Museum 2.0

APRIL 6, 2011

Let's say you spend a year working with a group of teens to co-create an exhibition, or you invite members and local artists to help redesign the lobby. In many cases, once the final project is launched, it's hard to detect the participatory touch. Not every participatory process has to scream "look at me!"

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Participatory Process Museum Children 48

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 22, 2012

What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? Will the artists ruin the museum with their plant vacations and coatroom concerts? Will the bureaucracy of the institution drown the artists in red tape? No, this is not a reality TV show.

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. The project is designed to scale. What's the "use" of visitors' comments?

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Participatory Music Project Video 48

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. HUMANS ARE THE BEST AGENTS OF PARTICIPATION When I wrote the book, I was coming from the perspective of an exhibit designer. Those people are driven not by the design precept of participation. Humans empower each other. Invite each other in.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2010

While there, I was lucky to get to experience a highly participatory exhibition that the MIA mounts once a decade: Foot in the Door. The rules are clear: anyone who lives in Minnesota and considers her/himself an artist can contribute one piece. The exhibition design suggests both democracy and intimacy.

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Participatory Museum Arts Artist 46

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2016

Most participatory projects were short-term, siloed innovations, not institutional transformations. The evaluation additionally called out some faulty assumptions in program design about leadership and staff continuity throughout the multi-year process. Bernadette Peters' provocative 2011 report, Whose Cake is it Anyway?

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Museum Participatory Resource Place 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Would you design an interactive exhibit that only 1% of visitors would want to use? This is a problem for two reasons.

Participatory 50

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. Artists work incredibly hard to produce their work. This isn't even participatory. It's just fun.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

Grantees, Experts, and Partners at the end of the Brainerd Foundation’s 21st Century Advocacy Design Lab. What if they used a design thinking process to not only get feedback from grantees but as a way to develop a more agile way of working? Why Use One? Notes from the presentations as well as photos can be found here.

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Design Strategy Facilitation Advocacy 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

If you design interactives for kids, adults recognize that the experience is not for them, and they don't engage. There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults. People of all ages are sensitive to the messages that design sends. The colors are muted.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Would you design an interactive exhibit that only 1% of visitors would want to use? This is a problem for two reasons.

Participatory 44

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

The institution is community-funded, staffed, and designed. The new building was designed to meet neighborhood needs--not just in the content covered, but in the inclusion of spaces made for particular kinds of activities sought by locals (i.e. It incorporates work by local artists, old and new construction, and is completely gorgeous.

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. Then we started working with our local design and technology firms— Ziba Design and Fashionbuddha —and in the prototyping, it became clear we had to go another way.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. To apply the results of my analysis to produce a community-driven program design specifically for implementation at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (the MAH). You can download and read the full version of my thesis here.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process."

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

In the fall of 2013, they launched Re:Make , an ambitious project to redevelop the museum, live, on the floor, with a mix of staff, guest artists, and community members. They see this as directly related to the founding principles of the Mill as a place of experimentation, design, creating, and making. It''s serious.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

Over three days, 52 artist teams erected experimental projects along San Francisco''s biggest thoroughfare. The result was a true experiment in designing the future--right here, right now--with artists and planners and civic leaders at the helm together. Invitation works better than confrontation.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it. Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere , a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2015

And so, one of the most successful, accidental, and fraught participatory projects of the past decade comes to an end. The "love locks" are not a project with an institutional or artistic director. So many participatory projects do the opposite, requiring you to take a dozen tricky steps to no meaningful end.

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Participatory Project Artist Instruction 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

In a straightforward way, Marilyn explains how her team developed a participatory project to improve engagement in a gallery with an awkward entry. This is a perfect example of a museum using participation as a design solution. This post appears here in excerpted form; you can read the whole story here.

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? The program operates like a camp that is co-led by the teens involved.

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Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

Early this month, I got the chance to hear legendary game designer Will Wright (Sim City) give a talk. In his talk, Wright said one thing that really stood out: Game players have a negotiated agency that is determined by how the game is designed. Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user.

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Game Artist Participatory Museum 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above). He is an authoritative artist of the social web with a slew of accolades and a suite of diverse projects under his belt.

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. This citywide festival showcased work by 1,517 artists competing for a $200,000 top cash prize awarded by public vote. 1,708 artists participated. An estimated 18,000 people attended, of which 4,929 nominated artists for the show.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2013

These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement. Participatory Performing Artist-in-Residence program. and I have always wanted to find ways to invite them in.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Community artists gave their honest feedback, and we crafted a display based on these discussions and their contributions.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

We had about thirty participants ranging from MAH trustees to artists, educators to architects, moms to grandfathers. 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. It was an evening meeting with beer and chips.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

We partnered with foster youth, former foster youth, artists, and community advocates to create an exhibition that used art to spark action on issues facing foster youth. This project wove together many different participatory threads. Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. What did we learn?

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. That's all fabulous, but it's also all by design. And when I think back on the past year, some of the most magical things that have happened at the museum have NOT been designed by us. The magic isn't by design.

Platform 41

Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

In particular, we want exhibition collaborators--artists, researchers, historians, collectors--to understand our goals and how we intend to steer the exhibition development process. We knew internally that we wanted our exhibitions to become more interdisciplinary, more participatory, and more responsive to audience needs.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

I''ve seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad). In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what."

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Museum Question Participatory Vietnam 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects. Community programs interns work with artists and historians, families and adults, to make everything from mini-participatory exhibitions to full-blown concert series.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

Have Fun - Do Good

OCTOBER 30, 2009

Interesting WorldChanging post, Just Launched: Journal of Participatory Medicine. Early registration deadline is Nov. Green Blogger Convention To Kick Off In Los Angeles Next Month on Eco razzi. We Inspire Grant : One year of creative services to one U.S. nonprofit (valued up to $75,000 ).

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Green Los Angeles Gift San Francisco 40

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2018

Audiences of all backgrounds found ways to connect with museums as it presented exhibitions with the help of foster youth, migrant farmers, roller-derby girls, mushroom hunters, surfers and incarcerated artists, among others.

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Washington Audience Museum Intergenerational 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad). In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what."

Question 49

Question Participatory Museum Vietnam 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

We''re offering internships this summer in: Participatory Exhibition Design. Help take the participatory elements of this permanent gallery to the finish line. A great opportunity for folks interested in design, fabrication, prototyping, and interactivity. We''ve also been expanding paid opportunities for local artists.

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Participatory Museum Community History 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

And this works pretty well in science museums, where designers talk about "hardening" exhibits to withstand the more aggressive touchers among us. 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. This was amazing.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49