Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0 On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggl es with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. That's why I asked.

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2009

Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. I enjoyed listening to it (virtually, not at the museum).

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Museum Alternative Portland Artist 22

Museum 2.0

JULY 7, 2010

Most of my work contracts involve a conversation that goes something like this: "We want to find ways to make our institution more participatory and lively." Audience development is not an exercise in concentric circles. Staff members at one museum said to me directly, "We don't want to be the museum for ladies who lunch anymore."

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2008

Dear Museum 2.0-ers, ers, Next week, I'll be going to DC for a meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Museum and Library Services on "Museums and Libraries in the 21st Century." Over the last 50 years, public-facing museums and libraries in the U.S. But one page!

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Museum Library Participatory Wikipedia 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. Here are a few things that I think helped make this experience valuable: We started from communities' needs, not the museum's. We also had interns recording during the honeycomb exercise.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Museum 2.0

JULY 10, 2018

The museum was in huge financial trouble. My expertise was on inviting strangers to participate in public settings like museums. Here are my three big takeaways from The Art of Gathering : Hosting is an exercise in courageous leadership. I remember the first staff meeting I ever ran. Everyone's eyes on me, expecting something.

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Hosting Arts Help Museum 31

Museum 2.0

APRIL 28, 2009

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggles with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. The most reliable question I'm using works in art museums.

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Technique Question Design Develop 52

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext , a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2017

It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. A SIMPLE WAY TO TRY IT This week, we experimented with visioning at my museum in an all-staff meeting. We took 30 minutes for the exercise. We learned how to write visions, how to use them, and how to share them with others.

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History Pennsylvania Michigan Indiana 26

Museum 2.0

JULY 2, 2009

How would you design a recommendation system for a museum? When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour. When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour.

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System Design Movie Museum 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2009

To kick off the course, we’re doing a simple exercise at the Seattle zoo (but you can do it anywhere). I believe that focusing specifically on the social capacity of an object, rather than its content or interpretation, yields new design techniques for museum exhibits and other participatory spaces. So how about it?

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Design Experiment Seattle Social 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

Today, Museum 2.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 and watched the Museum 2.0

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Museum Voice Minnesota Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

The focus is on bringing in outside influencers--folks from the Burning Man festival to World Without Oil --to help museum experience designers recharge, connect, and explore new ways to do creative work in teams. We've created an alternative website to provide a more participatory version of the standard pre-conference informational site.

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Collaboration Registration Brain Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve long admired Improv Everywhere , the NYC-based participatory public art group. The MP3 experiment is an exercise in following instructions. But it’s rare that museum exhibit designers or audio tour developers are willing to explicitly require certain kinds of actions by visitors.

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Instruction Instructional Nicaragua Experiment 21

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2010

I learned new vocabulary and questions to ask myself and others, but the exercise itself felt a bit frustrating and haphazard. This relationship bit helped me think about how different kinds of folks will be involved with a highly participatory, community-co-created project in the long-term. Finally, we looked at assets.

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Structure Model Social Profit 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 3, 2008

I've written before about techniques for talking to strangers, looking at how buttons , buses , and dogs and can all be tools for participatory design. I used that instruction recently to kick off a meeting at a museum planning a participatory education space. Interestingly, at the City Museum in St.

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Participatory St. Louis Museum Game 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2007

Welcome to the second in the four-part series on comfort (and its boundaries) in museums, a day late but just as tasty. The club members believe in the health benefits of laughter, and they engage socially in several laughter exercises: laughing at each other, laughing with tongues sticking out, laughing while shaking hands, and so on.

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Program People Museum Lecture 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2008

As one designer commented to me after last week's colloquium on museums and civic discourse, it feels fake, even condescending, like we're handing out little "talk back opportunities" just to give visitors something to do. Is it just an exercise in giving visitors a fake voice? Why do we ask visitors questions in exhibitions?

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Question Museum Participatory Voice 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 3, 2007

Almost every part of each weekend, from the ceremonies (open guided discussion) to the meals (homemade) was participatory. Instead, I think we uncovered one of the secrets to creating successful participatory experiences: people like to feel useful. The same dynamic plays out when it comes to participatory museum experiences.

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Collaboration Participatory Museum Exercise 20