AAM Conversations: Want to Talk?

(No relation to AAM. Just cute.)

I'm heading this weekend to the American Association of Museums conference in Minneapolis. I'm psyched to spend a few days with friends and colleagues talking about some of the challenges we're grappling with in our work. I'll also be part of two sessions on Tuesday, May 1 - one in the morning about money and business models, and one in the afternoon about prototyping and experimentation.

I'm bringing a few big questions with me to AAM this year. If any of these are questions that you are working on or thinking about, I'd love to find some time during the conference to sit down and talk. As I've spent more time in the AAM community, I've developed some really deep friendships--which is good--but it also means that I am less likely to spend much time at conferences with people I don't know. I hope this year that some of these questions can introduce me to new people and new ideas.

Here's what I'd love to explore at AAM this year:

• Event-driven models for museums. About 85% of visitors to our museum attend through a program/event. How prevalent is this? What should we be thinking about as we respond to community demand for events? What role will exhibitions play in this kind of institution? What's the chicken and what's the egg when it comes to events, exhibitions, and museum hours?
• Participatory history programming. Over the past year, we've found it fairly easy to invent and sustain participatory art and craft projects. We're having a harder time doing the same with history, especially when it comes to drop-in or single-night activities. I'd love to learn more about what other organizations are doing to invite casual, active participation in history. UPDATE! THIS TOPIC IS SO POPULAR THAT WE WILL HAVE A MEETUP ON SUNDAY, APRIL 29 TO DISCUSS. MEET IN CONVENTION CENTER LOBBY B, OUTSIDE THE AUDITORIUM, AT 1:30 FOR A ONE-HOUR INFORMAL DISCUSSION. NO RSVP REQUIRED. TEXT 831.331.5460 IF YOU CAN'T FIND US.
• Ethics of civic action. My institution is increasingly partnering with local cause-based organizations, especially in the social services. How should we be thinking about the ethics of who we partner with (and who we don't)? How do we deal with the blending of personal and institutional goals when it comes to contributing to efforts to improve the whole community?
• Working with teams through change. We've undergone a pretty radical transformation over the past year. People (including me) are energized but tired, too. What should I be thinking about as a manager who wants to keep pushing forward but also wants everyone to feel supported and not burned out?
• Fundraising with a community. Our museum is becoming increasingly community-driven in our programming and the way we engage with visitors on a daily basis. Our fundraising, however, is not moving in that direction. To what extent is it realistic or desirable to broaden our funding base? Should we think of ourselves as a client service organization (where visitors are clients and the support comes from others) or a "by and for the community" organization? This will come up somewhat in the Tuesday 9am Show Me the Money session, but I thought I'd raise it as a general question too.

If you want to talk about any of these questions too, awesome. I don't care what type of institution you are from or what your experience is, or even if you are attending the conference. I just care about having good conversations and learning from each other. Sunday April 29 is looking especially good for me for some meaty chats--let me know. Thanks!

p.s. If you are interested in interning/working at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and want to talk briefly about that at AAM, I'm open to that too.

Building Community Bridges: A "So What" Behind Social Participation

Last Friday, I witnessed something beautiful at my museum. A group in their late teens/early 20s were wandering through the museumwide exhibition on love. They were in a playful mood, talking about the objects, playing the games, responding on the comment boards. On the third floor, they sat down in our creativity lounge and started making collages. At the adjacent table, my colleague Stacey Garcia was meeting with a local artist, Kyle Lane-McKinley, to talk about an upcoming project. Kyle had brought his baby with him. When I walked by the first time, the teens were collaging and Kyle and Stacey were talking. Next time, everyone was talking. Third time, one of the girls was holding and playing with the baby while Kyle and Stacey continued their meeting.

This is a tiny example of social bridging--people making connections to others who are not like them, who have different backgrounds, ages, races, professions, etc. The term was popularized by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, in which he differentiates between social capital built through "bonding" with people who are like you and "bridging" with people who are not.

I've been documenting lots of small bridging incidents at our museum over the past few months. I don't know what formed the bridge between the artists and the teens in this circumstance. It could have been the baby (one of the girls was clearly pregnant, and a baby is a great social object no matter the circumstance). It could have been the friendly, low-key setting. It could have been the attitude of the museum that supports participation and conversation. I don't know what made it happen. I'm just glad it did--and I want to do whatever I can to make it happen more often.

For a long time, I knew I cared deeply about designing from "me to we"--inviting visitors to form social connections through participatory experiences--but I couldn't express a clear reason why. Social bridging is becoming my why. While both kinds of social capital are important (and their growth non-exclusive), there are often many more opportunities for bonding than for bridging in daily life. We bond with the friends we grew up with, the people we work and play with. Even online forums that invite diverse participation tend to hinge on bonding around a key shared interest. At museums, we mostly bond with the friends and family with whom we attend. Social bridging is harder to come by, especially as society becomes more striated. Bridging is essential to building strong, safe, diverse communities. There are few places where bridging happens naturally. If we can make our museum a place that intentionally encourages and inspires bridging, we will make a powerful impact on our whole community.

For this reason, at the MAH we try to explicitly bake social bridging into the way we plan programs and exhibitions. We deliberately partner with diverse groups for single events--for example, a February music event had a main stage lineup that jumped from ukelele singalong to opera to hawaiian dance to rock. We tailor the programming blend to diverse ages, making sure no activity is just for kids or adults, no matter how much glue or fire is involved. In exhibitions, we showcase local, first-person stories and objects--from students, roller derby girls, retirees, and homeless families--alongside the art and historic objects. We include comment boards and games that link visitors to each other, often not in real time, through shared stories and experiences. And in program evaluation, we ask collaborators and visitors alike if they met anyone new and how those encounters contributed to their experience.

We're just at the beginning of this work. We have a long way to go before we're really making a measurable impact--and we're not even quite sure what "measurable" will look like. We know that most of the bridging that goes on here is surface-level and brief--as in the example of the teens and the baby. I don't know how deep we can expect to go, or whether our role will primarily be as a space that encourages safe, friendly collisions in a community-wide pinball machine. From my perspective, if we can help make our community one in which people walking down the street smile at strangers instead of looking away, we'll be on the right track.

I'm excited to explore these topics more with you in the months to come, and I'm curious to what extent social bridging feels relevant and compelling in your own work. Where have you encountered it, what resources help you understand it, and what do you think we should be doing about it?

Upcoming Museum 2.0 Book Club: Blueprint

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. There was a location, a budget, and a flurry of planning. The team developed some highly innovative digital projects and approaches to history. Three years later, at the end of 2011, the project was canceled.

What happened? While not wholly explored, that question reverberates throughout a new book, Blueprint, that shares the plans for the Dutch Museum of National History. The book walks readers through galleries that never existed, and then steps back to tell the story of the project, the underpinning goals, the experimental projects along the way, and the pain in closing.

I chose this book for our next Museum 2.0 book club for three reasons:

1. The experimental projects of this museum-in-process included some of the most innovative participatory initiatives I've ever seen, especially in a discipline--history--that is often staid.
2. The book was released just four months after the project was officially canceled. My early skimming suggests that it is very much a "hot" history of a recent event and probably less prettied-up than most accounts of the politics of museum planning.
3. It's about Europe. Most of the books we've explored on this blog in the past focus on museums in North America. A lot is changing in European museums--especially when it comes to money. 

This book club will work like the others (see the "Book Discussion" keywords on the right to access past ones). Starting a month from now, on Wednesdays, the blog will features a mixture of my thoughts along with guest posts from you reflecting on how the book is useful in your own work. Because it might take a little while for you to get the book, we won't start until mid-May--likely May 16.

If you'd like to participate...

• Get your hands on a copy of the book in the next few weeks. You can buy it here, and yes, it is in English. To order, click the red arrow-shaped button that says "Bestel" on the upper left. Or see Jasper's kind comment below offering to help you buy one. Read it (or a large chunk of it). 
• If you are so motivated, fill out this two-question form to let me know you want to write a guest post or participate in a group discussion about the book. I'll be looking for guest posters who represent different types of institutions, countries, and approaches to the material. You don't need to be a museum professional to be eligible--just a good writer with an interesting perspective to share. 

For four weeks starting in mid-May, each Wednesday there will be a Museum 2.0 post with a response to the book. I'd like to write one or two of these at the most. The goal is to make the blog a community space for different viewpoints. Happy reading!

The Power of Symbolic Participation: A Story from the Skirball

Imagine you want to invite people to meaningfully engage with a serious topic in an exhibition. How would you do it? What forms of content delivery or participation might induce someone not just to read/look/listen but to care--and hopefully, to act?

Museums have been grappling with this question for years (here's a 2007 roundup of such projects), most aggressively in zoos and natural history museums where staff hope to inspire conservation and in history/concept museums that focus on civic engagement and activism. It's a particularly tough problem because of the multiple psychological steps required to shift someone from ignorance or disinterest to action. Too often, we jump immediately to offering visitors a way to act without first helping them care passionately about the issue at hand. You have to care before you want to act, and caring--about the earth, about civil rights, about art--is not a given. As environmental educator David Sobel has written, "If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the Earth before we ask them to save it."

I was reminded of this "care, then act" framework when I saw a recent story about a student's experience at a powerful issue-driven exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, Half the Sky. This exhibition about oppression of women worldwide is based on the book by the same title by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl DuWunn. It's a hard-hitting show about women who are suffering from and rising out of human trafficking, unequal access to education and health care, and cultures that treat them as disposable property. The exhibition, like the book, is intended not just to tell stories of doom but to encourage visitors to act to help transform the lives of women worldwide.

No small task for a museum exhibition. I was involved in early planning for this project, and we were all struck by the enormity of the challenges, our strong desire to make change, and the reality of what might be practical and possible.

When I visited the exhibition in November, I saw many participatory opportunities for visitors to act. Some are very specific and useful--postcard petitions to sign and send, a "click to give" campaign run in partnership with a corporate donor. Visitors can share what inspired them in the exhibition and what they plan to do after leaving the museum (similar to the Holocaust Museum's interactive about confronting genocide today).

But the most beautiful participatory elements are mostly symbolic in nature (and designed by Karina White, a very talented person). The largest was a "wish canopy" that hangs above the entire gallery. Visitors can "share a wish for a woman or girl" or "share a wish for a woman facing a difficult situation." The wishes are then added to the ceiling installation over time, creating a "sky" of wishes for women.

The strangest participatory element was a wall full of dots--20,000 of them, representing just a slice of the 60 million women who are suffering worldwide. There was no specific instruction with the dots. Visitors had colored them in, written tiny messages in them, and used them to make designs.

I didn't really understand what the dots were about. To me, they seemed like an activity without a reason--purely symbolic, and weak symbolism at that.

My perspective on the dots changed when I read a short blog post about a visit by a young visitor named B.J. (age/gender unknown). B.J. described Half the Sky this way:

The area was huge and completley white. They had little areas where stories of women suffering and the good they had done. They also had activities. 

One was where you wrote a wish for a woman you know and for a struggling woman out there. The other was were you colored in a dot with any color, saying you supported women. There were 20,000 dots. 

I knew I couldn't do the wish. What was I going to say? Sorry your life isn't awesome! Hope it gets better! That was what everyone would write and it was completley pointless, to me. 

So i did the dots. 

I colored and colored and colored and colored. Every dot was a new color, some were multi-color. For each dot,I felt like I was trying to help, or give support, somehow. 

When we left I was kind of stunned. While the other kids were talking about what was happening at school, changed but wanting to temporaily forget about anything really important, I sat their in silence, thinking. 

I thought about the women who tried so hard and suffered so much. I thought about the dots. And I thought about how many I would have colored, given the time. Maybe a thousand. Supporting a thousand.

This account fascinated me for several reasons. B.J. clearly was moved by the exhibition and didn't know how to respond. B.J. was not ready to do the concrete action of sharing a specific wish for a woman. B.J. didn't see that as a meaningful way to engage. But  B.J. did see the dots as meaningful.

I don't think that B.J. thought that filling in dots actually meant s/he was taking useful action. But it was a way for B.J. to express a newfound concern for women in need. It made me realize that symbolic participation might be a way for us to help visitors take the first step toward action by allowing them to express an emotional reaction. It's not practical to imagine that every visitor is ready to sign a petition or express his/her intention to change or act in a specific way. The dots provide a kind of scaffolding, allowing someone like B.J. to show s/he cares. And that's not weak or useless at all.

Just as there are scales of social and creative participation, maybe there are scales of civic participation as well that we should be considering as we design these kinds of activism-oriented projects. Anyone have a good model or relevant story to share about the pathway to action?

A Community-Driven Approach to Program Design

How do you develop programs that are responsive to your community in a meaningful way? How do you find out what's important to different communities, and how do you change your plans based on their needs?

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. We wanted to create a structure that would allow us to:

1. internally, clearly articulate our programmatic goals and assess our plans against those goals
2. externally, invite people with diverse backgrounds and connections throughout the County to help us understand their needs and brainstorm creative approaches to fulfilling them
3. sensibly balance the responsibilities and time commitment of staff and community members to the development process

In many ways, #3 was most important to us. After several months of planning massively collaborative programs (a typical monthly event might involve 50 partners), we've realized that the people who are best at helping us come up with ideas are not necessarily the people who are best to help us execute them. There are many amazing community representatives from business, arts, education, and social services who connect us to powerful ideas and partners. We don't want to wear them out on standing meetings or ongoing projects that may not draw on their talents.

So we've started a new committee called C3--the Creative Community Committee. C3 is a large, diverse group that meets bi-monthly/quarterly for a highly specific brainstorming session. C3 invites people to cross-pollinate and share ideas--the most promising of which we will follow up on to plan new programs.

The C3 process is highly indebted to two sources:

• Beck Tench's honeycomb diagram for articulating and assessing program goals (Museum of Life and Science, Durham, NC)
• Michael John Gorman's "Leonardo group"--a large group of diverse, creative individuals that his institution pulls together on a quarterly basis to brainstorm ideas for upcoming projects (Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland)

C3 had its first meeting last week. It was an evening meeting with beer and chips. We had about thirty participants ranging from MAH trustees to artists, educators to architects, moms to grandfathers. Here are the slides so you can see what we shared. We used Beck Tench's honeycomb format to present the six main goals for MAH community programs against which we'll assess new ideas (quickly--about the first ten minutes after introductions). 

Six goals for MAH community programs.

Then, we went honeycomb-crazy. We asked the whole group to brainstorm communities/constituencies who they thought could make a stronger connection with art, history, and culture. We picked five of those communities and split into small groups. Each small group spent fifteen minutes brainstorming the needs for that community, and then another fifteen discussing potential projects and collaborators that could help meet those needs. In the end, we came back together to share our most promising ideas. The whole meeting took 90 minutes and the majority of the time was spent really working, not sitting and listening.

Moving from community needs out to possible projects/collaborators. 

Here are a few things that I think helped make this experience valuable:

• We started from communities' needs, not the museum's. For example, one of our groups was focused on commuters. They spent the first half of their time not even mentioning the museum--just talking about challenges that commuters face, their exhaustion and stress, and the ways that their work separates them from the community. Once that group shifted to talking about project ideas and ways the museum could connect to this constituency, they were in a whole different mindset, and the suggestions they made reflected how we can meet community needs, not just market to a particular audience.
• We made people write things down constantly. From the very beginning of the session, we told people that we wanted to get as much as we could from them in the time allotted. We gave them a sheet of paper to use to make random notes about ideas they had--and we stopped the meeting a couple times to encourage people to write things down. We also had interns recording during the honeycomb exercise. In the end, we had lots of pieces of paper with ideas tied to specific individuals with whom we can follow up.
• We invited lots of people who didn't know each other. There's useful energy that arises when you put a teacher, a techie, a mom, and an artist in a group and ask them to work together. I think people appreciated getting to meet new people and stretching laterally. We plan to keep adding to the list of who we invite to these meetings to keep things fresh and varied.

What happens next? The real value of these kinds of meetings is in the followup. We deliberately avoided spending too much time sharing specific suggestions so that we can measure the ideas against our program goals and chase the most promising ones. Now the trick is for us to make sure we spend the time to do that assessing and chasing and make it happen.

Wandering Down the "Don't Touch" Line

How do you help visitors know what they can and cannot do in your museum? Most museums have this figured out: they have signs, they have guards, they have cases over the objects. But what happens if you take away the "Don't Touch" signs and the uniforms? What if you want to create a more generous atmosphere that presumes the goodwill and propriety of visitors? What if you WANT them to touch certain things?

I used to think these were easy questions to answer. I grew up professionally in the science and children's museum field, where touching is guaranteed and floor staff spend more time helping visitors learn and ensuring their personal safety than they do protecting the objects. I believe in the same idealistic vision that Frank Oppenheimer brought to the Exploratorium: if you respect visitors' intelligence and good sense, they will respect your objects. And this works pretty well in science museums, where designers talk about "hardening" exhibits to withstand the more aggressive touchers among us.

Art, however, does not come to museums pre-hardened. At the museum of art and history where I work, we are grappling with the question of how to help people enjoy themselves while keeping the art and artifacts safe.

We've taken down the don't touch signs and created a friendly, welcoming atmosphere. We've increased attendance among people who are new to museum experiences. The level of touching, especially of art, has increased. While it's great that people feel comfortable here, it's not great that they are (presumably unwittingly) endangering the art. This challenge is exacerbated by several factors including:

• Inconsistent level of touching allowed. We are increasing the number of interactive elements in the galleries, and we haven't found a clear way to say to people, "touch this but don't touch that." In the history gallery, we have some blended props and artifacts, and it's rarely clear what is and is not ok to touch. I sometimes talk to parents who are stressed out trying to figure out what their kids can and can't do.
• Many objects not in vitrines. We love showing objects outside the confines of a case. But it makes it less clear that they are not for touching. Putting objects on pedestals helps, but not always. 
• Focus on family audiences. As we make the museum more family-friendly in a number of ways (activities, casual spaces, interactive bits), we have a lot more kids in the galleries. They love to run up and grab things. Their parents are not always able or willing to stop them. Many don't have "museum experience" and don't know what we expect.
• Low level of staffing and security. We intentionally do not have much security at the museum. We don't have signs that say Don't Touch. We don't have guards. We do have friendly gallery hosts, but not every hour of the day. 
• Engagement with local artists. One of the things we love about exhibiting local artists is that they are often here to talk with visitors about their work. It's not unusual to see an artist showing a visitor how she constructed something or created an effect. It's also not unusual to see an artist touching their own work as they show it to visitors. Especially during our woodworking show, we had a flurry of fabulous woodworkers opening their cabinets and drawers. This was amazing. It also made visitors feel like they could do it too. 

This is only going to become a bigger issue for us as we invite in new audiences and incorporate more participatory experiences throughout the museum. I am unwilling to adopt standard strategies of security guards and cases everywhere--both of which I believe introduce an inhospitable environment to engaging with artworks and with other people. I want to provide a higher standard of care for the objects while also pushing forward a friendly, generous standard of care for visitors. 

How will we deal with this? Here are a few solutions I've seen and options we could consider:

• The Denver Art Museum does a terrific job indicating where there are family activities in galleries with a consistent visual look and feel that is repeated throughout the museum. We've talked about doing a "family guide" to our museum that helps people find these "do touch" spaces. However, in Denver, this approach is supported by the fact that there are guards in other spaces. The Oakland Museum, which tried a similar approach with their "touch me" stickers throughout the galleries (as shown above in the photo), has reported an overall increase in touching... all over the place.
• Labels that explain the reasons behind the "don't touch" rule. We had a "please don't lick the art" sign for woodworking that talked about the oils impacting the wood. I've enjoyed seeing labels that explain these things, but I wonder if it's a museum-wonk approach that doesn't work for general audiences.
• The Milwaukee Art Museum has a video explaining do's and don'ts of the museum for children. This video rubs me the wrong way because it reinforces the basic "nos" of museums in a cutesy way. Keep your arms behind your back. Avoid the guards who wag their fingers at you (until the part at the end where it suggests that guards are people too). In some ways, I feel like this is just a "don't touch" rule dressed up in a Reading Rainbow costume. But I appreciate the concept of a family-friendly introduction to the museum and I understand that this is not geared to me as a viewer.
• At the MAH, we've tried proactively "helping" visitors touch in certain exhibitions. For example, in the woodworking show referenced above, we ended up giving our gallery hosts white gloves so they could open drawers and doors for visitors. It's not the same as getting to stroke the wood (which everyone wanted to do), but it addresses some of their desires.
• Lots more trained staff or volunteers--not guards, but people who can welcome visitors to the museum and help them be comfortable and clear about the experience available. 
• More hardening (without casework). Maybe it's not possible to be as friendly as we want to be without a certain number of kids zooming up to grab a sculpture or people mistakenly thinking they can stroke a cabinet. Maybe there are design solutions that introduce barriers in less stark ways than casework. I'm kind of dubious of this, but it's possible.

What do you think? If you want to create a friendly, welcoming environment AND protect objects, what do you do? What's the "yes and" solution to this? I'd particularly love to hear from people who are non-museum professionals on this one.

Weekend Reading: 2012 Trends and Young Adult Programs

Two great museumy reports to brighten your weekend:

• TrendsWatch 2012. The folks at the AAM Center for the Future of Museums have been experimenting with sharing ideas in several ways over the past couple of years--through their blog, their weekly newsletter, and a series of research reports. This TrendsWatch report, which I hope they intend to make an annual affair, is the most effective piece I think they've put out. It's tight, clear writing on seven big ideas on their radar: crowdsourcing, shifting non-profit tax status, pop up museums, online fundraising, creative aging, augmented reality, and education reform. Each article includes museum examples along with a broader look at the trend. The content is pretty US-specific (especially regarding tax status and education) but the blend of issues makes it more broadly relevant than other reports that focus solely on demographics or technology. Such a diverse group of topics in one report got my mind moving laterally and imagining other trends I might want to follow.
• Creativity, Community, and a Dash of the Unexpected: Adventures in Engaging Young Adult Audiences. I have a personal connection to this report, which was produced by the Denver Art Museum after a multi-year project developing meaningful connections with young adults. Three years ago today I was in Denver working with this terrific group of educators, technologists, and marketing folks to help them imagine new community-driven approaches to programming. It's amazing to see how far they've gone and how thoughtfully they've engaged in this work. While I'm clearly biased based on my involvement, I think this report is a bit deeper than some others I've been seeing lately that mostly focus on the branding/marketing side of working with younger audiences. It mostly focuses on program design, not marketing or evaluation, and some of the program design insights and framings are really valuable. I found myself frequently thinking: we should do that at our museum. The report starts with the statement: "We originally thought of this audience as an age group but later realized that style, not age, was a better way to categorize the target audience." Amen. Enjoy this quick read on rethinking engagement with new audiences.

Open Thread: The Hardest Risks are the Ones You Don't Have to Take

Recently, I was talking with one of my colleagues about some ideas to alter a longstanding annual fundraiser at our museum. "I believe in these changes," she said. "But it's also hard to feel comfortable taking a risk on this, because I know the traditional model works."

The changes that are easiest to make are the ones that smack you in the face. Something isn't working. Visitors hate a policy. People stop coming, or donating, or caring. When an institution is in crisis, there are huge opportunities to transform the system, take risks, and try something new. How much worse could things get?

But when things are going well--maybe not great, but perfectly fine, thank you--change gets much more stressful. Not everyone has a compelling reason to change. I'm interested in the question of how you take risks when you don't have to--how you conceive them, and how you make them worth trying. I'm not talking about new opportunities or challenges, but genuine risks that might screw things up or take you into uncharted territory.

When have you taken a risk like this? What made you do it? Do you ever feel like the "good enough"ness of your organization is hindering your ability to take risks that could vault you forward?

How Do You Document Your Creative Process?

Recently, my colleagues have gone wild for Pinterest. Pinterest is an online sharing tool that allows you to construct virtual bulletin boards to collect and display images from across the web. While some museums are using the tool in clever public-facing ways, that's not what's happening here at the MAH. At our museum, our programs team is using Pinterest to develop ideas for upcoming community events. As staff members and interns discover intriguing activities, products, or artwork on the web, individuals can "pin" items of interest to the boards for specific events (i.e. Fire Festival) or program types (Family Programs). This is particularly effective for us since interns and volunteers are significant contributors to our programmatic team and everyone is on different schedules. We can collaborate on Pinterest boards asynchronously, comment on what others add to the boards, and plan events based on the aggregated information. We're starting to use it for the early stages of exhibition planning as well.

We're not using Pinterest to do something cool on the Web. We're using it to solve a basic internal communication problem. I used to constantly email links to individual staff members with a message like "we should try this." Pinterest replaces those emails by sharing that content a more broadly usable, indexable way. It aggregates design inspiration in a central place we all can share.

And that central place happens to be public. Pinterest allows us--requires us, really--to document a part of our creative process openly on the web. As social web tools become more mainstream and privacy concerns lessen (somewhat), I'm seeing more and more organizations use them in informal ways. Project coordination on wikis. Loosely formatted blogs to document progress. There's no extra effort involved to upload or create something special for public consumption. It's just part of the work itself.

What that means, potentially, is a lot more capacity to share the HOW behind our work, not just the end result. It's hard to learn from colleagues when everything is completed and spit-polished into a case study or conference session. I learn a lot more from the messy center of projects--when you know enough to have some goals and direction, but you're still muddling with what the final result will be. At least for me, that's when the juiciest part of the creative process happens.

At first, it felt a little odd to have people outside our own organization "follow" some of the Pinterest boards we thought we were using for internal purposes only. But then I realized we were functionally granting the world access to our brainstorming. I suspect as a professional I can learn a lot more from my colleagues if I can tap into and observe these kinds of internal conversations as projects are proceeding. And for students who mostly experience completed projects through packaged case studies, this kind of access may increase understanding about how the sausage is made.

I'm curious how other organizations are publicly documenting and sharing creative process. I think of this as fundamentally different from creating something packaged to share on the Web for comment. What tools are you using that naturally invite others to follow along? What messy creative bits are you sharing--intentionally or unintentionally?

Why We Wrote an Exhibition Philosophy

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. We wanted to share with people, in as clear and transparent a format as possible, our approach to developing exhibitions. In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process. It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners.

Here's the short version (read the whole thing here):

The Museum of Art & History is committed to creating exhibitions that inspire our diverse audiences to engage deeply with contemporary art and Santa Cruz County history. We see our visitors as partners in actively interpreting and exploring exhibition content. 

This philosophy steers our work, and it means that we do things a little differently than some other museums and galleries. If you are working with us as an artist or contributor to an exhibition, you should expect that museum staff will create multi-modal, interdisciplinary, participatory, immersive, and social experiences around your work. We will invite you to engage in discussion about these exhibition elements, and if you want to be involved in brainstorming possibilities, that’s fabulous. If not, that’s fine too–but you should know that we will be following this philosophy in all of the exhibitions that we develop. 

We wrote this exhibition philosophy after a series of confusing and sticky conversations with collaborators about mutual expectations of what an exhibition should be. We knew internally that we wanted our exhibitions to become more interdisciplinary, more participatory, and more responsive to audience needs. But we weren't explicitly making those goals public. Susan and I had many long conversations with contributors who were concerned that our efforts might demean or distract from their work. We discussed research about how visitors experience museums. We debated the relative merits of different forms of interactivity. We challenged our partners, they challenged us, and we all learned a lot from the experience. And by "learned a lot" I mean we learned we needed an exhibition philosophy--a starting point for dialogue that could happen earlier in the exhibition planning process.

Debates about interpretative materials, interactivity, audience needs, and visitor participation are often seen as internal museum wonk issues. But at a small community museum that primarily creates exhibitions with living, local artists and collaborators, we have to involve our partners in this conversation. If an artist is uncomfortable with the idea of interactivity around his work, or a historian is unwilling to allow visitors to comment on her research, that's a problem for us. It goes against our goals for the visitor experience, and those goals are ultimately more important to us than showing any particular artwork or artifact. In most cases, there's a way to work through the disagreements to come up with a solution that satisfies everyone's needs. But we wanted to be direct with potential partners about what we're trying to do--and why.

We're working to create a comparable philosophy for our community programs, the vast majority of which are planned with dozens of community partners. We feel like it's a good starting point for any new collaboration--you tell me what you're about, I tell you what I'm about, and we all understand what the goals are. Artist Mark Allen raised this issue in the recent report on the Machine Project residency at the Hammer Museum, saying (p. 40):

I think the hardest thing was that I never did and still don’t understand what people wanted, what they were expecting to get, and whether they got it or not. I think it was a little unclear what the mandate was. To a certain degree, I’m happy to do my own projects and it was amazing to work with you guys and I learned a lot, but any situation where you’re invited to do something and you don’t know if you’re fulfilling expectations is emotionally challenging. 

I'm curious about other ways that museums directly express their philosophy on exhibitions, or learning, or programming, as a guide for partners and visitors. I know a few institutions have internal documents on these kinds of things (ASTC just published several from science centers around the world), but I'm curious about the use and value of external statements. Have you done this at your museum, either directly with a document or indirectly through conversation? How do you help your community understand your goals and related methods?