A Simple Outcome of Visitor Participation: Delight

It's funny. I've spent years advocating for visitor participation for all kinds of reasons. Visitor contributions help participants feel connected to institutions. It can provide valuable information for the staff to do their jobs better. It helps institutions leverage the skills and creativity of their communities.

Now that I'm on staff at a museum, I've (re)discovered a more pedestrian value of visitor participation: it's delightful. Every day when I walk by our visitor comment board, I feel like I'm getting little gifts from visitors. The AT&T guy doesn't write poems for me. The budget doesn't produce abstract drawings or suggestions for how we can serve our community better.

I think on some level, we've always known that these handwritten notes, drawings, and missives are charming. Some institutions have even banked on that charm to create compelling ad campaigns featuring visitors' comments. As a researcher and activist for participation, I've sometimes downplayed the value of this charm because it seems like arsenal for professionals who claim participatory projects are frivolous. "Be charming and delightful" isn't one of the bottom-line goals of most museums.

But maybe it should be. For me, a professional who is pushing every day to make a struggling museum relevant and sustainable, I find incredible joy in these simple visitor comments. Scanning the comment board is one of the few activities in my workday when I'm confronted with unbridled creativity and optimism about the future of our institution. The comments provide me with some mental uplift, and they inspire me to keep pushing. And yes, they've served our organization in all kinds of tangible ways--introducing us to new interns, volunteers, and program ideas. But I have a new appreciation for the intangible now as well.

When we have to clear more room for new comments, I move the old ones to my office wall. My goal is to eventually be surrounded by the voices of our visitors--funny, sweet, demanding--so they can inspire me all day long. That may sound sappy, but these are tough times for people working in the arts. I figure we need all the delight we can get.

You Can Be A (fill in the blank)! ...Yeah, Right.

When I was in high school, we had an all-school assembly featuring a guest speaker who did a little thought experiment with all of us:

Speaker: How many of you can draw?
A couple kids raised their hands.
Speaker: How many of you can sing?
A tentative arm raised from a choir kid.
Speaker: How many of you can dance?
Nothing.

Speaker: If you were in kindergarten, you all would have raised your hands each time.

This was an aha moment for me at the time about self-confidence and self-evaluation, and it's one I've carried into my career. I started out working in science centers, where there is a very strong underlying message pushed at visitors again and again: "You can be a scientist!" I've often argued that art and history museums should adopt this approach and encourage visitors to explore their potential as artists or historians, not just audiences for content.

But now I've started to question the value of this message. There are many ridiculous exhibits that prompt you to "be the surgeon!" or "be the authenticator!" You will not actually become an archaeologist based on an exhibit, and the message quickly starts to feel silly and disingenuous.

The goal of the "you be the X" message is limited. It focuses on the mechanics of the roleplay and not the affective experience of what it would really be like to take on a foreign challenge. From my perspective, the most powerful outcome of role-playing is a sense of empathy for someone else's experience. What would it be like to live in a tenement? What does it feel like to take care of dying people? What is it like to discover something and have no one believe your findings?

I'd extend this to the long-standing debate about "You be the curator!" experiences in museums. I don't think it's useful for us to argue about whether people are or are not curators; nor is it useful to assign them job descriptions based on simple interactives. Instead, I'd rather we focus on experiences that say, "you can help us do our curatorial work," or "here's how a curator might look at this--coming from that perspective, what would you choose?"

It may be less sexy to say "you can try on another person's experience" than it is to say "you can be an X." But it's also more realistic (and a little less pushy). It encourages experimentation, discovery, and self-confidence. It embraces amateurism.

In some ways, the "you can be an X" argument precludes amateur involvement--it subtly suggests that the only way to be a scientist/artist/curator is to do so professionally. I still support the vision for museums and cultural institutions to help people discover new career paths and avocations. I'm just as charmed as the next person when someone says, "I became an engineer because of an experience I had at a science center." But those people are one in a million, and for the other 999,999, I'd rather we focus on encouraging exploration on an amateur level. I want to hear a lot more people saying, "I'd love to mess around with this on the weekend," or "I think I'll try to find a meetup group for that," or "I'm going to find my old paint set."

And so now when I remember that day in high school, I don't draw out the message that "you can be an artist/musician/dancer." Instead, I hear: "you can try lots of things, be competent at them, enjoy them, and learn from them. Even if they scare you."

That's a message I'd love to be sharing with visitors. What about you?

Open Thread: How Do You Feel About Music in Museums?

Should museums play music - in public spaces and or in galleries? If so, how should they determine what to play?

I asked this question on Facebook and Twitter, and the responses have been varied and fascinating. So I thought I'd open it up to the Museum 2.0 community, in hopes that we'll get some juicy international perspectives.

I'm conflicted on this issue.

Pros for music:

• Music helps designers frame the atmosphere for the intended experience at the museum. You can pick music that helps people get into a reflective, active, or social mood--whatever you are trying to achieve.
• A totally quiet, empty space can feel uncomfortable. Many visitors to our small museum have commented that they wish there was some music playing, and I assume that they believe it would help them have a more enjoyable experience.
• A low level of sound (music and or speaking) can provide a hum that helps people feel relaxed about talking in the museum. If it's not silent by design, people are more likely to override their "shussh!" expectations and talk.

Cons for music:

• While silence can be oppressive, music can be distracting.
• You can't please everyone. One person's favorite song makes another person want to stab themselves in the eye with a pencil. Most museums are trying to please everyone. They're not comfortable tailoring to an audience and saying "we're a jazz kind of place," or "we're a punk kind of place" the way a retail establishment would.
• Licensing fees. This shouldn't be a show stopper for a small institution that flies under the radar, but it's certainly worth considering.
• Repetitive music annoys staff. While I'm sensitive to this issue, I do not think it should be a serious factor in making a decision about this.

Lots of people online have weighed in with their "love it"s and "hate it"s. What I'd love to hear more of are reflections based on research and also clever ideas for HOW to use music if at all. Some of my favorite ideas that people have mentioned:

• having a sound curator and commissioning soundscapes for exhibitions (the City Museum in Arhus does this)
• inviting visitors to curate the tracklist
• sound installations in unusual places, like the elevator
• an experiment on how "incongruous" music might impact a viewing experience - i.e. techno in the art museum. I could imagine the same piece with a wildly varied soundtrack and asking people to talk about their response based on the song played.
• and of course, who could forget Machine Project's charming "personal audio tour" in which a visitor plugs his/her headphones into a guy with an electric guitar who follows the visitor around?

How have you seen music used effectively or disastrously in museums? What experiments or ideas would you like to try?

The Event-Driven Museum?

This is the casual attendance data from my first full month as the Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. It doesn't include school groups or facility rentals, but it does include everyone else who walks through our doors during open hours. This graph is making me change the way I think about what our museum is for and how we should market it. Simply, I'm shifting my perspective from an exhibit-driven model to an event-driven one.

Let me explain. Right now, as is obvious from the graph, our attendance at a single "Free First Friday" exceeds casual attendance for the rest of the month. On First Fridays we are open late, for free, with a band, food, and beverages for sale, as well as a few programmatic add-ons. First Friday is not just a Museum event; it happens all over Santa Cruz and has grown tremendously over the past few years. People turn out all over the city for art, and the Museum (along with lots of other galleries, retail stores, and restaurants) benefits.

First Fridays are raucous and fabulous events. It's not just a party; it's arguably the day of the month when we come the closest to achieving our vision of being a thriving, central gathering place for our community around art, history, ideas and culture. The audience is diverse and attentive; the experience is content-rich and on-mission. In May, we packed the auditorium at 5:30pm for a lecture on the future of the Museum, followed by an artist talk and tour. This past Friday, in addition to a small exhibit opening, we hosted a community art-making project where people could make quilt squares related to their most valued memories of home. People danced, pored over the exhibits, drank wine, did arts and crafts, and had a great time.

While part of our attendance spike on First Fridays is certainly due to the fact that the Museum is free, that's not as significant a factor as the fact that First Friday is an exciting event with a lot of community support and publicity. While we do have higher daytime attendance on First Friday than other weekdays (which could be attributed to the free admission), the throngs come from 6-8:30pm: hours we aren't usually open, when we offer a loud, social experience we don't usually provide.

Over the past several months, as I've been thinking about what makes the arts habit-forming, I come back again and again to the primacy of events as the driver that bring people in the door. Events have an urgency to them. They have a specific, focused narrative to them, and often a specific audience as well. They're social. They're often offered at special times that are more conducive to recreation than standard open hours. They provide amenities, like food and drink, that we don't usually offer. They are made for people to enjoy.

At a large museum, events and casual attendance are often thought of as separate parts of the operation, with an understanding that both offer valuable experiences in their own right. My suspicion is that even in organizations with a comparable attendance pattern to ours, the dominant mindset is "we are a museum of exhibits and educational programs that also provides events" as opposed "we are a museum that produces events and also has exhibits and educational programs." I know that's the paradigm I've always employed, despite seeing the huge spikes that museums of all sizes experience for specific events--heritage days, late nights, Dia de los Muertos, art festivals, Chinese boat races.

Why do we see these events as secondary if they are primary for a majority of our audience? From where I sit now, seeing the difference between days when five people visit and First Fridays where the museum is overflowing with people, I start to question why First Friday only happens once a month. For the majority of people who step through our doors, we are an event venue. More people come to the event who don't casually visit the museum than the other way around. And frankly, our casual visitation is so low that it can feel strange to be in the museum when there is no one else there.

And so as I look at this museum and what we have to do to increase participation, I'm starting with an event-based model. It's easier, cheaper, and faster for my team to develop high-quality programs with partners who already reach audiences of interest than it is for us to go directly to those audiences and convince them to casually visit our exhibits. Some of these events are big productions that will go on the calendar, but others are small--an artist demonstration, a game night, a makers' meetup. Even these simple events create a sense that "something is happening" at the museum in a way that exhibitions can't.

I know there are limitations to this model. It would be challenging (and exhausting) to produce events every day of the week, and not every visitor wants to experience museums in a social setting. But by offering events with a variety of types, sizes, intensity levels, and audiences, we can start to demonstrate that the museum is a dynamic, buzz-worthy place.

At the same time, we're working on making the museum a more welcoming physical space. My goal is to activate the museum with events at the same time as we soften some of the colder parts of the building that make a casual visit a little uncomfortable for many people. Again, this has little to do with exhibits--it has to do with being convivial and helping people who come for an event imagine that they might also like to come for a more self-driven experience.

If this all works out, a year from now the Museum of Art & History should both be a go-to program space (based on our events) and an appealing place to hang out (based on our welcoming efforts). I think we need both of those perceptions firmly in place before we can tackle the challenge of increasing casual daytime visitation.

I'm not sure if this strategy is a means to an end or a new model for how we'll operate all the time. What do you think? What would change if your institution was event-driven (or is it already)?

Empowering Staff to Take Creative Risks

What kind of support do you need to be confident about taking a risk in your work? What are you willing to risk to pursue your professional dreams?

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums in Houston, I was honored to chair a fabulous panel on empowering museum staff to take creative risks (slides here). This is a topic of particular fascination for me as someone who has worked as an external consultant/provocateur/risk-encourager and is now in the director's seat for the first time.

I was joined by Lori Fogarty (ED of the Oakland Museum of California), Adam Lerner (ED and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver), and Beck Tench (Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science).

I learned three big things from this panel:

1. Risk-takers need space-makers.
2. Risk-takers and space-makers are different kinds of leaders.
3. Risk-takers often don't see their choices as risky.

Here's a bit more on each of these.

Risk-takers need "space-makers" to provide them with the support, the creative license, and the encouragement to try new things, fail, and get up again.

Beck beautifully described her entry into museum work. She was told from day one that her director would be disappointed in her if she "didn't fall flat on her face." At first, she was excited, but it took time and trust for her to really believe her supervisors and start to pursue challenging goals. Over time, she transitioned from being a risk-taker to also being a space-maker for others in her organization, holding their hands and cheerleading them through the beginning of a process that would eventually end with a hand-off in which the new risk-takers would take total ownership of their new projects.

This concept of space-making resonated with the rest of us, and it also got me thinking about healthy and unhealthy ways to do it. I've talked with many directors who say, "I tell my staff to take risks, but they don't." I suspect those directors are not following up their words with actions that demonstrate their trust and willingness to make space for experimentation and failure.

It's not easy to get this right. When I worked at The Tech Museum, I employed an less-evolved mode of space-making: the "blame me" approach. Whenever my team got worried that we were taking a risk and might get in trouble, I'd always say, "blame me." Yes, my willingness to take the heat helped us execute a risky project during tough times, but it didn't necessarily empower people to take risks on their own. Beck's approach, in which staff empower each other, is much better for an organization overall. It's one of the things that impresses me most about the Ruru Revolution project at Puke Ariki in New Zealand--it's a fabulous example of staff members making space for each other to take risks together.

It's also something I've seen work well in a workshop setting. When an external trainer gives everyone specific instructions to be silly or try something odd, everyone gets to go through the stress, excitement, and positive outcome that comes with healthy risk-taking. Over my time as a consultant, I shifted from planning risky projects with clients to spending much more time just experimenting with them, getting everyone to play and model what it would be like to make a larger risk possible.

Some directors are highly effective at empowering risk-taking by being supreme space-makers, whereas others lead by example as supreme creative risk-takers themselves. The outcome is very different.

At one point, Adam Lerner commented that Lori is the ultimate space-maker, supporting creative risk-takers throughout her organization, whereas Adam is more like the art director of a design firm, a risk-taker whose creative vision steers the boat. Both models work; the Oakland Museum of California (where Lori works) is an incredible example of a large, bureaucratic organization undergoing a radical, whole institution redesign, whereas the MCA Denver (Adam's museum) is a small, focused fount of creative expression and ingenuity.

Which kind of leader do you want to be? Which one can you be? Lori is a master of complex leadership, with an incredible strategic vision for how to support a diverse staff of risk-takers, fence-sitters, and in-betweeners. Adam is a creative genius who attracts and cultivates a risk-taking team that develops truly original programming with a consistent voice.

Both of these models are prone to dangers; space-makers like Lori can fall short in creating the right structure for risk-taking, and risk-takers like Adam can overly constrict the creative direction of an institution. If Lori is too gentle, her staff might not go far enough out of their comfort zones. If Adam is too wild, his staff could spend all their time being zany and not enough getting their jobs done.

I'm still figuring out who I want to be as a leader in my own organization. I've been seen for a long time as a creative risk-taker, but I honestly get the most value out of hearing from people who have run with ideas I've shared and done mind-blowing projects based on them. I think it's easy to undervalue the Loris and overvalue the Adams in this world. I know from where I sit, I feel like I have a lot more to learn about space-making for my staff, volunteers, and participants.

Ultimately, risk-takers are people for whom there is no other option. They take risks because they are driven to accomplish their dreams above all else.

When preparing this panel discussion, we spent some time wrangling as a group about the difference between "being creative" and "taking risks." None of us, especially Beck, Adam, and I, who all identify as creative risk-takers, could really parse out what was and wasn't a risk.

This became obvious when Adam told the story of how he ended up leaving the Denver Art Museum to start The Lab at Belmar (which merged two years ago with MCA Denver when he became director). Adam told us he would make these crazy powerpoint presentations with ideas for art events that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he would present these to his bosses at the Denver Art Museum. His supervisors kept saying no, nicely, and he kept making his powerpoints. Eventually, when a donor came to the Museum managers looking for someone to help him start an experimental art center in the Belmar shopping center, they introduced him to Adam.

What drove Adam to keep making these presentations? What drove me to volunteer for new tasks at the Spy Museum despite my boss kicking me under the table to try to dissuade me? What drives anyone who applies for a job they aren't qualified for or asks someone they've just met out on a date? I suspect none of these people would say they are taking a risk. They would say they are doing what they have to do to pursue their dreams.

When people tell me they work at an institution where the management doesn't provide the support to take risks, I ask why they stay. I know there are a hundred reasons why people do jobs that aren't entirely fulfilling, but for me personally, that issue is a deal-breaker. I've always been willing to risk my job to do what I thought was right/exciting/necessary, and I never felt like it was a risk. I felt like it was a reasonable tradeoff to do what I needed to do.

This leads to the funny problem of answering the questions at the top of this post. Risk-takers might be the worst at understanding what kind of space-making is necessary to help others feel confident and able to take risks themselves. What are you willing to risk to pursue your dreams? What advice would you give someone like me who doesn't wholly understand what is and isn't necessary to make risk-taking possible?

Guest Post: Lessons Learned Designing a Mobile Game for Balboa Park

Today, a guest post from one of the people who inspires me: Ken Eklund. Ken is a game designer and writer who develops narrative, collaborative augmented reality experiences about serious issues. When I worked briefly with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative to conceptualize a mobile phone-based game to connect visitors to the park to its cultural institutions and history, I knew Ken would be the perfect person to make it happen. Now, that game, GISKIN ANOMALY, is live. In this post, Ken shares some surprising lessons learned so far.

What’s the opposite of Voicemail Hell? Giskin Anomaly

Right around Thanksgiving 2010 a strange story began to unfold in Balboa Park, San Diego. An official-looking decal for the “GISKIN ANOMALY SURVEY PROJECT” appeared on a window in the park. It has a 800-number on it (877-737-3132) and a three-digit ID number (131). But “official” it is not. When San Diego visitors dial the 800-number and then the ID number, they get past the smoke screen and hear a character named Pandora, who tracks down "anomalies", leave messages for someone named Drake, who then decodes them. The “anomalies” are ghost thoughts from the past left by people who were in Balboa Park during World War Two, and still somehow tethered to the landscape.

As I said, a strange story. Mysterious! Intriguing! And of course, not exactly true. GISKIN ANOMALY is a “historical fiction” game I created for Rich Cherry and the Balboa Park Online Collaborative. They asked for an experience that could transform how you perceived the Park – whether you were new or had lived in San Diego all your life. And widely accessible. Play any time, as much as you like, and play with any cellphone. The goal was to design an audio tour for people who never do audio tours.

GISKIN ANOMALY is now pretty much complete, getting good numbers, and winner of the silver MUSE award at AAM in the Games/Augmented Reality category. What are the lessons learned?

Lessons Learned 1: Build it, and they will come
We thought GISKIN was cool and different, but was it cool and different enough to actually attract people to the Park? Was it too weird? We had a hard time describing it (still do) and worried about this.

We shouldn’t have. We got over 1,000 calls our first day. Lesson: Have faith in your community. If you think something’s cool, chances are they will too.

Lessons Learned 2: Learn as you go
GISKIN has 7 episodes, and it would have been normal, I suppose, to get them all ready, then launch. But as it happened, I got the first episode completely ready (to completely test out the concept and the voicemail system) and then launched it. Then I wrote the second episode, produced it, launched it, and so on. This had an expected benefit – we got something in front of people quicker. And an unexpected one – everyone on the team could learn as we went along what worked and what didn’t, and we could dial in more of what worked.

Lesson: when your project, like GISKIN, really depends on the end experience, there’s no better way to evaluate it than to produce a bit of it and experience it complete and in situ.

Lessons Learned 3: This is not a museum talking (what a relief!)
Being a museum must be exhausting – you have to know so much and speak so carefully. What a relief it was to not have to worry about that. In GISKIN, Pandora and Drake aren’t museum people: they have no special knowledge; they ask the same questions the audience is asking and don’t always get answers. They leave LOTS of room for the audience to ask their own questions and fill in their own answers.

Lesson: An answer is like the proverbial fish: it only feeds someone for a day. The freedom to ask questions, however, will feed someone for a lifetime.

Lessons Learned 4: The stakes are high stakes
GISKIN players follow Pandora’s directions to find markers that show Drake exactly where the anomaly is located. We use simple plastic surveyor’s stakes. To get permission to place stakes like these in a city park is not a trivial matter (it can be hell, in fact), but it’s absolutely essential for the gameplay. Finding the stake is a simple moment of pure joy for the player.

Lesson: don’t compromise on the gameplay.

Lessons Learned 5: Something for everyone
I happened to see a family playing GISKIN, and I asked the young boy (maybe 12 yrs old) what the game was all about. “It’s the coolest ever,” he said. “You find one of the markers and then you call the number and there’s blah blah blah, but then they tell you where to find the next marker.”

Lesson: one person’s carefully crafted, incredibly nuanced narrative is another person’s blah blah blah. Embrace this truth. And then make your game rich enough that it is still “the coolest ever.”

Lessons Learned 6: The storyteller’s ego
In GISKIN, Drake and Pandora are following the thoughts left behind by a small group of people during WW2. The first episode are thoughts from 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, and the last episode is 1945, shortly before the end of the war. It’s a great storytelling arc, but... it takes you a couple hours to experience it all. Most people can’t or won’t (certainly, they don’t) take that much time.

The lesson here is a really important one for today, and it’s this: the storytelling ego that’s so important in non-participatory media can be a liability in participatory media. I probably should have considered a series of standalone mini-stories. Watch out for that moment when your desire to tell a story your way begins to undermine your player experience.

Lessons Learned 7: Use your mythic power
GISKIN works well because, at heart, it taps into something mythic: we wish places really could talk and tell us about events that happened there and the people who were there before us. It’s hard to explain this well in words, but it’s dead obvious when you’re in Balboa Park and listening to a spooky-sounding voice out of World War 2: you wish this were really real.

Lesson: what myths are working for you in your game or participatory project? If none, why the heck not?

Ken will be checking in to answer your questions on the blog all week. You can find out more about GISKIN ANOMALY at http://giskin.org. To experience it remotely, try the Online Walkthrough.

Why is "World Class" so Classist?

This weekend, I heard a story on NPR that really rankled me. Jason Beaubien was reporting on the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, the gleaming new art museum built as a "gift to Mexico" by the world's richest man, Carlos Slim. The museum is free to all-comers and showcases pieces from Slim's extensive collection of European and Mexican art, including pieces by major international artists whose work is not easy to find in Latin America.

The news report, strangely, focused on the question of whether the Soumaya Museum is a rich man's indulgence or a truly "worthy" cultural institution. Slim's son-in-law designed the building. It's in a commercial district. And Slim's biggest offense? He could have bought better art. The news report heavily featured an art historian from Wellesley College, James Oles, who griped that the Museum shows art just because Slim owns it, not because it's any good. At one point, Oles said,

You know, he's one of the only people in the world who could actually afford great, great art at the cost of great art. I will tell you there are many works of art hanging in the Soumaya Museum that I could afford on my professorial salary.

At this point, I was ready to throw the radio across the room. Instead, I listened patiently until the infuriating final sentence:

While the Soumaya Museum has drawn criticism from some in the art world, it's been extremely popular with ordinary Mexicans. Admission is free, and tens of thousands of people have flowed through the museum's doors in the weeks since it opened.

From my perspective, the radio piece pointed the finger in the wrong direction. Why slam Carlos Slim for putting up a monument to his dead wife that also provides Mexican people the opportunity to experience a diversity of world art for free? Why not, instead, indict the "art world" that slams an institution for failing to live up to its parsimonious standards?

Stories like these give the art world (and the museum world, by extension) a bad name. They unnecessarily pit "ordinary people" against experts. They reinforce a fallacy that "world class" institutions are those deemed to be so by a narrow, mostly monolithic group of critics. And worst of all, they might make some "ordinary people" feel inferior about enjoying art in a non-world class setting.

Whenever someone tells me he wants his museum to be seen as world class, I get nervous. In museumland, "world class" has come to mean that an institution is part of a very specific club with its own criteria and rules, most of which are entirely divorced from the needs of the local community. It's ironic that the term "world class"--which should embody an international panoply of forms of expression, presentation, and exploration of museum content--is instead used to hew to a singular vision of excellence.

I want to reclaim "world class" as a term that can celebrate the diverse ways that superlative cultural institutions serve their communities. The Ontario Science Centre is "world class" for its approach to welcoming visitors. The Wing Luke Museum is "world class" for its ability to be a meaningful meeting place for community issues. The Columbus Museum of Art is "world class" for its commitment to inviting visitors to engage with art with all their senses. And so on.

Let's not let art historians and aesthetes give our world class institutions a bad name. What makes a "world class" museum in your book?

Psst. Want an Internship?

It's my second week as the Executive Director at The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, and boy is my everything tired. Board committee meetings. Film festival openings. Historical landmark ceremonies. And that's just the fun stuff. I'm also making the 2011-2012 budget, getting to know our terrific staff and volunteers, and starting up a few small participatory projects to launch us into being a more community-driven institution.

And despite the fact that I've enjoyed being at the museum for 12 hours plus for ten days in a row, I'm quickly realizing that if I want to really get some fun participatory projects going, I need some help. There's just too much involved in the first few months of taking over a struggling museum to realistically imagine that I can also make enough fun stuff happen to keep me satisfied. Our staff is fabulous, but they are stretched thin with a slate of summer programs, exhibits, and fundraising efforts, so I'm looking for a few extra hands.

I know, I know. All the diligent boys and girls have already lined up incredible internships, summer jobs, and contracts with the circus. But if YOU are sitting there thinking, "gee, what I really want to do this summer is transform a sterile volunteer desk into a creativity lounge," or "I've always wanted to develop a late night game show where people answer local history trivia and make art at the same time," I have the opportunity for you.

Let me be frank. We have no money. We cannot pay you in dollars. Yes, I feel that museum workers should be paid and paid well for their efforts. But our museum is very small, and we rely heavily on volunteers to do all kinds of things from serving food to documenting collections.

And! Unlike people with paid positions, you will have the opportunity to focus entirely on creating a killer project. I will give you some direction and wander down longingly to see how things are going, but mostly, you'll have the run of the place. If you want to also volunteer some hours at the desk, awesome, but if not, that's ok too. I even have a couple ideas that you could work on without being here in Santa Cruz.

Here's specifically what I'm looking for:

1. Website redesign. Ever wanted to build a museum website from scratch? A simple one, maybe using Wordpress or Drupal? I know, lots of people get paid lots of money for this, but lots of people do it as volunteers, too. And I can promise you won't be dealing with a bunch of department heads who all want real estate on the homepage or an exec who wants a sparkly unicorn of goofy features. Please help us. Our website is navigationally challenged. And if this sounds too big, we have lots of more specific technology projects (point of sale, interactive staircase) you could get involved with. You don't have to be in Santa Cruz for this one.
2. Creativity Lounges. Right now, we have landings on our second and third floors that feature a volunteer sitting behind a desk. That volunteer is usually bored, somewhat uncomfortable, and way more interesting than the desk implies. I want to get some used furniture and create "lounges" on these landings where volunteers can do crafts or history research with visitors in a comfortable setting. Like couches? This is the internship for you.
3. Makers in the Lobby. We have a big, beautiful lobby. When we have events, it's fabulous, but other times it can feel a bit cavernous and dead. I want to invite local artists, crafters, and people who practice historical folkways to come and demo/make/perform in the lobby on a regular basis. I'm looking for an intern who loves to coordinate with artists and feels just as comfortable sweet-talking a ukelele band into giving a demonstration as he does cleaning up from a surfboard shaping afternoon.
4. Late night programming. This one is wide open. I'd like to start a late night program series focused on working adults, and I'm really open as to what that looks like. It could be a game show. It could be a tag-team art/history lecture series. It could be an exhibit jam. It could be an urban history scavenger hunt. It could be whatever you are thinking about right now.
5. Family days. Right now, we have monthly family art activities. They're good, but we could do better. We have an amazing plaza right outside the lobby and I'd love to find someone who wants to create incredible programming out there--chalk art murals, making music with unusual items, fort-building...

If you are interested in one or more of these opportunities, please fill out this form and I will get back to you soon. I'm not expecting to make all of these things happen this summer, but I'd love it if we could get a few exciting things off the ground.

How Do You Capture Compelling Visitor Stories? Interview with Christina Olsen

Lots of museums these days have video comment booths to invite visitors to tell their stories, but how many of those booths really deliver high-impact content? Last week, I talked with Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum, about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they made some unexpected decisions along the way.

How and why did Object Stories come to be?

The project arose from a grant announcement from MetLife Foundation around community engagement and outreach. I knew I didn’t want to do something temporary—a program that would last a year or two and then go away. And I also knew we wanted to connect with the Northwest Film Center, which is situated in the museum. There hasn’t been a history of collaboration between the museum and the film center and we wanted the chance to partner more deeply, and build a platform where we could continue to do so.

In the education department, we have some key values around slowing down, conversation and participation around art, and deep looking. And so this concept of asking visitors to spend some focused time thinking about their relationships with objects and artworks really made sense to me.

Also, on a personal level, I had this really powerful experience with my mother in a Storycorps booth in Grand Central years ago that had a profound impact on me. She had revealed things I’d never known, and I kept coming back to it. There was something in there that I wanted to play with in a museum concept.

What did you end up with and how did you get there?

Our first notion was all about something mobile, something that would go out to the community. We imagined an cart at the farmer’s markets where people could record stories. But we couldn’t figure out how we were going to sustain that with our staff.

We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead. It’s in a good location, but it’s also kind of a pass-through space to other galleries. It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you. The other parts of the gallery are for experiencing the stories, and for connecting with the Museum collection. We have cases with museum objects that people told stories about, with large images of those storytellers adjacent to the object, and in the middle of the gallery is a long rectangular table with touchscreens where people can access all the stories that have been recorded.

Your recording booth asks participants for audio stories plus photos of themselves with their objects. Why did you choose this format instead of video?

We had planned on having it be video. The proposal to Metlife was all video. Then we started working with our local design and technology firms—Ziba Design and Fashionbuddha—and in the prototyping, it became clear we had to go another way.

We partnered with the Film Center to conduct workshops with community organizations around personal object storytelling. These really informed the project, and helped get the word out about the gallery. We rigged up a video recording booth in Fashionbuddha’s studios. We found people would go in, do their story, come out, say it was so powerful and cathartic, but then the videos would be really bad—boring, too long, unstructured. They were often visually uncomfortable to watch. And some participants were turned off by the video recording—they found it too scary, and being on camera distracted them from telling their story – especially older people.

We had this moment where we were going to sign off on design and move to fabrication, and I was really worried. We had participants who loved the experience, but the watchers were really lukewarm about the results. And we realized of course that the majority audience would be watchers, not storytellers. We invited a cross-section of artists, filmmakers, and advertisers to join us for a think tank. We all sat down and looked at the content and we said, “this is not good enough, this is not watchable enough.”

So what did you do next?

We came up with a system that was much more structured and is based on audio, not video. In the current setup, you walk into the booth, all soundproofed and carpeted, and then you sit down on a cozy bench. You can come alone or with up to three people. You face a screen, and the screen is close enough to reach out and touch without getting up. The screen prompts you, with audio and with words, and it’s in both English and Spanish, because we really wanted to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community in Portland.

First, the screen asks if you want to watch an example story. If not, it says “let’s get started.”

There are five prompts that follow, and for each, you get 45 seconds to record a response. Each of the prompts was really carefully written and tested to scaffold people to tell a great story. People don’t necessarily walk in the booth knowing how to do that. For example, the first prompt, which is about discovery, asks, “When and how did you first receive, discover, or encounter your object? What was your first feeling or impression of it? Who was there?” This prompt really gets people sharing specifics, sharing details—the things that make a story successful.

Another good example is the final question: “If you had to give it to someone, who would it be and what would you say to them?” This question really makes people focus on the meat of what’s important about their object, and it’s a natural summarizer… but in an interesting, personal way.

After you record your audio, you get to take the photos and give your story a six-word title. We experimented with when in the process to take the photos, and it’s nice at the end—it’s a kind of reward. The recording is often very intense—people cry, it takes something out of them. Photos are fun. We prompt participants to hold the object in different ways: close to camera, pose with the object in your lap, hold your object as close to your face as possible, hold it in profile.

How do you edit the stories?

Fashionbuddha built a backend content management system where you can choose audio segments, reorder them, and choose photos. This is made to be sustainable with current staffing– while we have the ability to edit within a 45 second chunk, 99% of the time we don’t do it—we just pick the segments and photos we want to use and put them in order.

The gallery also features objects from the museum’s collection with people’s stories about them. Who are the people who record stories about museum objects?

That is more curated. The first testing we did there was very much the same as Object Stories – anyone could sign up and get involved, pick an object in the museum and tell a story about it. Those stories were, frankly, often very banal. There was an imbalance between stories with people’s own objects, with which they have profound relationships, versus museum objects that they might come see once or twice and like, but not really have a deep connection with.

So we realized we had to have an equivalence–the museum stories had to be profound too. And it couldn’t all be curators, but these storytellers had to be people who had profound relationships with museum objects. We have four stories up now: from a guard, a curator, a longtime museum lover, and an artist. In the future, I’m thinking of really mining our membership, putting out a call to them, building some programs that might help us seed and support the museum stories.

The website for the stories is beautiful. You also got some prime physical real estate for this project. How did you get the gallery?

That was really hard-won. At first, it was going to be a little booth tucked away somewhere. As the project progressed, our prototyping showed us we didn’t want a shallow experience--a photo booth where you could just drop in and do it. We wanted something where people could spend the time and focus deeply on the experience at hand. That required more space.

And it was really important to the director and to me that Object Stories connected to our mission and to our collection. That led me to feel strongly that we needed to have museum objects in the space. It couldn’t be an educational space with no works of art in it. I wanted to integrate this experience into what you do in the rest of the museum. We ended up with a very multi-departmental team, and that helped too.

The big goal is to activate your connection with objects in the rest of the museum, that Object Stories models the idea of having deep relationships with objects for any visitor who comes in.

What do you know so far about the non-participating visitors to the gallery?

I only know anecdotally. People are really entranced with the stories, browsing them on the touchscreens, and with the museum objects as well. They even spend a long time looking at this big case we put up that just features 8x10 cards with photos of people with their objects.

I was surprised at how long many visitors will spend at this case. It’s just graphics. Why would people look at that? I think it may be because people are visually included in the space, and that’s rare in an art museum. They’re very interested and maybe even moved by it.

You can browse stories online and sign up to record one at objectstories.pam.org. Object Stories is funded by the Metlife Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Lehman Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the PGE Foundation.

Thanks to Tina for sharing the story of this fascinating project. Tina will be monitoring the blog and responding to your comments over the coming week.

Answers to the Ten Questions I am Most Often Asked

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

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

BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUESTIONS ABOUT RESISTANCE TO CHANGE

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

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

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

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

6. How do you evaluate participatory engagement strategies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

QUESTIONS ABOUT WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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