Advice: An Exhibition about Talking to Strangers

In April, I gave 13 UW graduate students a simple challenge: make an exhibit that gets strangers to talk to each other. 10 weeks, $300, and a whole lot of post-it notes later, they succeeded.

Last month, student Nicole Robert wrote about the concept for Advice: Give it, Get it, Flip it, Fuck it. Now, the exhibit is closed and we're throwing open the doors on what was created. You can explore the project wiki where we coordinated the exhibit, including the project overview, our six-week plan to get it all done, and individual sections for development of concept, content, interaction, graphics, marketing, fabrication, installation, and evaluation. There is also a final evaluation report available for download, which offers lots of great quantitative and qualitative content about what visitors did in the exhibit. It also includes reflections from the exhibit team on the project.

I recommend you check out the wiki and evaluation report to dig deeply into the content. Below are three things I learned from the Advice exhibit and will take with me into future work.


Facilitated/Unfacilitated Blend

When we started this course, I really pushed the students to think about ways to induce unfacilitated interactions among strangers. I love facilitated experiences, but I worry that they aren't scalable to every visitor. In the end, the Advice exhibit offered four main experiences--two that were facilitated, and two that were unfacilitated. The facilitated experiences were an advice booth, at which you could receive real-time advice from children, money managers, tattoo artists, and more, and a button-making station, where a gallery attendant would help you play a simple game to make a custom button featuring your own advice "madlib" composed of your own nouns and verbs rolled into classic advice phrases. The unfacilitated experiences (discussed in more detail below) involved visitors writing their own pieces of advice on post-its and walls and answering each other's questions asynchronously.

At any time, there were two facilitators in the exhibit--one for the advice booth, and the other for the buttons. This might make Advice sound more like an educational program than an exhibit, or like a failure on the unfacilitated front. But the exhibit team did something novel. First, they replaced staff with volunteers--some entirely spontaneous--at the advice booth. Like the Living Library project, the advice booth was a platform that connected strangers with strangers--not just staff with strangers. One eight year-old enjoyed the advice-giving experience so much that he came back the following day for another shift in the booth!

Maybe more importantly, the facilitators were not the center of the Advice experience. They were roped to very specific locations and activities. Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it. I know that floor staff are expensive, but they really make a space come alive (see this post). And in Advice, the activities for staff were interesting and specific enough that a really eclectic mix of volunteers could perform them successfully.


In Praise of the Post-It

There's lots of post-it-powered art on the web these days (like this and this). I'd like to add my ardor to the pack and suggest that you really can make a compelling, content-rich interactive exhibit experience with a bunch of post-its. In Advice, the setup was simple: the exhibit team came up with a few seed questions, like "How do you heal a broken heart?," and put them up on signs behind glass. Then, they offered different shapes and colors of post-its, as well as pens and markers, for people to write responses.

The engagement in this part of the exhibit was very high. Random passers-by got hooked and spent twenty minutes carefully reading each post-it, writing responses, creating chains of conversation and spin-off questions and pieces of advice. It's worth noting that the exhibit space was not exactly optimal--it was a hallway separating the lobby of the student center from a dining hall. The previous exhibit in this space was a very provocative art exhibit about sexual violence, and yet in our brief site survey in April we saw almost no one stop to look at the art. Not so for the post-its. The Advice exhibit hooked maintenance staff, students, athletes, men, women--it really seemed to span the range of people passing through.

There were 230 responses to the nine staff-created seed questions, and in a more free-form area, visitors submitted 28 of their own questions which yielded 147 responses. Some of the advice was incredibly specific; for example, one person wrote a post-it that asked, "should my 17 year old who is going to college in the fall have a curfew this summer?" That post-it received 9 follow-up post-its, including a response from another parent in the same situation. Others stood and copied pieces of advice (especially classes to take and books to read) carefully into their personal notebooks.

It might seem surprising that people would take the time to write up questions on post-its when there is no guarantee that someone will respond, and very low likeliness that someone will respond while you are still in the gallery. The exhibit experienced low traffic overall in an odd area of the UW student center. But the impulse to participate was high and the threshold for doing so was very, very low. The post-its and pens were right there. The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.

People felt very comfortable not only adding their own advice but also critiquing others'. We saw many instances when someone would write "lol" or "love this" directly onto a previously posted post-it. People also asked follow-up questions. For example, one person recommended "grappa and Bessie Smith records" as a cure for a broken heart, to which another responded, "Who's Bessie Smith?" The query was answered by yet a third person, who wrote, "Uh, only the greatest singer of the 20's 'I need a little sugar in my bowl.'"

Do I know if the second person ever came back to find out who Bessie Smith is? No. But I know that the resultant conversation provided information to many subsequent visitors to the space. It's like following blog comments. Not everyone comes back to read the evolving comment stream, but the aggregate is always valuable to the next visitor.


Many Ways to Talk Back

When the student team inserted a "bathroom wall" component into the exhibit plan, I didn't really understand it. If visitors could write on post-its anywhere in the exhibit, why did they also need a place to scrawl with marker on an actual wall?

But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was "anything goes" by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls. They were totally focused on the questions and answers at hand. I think the bathroom wall made this possible by being an alternative for those who wanted to be a little less focused and just have fun with sharpies.

The Advice team also offered a guest comment book (sparsely used) for people to offer comments about the whole exhibit. There were also multiple ways to follow up or submit content online or by phone. All of these ways together constructed a landscape of visitor participation that supported a large number of people participating in ways that felt most appropriate for them.

This is a good lesson for museum talk-back design. If you only offer one place where visitors can contribute their thoughts to an exhibition, they are likely to use that opportunity to share their thoughts on all kinds of things. I've visited many exhibitions that ask focused questions at the end, and visitors respond with more general thoughts about the entire exhibition or museum. These contributions are valuable, but they erode the focus of the topic at hand.

In Advice, there were many forms of talk-back: the post-its, the bathroom wall, the book, the phone, the website. Each of these took pressure off the others as a visitor participation outlet, and the overall result was a coherent, diverse mix of on-topic visitor contributions.


What advice do you have for ways we might advance the practice of exhibit design for social interaction?

Don't Join the Conversation if You Aren't Ready to Listen

Whenever I work with an organization that says they want to “hear from visitors,” I always ask: what will you do with what you hear? Is this a research project? It is an exhibit of user-generated content? Is it a conversation? What will you do if they say something you don’t agree with? In almost all cases, museums assure me that they want to be in conversation, that they want to be responsive, that they want to “really hear” what people think.

This week, I read two stories about disagreeable flare-ups between institutions and consumers. In one case, the institution jumped into the conversation and converted an ugly situation into a positive community outcome. In the other case, the institution was unwilling to engage in the conversational environment and ended up isolated, fueling the fire.

Sadly, it was the second story that was about a museum. Let’s start there.

Here’s what happened: an art critic named Jerry Saltz posted an incendiary note on Facebook about the very low representation of women artists on the 4th and 5th floors (painting and sculpture) of MoMA. He encouraged his friends and followers to help him generate a package of comments and complaints on this topic to send to museum executives at the end of June. Then, he received a message from MoMA’s Chief Communications Officer, Kim Mitchell, which he posted (at her request). Here’s her message:

"Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation. And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women's Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you'll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going."

This message spurred hundreds more comments on Facebook, blog posts, and tweets, which eventually made their way to people like me. As Doug McLennan wrote in Arts Journal, Kim’s message was condescending, impersonal, did not respond to the specific issue at hand, and did not reflect an honest interest in engagement. Though she wrote, “we welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation,” Kim made it clear that MoMA will continue to talk about this issue internally, on their own, and we should just wait and “follow” their subsequent actions.

MoMA is present on many social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, and clearly “heard” from people about this issue. But only Kim was tapped to address it in a corporate manner. Despite offering conversational portals, MoMA was unwilling to engage conversationally in this case. It would have been very easy to send out a tweet or Facebook update with a link to the article and some version of the question, "what do you think?" so that MoMA could become part of the discussion. I presume that their silence on the airwaves means MoMA doesn't have a policy that allows staff to engage in these environments in the open, personal, conversational ways that are appropriate to the platforms when the topic veers away from positive comments and event announcements.

There are people on Jerry Saltz’s page and other venues having very passionate, engaging conversations about how to deal with gender representation issues in MoMA and other museums. It’s not like the gender issue is a big secret that Jerry exposed or that this topic isn't heatedly discussed inside and outside the museum world. But MoMA isn’t ready to participate with the public on these potentially tough, meaty conversations. They don't have the resources or policies to support real dialogue with the public, even if they are present in social media-land. They may be in Rome, but they’re not ready to do like the locals.


But don't despair. There is an alternative for those who are really ready to hear from visitors: engage responsively in an invested, honest, personal manner. That’s what Dave Schroeder did this week when he was in a similar position to MoMA.

Dave runs a yearly software conference called Flashbelt in Minneapolis. Like MoMA's upper floors, Flashbelt has a significant gender imbalance with about 5-10% of attendees being women. One of the keynote speakers, Hoss Gifford, gave a talk that many perceived as sexist/degrading/offensive and completely unprofessional. A female attendee, Courtney Remes, wrote about the experience and the managers of the Geek Girls Guide blog posted her comments along with a comprehensive call to action to encourage people to write to the event organizers and generally raise awareness about the issue.

The same day, Dave Schroeder wrote privately to the women and, significantly, posted a public apology about the incident on the Flashbelt homepage. He didn’t hide it on a secondary page; one day after the conference was over, the homepage of the conference focused solely on this issue. His statement was honest and explicit. He validated the concerns, apologized to everyone, took full responsibility for the issue, and expressed his commitment to redress this issue now and in the future. (Note: his letter has now moved here.)

The next day, the Geek Girls post was updated to announce that there would be a united response from Dave, Courtney, and the Geek Girls coming soon. Here’s what they said:

“Dave Schroeder, Courtney Remes, Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilker met this morning and had a great discussion. We're working together on a united response, which will be posted here as soon as it's done. This has obviously touched a nerve with a lot of people. Let's keep the dialogue going, and let's keep it positive and respectful.”

They met in person. They talked about it. This afternoon, they issued a lengthy collaborative statement. And they are encouraging more dialogue about the general issues of gender imbalance and prejudice in the software development world, which they are clearly willing to lead and take part in.

This is the way that institutions should be willing to act when we say we want to “be responsive” to people. I know there are many differences between the MoMA and Flashbelt incidents and that running a huge museum is much more complex than running a yearly conference. But the issues these stories bring up around willingness to "hear" and "engage" are universal.

This is why I always say that participatory tools are about relationships, not technology. You have to be honest about what kinds of relationships you are willing to take on. If your corporate culture prevents you from being an invested, accountable, honest, personal part of a serious conversation, then there are some conversations, relationships, and social venues in which you cannot fully participate. And it’s fine if you know you are not ready to be there. It's entirely your choice to engage or not in different kinds of relationships. But don’t show up for a conversation if you aren’t ready to listen.

How to Develop a (Small-Scale) Social Media Plan

Yesterday, I enjoyed three hours of graduate students' presentations of social media plans for museums in the Pacific Northwest. I've been working with these UW museology students for the past quarter, and each partnered with a local client institution to develop a social media plan either for a particular exhibition, program, or initiative, or for an entire institution.

Here is the process I offered them for developing and writing these plans. It can be used internally by staff, or externally (as in the students' cases) as a consultant with a partner organization. There are three parts: the institution or initiative's content and audience goals, the institution's assets, and the project concept that will match goals to resources in an achievable way. In most cases, parts 1 and 2 were discussed in a meeting as background research, and then the project idea (part 3) was presented back by the project developer for feedback from the larger team. It turned out well, and I hope it's useful for you.

Part 1: Define your goals.

1. What is this institution or initiative all about? Who is the target audience? These questions should focus and filter your planning more than anything else.
2. What kind of new relationships is the institution seeking? How would the institution like to alter or strengthen its relationship with the target audience? What kind of relationship is sought? Relationship types may include: broadcasting, spreading, listening, sharing, embracing, energizing, supporting, research, exchange, conversation… Ideally, you will pick one or two relationships that seems appropriate to the mission and goals, although institutions that are looking at comprehensive media plans may need documentation and ideas in several relationship buckets.

Part 2: Define your resources and boundaries.

1. What resources (time, money, and people) does the institution have to support this effort? What rules or control issues may prevent certain kinds of interactions? What are they already doing, what have they tried, and where are they now? These questions should help you define a reasonable scope for the project and hone in on some tactics that may be more appropriate than others.
2. What is the institution's intent with regard to its desired audience? How will they manage, grow, and respond to their newly energized communities? You need to make sure you are recommending something that the institution can honestly, enthusiastically, and appropriately manage in the context of their work processes etc. This is very hard to ascertain from the outside, but asking questions like, “what will you do with visitors’ contributions?” or “what will you do if someone posts something that is inaccurate?” can help.

Part 3: Develop the ideas and explain the plan.

1. Share your brilliant ideas. What are you recommending and why?
2. What are the startup needs? What will the institution have to do to get this going?
3. What is the promotion plan? How can the institution reach out to the target audience?
4. What are the maintenance needs? What will the institution have to do to keep it going?
5. What is the evaluation plan? How will this project be tracked and tested against the goals? How will you establish benchmarks and a starting baseline?

Upon review of the final social media plans, I was particularly impressed by the extent to which the students really took to heart the specific resources and constraints of their client museums to create realistic, achievable (and creative!) plans. For example...

• Jill Hardy worked with a museum that is trying to attract a younger, more diverse adult audience. Recognizing that the museum is situated in a highly walkable, hip neighborhood full of representatives of the target audience, she recommended a highly localized campaign that gets the museum thinking "like a neighbor" and becoming a cultural block party/bbq hub for a tight geographic area.
• Nicole Robert worked with a new institution that would like to deepen relationships with members and energize continued membership sign-ups online. Noting that the museum is at a very early stage in development and is still learning about its' audiences' needs (and getting their feet wet on the Web), she recommended a three-phase plan for both internal online skills development and external audience research and pilot projects.
• Kylie Pine worked with a small, traditional history museum very unfamiliar with social media but interested in embarking on online discussion. She tied each digital idea to a physical concept with a well-understood historical significance, such as a time capsule and a hope chest.
  
• Erin Milbeck worked with an innovative art space that has had a hard time attracting local audiences in a suburb fairly unfamiliar with contemporary art. She combined the challenge of limited time resources and the asset of a huge downtown storefront to recommend a window sign strategy that would introduce people to the space via text messaging.
• Kathryn Fromson worked with a traveling exhibit developer who would like to connect audiences at different venues to each other and to online environmental information related to sustainable choices. She developed a physical take-home piece that connects any version of the traveling exhibit to a centralized website with both local and shared resources.

Every project focused on the reality that--as with any other initiative--social media plans should not be all things to all people. As much as the students offered client museums great ideas, they also offered peace of mind in the oft-repeated recommendation that institutions not do everything and be everywhere, but focus on a few things that are really tied to goals and mission. Go forth and do awesome things. And relax. You can do them one at a time.

Think Like a Game Designer

I've been designing game-like experiences with museums for a long time. But this week, I participated in a game design workshop with Ken Eklund that totally changed my perspective. My starting point is interactive exhibit design; Ken's is game design. Getting a peek into how he approaches his work induced three aha moments related to prototyping, visitor entrypoints, and designing for maximum impact.

AHA #1: If you abstract far enough, you can prototype interpersonal interactions very quickly.

Ken led us through an activity in which we crowded around a table and watched six people play a quick card game called Pit. As they played, we talked openly about how the game was progressing. We observed and played many rounds of Pit, swapping in and out of the game seats. We talked about the strategies different players were using and tried to determine the most effective winning strategy based on our limited data. Finally, we developed several variations and played rounds with our own new rules.

This is, of course, a form of rapid prototyping. I've spent many hours watching people scratch their heads and bang on interactive prototypes. What stuck out about this experience was putting the focus on the interpersonal gameplay and interactions rather than the content experience. We didn't watch to see if people could "figure it out" or "get the answer." Instead, we watched to see how people pursued different strategies and how comfortable they were with different types of interaction.

We could also iterate incredibly quickly. Pit is a highly abstracted card game meant to simulate commodities trading. Because the infrastructure is so simple (just a pack of cards) and a round lasts only a few minutes, it was easy to change the rules on the fly. I've always believed in prototyping at the simplest level possible, but when it comes to group dynamics we often argue that without a full-size model or the actual space, it's hard to see how people will really interrelate. Pit proved to me that this isn't true. With a table, some chairs, and a set of cards, we were able to make some serious insights about how to affect the speed, energy, cognitive requirements, and overall nature of the game.


AHA #2: Visitors have strategies.

While watching Pit, we openly talked about strategic approaches to the game. David's strategy was to make as many trades as possible. Irina's strategy involved hoarding cards and only making high-value trades. In the context of a game, it's obvious that individuals play with some kind of strategy. Some people optimize their strategies to win, others to have a good time or explore a new aspect of the game.

We rarely talk about this when we design museum exhibits. We expect that visitors will intuit our intended strategy and play accordingly. This doesn't make sense. Games are more interesting when there is more than one viable strategy; that's why we graduate from Candyland to chess. Rather than designing a prescribed "correct" path through an interactive exhibit, we should be thinking more about the rule sets or platforms we can design that will invite visitors to successfully bring personal strategies and modes of interaction to the experience.


AHA #3: You can design interactions to encourage "playing well," i.e. in accordance with your organizational values.

Supporting multiple strategies doesn't mean you can't affect the way people play. We were amazed to realize that a simple change in the rules could transform a slow, strategic game into a fast-paced shouting match. We could change a game that was about diplomacy into one which rewarded cutthroat backstabbing. When we added rules that were well-designed, they fundamentally changed the way that people played the game and the attributes that made the game fun. When we came up with muddier rules, they just confounded the players about the overall goal. In 45 minutes, we were able to make some sophisticated observations about how to change the rules to reflect a wide variety of underlying values or goals.

Ken made the powerful point that many poorly designed games often have a mismatch between what it takes to play well and what it takes to win. Museum scavenger hunts are a classic example of this; we want people to "play well" by exploring obscure areas of the museum, but instead they focus on winning by zooming all over the place without contemplating the objects they seek. Of course, sometimes people have different opinions about what it means to play well--Scrabble enthusiasts will go to war over whether the playing well is about placing elegant word combinations or memorizing all the five-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary.

Ken challenged us to to design interactions to encourage and reward people for playing well. For example, he created a game for the retreat called "Faces in the Crowd" which was designed to encourage participants to meet each other. It had a very simple structure. Each person was given an "identity card" that featured a mashup of two faces smooshed together (see image at top). Your goal was to identify the half-faces on your card and trade cards with others until you were holding a card that featured half of your face. Once you found your partner (the other person attached to your face), you were supposed to determine what the two of you had in common and then present your completed identity set to the game master.

What did kind of values did the Faces in the Crowd gameplay reinforce? It encouraged you to meet new people and literally put names to faces. It forced you to interact with many people, and to work together to try to successfully make a match. And once you found your partner, you spent time talking about what you might possibly have in common (an interest in pyromania, for example). There were various strategies--hunt for a person on your card, ask and collaborate with others, make yourself obvious and hope others will come to you--but the overall experience was one that supported meeting people, expressing interest in them, and making connections (see fun 30-second video).

What does it mean to play well in your museum? Does it mean seeing lots of stuff? Engaging deeply with a few things? Sharing something with someone else? Taking home a memory? How can you reward people not just for following a set path, but for acting in accordance with your overall institutional values? How will you define and reward "playing well?"

Forget Conferences. I'm Going to Camp.

I just returned from the Creativity and Collaboration retreat (C2), a NAME/AAM program that I've been helping develop for about a year and a half. C2 brought together 100 exhibit-minded folks on the beach in Monterey, CA for 48 hours of making, learning, playing, contemplating, and celebrating. It was incredible. This is the second time this spring that I've participated in a professional development experience that is more like summer camp than a conference, and I am sold. Paul Orselli wants to dump powerpoint. I want to dump conferences and do these camp thingies instead.

There's a reason people who went to summer camp as a kid are cultists about the experience. It's heady and intense to plunge into a new community that is disconnected from the outside world. At its best, camp is a kind of aspirational play space where you can be yourself away from the stereotypes and burdens of your everyday life. I saw a lot of that at C2, and it allowed me to connect with new people in a space that acknowledged the intersections between personal and professional. Strangers talked about their fears and challenges honestly. The imaginative context of the workshops allowed us to get past petty sticking points and tackle big questions like how to balance creativity into your work, how to feel good about creating without evaluating the product, and how to deal with the tensions of working in teams. We had fun. We got inspired. And most notably (for me, at least), we felt really good about opening up to each other.

For me, most conferences are the opposite of this. Rather than feeling authentic, I feel like I have to project a professional caricature of myself. I'm wearing clothes I never otherwise wear. I'm doing things (hanging out late in bars, distractedly jumping from one conversation to the next) that I rarely otherwise do. I'm being rapidly and frequently evaluated as a one-dimensional version of me, and I'm meeting other people who are struggling with the same self-fictionalization. I get lost in the bigness of the crowds and end up gravitating towards spending time with a few close friends--the ones who "know me." That's great, but I'd much prefer to go on a hike with them than sit in a bar, and few conference experiences support that. I thought I would come home from C2 worn out, the way I feel after most conferences. Instead, my head is buzzing with energy and excitement about work.

When we first started planning C2, we were concerned that no one would come or that people would perceive it as frivolous in a time of extreme stress in the economy and museum industry. We tried hard to avoid designing a "kumbaya" weekend, though as it turned out, participants did spontaneously and unironically dance around a bonfire together. Instead of suffering for sign-ups, C2 was oversubscribed at 100 people, including many who paid their own way. We're already talking about some incarnation of "next time" with great enthusiasm.

And now, having experienced it, I have a different perspective on the frivolity question. Across the board, C2 provided more value to me than a standard conference. I met more new people with whom I have a genuine interest in keeping in touch. I learned more new techniques that I can apply directly to my work. I never had awkward forced interactions with people. There was always something interesting and valuable to discuss. And we got to do it all in a beautiful natural environment. As one attendee said after seeing ridiculously cute baby deer on the path for the umpteenth time, "cue the fawns."

I'm a big believer in seeking balance in your life between the physical and the virtual, the conceptual and the concrete. Taking time away to do professional development of any kind should be an opportunity to readjust the balance and get reconnected with what's been lacking. Most of us spend our work time on computers and in meetings, even if the work we do is ostensibly creative and related to a tactile experience. Most of us spend too much time indoors and sedentary. The frustration I have with conferences is that I wish they would inject more of the physical, the creative, and the active into my professional practice rather than reflecting my standard "sit down, learn stuff, and talk to people" lifestyle. That part of conferences--the content delivery and discussion--could be happily (for me at least) replaced with a digital experience. But the opportunity to build something with my hands with other people, to create mythic exhibits in an hour or redesign a card game or make food sculptures or fly someone in the air (all things I did in the last two days) cannot be digitized. That's how I want to spend my travel money and time. That's how I want to learn to be a better person and a better professional.

I'm not sure at this moment what this conviction will mean for the future. I spend a lot of time at conferences and don't expect that to go away. But if you are interested in helping develop camp-like alternatives to traditional conferences, a "camp" track, let me know. Now that I've seen the fawns, I don't see much reason to turn back.

Everyone's Smithsonian: Video, Slides, and an Open Strategic Planning Process

Two weeks ago, I conducted a participatory exhibit design workshop with staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Between the giant squid brainstorming and experimentation, I gave a talk to the larger Smithsonian Institution about multi-platform museum experiences. I started from curator David Allison's suggestion that the Smithsonian is moving from being "their" Smithsonian to becoming "everyone's" Smithsonian, and examined the conceptual and practical actions required to make this happen. I tried to address the Smithsonian's particular challenges and opportunities while contextualizing it with lots of examples across different museum sizes and types. The talk was webcast and taped, and if you have an hour, please consider checking out the video. The slides are also available for download. Seriously, if you are thinking "should I read more or should I just watch the video?" watch the video. It's better (though it takes a bit of time to load).

In condensed text version, here are my three steps to being a great multi-platform organization:

1. Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
2. Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
3. Develop relationships via any and all useful platforms that allow you to connect 1 to 2.

That's it. It's like an organizational game of madlibs. You have an audience need and an institutional value, and now you just need a verb that connects them.

The most important part of this is that 1 and 2 be as specific as possible, detailing both what is IN and what is OUT. Your mission should be an actionable measuring stick. You should be able to read your mission statement like a chapter of the Torah--exploding out its implications and using it as a kind of legal text for proper action. Every program, old and new, should be evaluated against the mission (and the business model) for soundness.

I used to think of mission statements as fluffy pieces of fakery. Now I feel like they are--or should be--integral to keeping institutions on track. If they are too flabby or meaningless, they don't serve anyone. The Smithsonian's current (and historic) mission has only one actionable statement: "increase and diffuse knowledge." I'm not sure that's enough to go on for such a complex and diverse set of research, education, and civic facilities.

I bring this up in part because the Smithsonian is currently undergoing a massive strategic planning process across many sectors of the institution. I sincerely hope this will lead to some actionable statements about what the Smithsonian is and isn't, which audiences they will prioritize and downgrade. There is no good strategic plan without a clear sense of what will be left out.

Admirably, the Smithsonian has opened up their new media strategic planning via a public wiki. They want your help, but they are also offering up what they are doing for the rest of us to explore. And if you don't have any serious scars from your own strategic planning experiences, it's a fascinating read. In particular, I've enjoyed digging into the workshops that were held on Education, Business Models, Technology and Ops, Curation and Research, and Directors. If you look at any given workshop, you can access the discussion guide (questions the facilitators thought were important for that group) and even more interestingly, a few participants' followup comments in an evaluation offered after the workshops. (Side note: three times as many educators filled out surveys than any of the other groups.) While most of the voices represented are positive about a "Smithsonian 2.0" future, you can also see the passion of different groups that feel underrepresented or unheard in the evaluation comments. I love that the new media team published these evaluations and responded to the individual comments. There's lots of content there that could be used as conversation starters in the next iteration of this process--whether at the Smithsonian or any other museum grappling with issues of how to integrate participation and multi-platform experiences into their institution.

Sure, there's a part of me that is skeptical that all of this may be a lot of meetings and talk for little change. I am an impatient person. I've always preferred working in small museums, where there may not be money but there is eagerness to experiment and the approval line is only one or two people deep. I get impatient with long complicated processes that require buy-in from hundreds of people. But the Smithsonian, as Elaine Gurian once wrote, is an ocean liner. I admire all the people who are trying tirelessly to turn it towards more open, inclusive shores.

Mixing Digital and Physical: The Holocaust Museum's Handwritten Pledge Wall

On a recent trip to DC, an old friend showed me around a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide. It's a small space that features stories of recent and current genocides and encourages visitors to "take action" via an interactive pledge wall. I've seen several museums experimenting with inviting visitors to take action, make promises, and join communities of intentionality (here's a post with examples from 2007), and the USHMM effort is particularly compelling for some specific design choices made in the development of the pledge wall.

The USHMM pledge wall is notable for its blending of digital and analog technologies. Rather than requiring visitors to key in their pledges via a keyboard, visitors scrawl their promises on special digital paper with pens. The paper is perforated with one section for the promise, which visitors keep, and another section for a signature, which visitors leave at the museum. Once signed, visitors drop the signed paper stubs into clear plexiglass cases that are beautifully lit (see image). The paper "remembers" the location of pen marks on the pledge section, so visitors' handwritten promises are quickly and magically projected on a digital projection wall in front of the pledge kiosks. The digital projection wall displays a dynamic show of recent pledges as well as statistics on how many pledges have been made to date, and the plexi cases provide a powerful physical representation of all the names and promises that have been made. This case full of real people's handwritten signatures is reminscient of the haunting pile of Holocaust prisoners' shoes in the permanent exhibition, providing a hopeful complement to that devastating set of artifacts.

Why require visitors to hand-write their pledges rather than keying them in on a keyboard? It certainly would have been easier for the museum to digitize and project visitors' entries if they were typed in, and it wouldn't have wasted so much (expensive, digital) paper. But it wouldn't have been nearly as powerful.

How do you approach a hard question like, "What will you do to meet the challenge of genocide today?" You can't just jot off a witty remark or quick reply. Requiring visitors to sit and think and then hand write their response forces them to slow down. Signing a pledge in your own handwriting ritualizes the experience. Adding your slip of paper to a physical, growing, highly visible archive makes you part of a larger community. I watched several visitors as they went through this process, which ends with your card being reproduced digitally, letter by letter, on the large projection wall in front of the kiosks. People were captivated by the slow animation of their pledges being added to the wall, and that slowness sealed a deliberate interaction.

I recently visited the Power of Children exhibition at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, which also features a pledge activity at a large installation called the Tree of Promise. In that case, there are two options available - a digital contribution system, in which you type your promise into a computer and watch it digitally "float" onto a screen in a giant artificial tree, and a purely analog system, where you write your promise on leaf-shaped post-it notes. The post-it notes were clearly more popular with the visitors I observed. Part of that popularity stems from the immediacy and accessibility of the activity. But I think it also relates to the personal way we connect to the words we write by hand, which are different from those we type. The digital world doesn't seem "real" in the same way that pen and paper does, and in the context of a physical, built environment like an exhibit, a post-it can often feel more appropriate than a computer screen.

Which brings us back to USHMM. Their pledge wall bridges the best of both worlds, inviting a personal, physical ritualization of your promise mixed with dynamic digital representation and recombination. It's a powerful example of the exciting possibilities that emerge when we really understand as designers which technologies are best for different visitor experiences.

That's not to say it's perfect. The USHMM pledge cards are complicated. The cards don't just allow you to make pledges; they also allow you to save multimedia stories on a touch table in another part of the exhibit. While I saw many visitors intuitively and successfully using the cards to make pledges, the table interaction was confusing. Again, the physical reinforcement at the pledge kiosks--seeing the aggregated stubs of signature cards in the plexi cases--helped visitors understand what to do. The table had no comparable physical analog to help people understand how to connect their cards to the multimedia content.

Visitors can take their cards home and review their pledges (and see others' pledges) on the Take Action website, where you can also make pledges directly via the internet. The system elegantly combines both onsite and online pledges in the digitial display on exhibit and on the web. This makes for a nice combination of printed and handwritten pledges, pledges local to DC and written in foreign languages as well. Because this exhibit is new, the staff don't yet have data on how many people choose to review their content at home. The USHMM team is aware of the confusions and are working to make the interactivity more intuitive for visitors.

On a conceptual level, I'm curious about what kinds of responses people might have to a question as complex and heady as "What will you do to meet the challenge of genocide today?" Is this really a question that visitors can answer? The exhibit doesn't provide answers--it mostly provides devastating stories about the challenges. Lots of people made pledges to talk to friends and family about the content, read the newspaper, learn more, or encourage others to visit the exhibit. Some offered specifics, like voting for candidates who advocate taking action on worldwide genocide or pushing their synangogues to provide support for genocide victims. Some responses were more reflective, like "I will never forget." While I am skeptical about these more aphoristic responses, I respect the fact that different people process information differently. And I do believe that the slow, ritualized, personal design of the USHMM pledge wall contributes to higher effectiveness--whatever your response--than more slapdash talkback opportunities.

The handwritten pledge is an intelligent starting point for creating merged digital/analog participatory experiences. What physical rituals do you find useful when you are sharing a story or expressing an idea? Which physical actions do you wish you could merge with digital story-sharing to create more powerful content experiences?

Wanted: Your Advice (Guest Post)

This guest post was written by Nicole Robert, a graduate student in the course I’m teaching at the University of Washington on social technology. Nicole and her classmates are building a rapid-fire, user-generated online and physical exhibit which will be open June 6-8 in Seattle. This post shares some of the development story, and most importantly, issues a call to action to add your two cents to the exhibit.

Designing an exhibit, the first questions are usually: “what is this about? What’s the content? What’s the message?” As a graduate student in a museum studies program, I have learned how to develop an exhibit based on a collection of objects or a specific story. Now, I and thirteen other students are creating an exhibit designed not around content goals but social action goals. Instead of asking, “What is this exhibit about?” we are asking, “What do we want visitors to do in our exhibit?”

The University of Washington Museology Graduate Program invited Nina up to Seattle to teach a course on using social technologies in museums. Nina challenged us to create an exhibit in 6 weeks that would get strangers to talk to each other. So, instead of figuring out what collection to feature, we brainstormed themes that would guide interactions. We knew that the exhibit would run in the UW student center during the week leading up to graduation, so we wanted to develop something that would be relevant to students at the end of the year without being cheesy. The result is an exhibit about advice. Our “big idea” is:

Advice: give it, get it, flip it, fuck it.

The idea around advice is that we all experience it—some people like to give it, some get it, others pass it on and we all have occasionally gotten advice that we chose to forget. Advice necessarily involves a transfer of knowledge from one person to another—an interpersonal interaction—so both the format and the ubiquity of advice make it a great structuring concept for our goals.

In this design experiment, we are inviting individuals far and wide to give us advice. Visit our website to find out how you can contribute video, photos, voice recordings or written advice. We're taking a multi-platform approach: you can call in advice from your phone, add advice images to our Flickr pool, email advice to us, or even send advice via Twitter. And tell your friends! Your advice will literally shape the physical exhibit, which will be displayed on the University of Washington campus in the Husky Union Building from Sat. June 6 to Mon. June 8, 9 am to 6 pm.

In addition to the content collected online, the physical installation will feature an advice-giving booth where “expert” advice-givers will volunteer to share their knowledge. You might be able to ask a single mom or a physicist for a gem of advice. Then take what they tell you and pass it on in other interactives, or leave your own contribution on the “Questions of the Ages” board. Good or bad, your advice—and the interactions that advice creates—takes center stage in this exhibit.

Other interactive exhibit components include:

• ADVICE-LIBS: Visitors will create advice Mad-Lib style, by vetting requested sentence components (noun, verb, adjective) and then having these placing these into well-known adages (i.e. "always ______ before you _______" or "a ________ in the hand is worth two in the _________.") These wacky 'remixed' adages would then be pressed into buttons for visitors to wear/take home.
• THE BATHROOM WALL: Visitors will write advice to the masses onto either a real or contrived "bathroom wall." They will be encouraged by signage to share great/horrible advice and to cross-off, comment upon and remix others statements-- just about what people do on normal bathroom walls.
• QUESTIONS OF THE AGES: Visitors will write advice on glass cases in which we have posted pre-selected questions that would be relevant to a wide population including: "What should you do for a broken heart?" "How do you break the ice when talking to a stranger?" "How do you tell a friend something that might hurt their feelings?" etc.
• GIVE ME SOMETHING TO GO ON: Visitors will be able to post questions that they want responses to in available free spaces on glass cases and other visitors will be able to cluster responses around these questions. Exhibit attendants will be the only ones allowed to remove/delete questions, and this should happen once room to respond runs out. Attendants will also photo-capture images of these displays for the website. Signage should encourage people to leave questions in the free spaces and respond.
  

During the three-day installation, we will observe and evaluate the success (or failure) of our designs. We plan to modify interactives that are not working and see if we can get better results. The whole experiment will provide all of us with valuable information about how museum exhibits can become a foundation of social interactions. At the end, we will publish our evaluation report and our development wiki (where we’ve been designing the exhibit) will be open for you to peruse.

Nina has asked our class to create a project that “will help move forward museum research on developing exhibitions that serve as platforms for social engagement.” An exciting challenge! But in order to meet it, we need your help. We want your advice. Advice you love, advice you hate, the strangest advice that you ever heard—whatever you choose, tell us about it.

Self-Identification and Status Updates: Personal Entrypoints to Museum Experiences

I've become convinced that successful paths to participation in museums start with self-identification. If you want visitors to share stories or personal expression in your institution, you need to respect them as individuals who have something of value to contribute. The easiest way to do that is to acknowledge their uniqueness and validate their ability to connect with the museum on their own terms. What am I talking about? I'm talking about personal profiles.

Who is the "me" in the museum experience? Museums are surprisingly poor at allowing visitors--even members--to self-identify and relating to them based on their unique identities. Asserting personal identity with respect to an institution is something we do daily in other environments. When I walk into my climbing gym, the staff member at the desk greets me by name. When he looks me up in the computer, he sees how often I come, what classes I’ve taken, and any major safety infractions on record. In short, he knows me by my actions relative to the gym, and he can offer me custom information based on my past behavior. I have a relationship with the institution, mediated by a computer and a smiling face.

Not so at museums. Even places where I'm a member, I rarely am tracked as anything but another body through the door. This lack of personalization at the front door sets an expectation that I am not valued as an individual in this museum. I am just a faceless visitor.

To some extent, ameliorating that facelessness via personalization is a question of guest service. Danny Meyer, restauranteur and hospitality guru, encourages his staff across several restaurants to keep "customer notes" that can easily be shared between reservationists, maitre-d's, wait staff, and managers. When a couple calls to make a reservation for their anniversary, the reservationist notes it, and when the couple arrives at the restaurant, their special occasion is acknowledged and celebrated by the staff. While this can be facilitated digitally, it doesn't take complicated tools to create an environment in which guests are treated personally based on their preferences and interests.

It feels magical when a florist remembers your name or a waiter brings you your coffee just the way you like it. But personalization can go much further than creating positive guest experiences. At its best, personalization creates an opportunity for visitors to enter museums on their own terms and to experience the institution based on their own learning styles, interests, and affinities. This doesn't mean that the museum needs to know and be responsive to every detail of each visitor's personal identity. Instead, each museum needs to develop a framework for what the "visitor profile" should be relative to the institution.

Consider, for example, the Sony Wonder Technology Lab in New York City. The Lab is a hands-on science center focused on creative use of digital technologies. When you enter, you start the visit by "logging in" at a kiosk that records your name, your voice, your photo, and your favorite color and music genre. Then, that profile is saved onto an RFID card that you use to access all of the interactive exhibits in the Lab. Each exhibit greets you by name at the beginning of the experience. When you augment an image, you distort your own face. When you make an audio mashup, your voice is part of the mix. This may sound gimmicky, but it's incredibly emotionally powerful. It draws you into every exhibit via your own narcissism. What could be more personally relevant--and compelling--than your own image and voice? At the Lab, your profile is a simple cache of personal data you can draw on as collaborator, co-creating the exhibit content.

For the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, the visitor's personal profile is a set of visitor-contributed content that can be inserted into the exhibit infrastructure. This makes sense in the context of a hands-on museum full of interactive exhibits in which you are modifying digital assets. But what's the right visitor profile for a history museum or an art museum? How should visitors self-identify relative to a research institution or a natural history museum?

There is no "right" answer for what a visitor profile should be. Instead, consider the framework of what will go into the visitor profile. Institutions and websites that use profiles set different constraints to support particular kinds of profiles to fit the overall context of their services. Some allow you to write your life story. Others restrict you to picking an image and a word that represents you. At the Brooklyn Museum, you are invited to pick a digital avatar (image) from their collection to represent you. The Signtific game encourages you to pick a single word to describe yourself (I chose "museumer"). These restrictions help frame and focus who the "me" can be relative to the content experience at hand.

Let's delve into one kind of restricted text-based profile: the status update. Status updates are short messages that users of many online services use to self-define their current state. Status updates may be messages like, "I'm going out to lunch with my mom," or "Just found this amazing resource for calculus teachers!" They constitute a kind of mini-profile, frequently updated, which reflects the author's self-expression over time.

Here is how four different online services solicit status updates:

• On Twitter, an open short-messaging site, asks, "What are you doing?"
• Facebook, a social network for friends, asks, "What's on your mind?"
• Yammer, a private short-messaging service for corporations, asks, "What are you working on?"
• Creative Spaces, a social space for collections of museum objects, asks, "What inspired you today?"

Each of these questions reflects the unique structure, usage, and content of each service. Because Twitter is designed as a broadcasting service, the focus is on action--things you do, links you discover. Since Facebook is focused towards private groups of friends, the solicitation is more personal, inviting people to share their feelings. Yammer is used by colleagues who care how your 2pm client meeting went, not how your cat is doing. And Creative Spaces wants to support people exploring and being creatively energized by ideas and objects, so they ask people to define themselves via personal inspiration.

To construct the right profile question, you need to consider the profile or status experience both for the contributor and the spectator. Of course, in most cases, contributors are spectators and vice versa; the audience is blended. But it's important to consider how people will perceive the question both when they are asked to answer it and when they are reading the answers. For contributors, the question must be friendly and simple enough that people feel they can confidently answer the question. Even if some people choose to write embarrassing or unprofessional things about themselves on their profiles, the status update systems are not set up intentionally to embarrass or trick the contributors. They are set up to support the contributors sharing what they feel comfortable offering. In some cases, like Creative Spaces, the question asked is unusual enough to shift the perceptual frame of the whole experience with the site. If you walk into a space and someone asks you what inspires you, you are primed for an inspirational experience. If you walk into a space and someone asks you what challenges you, you are primed for competition.

From the spectator perspective, the questions should generate responses that constitute a body of content that is relevant to the structure of the overall site or institution. Yammer asks, "What are you working on?" and the result is a content stream of professional notes on the ebb and flow of employees' actions. Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?" and the result is a stream of personal thoughts and feelings. The aggregate experience of the content affects spectators' understanding of the overall site and its value to them.

Imagine you have just one question to ask visitors that can be used to contextualize their experience relative to your museum. What would you ask them? How do you see visitors defining themselves in the museum? How do they wish to self-identify in the museum, and what can you do with those profiles?

The Multi-Platform Museum: Coming Live to You on May 18

You know how Ira Glass recently broadcast his radio show This American Life live to movie theaters across North America? Next week, I'm doing something way less cool and way more convenient. I'm doing a workshop with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History which includes a public lecture on "the multi-platform museum" on May 18 at 3pm ET (GMT -5). Because the Smithsonian is a public institution, the lecture will be free and open to anyone, both physically at the Baird Auditorium and digitally via a live webcast (here's the link, and no it doesn't work yet but don't worry, it will).

What is a multi-platform museum? It's a place that engages with visitors through many distribution mechanisms, including exhibits, programs, and the web. Most museums already are multi-platform places, but many consider each platform to be its own discrete silo rather than part of a strategic composite. I'll be talking about museums bridging online and onsite experiences to develop relationships with visitors that are not limited to prescriptive "pre-visit," "visit," and "post-visit" events or transactions. We'll talk about how to extrapolate your museum's mission into a roadmap for engaging with visitors in new ways, and we'll discuss how to analyze and evaluate what content experiences are right for different platforms. I'll share examples around personalization, behind-the-scenes connections, visitor participation on the floor, and of course, giant squid. The focus will be on the Smithsonian, which has a unique position as a national institution with over 20 venues, but many examples and design strategies are applicable to a broad range of museums.

I've been working with these ideas and museums for a long time, but this will be the first time I'm working with a place as big, complex, and bureaucratic as the Smithsonian. I usually try to push myself to think about social engagement from the perspective of the smallest museum with the most limited budget. But this is an opportunity to think big. What do you think the Smithsonian should be doing to engage more deeply and broadly with the public? What does the mission to "increase and diffuse knowledge" mean to you in this multi-platform world?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments and I will try to integrate them into my talk. I hope you'll be able to join me on March 18, digitally or physically. If you'd like more information about the event and whether large pom-poms are allowed in the auditorium, please contact Michael Mason at masonm (at) si (dot) edu.