Welcome to Pine Point: A Multimedia Exploration of Nostalgia, History, and What it Means to be Human

In 1990, educator and cultural critic Neil Postman described a museum as "an answer to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be a human being?"

I must admit that I've never found this definition very helpful. While I understand Postman's argument that every museum portrays a perspective on the nature of humanity, in most cases, I find that portrayal so abstract, so stripped of personhood, that it's hard to see the human in the institution. Without an explicit "I" voice, the museum's perspective on humanity is oblique to say the least.

But I came back to Postman's quote when viewing Welcome to Pine Point, a multimedia documentary about a small mining town in the Northwest Territories. Pine Point was a single-industry town, and when the mine closed in 1988, the town closed along with it. Welcome to Pine Point is a kind of virtual museum exhibition about the town, told from the perspective of Michael Simons, an artist who grew up in the nearby town of Yellowknife and visited Pine Point as a boy.

Welcome to Pine Point is not a museum project. It is an incredible narrative work that incorporates text, music, videos, and images into a lightly interactive, utterly engrossing digital story. (When you check it out, make sure to put your browser on fullscreen mode.) It is, in short, the best multimedia history project I've ever seen, and I wish more museums were pursuing projects like it.

What makes Welcome to Pine Point so amazing?

• It's nostalgic in the best sense of the word. In 2009, Dan Spock wrote a beautiful essay, In Defense of Nostalgia, arguing that history museums should embrace the emotional power of loss, memory, and personal connection that comes with nostalgia. By interweaving images, artifacts, sounds, and the human stories of the town, Welcome to Pine Point invites people with no prior connection to the Northwest Territories to care deeply about its story.
• It uses multimedia beautifully. I was really impressed by the diversity of artifacts in Welcome to Pine Point--from yearbook photos to VFW badges to video and photos from the 1980s and today. The variance and effective use of different media types reminded me of any great exhibition design, and it also highlighted how rarely museum professionals apply creative, surprising design techniques in online or media-based exhibits.
• It tells layered personal stories. The subjective "I" voice of Michael drives the whole story. Because he cares about Pine Point, you care, or at least you're up for the adventure. Michael's strong narrative voice makes jumps in location or story manageable (even if I did spend some time confused about the connection between Cosmos 954 and Pine Point). Michael also interviews former Pine Pointers, and the highly personal "then and now" features on Kim Feodoroff and Richard Cloutier are highlights of the whole project.
• It makes you contemplate your own connection to history. The first-person narration allows the project to directly address the audience with deep questions without sounding unnatural. When Michael wonders what it would be like to have your hometown disappear, he doesn't sound pretentious. He's a real person trying to figure it out, and that makes you as a viewer want to join him in figuring it out too. Some of the artifacts--government documents explaining that Pine Point will be taken off the map, videos from the final week of the town's existence--are devastating. It's impossible to watch people toasting the end of their town and not think about how you would feel in the same situation.
• It makes you think about what it means to be human. Coming back to Neil Postman's quote, and Postman's related concerns about people blindly allowing themselves to be controlled by technology, Welcome to Pine Point is an arresting exploration of the conflicts between technological progress and humanity. If a mine makes a town exist, is that good? If a mine closes and it makes the town cease to exist, is that bad? What happens to the people? How do we make these decisions, individually and collectively? These are big juicy questions that few exhibitions really force me to grapple with the way I did as I watched Welcome to Pine Point.

Welcome to Pine Point has a lot to teach all of us who strive to design exhibitions and experiences that explore history in a meaningful way. It also, in my opinion, has something to learn from the museum model. The one negative reaction I had to Welcome to Pine Point was its insistence on a linear presentation of the story. While I appreciate the benefits of a straight narrative, in this case, I think the content could have been just as powerfully presented in a hub and spoke model with freer user navigation. The "chapters" of the project were loose, and I didn't necessarily feel I needed to see them in order. Some I wanted to return to, and some I wanted to skip. I would love to see an exhibition version of Welcome to Pine Point, in a gallery where I can flit in and out of various alcoves of memory... and then talk about it with others in the cafe. This is a project that begs conversation.

I hope we can start that conversation here. Experience the project, share a comment, and let's talk.

The Ministry of Rules: Interview with Nikki Pugh

Last month, artist Nikki Pugh led an utterly charming, often hilarious community residency at the City Gallery in Leicester, UK. Nikki created "The Ministry of Rules"--a shadow organization that existed for one week during half-term break, staffed by visitors who served as "Inspectors" investigating, exploring, and poking fun at the rules that make museums and galleries go. I spoke with Nikki this week to learn more about the Ministry and their fun and games.

How did this project come about?

The City Gallery was mounting a contemporary art exhibition at the New Walk Museum called Play Ground, which featured artists who treat the gallery space as a kind of carnival instead of as an aesthetic temple. The gallery staff wanted half-term activities as part of their learning program and they invited me to lead these through what evolved into a residency format. The idea for the Ministry of Rules came from a desire to provide a framework as a jumping-off point for activities relating to concepts within the exhibition and my own art practice, as well as play and games in a wider sense. I wanted the details of the residency to be shaped by the people who got involved with it, so it needed a structure with an edge that could be pushed against in different directions.

What were the City Gallery goals for the project?

The staff member I worked with had in mind a particular feeling she wanted people to go away having--that kind of sense of community that comes when you've worked together to achieve something. I wanted, if possible, to really confront the ideas wrapped up in the exhibition's introductory text. But I also knew that I wanted the project to be emergent, so I had to be prepared to let this go if necessary.

I think that's what's most impressive to me about the project--the fact that every day's activities were determined by the visitors who'd come the day before. Can you explain how that worked?

I really wanted visitors to make this their own project and their own space; not mine. We had a corner of the gallery that was cordoned off as the Ministry's HQ, and you could only enter if you were a Ministry employee (my badge clearly marked me as a secretary). Most of my time was spent managing that threshold: providing the initial information and invitation; managing expectations of it being an 'easy' craft activity; helping people make their ID badges; and guiding them through taking their Inspectors' Pledge. Only then, as an official Inspector for the Ministry, could you could enter the space. “Come in, this is your headquarters now, yourinvestigation, you make the decisions.”

There was a large mind map on the wall with a prompt in the middle encouraging visitors to imagine a slightly distant future with no staff present to enforce the rules in galleries or museums. The Inspectors could contribute ideas about what that might happen as a result. We used those ideas as the basis for the daily activities in the Ministry.

For example, at the end of day 1, we had one thread on the mind map about what would happen if the absence of staff meant that no one would be there to turn the lights on. One inspector had written that if the lights were off, "you could get up closer to the paintings and smell them as well." This sparked our activity for day 2, where we invited Inspectors to make nose trumpets to amplify the smell of the museum. They made cones from construction paper and then went out into the museum to sniff things and record the smells on clipboards.

Every day had a pattern like this. At the end of the afternoon, volunteers and I would examine the mind map and we'd come up with an activity for the next day in response to what had been written. On day 3 we made memory machines, based on a couple of comments wondering how people would learn with no staff around and whether that meant we would forget about the past. On day 4 Inspectors made "top secret trails"--personalized maps of the museum--based on a comment about kids passing knowledge to each other. Interestingly, although Inspectors spent comparatively little time working on the mind map, it was a vital tool for us in making the Ministry an emergent process.

How did the museum staff respond to this experience?

There were certain anxieties before we started: I was an unknown face; the gallery was deliberately trying a new way of working with an artist; and there were relationships between the two hosts to be negotiated. All this on top of the emergent nature of the project and no one really knowing ahead of time what was going to happen. However, once we got going there was a real buzz as the activities started permeating the whole building.

For example, on Monday afternoon Inspectors were asked to make more interesting alternatives to all the signs and rules in the building. Once the new signs had been made, I challenged Inspectors to place them somewhere in the museum. I told them that outside our HQ we couldn't be sure if staff might be sympathetic to the Ministry of Rules or not, and therefore Inspectors should sneak their signs into position whilst no one was looking. The staff had been briefed in advance and they could decide whether to be friendly or not when they encountered suspicious behavior. The Inspectors' Pledge from the initiation process established boundaries of acceptable behaviour for when the activities took place in the wild and there were no reported problems. We left a lot of cardboard around the place over those 5 days and for the most part it wasn't tidied away.

Sounds like that's a great way to play with the idea of the Ministry being a "shadow" organization within the larger museum. How important was it for people to know they were part of something secretive as opposed to just openly invited to participate?

When I do school projects or pervasive games (for adults), it's really important to set that context of an expanded version of self to steer things slightly beyond participants' comfort zone. But in the particular context of the museum at half-term, I don't know if it actually was that vital. People were quite happy to come along and draw things and make things and do things. And the kids were often 5 and younger, so some of the Ministry ritual may have gone over their heads. However, in the particular context of drop-in activities in a busy museum at half-term, I don't know if it actually was that vital. People were quite content to simply come along and draw things and make things and do things. Also many of the children were around 5 years old or younger, so some of the Ministry ritual and specific reinforcing language I used may have gone over their heads. It wasn't that important that I wouldn't drop it or adapt it if it obviously wasn't appropriate!

I deliberately ditched the whole Ministry of Rules thing on the final day to try and see if it mattered or not. Instead of asking people to join a secret organization, as they approached the HQ I would appeal to them with something like: "Thank goodness! You must be the Museum Fixer Uppers! We really need your help!" positioning them as experts whose skills and assistance were urgently required.

I think that aspect was more important: soliciting their help and expertise. That kind of conspiracy and complicity is more important than the secrecy stuff.

Going back to the original goal of people working together in community, how did you keep from being the "go to" person who all the Inspectors looked to as the facilitator of their experience?

Beyond the initial orientation I deliberately distanced myself from telling people what to do. They were the Inspectors. We facilitated the entry into the fiction and the practical activity and then the Inspectors pretty much self organised, seeking out the materials they needed and settling into whatever space was available.

Over the whole week, there were only about two or three Inspectors (old and young) who would persistently come up and ask me "what do I do next?" For the most part people took it on themselves and went with it. That kind of became the main goal as the project found it's identity - conferring ownership of the events and the space. I was always mindful of trying to step back and let as much as possible come from and belong to the participants.

In truth, while that was very successful, I don't think we cracked the challenge of really getting people to work with each other across groups. On the last day, we very intentionally designed an activity that was intended to bring people together to assemble new exhibits out of an assortment of components made by the Inspectors, but even then people gravitated towards working on their own or within their own families. ID/name badges were used to help encourage group crossover, but I think that rarely happened in practice. In the end it was a community project in which participants contributed meaningfully and sequentially to the bigger idea of the Ministry, the content of the space and the actions being made, but they didn't necessarily collaborate directly in real time.

Thanks so much to Nikki for sharing her story. Nikki can be found on the Web and on Twitter, and she will be monitoring and responding to comments here on the blog this week.

Adventures in Participatory Audience Engagement at the Henry Art Gallery

This winter, I once again taught a graduate class in the University of Washington's Museology program. In 2009, students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. This year, we took a different approach. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. You can explore the projects in full on the class wiki. This post shares my reflections on the projects and five things I learned from their work. All the photos in this post are on Flickr here.

Background: Why They Did What They Did

The Henry Art Gallery exhibition we worked with, Vortexhibition Polyphonica, was intended to explore three big ideas:

1. Different voices “intervene” or add new points of view to the exhibition at periodic intervals.
2. Surprising or unexpected, as well as unknown, works from the permanent collections are featured.
3. The guiding principle is uncovering relationships between the works of art themselves rather than explicating information or theoretical concepts.

I suspect these big ideas were opaque to most visitors. The exhibition looked like any standard contemporary white box with artwork and labels, albeit featuring an eclectic mix of works and signed labels (to accentuate the role of different voices). My students decided to make these big ideas more explicit and engage visitors as participants while doing so.

To that end, they designed and executed three projects:

1. Xavier, an opportunity for visitors to "talk" with a sculpture in the exhibition via magnetic quotation boards and alphabet fridge magnets.
2. Stringing Connections, in which visitors could describe relationships between works in the exhibition and make them visible by tying pieces of yarn between them on a large map of the gallery.
3. Dirty Laundry, which invited visitors to air their own personal secrets and memories connected to works of art and to the exhibition overall.

All of these were designed intentionally to support the exhibition goals around multi-vocality, surprise, and relationships among artworks. While the students didn't have a chance to do exit interviews before the participatory activities were added to the exhibition, in summative evaluation when the participatory activities were available, many visitors volunteered that the

activities helped them explore relationships between works (Stringing Connections), the surprises hidden within artworks (Dirty Laundry), and the idea of many voices discussing art (Xavier). These nontraditional audience engagement techniques helped make complex goals and visions explicit and understandable to visitors.

What I Learned Part 1: Facilitation is Powerful

When I taught this class the first time, I put a real

premium on the idea of designing participatory activities that were visitor-driven and required minimal or no facilitation. Two years later, while I still appreciate the very real operational limitations of most institutions with regard to facilitation, I now believe that it's often essential to success. This is especially true in more traditional or formal institutions, where a pervasive "don't touch, be quiet" sensibility colors the ways visitors behave. It also proved necessary from a practical perspective in a security-minded institution where craft materials in the galleries had to be carefully controlled.

In the case of the Henry--a sparsely attended contemporary art space--the smiling invitations from my students for people to participate played a huge role in people's engagement and enjoyment. When activities were not facilitated, people were often too timid to interact. (This is less true of Dirty Laundry, which required a blend of friendly invitation to participate and private spaces to contribute secrets.) As one participant said, "the museum feels friendly in a way it usually doesn't." People make the museum friendly, not activities. All of the activities were well-used, and I think the main attractor was smiling students who invited you to play.

It's also worth noting that the facilitation supported thoughtful, on-topic engagement. While visitors used Stringing Connections and Xavier to express a variety of ideas related to art and how artworks are connected, there were no inappropriate or off-topic submissions to these projects. These two projects were always facilitated. Facilitators gave visitors a person to ask if they had questions and probably reinforced a sense that you were in the presence of an authority (a friendly one) and this was not a time to screw off.

Dirty Laundry was more complicated. It was facilitated in some areas but not in others. For example, visitors were invited to add their own secrets to hampers in front of selected artworks and were instructed to write secrets or memories that those specific artworks evoked. Even with example content to guide participation, most visitors used these opportunities to write secrets on any topic, unrelated to the artwork. Written instructions were not enough to compel them to do otherwise.

Lesson 2: Reward with Shareable Take-Aways

Each of the project teams gave participants some kind of gift for taking part. Dirty Laundry had buttons. Stringing Connections made friendship bracelets with extra yarn, which quickly became a hot commodity. And the Xavier team took a photo of each visitor with his conversation and immediately uploaded it to Flickr, handing the visitor a card with a link to access the photo later. These buttons, bracelets, and cards advertised the activities to other visitors and enhanced the sense of friendliness and invitation that helped people feel comfortable participating.

Each project also invited visitors to make assets that then were immediately available for others to see and build on. People revisited the Stringing Connections map several times to see what had been added, and Xavier participants came back to watch the Flickr sideshow. This was perhaps most effective with Dirty Laundry, where some participants who contributed a secret on the street outside the museum later came inside to check out their secrets and the rest of the collection. This isn't participatory rocket science, but the power of being able to see how you have contributed to a growing collection or project in real time is powerful.

Lesson #3: You Really Can't Guess What People Will Contribute

While this lesson is especially true of the Dirty Laundry secrets (see lesson 4), I was equally impressed by the diversity of contributions in Xavier and Stringing Connections. On the Stringing Connections map, visitors were invited to label the relationship they saw between artworks with a short phrase or sentence. While some were simple and descriptive ("very geometric," "they both feature red"), other labels revealed surprising connections ("it's what your insides look like," "silent sound"). Likewise with Xavier, some people would take a silly tack to their conversation with the sculpture, whereas others were more abstract. These differences didn't seem to be correlated with age or appearance. And while of course we know not to judge books by their covers, it's always nice to have a nine-year-old boy or an elderly couple surprise you into remembering that.

Lesson #4: Yes, Total Strangers will Share Shocking Secrets in Museums

While this project held lots of surprises, for me the biggest one was how popular the Dirty Laundry activity was, and how many people were willing to write personal secrets on bright pieces of laundry-shaped construction paper. There were 168 secrets contributed during the weekend this activity ran (a weekend in which 250 people visited the museum).

The secrets ranged from funny to sexy to deeply serious. I am still flummoxed as to what would make someone admit to an affair or bad parenting in a sterile art gallery, or the devastating one that read, "I avoid the important, difficult conversations with those I love the most." I was generally surprised that neon construction paper and golf pencils felt like good materials for sharing such personal content. I was also surprised that so many people were willing to write a secret and hand it to a facilitator to be hung on a clothesline. While the group had planned for ways to invite anonymous participation, that didn't seem to be a concern for many contributors.

Why did this happen? I don't know. But one student commented, "A lot of people need therapy and can't afford it. This is kind of an opportunity for that." I think this makes some sense. In this short video, one participant even talks about her therapist.

The secrets had such a power and draw that they started to overshadow connections with the exhibition itself. It was clear that there were some people for which the secrets were a compelling exhibit in their own right. This could be a good thing in the right context, but it's worth being aware of when you do and don't want participatory activities to stand alone.

Lesson #5: Experimentation is Stressful

We teamed up with the Henry for this project because staff members there expressed a real desire to experiment with participatory engagement. As it turned out, the experiment pushed everyone's abilities and comfort levels. I am incredibly grateful to the Henry for being so flexible and supportive of our class. It was just darn hard to do a rapid, messy experiment in a formal institution.

This was partly my fault. I resisted requests from the Henry to let staff really collaborate with students so I could protect students' independence and ability to pursue their passions without feeling pressured or influenced by staff desires. We also had an incredibly tight timeline--one month from first meeting to live projects--which necessitated setting ground rules from the start so students wouldn't have to keep asking staff if their projects were ok. While the Henry was open to experimentation, they hadn't really done interactive activities in the galleries alongside artworks before, and this project brought up a lot of questions. We had one big issue with Xavier when staff raised the question of whether the students were modifying the artwork or activating engagement around it. Ultimately that question was resolved by repositioning the activity to be slightly less close to the sculpture, but getting to that solution involved some hasty meetings and negotiations.

In the end, students told me they vastly preferred working with a museum to developing a project in a non-institutional public space. I feel mixed about this choice. While I think the students did fabulous work that is very translatable to future careers in exhibition and program design, I personally struggled with the constraints of the traditional museum wrapper. I felt like we couldn't go as far as I wanted in terms of pushing the boundaries of audience participation, and I worried that the students might end up designing glorified cart activities. Now that the dust has cleared, I think about Paul Light's definition of nonprofit innovation as "an act that challenges the prevailing wisdom as it creates public value." In the context of the Henry Art Gallery and the UW Museology program, these students were superb innovators. Now it's up to me to figure out how to push the envelope a bit further next time.

Quick Hit: What Should I Ask about Google Art?

This Friday, March 4, I'll be moderating a panel discussion about experiencing art in virtual environments at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (4pm, 1 hour, free). Our guests are two of the people behind the Google Art Project - Anna de Paula Hanika and Kai Kewei.

Anna has been forthright in the press about her enthusiasm for Google Art to open up museum and art experiences for a wide and diverse audience. I'm looking forward to a conversation that focuses on how and why Google Art and other museum-related technology initiatives can do just that. Needless to say, I'm one of the people who believes the 2008 IMLS research that shows that online encounters with museums increase visitation. Friday will present an opportunity for a deeper discussion about how virtual experiences impact users both in terms of art engagement and interest in museums.

I have a few questions I'm planning to ask about the virtual and the real, situated 3D versus more user-driven browsing, and surprising use cases for Google Art. But I'm not an expert, and I suspect many of you reading this know a lot more about Google Art than I do. What would you like me to ask? What do you want to know, and what discussions do you think are most important at this point?

The panel will not be recorded or streamed, but I'll happily report back in the comments here once it's over.

Framework vs. Sensibility: Separating Format from Voice

I was talking this week with Mark Allen, the founder of Machine Project (an alternative arts space in LA), about different models for community engagement in cultural institutions. At one point, he commented that there's a difference between the "framework" and the "sensibility" for engagement. The framework is the format or setup for how community members are invited to participate. The sensibility is the content and the style with which the engagement happens.

I've written before about the difference between participatory processes and products, but this question of frameworks and sensibility is more broadly applicable to community engagement strategies. An institution might have a formal framework and an informal sensibility or vice versa. For example, consider two independent arts organizations in Los Angeles -- Machine Project and The Public School. Machine Project has a curatorial framework--Mark and his team carefully craft its events, workshops, and exhibits. In contrast, The Public School has a democratic framework--anyone can use their website to propose a class she'd like to take or teach.

The Public School's framework is more open than Machine Project's, but that doesn't mean it has a more informal sensibility. From the perspective of a potential visitor, Machine Project presents a friendly, often silly sensibility, whereas the Public School feels formal, even a little elitist. Check out the Public School website, and you'll see you can take classes in Spinoza and Japanese aesthetics. There are terms like "cosmology of the intangible" that raise my high art hackles. Machine Project, on the other hand, recently hosted a dumpling party and offered parent-child workshops in hot-wiring cars. Here's an excerpt from the delightful dumpling party invite:

Tickets are $20 a person and cover all the dumplings you can eat, unless someone else eats all they can eat faster than you and we run out of dumplings. But we're going to get a lot of dumplings. Space is limited because it's just one grandmother's condo and the neighbors are really old and we don't want to upset them.

For me, it's helpful to separate sensibility from frameworks so I can think about what I'm trying to achieve with a particular project or institution. Sometimes, when I'm focused on welcoming visitors and being good hosts, I'm really talking about sensibility. And other times, when I'm focused on opening up access and opportunities for audience members to partner with staff, I'm talking about framework. It's interesting to note that frameworks can be easily replicated and extended--The Public School now has centers in seven cities around the world--whereas sensibilities, which are often idiosyncratic to institutional leaders, cannot.

It's easy to assume that an informal sensibility implies an open framework and vice versa--but that assumption doesn't bear out in reality. A museum can be friendly, or serious, or funny, while maintaining a traditional relationship with visitors as consumers of experiences. And alternatively, an institution can conduct co-creative projects with community members without altering its external sensibility or institutional tone. A welcoming and collaborative sensibility is important to attracting and working with participants, but that tone may not carry over to the rest of the institution and its broader audience.

In fact, I find that participatory products are often more likely to reflect a formal sensibility than their traditional counterparts. Community galleries look old-fashioned because citizen curators aspire to emulate the most traditional vision of a museum possible. Teen docents are more serious than adults because they want to be treated like professionals. Co-creation projects are often measured partly by their ability to "fit in" with the rest of the institution. It takes a high level of confidence--which comes with experience--to reject the dominant sensibility and try something else.

When we look at innovative community engagement initiatives, or when we think of how we ourselves want to be innovative, it's worth considering the difference between innovative frameworks and sensibilities. There are some extraordinary institutions, like STREB Labs in New York, that innovate in both ways. But it's far more typical to focus on just one. The Exploratorium and MCA Denver are both masters of pairing fairly standard museum frameworks for audience engagement with an energized, funky sensibility. The Wing Luke Asian Museum marries an incredible, radical community framework with a more traditional museum sensibility. The Wing Luke makes their format available for others to use, whereas the elevator performances at the MCA Denver and the cardboard villages at the Exploratorium are part of what make those institutions uniquely themselves.

When I first met Adam Lerner, the Director of the MCA Denver, we had a friendly argument about visitor participation. Adam advocated that museums should focus on cultivating a strong voice rather than giving up to the clutter and dilution of the town square. I argued that involving visitors with a well-designed process meant diversifying and opening the institution, not muddling it with junk. I realize now that we were talking about two different things. Adam is a master of sensibility. I was focused on framework. We're both driven to make museums more exciting and relevant to visitors; we were just tackling the problem in different ways.

These days, I spend a lot of time working on new models for both framework and sensibility. It's hard to say which is more important--or challenging--to transform. What's more interesting to you--changing the voice and sensibility with which you engage audiences, or changing the framework for doing so? Do you see these as separate, connected, or conflated?

Quick Hit: How Do You Follow Up with Participants?

When someone leaves a comment, makes a sculpture, or writes a poem at your institution, is that the end of their participation? This email from TripAdvisor is a great example of the simple power of getting back in touch with participants--to thank them, and more importantly, to demonstrate that their participation mattered to other visitors.

There are great examples of this kind of thing focusing solely on the participant--for example, the Chicago Children's Museum practice of inviting kids to write postcards home to themselves from the museum. But a lot of participation extends beyond the individual, and we should celebrate that. Too often, we treat participation as a one-on-one transaction between participant and institution, when in reality visitors are always making things for each other as well. These kinds of messages help people be more aware of how their actions impact others, helping them move from "me" to "we."

Imagine sending someone a simple email to say that "fifty visitors have played with your toy/enjoyed your video/responded to your comment." This kind of message does three things:

• it validates participation in the eyes not just of the institution but other "people like you"
• it reminds visitors that they participated and that their work lives on at the institution
• it may inspire them to come back again to see how their work has evolved and what others have shared

Of course, this requires capturing an email address at the point of participation, which isn't always easy, especially for low-tech projects. But in a few recent projects where I've offered visitors the option to have something emailed home, I've gotten 95-100% participation. People are eager to continue their relationship with an institution after having a creative, social interaction onsite. Why not use messages like this one to help those relationships along?

Design for Participation: Video from NODEM 2010

I just discovered that my keynote at the 2o10 NODEM conference on digital media and heritage is available online. If you're into video, check out this 25 minute talk I gave on the conference theme "from place to presence." I focused on three surprising things I've learned about design for participation both in physical spaces and on the Web:

1. the importance of constraints and scaffolding to supporting creative and social participation
2. the role design plays in driving how people participate
3. the essential necessity for the institution to be responsive to participants

If you want to download the slides, they're here. And if you want to see other NODEM talks from Fiona Cameron and Michael Edson, they're here.

Enjoy!

Leading the Participant

Remember the last time someone said to you, "this is entirely your choice?" Maybe it was your family saying you could pick the restaurant, or your boss offering you one of two paths forward. Whatever the situation, personal or professional, the choice is not always honestly yours. Sometimes you really are the master of your own fate. Sometimes you're not.

When institutions invite visitors to participate on their terms, it's often tinged with the same lack of clarity about visitors' personal agency. Last month, the radio show This American Life ran a fascinating episode called "Kid Politics," which starts with a long segment about the Air Force One Discovery Center immersive experience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Whatever your opinion of Reagan, the segment, reported by Starlee Kline, is a fascinating perspective on what happens when we tell visitors the choice is theirs and then subtly (or not-so-subtly) tell them what to do.

The Discovery Center is a one-hour simulation in which groups of students (grade 5 and up) role play in a realistic, interactive environment. The students are each given roles on one of three teams--the Oval Office, a military command center, and a press room. The topic is the invasion of Grenada. The students are presented with the situation that Reagan faced (1983, a Communist revolution in a small country near other Communist countries, a group of 800 American medical students stranded there) and asked to figure out what to do. You can listen to Starlee Kline's opinionated 20-minute piece about it here. There's also a shorter, more expository (and positive) CBS video about the experience here.

As the students enter the simulation, onscreen actors tell them:

When you walk through these doors, you will no longer be students. You will make history. Lives are at stake. Adult staff members are not here to answer questions or help you. The responsibility is entirely yours.

But that's not exactly true from Starlee Kline's perspective. Starlee follows the group of students who portray Reagan and his advisors in the Oval Office. The simulation is structured to give students information, then a binary choice. Then more information, then another binary choice. Each time the students decide what to do, the young Reagan picks up a red phone and presses either A or B. But it's not a fair choice. As Starlee explains:

Before they start, the kids are told there aren't right or wrong answers. But the whole thing's rigged to make what Ronald Reagan did in 1983 look like the most appealing option. Each time they choose to do what he did, a bell goes off like they've won a tropical vacation to Grenada, instead of an invasion.

The adult educators and onscreen actors reward the group, saying things like "nicely done, that's correct based on what Ronald Reagan did," and "excellent work, President Reagan."

Starlee follows several groups through the Discovery Center experience over the course of a day. It isn't until the last group when Starlee sees a young Reagan who decides against the invasion--and against history. Whenever he enters the "wrong" choice, there's a loud, angry buzzer. This time, the onscreen actors and educator don't say "good job" or reward the students for their desire to avoid invasion. Instead, they get a lecture on what really happened in 1983.

If the point of the Discovery Center is to teach students the facts of the Grenada invasion, it's reasonable to create a program in which there's a right and wrong answer about what happened in history. But walking into this experience, the kids were told that the responsibility was "entirely theirs." It's disingenuous--and makes for a lopsided role playing experience--if there's only really one path to take.

That said, I sympathize with the challenges involved in designing something like this--challenges we faced again and again when I was working on the Operation Spy immersive experience at the International Spy Museum. Mira Cohen, the Reagan Library's Director of Education (and the creator of the Discovery Center experience) told me that the intent was to design a pilot program for 5th graders with a focus on learning historical thinking skills. As Mira explained:

The goal is for students to experience presidential decision making, and then debrief, discuss, and share, utilizing historical and civic literacy skills. The buzzer is meant to show whether or not you made the same choice as Reagan--not whether or not there was a right or wrong choice made. And the intention was for the facilitator to point out either during the experience itself or during the debrief that there are a lot of different choices.

Alissa Whitely, who manages the operation of the Discovery Center for the Reagan Foundation, felt that Starlee Kline misrepresented the whole Discovery Center experience and that it is much more even-handed than was portrayed by Starlee. Alissa told me:

Again and again, our educators tell the students that there are no wrong answers here and that students have a different perspective given their place in history. Yes, the majority of the groups probably choose what Reagan actually did. But when the students leave, we want to make sure they have the right information about what really happened in history. There's a thin line between understanding what really happened and imagining something else based on what the students experienced in a simulation.

Could 5th graders handle a truly open simulation? Maybe, maybe not. In a charming and potential heretical chapter in the book Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, Minnesota History Center Museum director Dan Spock argues that for kids, imagining history, even inaccurately, may be more valuable than teaching them what really happened. While I tend to agree with Dan, I suspect that school boards across California may not share our enthusiasm. Imagine how the Discovery Center simulation might be different if kids really had a choice, if the Library worked with historians to imagine and spin out augmented versions of the past. It would be both exciting and confusing.

It would also be expensive. In the case of Operation Spy, we developed a fictitious espionage story, so we felt free to give visitors open choices and spin out different, value-neutral outcomes. But even in that situation, we only gave visitors a truly open choice at the end--it was just too complicated and costly to design spaces, interactive challenges, and media to support multiple storylines throughout the whole experience. Mira Cohen noted some of the practical considerations that kept the Reagan Library team from going in this direction with the Discovery Center, commenting:

From an experiential perspective, if we had true forking paths, it would take more time and more complex facilitation. We had a mandate to be able to put through five school groups per day, which means 45-50 minutes per group. Also, we're working with 5th graders who actually aren't learning anything about 20th century history, so they're coming in with a focus on historical thinking but not a strong understanding of what happened in the 1980s. I absolutely could imagine that those kinds of forking scenarios could be created using more space, more historical documents, greater time for analysis, maybe a different audience, and I think that would be extraordinarily exciting.

This post isn't a question of who's "right" about how these experiences are perceived by visitors. There's no A or B button at the end of this post with a buzzer ready to go off if you agree with Starlee Kline or the folks who work with the Air Force One Discovery Center. This post is here to raise questions: what kinds of choices are you letting participants make in the experiences you design? How honest and transparent are you about those choices? And if you are leading the participant, why?

Are the Arts Habit-Forming?

Imagine this situation:

You go to an arts event, one of a type you rarely or never take part in. Maybe it's a live music concert, or a museum visit, or a play. You have a great time.

What will it take for you to do it again?

This is a question I've been puzzling over now for a few months, both professionally and personally. There's been a lot of innovation in arts programming in the last few years. Museums and other venues are offering special programs for teens, for hipsters, for people who want a more active or spiritual or participatory experience. Sometimes these innovations are woven into the institutional core programming, as at the redesigned, highly interactive Oakland Museum of California. Others layer these new activities and audiences on through monthly late nights or short-term installations.

In most cases the goal is the same: to attract new audiences and help them understand how the institution (and the arts experience) might fit into their lives. Internally, staff members spend a good amount of time grappling with how to invite new audiences in, and whether it is possible to use "parallel" programming to draw new visitors into the "pipeline" of core offerings.

But I'm interested in a more basic question: what does it take for a person--a visitor/audience member--to form an art or museum habit? If we want to transform museums into place for everyday use that people drop in on for a quick fix of history, a meeting with a friend, or a cup of coffee, what will that require?

I ask these questions because I think there's a pretty big gulf between the one-time or occasional arts experience and the idea of art and institutions as part of your life. For myself personally, this gulf rears its head every time I go to a live music concert. Each time I go (about four times a year), I have a fabulous time. But it never makes me want to increase the frequency of my participation. Only in the last two weeks, when I've had the unusual experience of going to three music events (symphony, rock, jazz) in a short period of time, have I started to think about the possibility of integrating live music more consistently into my life.

How do you form an arts habit? Is the psychology behind doing so the same as forming a fitness habit or a social habit (like going out to the same bar weekly with friends)? Investigating this question with friends and colleagues, it seems like people form habits that take them outside the home for at least four reasons:

1. Social pressure. If you have a friend or group of friends who like to "go out"--whether that's brunch, hiking, movies, or museums--you're more likely to form a habit that involves external venues. I've met people who tell me, "every Sunday we go to brunch and then the museum," or "our crew loves to go dancing every weekend." These habits tend to be highly socially-focused--if the group or some portion of the group isn't going, individuals won't go out on their own.
2. External schedule or pressure. Soccer leagues, weekly yoga, six-session guitar lessons, theater season passes. When something gets booked on your calendar, you attend. Some of the most successful museum programs I know of that draw people again and again happen on a regular schedule. If you love Toddler Time, it becomes part of your Tuesdays. It's funny that museums tout the fact that you can come "anytime," but in most of our lives, the things we commit to are things that happen on a regular schedule. If your calendar doesn't ping you to go to class, you might not attend.
3. Repeat exposure. This is related to 2) but slightly different. Lots of motivational literature suggests that it takes multiple sessions in a short timeframe to take on a new habit, whether a new food, fitness regimen, or activity. This is why some yoga studios offer "30 day challenges" in which you get all your classes free if you come every day for 30 days. The idea is that once you've come every day for a month, you'll be sufficiently hooked to continue your participation (albeit likely at slower frequency). I think I'm experiencing this shift with live music now due to repeat exposure in a short period of time.
4. Intrinsic pressure or desire. This is the holy grail for arts, I think--the person who shifts from social or external pressure to feeling, deep inside, that they want to make the arts institution part of their regular life. Of course, intrinsic desire is not always motivated by the purest intentions. People go to the gym and the grocery store because they feel they must. It helps that these activities have an outcome that is widely accepted as good and useful. Even internally-driven motivation is influenced by external societal pressures.

Some activities are terrifically good at encouraging regular use because they combine all three of these. For me, this often happens with team sports. A new sport instantly introduces me to a gung-ho social group, a regular schedule of opportunity to play, a heavy dose of endorphins, and the chance to challenge myself physically and mentally. For someone else, this might be knitting (which also can come with social support, regular schedule, opportunity to be creative, and a warm and pleasing outcome). There are other activities that start with only one type of motivation--say, the intrinsic desire to get a cup of coffee--but are reinforced over time by other forms, such as casual friendships with the coffee shop staff and other regulars.

What are museums and arts institutions doing to tap into these forms of motivation? If you want to encourage people not just to come once but to come regularly, how do you do it (besides hawking a membership)? Here are a few ideas I could imagine supporting the development of new habits around arts participation:

• Market your venue explicitly as a social one. The single most likely reason I will go try something new is if a friend, date, or family member invites me. Even though data shows that the majority of people visit museums in social groups, there's a misperception--especially of art museums--that they are places for solo contemplation. Especially for infrequent arts participants, marketing that emphasizes the museum as a date venue, a post-brunch stroll for the girls, or an after school hangout, can help people see that they can suggest a museum to friends the way they might suggest a restaurant.
• Create more regular programming that you encourage people to buy or register for as a series. There's a reason theaters work so hard to get season subscribers (and it's not just the advance payment). When you "sign on" for six plays, you have an external motivation to attend. You don't have to remember, consider the opportunity, and motivate yourself each time a new show comes--it's already on your calendar. I've talked to some busy parents who say museums aren't part of their lives because their kids are already jam-packed with soccer and violin lessons and play dates. If families in your area coordinate their outings on an advance calendar, your institution needs to get on that schedule to be a viable part of their lives.
• Introduce new participants to committed members at every new event. New audiences may not be aware that there are other people who see dance performances or jazz shows or science exhibits as part of their everyday lives. One of the most powerful motivators I've had in athletic situations is when an experienced player welcomes me into the game, gives me some pointers, and invites me to join the team to hang out after the sweating is done. Too many new arts experiences are lonely, transactional, and devoid of social engagement with other participants. If your institution or event has members or regulars who love the programming, those people are the best ones to welcome newcomers and share their (hopefully infectious) joy with them.
• Help people understand what they will "get" out of regular participation. To a newcomer, it's not apparent that a museum offers many kinds of programs, or that regular attendance to an arts event might provide deeper or multi-faceted experiences over time. What they see is what they get: that day, that event. Gyms are incredibly good at selling people on the idea of increased fitness, attractiveness, self-confidence, and muscle tone over time. They introduce every new member to the wide range of activities offered and explain how all of them contribute to a healthier you. But arts professionals are more squeamish about trumpeting the value of their offerings. People are not bombarded by marketing messages and societal pressure to engage with cultural venues. There aren't ads on TV talking about how great it is to get lost in art. Cultural institutions need to be overt and unapologetic about the benefits of sustained involvement. Visitors, especially new ones, aren't going to connect the dots on their own.
• Encourage people to use the institution for a broad range of reasons. Jasper Visser wrote a great blog post about untraditional uses of museums, celebrating people who come in to shop, do homework, or meet new people. We need to make these myriad uses more explicit. The people who feel comfortable having a social event at a museum or popping in to spend time with a single artifact tend to be people who have great experience with and comfort in the institution already. Most visitors feel like they have to "do it all" to have a successful experience. We need to debunk this impression if we want people to use the museum casually. I love the Dallas Museum of Art's list of "100 experiences" you can have at that institution. This kind of list helps people understand that there are lots of ways to "do" the museum and that they don't have to leave exhausted to have done it "right."
• Find a way to encourage a participation blitz. What's the 30-day yoga challenge equivalent for the arts? Could a group of institutions in your town get together and offer a set of experiences, events, or cultural practices that people could partake in daily for a month? This could be an exciting way to jump start participation in many institutions, and at the same time, to support the development of new social relationships that center around the arts.

What do you think it takes to build an arts habit?

Sustaining Innovation Part 4: Slack or Shoestring?

This is the last in a series of posts about Paul Light's book Sustaining Innovation: Creating Nonprofit and Government Organizations that Innovate Naturally. This post is another "open thread" encouraging conversation about a core question that arose for me as we've explored the topic this month.

Last week, this blog featured an interview with Sarah Schultz, a long-time staffer at the Walker Art Center, about her experiences working in an innovative arts organization. One of the things Sarah focused on is the idea of having "slack"--money, time, and headspace--to pursue experiments and let innovative ideas germinate. As we discussed slack, I was very sensitive to the fact that Sarah works in a big institution where there IS money to find in the corners of the budget and where there are enough people to be able to put together creative projects without completely abandoning their basic work requirements.

Most museums, frankly, aren't like that. The majority of museums are quite small in budget and staff. Sarah may be looking for slack on the order of $10,000 while your museum might be lucky to scrounge $100 for new ideas.

And this makes me wonder: is the "slack" model as appropriate to small, scrappy institutions as it is to larger organizations? The alternative is the model that startups use--the "shoestring" model--where passionate people bootstrap their vision into being, constantly facing threats from the outside. In Paul Light's book, he describes several nonprofits that are more shoestring than slack, fighting every day to make their innovative ideas happen. One of those--the Phoenix Group--overextends itself and has to close up shop, but the others survive and thrive.

Picking this apart requires differentiating organizational maturity from size or budget. In her great book on nonprofit lifecycles, Susan Kenny Stevens defines seven stages of nonprofits: idea, startup, growth, mature, decline, turnaround, and terminal (if the turnaround doesn't happen). The Walker is clearly both mature and large. As a mature institution, it needs to focus on using slack to drive innovation, since innovation often falls off the table when an organization reaches maturity. Without continuing to innovate and stay relevant, the organization goes into decline.

But for institutions that are not yet mature, baking in slack may not be necessary or even feasible. An institution that is (whether by design or accident) constantly in startup or growth mode is one that is constantly innovating by necessity. This mode of operation can be exhausting and risky, but it's also exciting and not as prone to slip into the self-congratulatory irrelevance that marks the shift from maturity to decline.

I'm not sure what's better: to be a mature institution with various systems to continue promoting innovation or to be a startup institution that is always hungry for innovation to drive growth. I know that Paul Light would say it's the first one, because nonprofits need to avoid risk to sustainably deliver on their missions. But I'm not sure I agree, or that that model is best for everyone. What's worse, the threat of irrelevance or the threat of insolvency? How would you rather innovate--on a shoestring, or with built-in slack?