The Event-Driven Museum, One Year Later

A year ago, I wrote a post speculating about whether events (institutionally-produced programs) might be a primary driver for people to attend museums, with exhibitions being secondary. Now, a year later, I've seen the beginnings of how that question has borne out at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), as well as hearing from folks around the museum industry about the interplay of exhibitions and events at their own institutions.

And so, in this post, a few findings, and more questions.

Many museums, big and small, thrive on events. I had originally assumed that this phenomenon might affect smaller museums in smaller markets more than large urban institutions, but I've since learned from colleagues at big hitters like LACMA and the Dallas Museum of Art that the majority of their visitors attend through events. One director of a children's museum even told me that they "eventize" normal operations--calling a Saturday a "family festival" without changing the planned programming--to draw more people. At our museum, about 68% of casual visitors (non-school tours) attended through events this year.

This isn't true for every museum. There are still many museums in large tourist centers with a hefty one-time audience. Zoos, aquaria, science and children's museums boast a significant "anytime" audience of families who return again and again. But for art and history museums, especially outside the biggest tourism markets, I wouldn't be surprised if events drive the lion's share of attendance, period.

At our small museum, events have driven a huge increase in attendance, community partnerships, and media coverage. We're still crunching numbers for the close of the fiscal year, but our attendance has more than doubled from 17,349 last year to about 36,000 this year. The vast majority of that increase has come through attendance to new events.

These events don't just increase audience. This year, we produced our events--especially the 3rd Friday evening series--in partnership with over 700 artists and community organizations in Santa Cruz. Events enabled us to partner with diverse groups who brought in new audiences and programmatic opportunities. We turned a place where “nothing happens” into a place where something was often happening. We got media attention each time we hosted an event, and within a year, we were celebrated by the local weekly as “a major go-to hotspot… that keeps things fresh and fuels the creative fires of Santa Cruz.”

So why is this happening, and what does it mean? Here are three possibilities I'm toying with for why events are taking center stage at museums:

• Culturally, we are shifting to a more event-driven society. Recreational time is down, people are more scheduled than ever, and “casually” visiting a museum is irrelevant to many people, especially those who live outside large urban cultural centers. Festivals—whether of jazz, visual art, ethnic identity, or historic reenactment—are experiencing record attendance even as more permanent institutions that offer the same content are struggling. People want to come for the weekend, the moment, the event. (Note: this is a hypothesis with little data to back it up. Can you help with some concrete information to confirm or refute this idea?)
• It's less about the event than the timing. Audience behavior could be more driven by museum hours than by the type of activity offered. Events mostly happen in the evening or on weekends, outside of work time. The majority of our exhibition hours do not. Maybe if museums were open from 3-10pm instead of 10am-5pm, the attendance would be higher overall. However, it is worth noting that at the MAH, a Saturday without an event during daytime hours typically draws half as many visitors as a Saturday with even a very low-key drop-in program. 
• Events generate media buzz and attention with greater frequency than exhibitions. The more events we do, the more we get known for events, and the more people attend during them. If society is more event-driven than ever, we have to give people explicit (and frequent) reasons to think of museums as an "anytime" experience, or they never will attend casually. This could be a worthwhile long play that introduces people to the value of a weekly "museum moment," or it could be an uphill battle against the reality of how and why people prefer to engage. 

I'm most interested in the first of these, and I'm genuinely curious to hear about any studies or data that might shed light on the (real or imagined) cultural shift towards events. In talking with executive directors of a range of arts organizations, it really does seem that festivals are performing better than their regularly-scheduled counterparts. I don't know if that has always been the case or whether festival formats are just now in ascendance. What have you seen, both from the arts management side and from your own experience as a consumer?

What Belgian Beer-Brewing Monks Taught Me about Non-Profit Business Models

If you want to drink the best beer in the world, you'd better be ready to work for it. A recent episode of the design podcast 99 Percent Invisible chronicled the hoops people jump through to get a bottle of Westvleteren 12, which is produced by the monks of the Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren in Flanders, Belgium. You can only reserve a bottle by phone. You must pick it up in person at the Abbey at a specific time on a specific date. You can only buy a small amount, and you are limited to one purchase every 60 days.

The episode is mostly focused on the thrill of the hunt, and all the attendant ways exclusivity fuels desire. But late in the episode (minute 9), when the supplicant finally drinks the beer at the monastery, he is underwhelmed. The beer is terrific, but the experience is unfulfilling. He feels anonymous. He feels disconnected. He made it to Mecca, and it's kind of eh.

Why the disconnect? As Roman Mars, the show's host, puts it, "You, the consumers of beer, are not the real customer. God is." The monks make beer to support their monastic lifestyle, not to serve consumers. The exclusivity and the complicated path to purchasing the beer are not branding strategies to trump up the value of the beer. They are limitations that enable monks to spend most of their time being monks.

Listening to the podcast, I was struck by its strange connections to the non-profit world's approach to funding. In many ways, the monks have a much more practical approach to the problem of supporting their mission than the rest of us do. They brew beer to provide the income to support their religious work. It's the ultimate case of unrelated business income. They don't want their beer-brewing work and their prayer to be commingled; they are intentionally separate. Whereas non-profits work hard to fit everything they do under one mission, the monks split it up. The beer supports the mission. The beer is not part of the mission.

In the arts, this bears directly on the current debate around "art for art's sake" versus "art for community development." Not every arts organization is fundamentally focused on connecting with and engaging audiences. While a few are, the majority are only slowly pivoting towards a primary focus on audience engagement. Some do so with gusto, seeing the opportunity for transformation, relevance, and new relationships with the public. Others do so half-heartedly. Some even feel forced to do so. They want to be art monks, not customer-serving businesses.

It's totally valid for an artist or an art organization to have a monastic approach. For these organizations, the ultimate audience--the one they care most about--is something else. It could be "art" with a capital A, the pursuit of social justice or innovation or institutional critique. I've talked to plenty of non-profit artistic directors and curators who will say that the master is the work... or if not the work, the artists behind the work. To them, audience engagement is a distraction at best, a dilution or bastardization at worst.

So why do they even consider it? These days, a few key arts funders are shifting towards public engagement through art. Everyone is strapped, so organizations try to move with the funders. Monastically-inclined institutions pursue donors who support public engagement with the work, and they package the work into a kind of sausage they can sell to audiences. The result is not Mecca. It's something less than, something that often frustrates artists and audiences alike.

Community-focused organizations have the same problem in reverse. Even if they primarily care about deep engagement with audiences, these organizations often have to talk about "artistic excellence" to get noticed by traditional arts funders and donors. Community organizations without brand-name artists can be denigrated as "craft centers," even if the outcomes of their engagement efforts are tremendous.

The problem is that no one--neither art monks nor community-driven organizations--are entitled to funding. We all have to find supporters and customers who can help us pay the bills. Maybe, instead of shifting with the traditional funding, all kinds of arts organizations should be proudly and blatantly seeking out unrelated sources of income. I recently heard the director of a major performing arts organization pejoratively refer to for-profit music venues as "bars with bands" as opposed to organizations that exist to produce and present "real" music. But is it any less problematic to be supported by grants and high ticket prices than by beverage sales? Does it lead to more "pure" programming decisions? I don't think so.

We are always told that everything we do should flow from our mission. Maybe instead, we should think like the monks and figure out how we can make sure everything we do serves our mission. There are arts organizations (including my own) that get significant amounts of their operating budgets from endowments, real estate, or parking garages. There are innovative arts organizations that are led by volunteer staff members who make their money as teachers or engineers or marketers. Maybe we shouldn't apologize for these "non-mission-based" sources of income. Maybe we should pursue more of them. After all, they are what allow us to pursue our missions--for whomever our ultimate audience may be.

17 Ways We Made our Exhibition Participatory

Going to MAH and seeing the LOVE exhibition on First Friday was a wonderful experience. It made me think in ways that I haven't before about the relation of art--as expressive culture--to democracy. It was fascinating to see people--across social differences--responding to representations of love in the paintings, images, objects and narratives that were part of the installation. It was exhilarating to see them inspired to create their own meanings in response: lovers whispering together in alcoves, people of all ages writing and drawing on walls and post-its, children painting, everyone sitting rapt before screens.
--Helene Moglen, professor of literature, UCSC 

After a year of tinkering, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is now showing an exhibition, All You Need is Love, that embodies our new direction as an institution. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement. The exhibition is far from perfect, but it's a big step towards reflecting the "thriving, central gathering place" of our strategic vision.

This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements. We experimented with many different forms of visitor participation throughout the building, trying to balance social and individual, text-based and artistic, cerebral and silly. With one exception, no single activity cost more than $30 to produce/maintain. We developed and prototyped everything in-house with staff and interns. Pull up an armchair for a tour of our participatory hits, misses, and related discoveries. (Note: you can view these photos of the exhibition on Flickr here.)

Content Development

While most of the participatory components to the exhibition are products that are visitor-facing, there were a few ways we made our development process participatory in terms of collecting and curating content:

• We partnered with two local newspapers--the Good Times and the Sentinel--to run contests looking for people with stories of crazy things they'd done for love and love rituals with family and friends. The best of the results were published on the papers online and included in the exhibition complete with first person labels, photographs, and artifacts.
• We collaborated with two local organizations--the Rebele Homeless Family Shelter and Dominican Oaks retirement community--to conduct oral histories and produce a small audio and photo-based exhibit on maintaining love in tough situations. Here's a photo of one of the retired couples who came with their family to celebrate her 80th birthday in the exhibition.
• We invited museum members and a few community members/organizations to create small exhibition components about unique love experiences with family, friends, teammates, romantic partners, and pets. 
• We invited a private art school to fill a very public wall with paintings made by students in response to the question, "How would you depict love?" This is the most visible community component in the exhibition--a huge wall of 60 paintings hung salon-style, including a giant Marilyn Monroe, several superheroes, cats, goth girls--whatever said "love" to a range of kids. The inclusion and prominence of amateur art in the museum makes a complicated statement that is worth a whole other blog post.
• We prototyped the most complicated interactives (the Love Styles quiz and Hearts to Hearts game) with visitors in the months leading up to opening. Because our visitation is highest during our monthly First Friday events, we used those as opportunities for testing. We called the prototypes "activities," got lots of participants, and people loved giving their feedback and seeing the prototypes evolve over a couple months. We've continued to do this for future exhibitions.

The Love Lounge

I LOVE... entryway.

On the first floor of the museum, just as you walk in, you encounter a small gallery that we have transformed into a participatory, creative space. This gallery has always been tough for exhibitions--it serves as a pass-through to the classroom, and during evening events, people pour through it on their way to and from classroom activities. We decided that instead of fighting this use, we should embrace it and reposition the gallery as an informal, welcoming space for active engagement with content. We also felt that it was useful to "front load" participation so that people understand right off the bat that they can engage actively at the MAH. So many museum exhibitions relegate the participatory bits in at the end. We wanted to welcome people in a participatory way, so that hopefully, they would carry that same energy and enthusiasm for active engagement upstairs.

The content of the Love Lounge focuses on individuals from Santa Cruz County, historic and current, and the crazy things they have done for love. Some are conceptual (i.e. interracial marriage, keeping a family together while homeless) and others are more immediate (i.e. making a special gift). The content was developed in a participatory way but is presented traditionally via artifacts, text, photos, and audio.

There are three participatory components for visitors to the Love Lounge:

• An entrance doorway with spray-painted I LOVE ________ that people can complete with chalk. People love this and it's easy to manage with a sponge. The content is fairly surface-level, but it creates a nice feel when you walk in. 
• A wall on which people can write answers to the question: "What's the craziest thing you've done for love?" with sharpies. This is the smash hit of the room and the most risky thing in the whole exhibition. What kind of crazy museum gives people sharpies and lets them write on a wall? As it turns out, the wall is fairly manageable and generates fabulous stories. The biggest problem is the sharpies running out; visitors pound them into the walls, and they have to be replaced every two weeks. We also have problems with kids scrawling on the bottom (you can see the height below which the wall becomes a toddler playground) and occasionally, people writing inappropriate things. We haven't had too much swearing, but there are rare moments of violence. "Murder" is not something you want to see on this kind of wall. We manage the wall by repainting it when it gets full (about every 3 weeks, and yes, we photograph it first) and spot-repainting anything offensive the day it is noticed. The content truly is amazing. Every time we repaint, I'm sad to see many of the stories go--but then I'm always overwhelmed with the quality of what replaces them.
• A typewriter on which people can write love letters. They can pin them to the wall or take them home. This is the sleeper surprise of the room--few people do it, but those who do get completely hooked. It's not unusual to find a teenager at the typewriter for an hour or a family learning how to use it together. 

There was a fourth interactive element in the Love Lounge in which people could recommend favorite love songs to get added to the soundtrack that plays in the space. We cut it in the first week after opening. It wasn't a substantive activity, we had no way to get back to people to tell them their song had been added, and it was right next to the typewriter--too many activities on one little desk.

Sound Stairs

As you walk up the stairs to the second floor of the exhibition, where the main gallery is, your footsteps trigger voices from the community saying "I love dance," "I love anthropology," "I love cats," etc. This installation is the only one that cost more than $30--about $2,000 for the parts. We see it as a long-term investment for the museum. We stole the idea from the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and worked with a fabulous local volunteer engineer to make it happen. We invite visitors to record themselves at the front desk with the staff member, and every month, we dump new voices into the staircase. We plan for this to be a permanent installation with content specific to the given exhibition at any time. This sound installation is delightful and adds surprise to the museum. I'm not sure whether people come back to hear their voices on it, but they certainly enjoy triggering them, listening, and recording themselves.

Second Floor and the Main Gallery

The main gallery for the exhibition primarily focuses on a blend of traditional exhibition content exploring romantic and platonic love. There is a mix of artwork, historical artifacts, community stories, and labels about the psychology of love. There are also four participatory experiences spread throughout the gallery:

The abacus and sticker setup for the Love Styles test.

• "After the Breakup, I..." wall. This is a simple post-it-based talkback wall where people share their breakup stories. Powerful, poignant, and entertaining. We used this technique to develop the prompt. Requires occasional culling for violent or overly sexual content, but mostly, it's PG-13 and on-topic.
• Love Styles personality test. This is our most elegant interactive in the exhibition, and it is always occupied by absorbed visitors. It is a personality test (based on real science) in which you can determine your own love style by answering a series of questions, teen magazine-style. We spent a long time prototyping this one. We didn't want people to have to add up points or do anything too onerous to participate. So, we created simple handmade abacuses that people use to track their responses to sets of questions. At the end of the quiz, you look at the beads to figure out what style is dominant. You then put a sticker under the name of your dominant style. The stickers accumulate to show a simple statistical distribution of love styles in the visitor community. Every once in a while, a post-it from the breakup interactive will make its way over here as a form of commentary on the activity. 
• Hearts to Hearts card game. This social game, based on the popular Apples to Apples, is a mixed bag. The idea is to select adjectives from a deck that best describe the feeling of common relationship experiences--Thanksgiving dinner, office holiday parties, sharing rooms with siblings. When you get a group together at the table, it's incredibly fun and successful at prompting people to share personal stories related to the topics at hand. But it's hard to explain to visitors who haven't played Apples to Apples, and if there is not a gallery host to facilitate, this one often sits unplayed.   



A DIY wedding!

• DIY Wedding Chapel. This one was not created by us. Artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle decided to create an immersive, surreal wedding chapel in which to show video clips from their series of weddings to the earth. They wanted to invite visitors to engage in spontaneous wedding ceremonies in the chapel, and so we brainstormed together until we decided on a blackboard with fill-in-the-blank wedding vows. (Rejected ideas included a paper towel dispenser for vows.) While very few people actually write and recite vows in the chapel, the ones that do are passionate and heartfelt, even when goofy. This is definitely a case where people's participation is higher given the overall participatory vibe of the gallery. In a traditional museum, I suspect people would see the blackboard as "part of the art" and not touch.

Elsewhere on the second floor, there are two small activities that explicitly tie the love show to our history collection:

• Love Map. In the history gallery, there is a map of Santa Cruz County with paper, pins, and red yarn for writing a memory about a love experience in the county and connecting it to the place where it happened. This was launched as a facilitated activity during a "Love Fest" event in April and stayed. It is a bit of an ugly stepchild interactive--since it wasn't planned with the rest of the exhibition, we tend to forget to maintain and regulate the content. It can get messy, but the layered effect is somewhat appealing despite the reduced coherence.
• Love matching game. Also created for the Love Fest, this little game is perched on a wall on the way from the second to the third floor. It is a simple poster showcasing photos from the museum archives of couples in love, old valentines, etc., along with cards with clues to match to the photos on the posterboard. We have found these staircase landing activities to be surprisingly appealing. Here are some girls crowded around it on their way through the museum. 

3rd Floor

The third floor of the museum takes love to a more spiritual and conceptual level. The sole gallery holds extraordinary paintings by Joan Brown, mostly reflecting her deep love of cats. Outside the gallery, there are personal stories from community members about connections to animals, and a lobby area that we have rebranded as a Creativity Lounge. There are three participatory activities on the third floor:

Cat temple meditation.

• Animal stories. At the end of a wall featuring five animal photos and related first-person stories, there is an entreaty for participation. If you have a pet story to add to the wall outside the gallery, you can email it to our curator of history/collections manager, Marla. Only two people have done this. People like looking at and reading the pet stories on display, but the idea of going home, finding a photo, writing something up, and sending it in? Not so much.
• Me collages. The Creativity Lounge is entirely taken over by this simple activity, in which visitors are invited to make collages that represent "the things you love most" from recycled magazines. There is a beautiful, simple set of clotheslines on which visitors can hang their completed collages. This activity is a bit of a conundrum. From an experience perspective, it's terrific. Visitors of all ages spend a long time working on their collages. They talk with each other while creating, both bonding and bridging as they cut and glue. There are many people who clearly have aha moments about the pleasure of simple art activities. And yet, while the collages look lovely on the wall, the content produced by them is weak. Almost no one looks at the finished collages except as a design element. We have a basket of completed ones (too many to hang!) with a sign that says, "Take home a hand-made collage." No one does. They pile up.
• Meditation cushions. This is a different kind of interaction. In the gallery with the Joan Brown paintings, there is a "cat temple" that Joan built and painted. It is strange and beautiful and we wanted people to have a different way to experience it. We put out some simple cushions on the floor--the kind you'd put on patio chairs--in a semi-circle around the temple. There's a simple label inviting you to sit and meditate on the work. I'm always surprised and delighted when I see people doing so, sitting quietly on red cushions, while just outside the gallery the scissors and magazine bits are flying at the collage activity. It's nice to remember that there really is room for all different kinds of participation in a museum.

So What?

What's the cumulative effect of all these participatory experiences? Do they really help people connect with the content at hand? And if their development means less room (mental or physical) for contemplation of artworks and historic artifacts, is it worth it?

Of course, I'm biased. I feel strongly that we need to provide multiple entry points to exhibitions. We need labels AND audio AND post-its AND collage-making AND games AND meditation. I am proud to see visitors increasing their dwell time, sharing their delight and enjoyment of the space, having meaningful conversations in the galleries, and generally expressing that the museum is becoming a useful place for them to explore topics near and dear to the heart (literally).

What's the downside? In this case, the tradeoff was in design. Because we were taking this "and" approach for the first time, we didn't quite have the skills to figure out how we should organize everything to be participatory AND look gorgeous. We realized we needed a more complex hierarchical design approach to incorporate all the new elements sensibly and attractively. The multi-disciplinary content and the inclusion of community voices were just as challenging from a design perspective as the participatory components. The whole process exposed our weaknesses in a good way. We know what we need learn about and improve on over time.

For now, I'm glad to hear visitor comments like this one, from a 16-year-old girl:

even though we have seen famous exhibits from picasso to monet-this is the first exhibit that makes me want to do art

Amen to that.

Blueprint Book Club Part 3: The Future of the National Vending Machine

This post is the third and final in a series of reactions to Blueprint, a book chronicling the rise and fall of the Dutch Museum of National History (INNL) in 2008-2011. This guest post was written by Geert-Jan Davelaar and Anna Tiedink, educators at the Zuiderzee Open Air Museum in the Netherlands, the museum that "adopted" the INNL's National Vending Machine project after INNL's closure. The Vending Machine project was one of my favorites; you can learn more about it here. 

After INNL was forced to close its (mostly virtual) doors, the National Vending Machine, one of the projects the Museum of National History had set up, was transferred to the Zuiderzeemuseum. How is the exhibit living on at the museum and what is it like to take over someone else’s project? We’d like to share some thoughts and ideas in this guest post.

 The National Vending Machine is an actual functional machine, which, instead of traditional Dutch snacks, contains different everyday objects and souvenirs visitors can buy for a small sum. Information on a label and a short video clip informs the buyer about the history behind objects including a tulip, fishing boat, licorice and tea towel. Online, participants can share why they bought the object and suggest a new object for the machine.

A vending machine is actually a pretty good metaphor for the process of taking over the exhibit from INNL:

• It was convenient: without going through the process of initiation and development our museum was treated to a very attractive exhibit, all set up and ready to go. 
• It was well stocked: not only did we have about 60 objects and their stories; the whole project was well documented as well. 
• It was solid: in the 1.5 years the exhibit had been presented at four different locations across the Netherlands, it had proven itself to be a great tool in engaging the public with historical objects. 

But the National Vending Machine, as most of INNL’s projects, is a prototype. Consequently, soon after the transfer, our discussions focused on the objective of the machine in its new context: what purpose does it have? Where should we place it and how do we want our visitors to engage with it? 

Zuiderzeemuseum is an open-air museum that focuses on a specific region in the north of the Netherlands. Originally, we placed the vending machine in the car park ticketing area, where about 60% of our visitors wait for a ferry to come to the museum itself. After exhibiting the vending machine in our entrance building, we found it was used by a cross-section of our audience: families, day-trippers, pupils and students. We also noticed about 30% of the exhibit's visitors by-passed the registration procedure, choosing to buy an object without creating a user profile. This focus on buying the object was also reflected in the fact that none of the registered participants responded to the objects online. The vending machine itself was popular, but the secondary experience around it was not.

So now, we are trying to come up with a way to go beyond the convenience of the quick sale and seduce our audience to have a deeper engagement with the histories behind the objects. We want to have a conversation with our audience and facilitate storytelling. We want to increase the offline and online participation and go beyond what can be seen as a gimmick: buying an historical object in an unexpected way.

While we are interested in facilitating deeper experiences, we also plan to start tweaking the usability of the vending machines to make buying an object as easy as possible. Why should a visitor go through a laborious registration procedure to get a RFID card when it has no other use for him or her? The RFID card was intended to be the entrance ticket for INNL, so it made sense in that context during their planning. For us, the card is less useful. Also, just like any vending machine, objects get physically stuck in the system. Rethinking the design and the technology used is an important part of this ongoing process.

Being an open-air museum presenting the past, present and future of a specific region in the north of The Netherlands, our discussion of what regional objects we should include in the vending machine goes deeper. Are we the ones who should curate the items that tell people’s history? We don’t think so. Most importantly, we see the Vending Machine as a catalyst for co-creation, giving our audience greater influence and a greater voice to a shared history. The Vending Machine will travel to different communities in and outside our region. We would like to link with other organizations, institutions, individuals and neighborhoods and have them decide which objects represent their history and belong in the exhibit. This project will result in new objects for the Vending Machine as well as our coming new main exhibition. The vending machine could even be a message in a bottle: going from one place to the other spreading its stories as it moves.

So, we’re back to our original vending machine. In a way we are like our visitors, standing in front of the brightly lit National Vending Machine, coins in our hands, 80 different compartments to choose from, trying to make our decision as we would an actual vending machine. We're left wondering what aims can be relevant for this exhibit and our museum. Which compartment would you open?

Blueprint Book Club Part 2: Museums as Battlefields in the History Wars

This post is the second in a series of reactions to Blueprint, a book chronicling the rise and fall of the Dutch Museum of National History (INNL) in 2008-2011. This guest post was written by Regan Forrest, exhibition developer and visitor experience researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia. Regan was struck by the similarities between the controversy around the Dutch Museum of National History and the issues that surrounded the National Museum of Australia when it opened ten years ago. 

As someone who has worked on several “ground-up” museum projects, some that have made it to fruition, others not, I was particularly interested in the background context of INNL rather than the specifics of the planned museum. In my experience, there is often very little difference between the design and content of those that make it and those that don’t: it’s all about politics, economics, personalities and timing. A new national museum is a particularly ambitious undertaking, because what is being created is a highly visible and long-standing statement about national identity, national priorities and a projection of self-image to the world at large. Anyone with such a brief in this day and age has their work cut out for them. The days of the unidimensional grand narrative are behind us, replaced by ongoing debate and disagreement. It’s a far more complex picture to present.

The dismissal of the INNL’s plans as a ‘post-modern mish-mash’ (Blueprint, p219) immediately jumped out at me as something that might have been said in some quarters about the National Museum of Australia(NMA) when it opened in 2001. The NMA was a key battlefield in Australia’s “History Wars," a continuing national debate about how we recognise, teach and interpret the knottier aspects of Australia’s colonial past. The NMA was accused of presenting a “black armband” view of Australia’s history (i.e., dwelling on the predations of colonialism rather than celebrating national achievements).

Due to the political climate of the time, a review of the Museum was commissioned in 2003 to determine whether the museum had complied with the requirements of its charter. The 2003 review found that, while accusations of systematic political bias were on the whole unwarranted, there were considerable issues with respect to both the museum’s physical and conceptual orientation. Signage was inadequate and gallery titles were ambiguous and confusing. The outdoor courtyard was an ‘overwhelming’ expanse of concrete, with symbolism that was incomprehensible without considerable prior knowledge or the presence of a guide.

The review’s authors emphasised the importance of narrative (if not Grand Narrative) as a communication tool. In this sense, the NMA was deemed to have missed a trick. The linking themes and narratives of the museum were insufficiently explicit in many places, making the experience feel disjointed. In some cases, the lack of a strong collection to support the storylines emphasised narrative weaknesses. On the other hand, the review of the Museum’s programs was mostly favourable and the museum’s online presence was praised.

In response to the report, the NMA produced a Collections and Gallery Development Plan to address the issues highlighted. Changes to exhibitions and visitor orientation have been made, the museum’s programs continue to evolve, and there is a redevelopment to the building currently underway which will expand the public spaces and make it possible for the museum to display more of its iconic objects.

The history wars may not have ended, but they have moved on to other battlefields. Overall, the 2003 review recognised that the NMA was a work in progress. There was an acknowledgement that institutions need time and space to evolve. The expectation that everything should be bang-on right from the time of ribbon cutting is widespread but unrealistic.

So when considering plans on paper for a museum that didn’t even make it to the ribbon stage, some latitude is warranted. We don’t know how things would have evolved from opening day. How would the competing views of Dutch history have played out? To what extent would changing political tides have influenced the outcome? Would the interlocking storylines have made sense to the average visitor? Would it have captured the imagination of audiences? Would visitors have left feeling energised, or overwhelmed?

These questions may remain points of conjecture indefinitely. But if, as the authors hope, the museum eventually becomes reality, we may well have a chance to find out.

Blueprint Book Club Part 1: How Do You Create a Future-Thinking History Museum?

Note: If you have read the book and would like to write a guest post for this series, please contact me.

Imagine you've just been tasked with developing an innovative, future-thinking national museum for your country's history. Where would you start? How would you decide what to include, what tone to take, and how to present the material? How would you navigate the political minefields of such an endeavor?

Blueprint is the story of a group of people who tried to create a Dutch Museum of National History (INNL). In 2008, when this group was assembled, they had political backing, financial support, and an energetic approach to their work. By the end of 2011, the House of Representatives withdrew its political and financial support. The staff was fired, the digital projects divvied out to other institutions, the plans for the physical museum shelved. The Museum directors released Blueprint as a showcase for these plans. Still seething from the outcome, they didn't mince words; in the foreword, they state that "the rise and fall of the Museum of National History will be recorded as confirmation of a range of Dutch deficiencies." These guys won't be running for office anytime soon.

Blueprint is a maddening sketch of the museum that might have been, one that alternates between shaky and bold strokes. The majority of the book is a tour of the conceptualized physical institution, with smaller sections devoted to the political history of the project and the activities (mostly participatory, distributed, and digital) that the team undertook from 2009-2011 to start building their constituency. The root of my frustration with the book is not that the project never came to fruition. It's that the project, which was pitched as a whole new approach to museum-making, seems inconsistent. The media strategy is impressive. The early participatory projects are terrific. But the interpretative plan for the physical site seems incredibly ordinary.

The gallery and building descriptions make the museum sound like an early-2000s multi-media production in the model of the International Spy Museum, the Newseum, or any number of Gallagher & Associates or Ralph Applebaum creations. Immersive design. A mixture of chronology and thematic approaches. Hooks based on popular culture. Few objects surrounded by supporting media. Lots of screens. Limited interactivity. Starchictecture. There's nothing wrong with this kind of museum, but we've all seen several like it. It's hardly a model for an entirely new approach to museum design. There's barely a peep about the balance between exhibitions and programs, the role and use of public spaces, or the relationship between the institution and its communities. Beyond being media-rich and object-light, the plan has little to distinguish it from traditional museums.

In contrast, the activities undertaken to promote and launch the museum are truly inspiring. In three years, INNL created a series of fresh, exciting approaches to engaging communities with history. These include:

• New Greetings From... - a national competition in which 8,000 people submitted photographs to represent the iconic image of the Netherlands. 
• Freedomtrain - an exhibition about the history of liberation in 20th century Netherlands that was housed entirely inside a train that traveled the country throughout the spring of 2010.
• Xwashier - a Foursquare-style mobile app in which people could encounter historic sites throughout the country and retrieve multi-media content about the history while onsite.
• One Minutes - a film competition in which students and young filmmakers made one minute films on the theme of "where history begins."
• National Vending Machine - a travelling vending machine that invites people to connect with everyday objects that represent various aspects of the Dutch experience and history.

Each of these projects is people-centered, invites meaningful participation, and interprets the idea of a national history in a novel way. I was surprised, shocked even, that the plans for the physical museum included almost none of the ingenuity I saw in these planning projects. The description of the building is a straight-ahead depiction of gallery content, with almost no discussion of who the museum is for, how visitors will engage, and how they will interact with each other. There are hints of innovation--mentions of a digital backbone, an individualized content delivery system, a few games, a central forum--but those elements are footnotes to long descriptions of push media experiences in highly themed traditional exhibition spaces.

What are we to make of the difference between what INNL planned for the physical site and what it created in the digital and distributed world? To me, there are at least three plausible interpretations of the disconnect:

1. Their brilliance was inconsistent. The team was highly innovative when it came to new media and national awareness-building projects, but when it came to planning an actual museum, they fell prey to existing formulas supplied by architects, consultants, curators, and designers. They focused too much on the admittedly challenging question of how to reposition the content of Dutch history and not enough on the question of how to reposition engagement with it in a museum setting. A team that was superb at relevant, audience-centered work outside the institution couldn't find a way to bring their fresh thinking inside.
2. The book misrepresents the effort. The team was highly innovative, period. The plans for the museum are not representative of what they actually would have built based on their track record. For the purposes of the book, they focused on discussion of the objects, the scenes, and the building, but in reality, they would have built something much more distinctive and in keeping with their activities to date. This perspective may reflect overly wishful thinking; I realize it does not align with the museum plan as presented.
3. The planning activities were just marketing. This is my most cynical interpretation, and I assume it's not true. But there is a strange undercurrent of "brand building" that runs through the whole book, and you could interpret the participatory, experimental projects as marketing ploys to prop up an otherwise traditional museum. In some ways, I am impressed by the INNL's strategy to launch targeted "awareness campaigns" to "stimulate a fascination with and involvement in the history of the Netherlands." It's clear that INNL had a truly broad scope and multi-media approach to connecting people with history. But given the traditional nature of the museum's interpretative plan, I wonder if citizen participation is a strategy that they saw as fitting for digital/marketing projects, but not for the serious work of a museum.

Was INNL a project to build a future-thinking museum of national history? What's your interpretation?

Building a Culture of Experimentation

Note: the Blueprint book club will start next week. Sorry for the delay.

It’s not every day you find a prototype in the bathroom. Last week, I sat down on a toilet in our museum and found myself looking at an interactive station intended to test a “Legends of the Stall” sign concept for the restrooms. Legends of the Stall was started by a visitor services staff member, Katie Chrivia, who collaborated with interns and volunteers to develop the content and the design. I’d forgotten about Legends of the Stall, assuming it was ticking along in the background or pushed aside by the busy-ness of daily tasks. And then I found this prototype in the bathroom, put up without anyone’s permission, well-executed, and garnering useful responses. I peed, read the sign, and added my comments to the growing list on the wall. And left, smiling.

Rock on. Some of my happiest moments as a director come when I encounter awesome things in our museum that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It’s the pride of the “space maker” who enables other people to be risk-takers. I’m starting to really appreciate the difference between being an individual agent and creating a culture of agency. It wasn’t intuitive for me as a hands-on person. I knew how to do it myself. I knew how to do it with a team. Now I’m learning how to not-do it, but to enable it.

And increasingly, what I’m trying to enable is a culture of experimentation. We often talk about “change” or “innovation” as the goal for our institutions, but I’d argue that building a culture of experimentation is more important than building a culture of change. I’m not even sure a “culture of change” is a meaningful concept or one that could be sustained over an extended period. Experimenters are driven by the desire to try things out and see what works, to collect data, to learn from the results. They are open to possibilities. Innovators and change-makers may not be.

What does a culture of experimentation look like? For us, it means:

• We feel empowered to try things out. My colleagues are responsible, caring people who want our museum to be awesome. They have the good judgment to know that putting up a prototype in the bathroom is not just ok, but a really good way to engage people with our work and improve the final result. There's no oversight or permission required because the activity is self-evidently in keeping with our goals and strategy.
• We seek and value the feedback of others. Katie genuinely wants to make the Legends of the Stall as good a project as possible. So she asks people what they think. Across all of our work—exhibition planning, event programming—we’re constantly looking for ways to get feedback from visitors and colleagues. We’re constantly changing how and what we ask people so we get more useful feedback.
• We ask questions that will lead us to action. Whenever an intern takes a prototype out on the floor, I ask her, “What might change about this project based on this test?” If she is not willing or able to articulate a potential change, it’s not a prototype—it’s just a model of a foregone conclusion. At the MAH, prototypes have to be used to test a hypothesis, or to decide among options. This becomes more and more automatic as people feel the confidence that comes with making a decision based on data instead of arbitrary soothsaying.
• We feel comfortable with critique. This one is really important. Some experiments fail. Some exhibit ideas are lame. Some event components are dull. The more we put ourselves out there and live with the good and bad feedback, the more we see negative feedback as helpful to our progress. I’ve been happily surprised at how our team has become highly engaged in constructive critique while maintaining positive feelings about each other. I’m glad to see critical questions alongside the encouragement and recommendations on Legends of the Stall. That’s what pushes us to improve.

How does experimentation play a role (or not) in the culture of your organization? Or alternatively, what kind of culture are you trying to build, and what indicators reflect that?

Oh, and semi-relatedly, we're hiring. 

Dangerous/Ridiculous: Reflections on AAM

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. As always, the conference was a party mix of inspiring and dull, familiar and new. It's one of the rare settings in which you can see glimpses of the past and the future all under one roof.

Here, in no particular order, are the things that energized me most:

• "No idea is too ridiculous." Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. While I'm always inspired by stories of how we take risks to make programming more relevant and dynamic (thanks, Lisa Lee and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum), I was particularly struck by Kathy's thoughtful framing of the session. As she noted, it's fairly obvious why it feels risky to do something dangerous in our institutions. What's less obvious--and potentially, a bigger problem--is the self-censorship we perform to avoid doing things that seem ridiculous in the eyes of our peers. Looking silly, Kathy argued, is a barrier to experimentation. I found this idea really powerful. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. Our curator writes labels about licking the art. I host dating games. We dance out our bad times. This session made me see our silliness as a real asset as we keep pushing boundaries.
• Talking about money, openly. I led a session with Eric Siegel and Ellen Rosenthal on museum business models and some of the issues we grapple with in managing money. Ellen shared the brilliant work at Conner Prairie to make finances transparent to all staff. Eric talked about how the New York Hall of Science is trying to fund risk-taking, not just talk about it or under-resource it. And I talked about some of the challenges of finding the right income and expense models for a museum that operates more like a community center than a traditional cultural institution. It was terrific to have a packed room and a long, open conversation (we split the session into half presenting, half audience discussion) about these issues. Attendees brought up questions about how they can get more involved with financial discussions in their institutions, how we can change the ways we approach fundraising, how we can think about earned income differently. This was a topic I was never interested in before I became a director. Now I think it's really critical to all of us advancing the field and making our institutions viable. Here are our slides and Ellen's handouts if you want to learn more.
• Merilee Mostov and the Columbus Museum of Art. This woman is killing it when it comes to developing in-gallery interactive experiences around permanent collections. Merilee and I were on a panel together called Museum as Prototype (my slides here), and I got that delightful jealous feeling seeing all the amazing stuff she's doing. Handing out paper hearts on Valentine's Day so visitors could put them in front of favorite paintings. Creating her own versions of classic board games like Guess Who? for the galleries. Testing, refining, experimenting, and doing it all with style. The lead photo on this post is from a project I saw when I visited last spring. If you are interested in innovation in in-gallery experiences, get thee to Columbus.
• Viability of meetups. A couple of weeks ago, I posted on this blog that I was interested in meeting some new people at the conference. I was amazed at how effective this was--almost immediately, my schedule filled up with short, focused meetings with diverse individuals about topics I really care about. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday. I was also thrilled to see Michelle DelCarlo do a pop up "pop up museum" during the conference, advertised only through Twitter. While the content of any one meeting wasn't mind-blowing, the fact that we're now sufficiently technology-mediated that these kinds of informal, spontaneous events can happen is really exciting. Frankly, as someone who attends fewer sessions every year, I wonder how long it will be before there is a shadow conference of people who come to the city just to meet up around the edges. AAM (and other conference organizers) might want to think about how to embrace and engage these kinds of folks before they become seen as annoying parasites on the conference itself.
• Participatory art and co-creation on the rise. The conversation about community engagement at AAM has evolved, and this year, it had a distinctly social practice/art bent. The conference showcased many fabulous projects--Flux Foundation, Open Field, Shine a Light, Create Denver--that support substantive co-creation experiences for artists and amateurs alike. It's interesting to me that this year's conference seemed so art-heavy when it comes to participation. Art museums may have been slow to come to this party, but those that do are coming in smart and strong. History and science museums... time to step it up.
• Staying with friends. OK, this one is personal, but I was amazed at how wonderful it was to stay with a good friend, in a house, away from the insanity of the conference. We hosted a dinner party for diverse museum people, made pancakes, and reconnected at the end of long days. Not every city has a good friend, but this does make me think about the option of renting a house for future conferences. AirBnB might make it viable... who wants to stay in a houseboat next year in Baltimore?

What did you get out of the conference? What excited you? 

Year One as a Museum Director... Survived!

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago).

It’s been a wild and wonderful year—without question, my most challenging and stimulating yet. We went through a dramatic financial turnaround and redefined our relationship with our community through a series of experimental participatory projects and new programmatic approaches. We have come out the other end with dramatic increases in attendance (62%), membership (30%), and financial stability (priceless). We have new support from foundations and individuals who care about innovation in audience engagement—and even more importantly, participants who are excited to experiment with us. People are showing up, getting involved, and sharing their enthusiasm in droves. Personally, I’ve learned to work in whole new worlds, from fundraising to management to community development. It is incredibly rewarding work. I feel lucky.

I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments. In the meantime, here are some of the...

THINGS I’M MOST PROUD OF:

• Redefining our role in the community. I’ve always been interested in the social mission of museums, and I feel strongly that the MAH will be successful if we are not only a great cultural or learning organization but a great community organization—one with compelling relevance to the issues that matter most in Santa Cruz. I’m proud of our partnerships with the Homeless Service Center, Second Harvest Food Bank, UCSC, the Chamber of Commerce, and other organizations that are at the heart of the Santa Cruz identity. I look forward to more strategic partnerships that support community development broadly in our county.
• Just doing it. We didn’t go through an extensive planning process followed by deliberative, careful steps forward. We had a vision, a short list of goals for the first year, and an energetic (if underfunded) attack. Over the past year, we’ve developed several planning methodologies and approaches to our work—such as our exhibition philosophy and community program development process—and we did it iteratively through a series of experiments. We tried and tested and played and worked our way forward, and we’re still doing it. It is, as Kathleen McLean puts it, “museum as prototype,” and it is exhilarating, thoughtful work for all of us.

MISTAKES I MADE:

• Using the F word. When I arrived, the MAH was incredibly close to the brink financially—we had less than one week of cash in the bank. In the early days, I would say to donors and to the media that the museum was failing and that we needed their investment and commitment to turn it around and thrive. This narrative worked well in the press—especially when we had early impressive results—but it was demoralizing and offensive to some of the staff and volunteers who had worked hard to deliver the best museum experiences possible in the years prior. Staff members led us in reframing our language to talk about the museum as transforming from a “traditional model to a 21^st century model” instead of failing and then succeeding.
• Conflating financial trends with financial position. When I came, I saw an institution that had a multi-year pattern of operating in the red. We had to reverse the trend, and I made drastic, immediate cuts and changes to cut expenses. Everyone made sacrifices. I thought it was the only option. We had layoffs and all remaining staff took 20% salary cuts across the board (which were restored over the following six months as we raised an operating reserve). Then, the turnaround happened faster than I expected, and I now see the situation a little differently. Maybe instead of thinking about needing to turn around the monthly cash flow, I should have thought about the net cash required to put us on more stable ground. If I were in this situation again, I might make the same choice, but I think I’d put more options on the table in the decision-making.
• Not acknowledging enough the stress that comes with disruptive change. While I think I did a decent job communicating my vision for the turnaround and changes with staff, I did a poor job responding to the spoken—and mostly unspoken—stress that came with it. While effective as a tool for rapid change, “embrace the chaos” is not a comfortable management strategy. I credit everyone on our team for adapting and leading with extraordinary enthusiasm and optimism.

THINGS THAT SURPRISE ME:

• The central role of event-driven experiences. From day 1, I believed that we needed to focus in our first year on creating new participatory events to engage the community. My theory was that visitors would be introduced to the museum through events and then return for daytime visits to the galleries. Instead, we find that they do return—for more events. 85% of our visitors attend through events. Events generate media, focus public attention, and catalyze social energy. The jury is still out on how we will negotiate the relationship between events and casual visits when it comes to hours, pricing, and resource allocation—but this is something we will definitely keep exploring.
• The cumulative effect of participation. I often talk about audience participation as a deployable tool—one among many—to enhance engagement. While I still think of it that way, at the MAH, we’re seeing some of the surprising effects of lots of participatory techniques all under one roof. Our message to the community about getting involved, coupled with policies that encourage flexible collaboration and stations throughout the building that invite participation is generating striking levels and types of co-creative activity in all arenas. It's comparable to the difference between a place with a few interactives and an interactive science center--it changes the way people engage and who comes. I’m not suggesting that every institution can or should move in this direction, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it in action and I’m struck by the distinction.
• The speed and extent of the community response. We still have a long way to go to make the MAH the “thriving central gathering place” of our vision statement. But it’s kind of amazing how quickly our role in the eyes of community members changed. Visitors, members, donors, volunteers, and the media have been effusive about what they describe as the “new energy” at the museum. I didn’t imagine that would happen in such a short time frame, and I think it’s going to help all of us—staff, board and community members—continue the conversation about how to keep the energy going.
• The possible determinism of cultural geography. I used to say that participation can work in all cultures and institution types—it’s just a matter of finding the right type of participation for that community. While I still believe this, I am frequently struck by how “Santa Cruz” a lot of our story is. Free hugs for new members, collaborative sculpture projects, fire festivals… these things could work in lots of places, but I’m not sure they would evoke the same interest, passion, and almost universal enthusiasm that we enjoy. I talked about this with international museum friends at AAM and they had mixed responses—some bought the Santa Cruz niche concept, others didn’t. Again, the jury is out.

Here’s to the coming year, which will hopefully be as full of learning, engaging, and experimenting as this past year. And more sleep. That would be good too. 

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.