "how relaxed are you?" alpha brain waves game I always see at ASTC.

How could museums be part of this? Two ways immediately come to mind:
1. Be a leader and testing ground for people to explore these kinds of logging devices. There are lots of science museums with exhibits that provide simulations of exactly these phenomena. Turn on the light switch, the motor, and the buzzer and see how the voltmeter reacts. And there are also many museums touting their green architecture etc. Why not implement some of these real-time gaming mechanisms not as simulations, but as opportunities for guests to be aware of and log themselves through the museum? Give people pedometers so they can try to get the most steps through the place (or the fewest). Or, report on the exhibits themselves. This exhibit is using X mA of power right now... and now that you hit that button, it's a little higher. Or, sponsor some of these crazy game events--races to see who can maintain the highest mpg over a set path. Give people voice recorders and hold a contest to see who gives the most compliments over a weekend. Who drinks the most water. People are most excited about data collection when the data is about them. And if the games can raise awareness (and change behavior!) about their actions and interactions, even better.

2. Start developing these kinds of devices for sale. I could imagine museums being a hotbed for development of logging devices that make a game out of real life. That's what museum designers are doing all the time--trying to make games out of educational concepts and learning experiences. The fcd is such a simple and compelling game. What other games can we make out of our life experiences? Can museums lead the way in making these analogies--and the positive change (and dollars)--that comes with their execution?