What Are the Most Important Problems in Our Field?

I'm working on a keynote address for next week's Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Baltimore. The speech is in memory of Stephen Weil, one of the giants of contemporary American museum thinking--a radical in a bowtie who strove to "make museums matter."

As I think about what can and might make museums matter today, I keep rereading a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician who made major research contributions to the fields of computer science and information technology. In 1986, Hamming made an incredible speech, "You and Your Research," about the question of what makes some scientists achieve great things and others, not so much. The crux of his argument is this: make sure you are working on the most important problems in your field. He explains:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It's perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems.

This last sentence, I fear, describes the average worker, not just the average scientist. Most of us spend most of our time working on problems that are not important. That's somewhat reasonable--we all have to make payroll and run our programs and keep things going. My bigger concern is that when we DO make time for the bigger picture, the problems we choose to tackle are not the most important ones.

What are the most important problems in the cultural sector? The two hot problems seem to be:

1. finding new business models to sustain funding and support operations
2. making offerings relevant and appealing to shifting audiences

These topics may flood the blogosphere and conference circuit, but I don't think they're ultimately the most important. These problems are fundamentally self-serving; they come from the root question "how can we survive?" These questions could just as easily apply to any struggling industry (postal service, cigarettes) as to cultural institutions.

I suspect there are other problems we can work on that are more about culture and learning and less about institutional survival. When we think about "making museums matter," the important parts are the "making" and the "mattering"--not the museums. The goal is not to justify museums' existence but to make them as useful as possible.

So what are the important problems we need to tackle to become more meaningful institutions? I'm trying to mull a few for this talk next week, and I'd love your thoughts on what you see as the most important problems in our field. Here's what I've come up with:

1. How can we make cultural knowledge--content, context, and experience--as widely, freely, and equitably accessible as possible?
2. How can our institutions and programs improve quality of life for individuals and communities?
3. How should we structure our institutions and funding programs to do 1 and 2?

What would you add to this list?

On Saying Yes

It's a Saturday night when I get the email. "Sharon D. Payne," member of the incredibly popular Santa Cruz roller derby team, wants to pitch a partnership with our museum. She doesn't have a specific idea for a partner event or exhibit, but she feels like we have a lot to offer each other in terms of publicity and a shared focus on enhancing cultural experiences in the community. And she wants to do it now--in the next two weeks.

I want to say yes. In fact, I do say yes. But then, it turns out we've already said yes to three other groups for the event in question. I end up having to call and say we're going to wait until the spring to make something happen. And then I feel like a jerk.

I love saying yes. Yes to the heirloom seed library that now graces our lobby. Yes to partnerships with the Second Harvest Food Bank and the Homeless Service Center. Yes to tie-ins with the Symphony and the Boys and Girls Club. Yes to the Big Read with the library, yes to the Burningman artists who want to show their giant kinetic sculpture in the lobby, yes to projections on the side of the building.

Saying yes is one of the few things I can offer sympatico community organizations and individuals. We have a "no money, no bullshit" motto here right now; there's no money for partner projects, but we can say yes with a minimum of bureaucracy and red tape. We've actually gotten some of our best partnerships (like the seed library) because another organization said no. Being nimble and open to a bit of chaos is a luxury that comes with being a small institution on a mission to be a community hub. It's exciting to have someone approach us on a Tuesday with a great idea for Saturday, and as much as possible, we try to say yes.

But it's getting harder to do so as time goes on. Each time we say yes, the schedule gets a bit more full, the space is a bit more complete, the insanity a little higher. I'm learning to say "yes, but not now" or "yes, but let's figure it out a little more," and sometimes, painfully, "no."

I can see how it gets easy for an organization to get in the habit of starting from "no" instead of "yes." Chaos can be stressful. When we have more money and programs, maybe we won't want to deal with the headaches of installing a giant multi-person hammock in the lobby--even if it is free.

I don't want to get there. I believe that we're doing our best work when we are able to say yes to people who walk in the door with good ideas and real community needs to be met. And I feel like we're most fresh and dynamic when we can keep being responsive to the next idea.

The challenge, then, is to figure out how to say yes consistently, smartly, over the long term. Just as any project has its messy, open-ended phase before it hardens into completion, we're in a messy phase as an institution. What will we harden into? Is it better to try to stay in the messy phase as long as possible, or to create a structure that supports the messiness within a more formal setting?

This brings me back to Paul Light's recommendation in Sustaining Innovation that organizations need to learn "how to say no and why to say yes." My presumption is that as time goes on, our answer to the question of "why to say yes" will change. Right now, we're saying yes because it's a way to build trust in the community, to build on the enthusiasm of others, and to enliven our space with the passion and diversity of our partners. It would probably be a worthwhile exercise in the future to make sure we sit down as a staff and ask ourselves: "why should we say yes to this or that?" and track the change. But I don't want to codify anything to death. I'm still not sure whether informality and flexibility can be a permanent state of being... but I'd like to try. And in the meantime, I'm dreaming of what will make the most sense in the spring with the Derby girls.

Do you feel like you work in a place where "yes" is the default? What do you see making that possible (or impossible)?

Does Your Institution Really Need to Be Hip? Audience Development Reconsidered

Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. It was a local history urban scavenger hunt that sent teams of 2-5 people out into the city to track down as many historic checkpoints as they could over the course of an evening. The event was oversold, and participants raved about the experience.

We created Race Through Time in partnership with a local networking group called Santa Cruz Next, whose primary aim is to support and celebrate ways that young professionals can and are changing our community for the better. Race Through Time was designed specifically for this audience of 30 and 40-somethings looking for fun social events with a Santa Cruz bent. We saw Race Through Time as an opportunity to share our mission around engaging with history with a new and highly desirable audience of young professionals. Everything about the event--from the time slot to the tone of the content to the music played--was designed for that audience.

When Friday night rolled around, we did see a crowd that skewed decidedly younger and hipper than our standard museum audience. But we also saw something else: parents and teenagers, grandparents and grandkids, elderly couples, out for a fun scavenger hunt evening. Yes, there was the 40-ish lawyer who effused that she'd never seen so many young people in the museum before. But there was also the couple in their 70s who told me this was the most fun they'd ever had on a Friday night in Santa Cruz. And from my perspective, it was this diversity that made the event unique--and made me rethink the way that cultural professionals typically approach audience development.

I've written before about the "parallel vs. pipeline" approach to new audience development. The concept goes like this: if you want to invite in people who don't traditionally engage with your offerings, you offer them an experience that is so tailored to their unique interests and preferred modes of engagement that it really is only for them. Performances just for teens. Late night mixers at museums for young adults. The experience is dramatically different from the norm and the audience is very targeted. It's a parallel experience, one that may or may not be eventually integrated into the core "pipeline" of traditional experiences and audiences.

We thought that Race Through Time would fall in this category--that it would be 90% people from the Santa Cruz Next young professional crowd. But it was more like 60%--enough for all those young people to feel like they were in the right place, but not enough to feel like it was "their" event alone. There were twenty-year old hippies. There were grizzled cyclists. There were families. It turned out that there were many different kinds of people who were excited about an active, adventurous approach to history.

This gets me thinking about whether the most productive programs for cultural organizations from an audience development perspective are not wholly parallel to the norm but somewhere just slightly outside, somewhere that links the typical to the possible. Maybe being incredibly hip one night a year or month or week is not enough to help the audiences who come to those events connect to the institution writ large. Those events bring in specific crowds for singular experiences, but to what end? If you have a wild event that feels like a spaceship landed on your institution, what happens when the ship leaves the next day?

Museums are not for specific crowds alone. As Elaine Heumann Gurian has often noted, the magic comes when cultural institutions bring together people who don't typically mix. As someone who can feel a bit alienated at events with homogenous audiences--even people who look like me--I appreciate the opportunity to be in a crowd that includes me without being prescriptive or limiting.

We lose something if we focus too narrowly on specific audiences. I've started realizing that at First Fridays, when our museum swells with people out on the town for an art experience. We are by no means the hippest First Friday destination in Santa Cruz, and sometimes, after a long evening at the museum, I'll head out to a gallery and look longingly at the young, cool artist crowd gathered within. I love hanging out with those people in those hip venues. But I also love that the museum invites those young adults in along with elderly folks in wheelchairs, families with toddlers--the happily un-hip.

And so I'm letting go of the idea that we have to be exclusionary to attract young people and looking for more diverse alternatives. The marketing argument has always been that we have to segment, that we have to tailor. But what if we segment to "people who like to meet people who are not like them?" I think that's a stronger community value proposition than becoming as cool--and limited--as an institution with a tightly-limited audience.

Do our institutions really need to be hip to be successful? Or do they just need to be welcoming, open, comfortable places that offer a diversity of experience? I realize I may be totally biased on this since I'm watching it happen in my own institution and my own community, and I'm also personally not a very hip person. What do you think?

Fundraising as Participatory Practice: Myths, Realities, Possibilities

"Fundraising is about relationships."

"The key to fundraising is listening."

"Development works when you are responsive to the donor's needs, not just presenting your own."

Anyone who has worked in fundraising has likely heard these missives again and again. But as a creative type who has recently taken on an executive role, I've been fascinated, shocked even, to learn that the folks in the development department have been singing the relationship chorus for so long.

On the one hand, this is awesome. I'm finding myself really enjoying fundraising because it is fundamentally about inspiring people to participate--and to do so in a way that is significant both for the organization and for themselves. As a designer, I'm always trying to ensure that participatory activities, however casual, impact both the participant and the organization. When someone gives money, that's almost always a given.

On the other hand, there's something deeply weird about the fact that I didn't know that fundraising was about relationships before I started doing it. If fundraisers are so keen on relationships, why weren't they the first into social media and participatory projects on behalf of their organizations? Even stranger, why are they so often the most opposed to such relationship-oriented efforts when extended to everyday members or visitors? I've led many meetings and workshops on building relationships with audience members in which development officers are the least comfortable with fostering open, two-way engagement with participants.

What's going on here? I suspect there are two contradictory issues behind this confusion:

1. While relationships are about giving and receiving, fundraising strategies frequently rely on a scarcity model in which gifts and thank you's are finite and defined. In a world in which donors are traunched, relationship "benefits" are meted out to individuals based on their level of giving. You can't have a personal relationship with someone who hasn't earned it through appropriate gifts--you'd be "wasting" your attentiveness.
2. While relationships are about trust and open communication, donor communication is perceived as very high stakes. Fundraisers therefore want to sculpt the message as much as possible. Too much openness could lead to someone being unhappy and withdrawing their participation.

Interestingly, in the participatory design model I'm more familiar with on the Web and in collaborative project design, the fundamental issues are different. It tends to be easy to communicate openly and express appreciation abundantly when you are co-creating an exhibition or a community art project. There's no such thing as too much community cheerleading or engagement. What's hard is to ensure that people make meaningful contributions and to help participants advance from one-time actions into ongoing involvement--two things that fundraisers are pretty darn good at.

I'd love to see a book, blog, or conference that focuses broadly on building relationships in cultural organizations--with donors, staff, visitors, audiences, members. I think there's a lot we have to learn from each other to get to a place where those relationships are as genuine and meaningful as possible. Authentic relationship-building is something I've long debated with friends in the education, exhibition, and online worlds. And now I feel silly that I haven't more actively engaged with fundraisers about it.

Guest Post: What YBCA is Learning from a Personalized Museum Membership Program

This guest post was written by Laurel Butler, Education and Education Specialist at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, CA. Laurel is the "Art Coach" who runs an unusual personalized YBCA:YOU membership program that started last year. YBCA:YOU is an intriguing take on experiments in membership and raises interesting questions about what scaffolding people need to have social and repeat experiences in museums. Joël Tan, YBCA's Director of Community Engagement & creator of YBCA:YOU, will monitor and respond to your questions and ideas in the comments section.

Two strangers stand next to each other in a gallery, staring at the same piece. Secretly, each wishes the other would turn and ask: “What do you think?” They want to connect with each other about the art. But they don’t.

If an arts experience is not shared, is the experience still transformative? Or are we missing a crucial part of the process?

I’ve always been the type of person who likes to ask strangers what they think. So, when I was hired to manage the YBCA: YOU pilot program at YBCA, the challenge was clear: How could I turn these fleeting, missed connections into meaningful moments of interpersonal engagement? Or, more simply: How can I make 100 art lovers become friends with each other?

The YBCA: YOU program is an integrated, personalized approach to the YBCA arts experience, designed to revolutionize the way the community engages with contemporary art and ideas. Participants in the program get an all-access pass to our space, and are able to use it any way that resonates with their interests. They also work with me, their personal “arts coach” to meet their aesthetic goals and maintain a consistent practice.

It’s a little like a gym membership with a dash of case management and counseling. This isn’t a coincidence ─ YBCA:YOU grew out of years of audience development research and was highly informed by our Director of Community Engagement Joël Tan's prior work in AIDS case management and public health. How many institutions really take the time to sit down with individual audience member and talk about what art they like, or what art they hate, or how they wish their arts experiences were different, or better? Apparently, the idea was exciting to other folks as well: A single press release generated twice as much interest as we had anticipated. At first, we were concerned about capacity ─ would we really be able to “get personal” with 150 people? But we were convinced that no survey, questionnaire, or aggregated data could provide the nuances and subtleties that come with a face-to-face meeting.

So, we sat down with every person who signed up for the program, and listened to their story, taking notes on the kinds of arts programming that might best support their interests and goals. There was Henri, who wanted to explore his budding interest in performance. We told him about Lemi Ponifasio/MAU at YBCA, and the Second Sundays series at Counterpulse. There was Jane, who was interested in the East Bay arts landscape. We recommended that she check out Art Murmur on the first Friday of the month.

The “Aesthetic Development Planning” (ADP) meetings were as diverse as you might expect from 100 plus Bay Area arts enthusiasts. However, there was one salient piece of feedback that kept coming up over and over: People wanted to connect with other people around the art. Traci felt put-off by the “scene” that surrounded the art world. She felt that she lacked formal training and knowledge, and was afraid of “saying the wrong thing”. Anton felt that his reading of art was so consumed by scholarly critique that it was hard to articulate a purely intuitive response. Many felt that there never seemed to be an appropriate context or venue for that kind of thing. You can’t simply turn to the stranger next to you and ask “What do you think”?
We’d been thinking about YBCA: YOU as a way to develop a deeper, more personal relationship between YBCA and its visitors, but what about creating community within our constituency? What does it take for an institution to connect people on an individual level?

We began by integrating our Art Savvy program into YBCA:YOU. Art Savvy is a facilitated gallery tour that uses the principles of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to engage in deep observation and conversation around a piece of visual art. It’s a great way to get those two strangers in the gallery to talk to each other. We held YBCA:YOU Savvy sessions around our exhibitions, films, performances… even gallery walks and field trips around town. The folks who attended these events raved about how much fun they had, how much they had enriched and deepened their connection to the art. And yet, out of over 100 potential participants, we never got more than a dozen-or-so YOUers to show.

So, last month we decided to make phone calls to each of the YOUers to discuss the progress of their aesthetic development and talk about their experience of the program thus far. Again, the conversations were complex and diverse as the cohort itself, but one trope kept coming up over and over:
“It’s not you, it’s me.”

These folks made it clear that the program was, indeed, motivating them to make art more of a habit, but they needed more time to incorporate the idea of aesthetic development into their own lives, on their own terms. I realized that I was being impatient – the program, after all, hadn’t even been in place for six months! I couldn’t expect to see a radical social transformation right away, because the personal transformation needed to take place first.

The benefits of regular sessions at the gym, or visits to the dentist, or a therapist, or time spent with friends, are all pretty self-evident after six months. But, as Abigail Housen’s Aesthetic Development Stage Theory (PDF) tells us, it takes just as long to develop aesthetic muscles as physical muscles, and the results are not always so immediately clear. YOUers by and large were making art more of a habit in their lives, but not in drastic terms. They were branching out of their comfort zone one performance at a time, looking at the world around them with a new set of eyes to find the potential of art embedded within their daily lives.

It seems to me now that the capacity to make space in one’s life for art may precede the type of community participation that we were looking for as an indicator of programmatic success. I still believe that, with enough time and consistent personalized contact, a program like YBCA:YOU can revolutionize the way the world engages with contemporary art and ideas. However, like any revolution, it has to begin with the personal.

ISO Brilliant, Business-Oriented Professional Who Wants a Job in a Museum

Psst... want to move to Santa Cruz and work at my museum? Or do you know someone who might be perfect for this job?

We are looking for an obsessively detail-oriented, highly resourceful, financially savvy, culture-loving individual to be the Administrative Manager of The Museum of Art & History. You will work as the direct assistant to the Executive Director and manage the finances for the museum. You must be a proactive self-starter, extremely organized, and able to juggle multiple deadline-driven tasks simultaneously. You must also have accounting experience or high financial acuity. This is an opportunity to be involved with every aspect of a changing organization. If your career goal is to become the CFO or CEO of an arts or educational nonprofit, this is the perfect early career opportunity for you. This is a full-time position with benefits and a starting salary of $28,000-$32,000 depending on experience.

The Administrative Manager’s major responsibilities include:

• Enter and track all accounting transactions and accounts including booking of accounts payable and receivable, invoicing, daily cash transactions, fixed assets, inventory transactions, and subsidiary organizations
• Process payroll and coordinate yearly worker’s compensation audit
• Create monthly reports such as departmental spending reports, cash flows and forecasts, financial statements, endowment analysis
• Relentlessly research and implement systems to make the museum more effective from a business perspective
• Manage employee records, administer benefits programs, and field basic HR questions
• Oversee daily administrative tasks: ordering supplies, copying, faxing, mailing, maintaining office equipment
• Support the Executive Director in communication with donors and trustees, preparing meeting notes, and handling internal scheduling
• Lots of little projects across museum administration, fundraising, and programming

Our ideal candidate:

• Has a bachelor's degree and has had courses in accounting, finance, or business
• Has worked for 2 or more years in an accounting environment or has run a business
• Is a whiz with Quickbooks, Excel, and Google applications (Mail, Calendar, Docs)
• Is not afraid to monkey with the printer to make it work
• Writes beautifully and is a stickler for good spelling and grammar
• Has experience in a museum, retail, or other public-facing environment
• Is just as comfortable welcoming visitors as preparing a spreadsheet
• Loves working in a team and balancing lots of different tasks and priorities
• Knows how to handle confidential and sensitive information with professional discretion
• Has solid knowledge of the principles and practices of human resources
• Immediately responds to requests with, “Yes, I can help” even if it’s something you’ve never done before

To apply, please send a single PDF document to jobs@santacruzmah.org that includes two items:

1. A cover letter that addresses the unique skills you bring to the table, your long-term professional goals, your salary requirements, and your availability (2 pages maximum).
2. A resume with at least one professional reference.

When you send in this document, we will send you a short application with questions and activities you will be asked to perform (at home) to demonstrate your abilities. These activities are not optional; you must return the application to be fully considered for the job.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog programming...

Quick Hit: Long Interview

There is a long interview with me in this week's Good Times (Santa Cruz's leading weekly). I had a wonderful conversation with Geoffrey Dunn and he did a great job pushing the conversation all over the cultural and educational map. We talked Paulo Friere, what museums can learn from dentists' offices, and the challenges of not feeling stupid while viewing art.

Enjoy.

Supporting Museum Tribes & Fans through Shared Ritual

Many people (Paul Orselli, Linda Norris, Pete Newcurator) in the museum field have written about the question of museum "tribes"--based partly on Seth Godin's book, partly on the longstanding fan culture that pervades our lives through sport, celebrity, and shared experience of mass events. The question is usually, "How can museums cultivate fandom among visitors?" or "What would a museum look like that embraced and supported tribal followings?"

I spent an (early) morning today with the local chapter of Kiwanis that got me thinking about this question again. I was struck by how ritualistic their meeting was--idiosyncratic nametags, a special song to welcome guests, a donation pool in which people offer "sad" or "happy" dollars to commemorate recent events in their lives, a raffle to choose who will create the trivia game for next week. There was a lot of camaraderie among the participants, but it was apparent that the structured ritual was just as important as the friendships to holding the group together.

So often when we talk about fans, we focus on shared affinity. People like the same sports team or band or craft activity, and therefore, form tribes based on that interest. But sometimes we forget how important ritual is to heightening that tribal sense and transforming individual collective fandom into something more communal. It's knowing the cheer as much as it is caring about the team. It's knowing when to stand up and when to clap. Fandom without shared ritual isn't tribalism--it's loneliness.

These tribal rituals, while often fan-driven, are hardly spontaneous. Professional cheerleaders of all kinds lead us through the motions, show us the way to fit in, and model the experience. And that makes me wonder if museum staff members should be starting rituals to help fans get involved.

I realize this may sound like social engineering, but in practice it's often quite charming and lowkey. At the Indianapolis Children's Museum, they have a "closing parade" every day to usher (potentially upset) children and families out the door. There are staff in plush costumes. They hand flags to little kids to wave. I even think there's a goodbye song. This ritual doesn't just leave families with a warm feeling about the museum--it encourages fans to share the experience with each other (as I'm doing with you right now).

Do you have institutional rituals that involve visitors or members?

Engagement, Distraction, and the Puzzle of the Puzzle

Note: Thanks to Lisa Hochstein for allowing me to quote her emails in this post. She is a fabulous and thoughtful artist. You can learn more about her work here.

Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out.

The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art. The same day we opened the Creativity Lounge, we opened new exhibitions throughout the building, including a paper collage show in the 3rd floor lobby by local artist Lisa Hochstein. Lisa was thrilled that her work was on display at the museum. She was less thrilled about the Creativity Lounge--or very specifically, the art jigsaw puzzle in the middle of the coffee table.

Lisa emailed me to ask us to remove the puzzle, commenting:

It seems to me that there's a fine line between something that is inviting versus something that is distracting, and for me this falls into the latter category. I think it also sends a message that you don't trust the exhibits to engage the public and that, instead, you will bring in something else to entertain them.

I disagreed, and the puzzle stayed. We started a pretty fascinating (and yes, a little frustrating) dialogue about the puzzle and the question of what constitutes desired engagement in the museum.

Lisa and I have fundamentally different ideas of what a "good" museum experience is. For Lisa, the goal is for people to engage with the exhibitions. For me, the goal is for people to have an enjoyable, educational, cultural, social experience. That includes exhibitions, but it is not limited to them. I consider visitor experiences successful if people walk out inspired by art, stimulated by history, and eager to come back and share more with friends and family. I think it takes a diverse range of components to provide these outcomes, and I see the museum as a holistic experience comprising these components.

But for obvious reasons, Lisa cares about the experience people have with her exhibition specifically. When Lisa and I first discussed this, I argued that increased dwell time in the area and increased visitor comfort would likely lead to people spending more time looking at her work than would otherwise occur. But Lisa questioned this. Would visitors remember the puzzle or the exhibition around it? Is a contact high really sufficient when it comes to exhibition engagement?

This is a version of what I call "the petting zoo problem." An unnamed art museum once created an incredible interactive and participatory installation related to a temporary exhibition. This installation was a big hit by exhibition evaluation standards--high dwell time, high engagement, high satisfaction. But some people on staff at the museum questioned the validity of the installation, saying, "Of course people like it--it's a petting zoo. People love petting zoos."

To Lisa, the jigsaw puzzle is a petting zoo. Interestingly, she sees art and history books as more sympatico with the goals and intent of a museum, and she feels positively about people perusing them. I don't see the puzzle as different from the books--both are tools that offer people alternative activities, and I don't see one as more absorbing or distracting than the other. From my perspective, if one part's a petting zoo, it's all a petting zoo. But it's an on-mission petting zoo--and that's what matters to me.

There's no question that the Creativity Lounge (and the puzzle) is a hit with visitors. We've received several positive comments about it, and we've observed a major increase in dwell time and repeat use of the third floor lobby since the installation has gone up. Families who used to zip through in under a minute are now spending thirty minutes working on the puzzle and looking around. Teenagers are curling up with art magazines. One woman worked on the puzzle for two hours last week--when I asked, she said her teenage daughter was out shopping and she decided to come play in the museum while she waited.

To me, this is all good news. It demonstrates that we're on our way to becoming the "thriving, central gathering place" in our strategic plan. But it doesn't necessarily mean that more people are engaging with Lisa's exhibition more deeply. In the future, I'd love to make custom puzzles based on work in our collection (like the Columbus Museum of Art does) so that people can engage more deeply with those specific works. But I'll always also feel great about opportunities for people to engage with each other around culture in ways that are not exhibition- or collection-driven, because that's our mission too.

Now, two weeks later, I contacted Lisa again to ask if her opinion had changed after spending time in the space. Lisa wrote:

I do see a value in creating a space where people like to spend time and where they feel comfortable to just unwind and be. It's good for the museum to become important in more peoples' lives, thereby assuring (hopefully) its longer-term viability. If attendance and membership go up as you add more of the types of features that I would consider distractions, then maybe they're a good thing. Personally, it's a bit of a disappointment to me to think that the displays in the museum aren't sufficient to accomplish those goals, but I recognize that my own biases are just one piece of a much larger picture (or puzzle).

Kudos to Lisa for being open to a thoughtful dialogue about these issues. It's interesting to me that she talks about the displays not being "sufficient to accomplish those goals." I don't think of exhibitions as the be-all end-all of the museum experience, and so I don't think they should be sufficient on their own to accomplish our visitor experience goals. I don't think I'm devaluing exhibitions by adding the puzzle--I see it as an "and" that makes the whole museum a more desirable place to be.

I'm curious if you've dealt with similar debates at your own museums--either with external partners like Lisa or internally with other staff. What's your experience, and how have you resolved issues like this?

QR Codes and Visitor Motivation: Tell Them What They'll Get with that Shiny Gadget

We just opened new exhibitions at The Museum of Art & History, including one on woodworking that includes QR codes. For those who don't know, a QR ("quick response") code is a two-dimensional matrix that can embed more complicated information than a standard barcode. Why would you want a fancy barcode in your exhibition? When a person with a smartphone and a QR reader app scans one of these codes, it can launch a webpage on the phone, pulling up videos, images, and other additional multi-media content.

I presume that most Museum 2.0 readers are familiar with QR codes. I've been seeing them in museums (and parks) for a couple of years now, and I've used them in a couple projects, but I never felt a desire to write about them. I've been skeptical of their impact on museums. They're only accessible to the minority of visitors who attend with smartphones, and they're only used by the small percentage of those visitors who know how to download apps and are motivated to access additional content in museums. They've seemed like a sexy "gee whiz" technology that delivers very little so far.

When the woodworkers with whom we were working on this exhibition came to us and suggested using QR codes to access additional content about their work, I was determined to make sure we'd do a little better than just sprinkling codes around the room. What we did isn't rocket science, but I thought it might be useful to anyone who is considering using QR codes in their own institution.

From my perspective, the biggest issue with how QR codes are deployed in museums is that there's very little information provided about WHY a visitor would want to scan a given code. There's often an object label, a code, and an unwritten mystery about what you'll get when you scan the code. When I visited one contemporary art museum last year, this mystery took on an almost poetic scale. Sometimes, I'd scan a code and get a 10-min video of the artist working on a piece. The next code would take me to someone's website. There was no consistency and few pointers to let me know what I'd get.

QR codes without context are appealing to two audiences: museum geeks and technology geeks. At the MAH, we want to reach a broader audience of people with smart phones who are digging the exhibition. The woodworkers gave us fabulous multimedia content, and we created a very simple label format to advertise what visitors get when they scan a code. There's an object label. There's a code. And then there's a single sentence explaining what you can access and its duration. Here are some examples:

Scan the QR code to see the inside of this cabinet (1 min slideshow).

Scan the QR code to listen to the artist playing this instrument (40 sec audio clip).

Scan the QR code to watch the artist carving these pieces (9 min video).

This is just our attempt to help visitors understand why they might want to scan the code and what they'll get. Over the weekend, I had several (mostly elderly) visitors approach me and ask, "Can you help me watch this video on my phone?" They weren't generically interested in the QR codes. They were interested in specific content--hearing the harp played, watching the cabinet come to life.

It can be easy to forget this anytime we have a new gadget at our disposal. I can't count the number of museums I've been to that advertise an exciting multimedia add-on, lavishly describing the technology without a peep about the content or the value added. Yes, people want behind the scenes and inside the cabinet and the artifact in action. But with the possible exception of labels--an incredibly familiar technology--visitors aren't ready to trust that any interpretative technology has merit in its own right (see Peter Samis and Stephanie Pau's fabulous 2009 paper on the topic). And the more futzing it takes to access the content, the more motivated they'd better be by what they're going to get.

What are you doing to help visitors understand why they'd want to use your technology?