Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

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? Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects?

Participatory 24

Participatory Teen Experiment Museum 24

Museum 2.0

MAY 8, 2013

Like a lot of organizations, my museum struggles with two conflicting goals: The museum should be for everyone in our community. We''re more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them. How do you reconcile inclusion and targeting in program design?

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Social Museum Arts Program 55

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 9, 2010

Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory Arts 29

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation.

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

JULY 26, 2010

From a museum perspective, I think there's a lot to learn from these venues' business models, approach to collecting and exhibiting work, and connection with their audiences. In 2003, writer George Scheer inherited his grandmother's thrift store and decided to turn it into an artists' center and museum.

Culture 49

Culture Alternative Museum St. Louis 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. The outcome of our conversations is dependent on the diversity of designed environments in which they occur. "Where were you last night?" If someone asked you that question, how would you answer?

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Goal Difference Design Platform 31

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

Last Friday night, my museum hosted a fabulous (in my biased opinion) event called Race Through Time. Race Through Time was designed specifically for this audience of 30 and 40-somethings looking for fun social events with a Santa Cruz bent. Performances just for teens. Late night mixers at museums for young adults.

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Audience Develop Museum History 52

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2007

But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. MOMA has standard art museum labels. When I asked an art museum educator about this (“How should I look at art?”) Tags: storytelling exhibition design.

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Museum Arts Artist Audio 30

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. The exhibition or program is of high quality, and from the visitor perspective, it may look like museum as usual. Community processes are both exciting and time-consuming.

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Participatory Process Museum Children 48

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2012

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. When I walked by the first time, the teens were collaging and Kyle and Stacey were talking. At museums, we mostly bond with the friends and family with whom we attend.

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Community Social Build Teen 42

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 1, 2006

specializes in designing museum experiences and exhibitions that are community informed, socially stimulating, technologically ambitious, and intriguingly experimental. I am available for consulting and strategic development, and creative design and leadership of exhibition, technology, and museum planning projects.

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Museum Professional Service Participatory 21

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 7, 2010

Last week marked four years for the Museum 2.0 People--especially young folks looking to break into the museum business--often ask me how I got here. Ed Rodley recently wrote a blog post about museum jobs entitled "Getting Hired: It's Who You Know and Who Knows You." This seems like an appropriate time to share the story.

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Museum Ideas Job Project 52

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

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. So many museum exhibitions relegate the participatory bits in at the end. The Love Lounge I LOVE. with sharpies.

Participatory 51

Participatory Museum Arts Blackboard 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JUNE 3, 2005

Some of the entries of what you can read on the Walker Blog, may appear at first glance to be mundane details of cube life , but then you remember that it is a museum blog and it makes the institution seem more human.

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Arts Artist Process Remix 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. The group was mostly young (teens to thirties) and nerd-diverse: a little bit punk, a little bit hacker, a little bit craft grrl. It was pretty freaking amazing.

Community 43

Community Reflection Online Museum 43

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

I've long believed that museums have a special opportunity to support the community spirit of Web 2.0 This month brings three examples of museums hosting meetups for online communities: On 8.6.08, the Computer History Museum (Silicon Valley, CA) hosted a Yelp! Me: Have you ever been to this museum? meetup for Elite Yelp!

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Museum Hosting Community Model 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 27, 2009

This week, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened a new temporary exhibition called The Psychedelic Experience , featuring rock posters from San Francisco in the heyday of Bill Graham and electric kool-aid. It is an incredible museum experience. The visitor is given a copy of her poster and the museum keeps a copy as well.

Museum 21

Museum Denver Arts Participatory 21

OpenAI

JULY 14, 2022

Creative professionals using DALL·E today range from illustrators, AR designers, and authors to chefs, landscape architects, tattoo artists, and clothing designers, to directors, sound designers, dancers, and much more. The list expands every day.

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Artist San Francisco Cancer Chad 53

NTEN

JUNE 21, 2011

The speakers for this panel include: Tracy Fullerton - Electronics Arts Game Innovation Lab Ruth Cohen - American Museum of natural History Elaine Charnov - The NY Public Library Jason Eppink - Museum of the Moving Image Syed Salahuddin - Babycastles Elaine Cohen: The New York Public Library 100 Years of the flagship library in New York.

Culture 52

Culture Game Change Museum 52

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. Across the museum field, the questions about visitor participation have gone from "what?" HUMANS ARE THE BEST AGENTS OF PARTICIPATION When I wrote the book, I was coming from the perspective of an exhibit designer. and "why?" to "how?".

Participatory 20

Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

In the spirit of a popular post written earlier this year , I want to share the behind the scenes on our current almost-museumwide exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Santa Cruz Collects. This exhibition represents a few big shifts for us: We used a more participatory design process. We focused more on design.

Participatory 44

Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

What's the biggest mistake people make when involving non-professionals in exhibition design? It's a surprising fact that volunteer designers don't want a blank slate for their creativity. We gave them all the information we had, and on the first day they had a 90-minute conference call with the real exhibit designers.

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Teen Volunteer Create Design 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2017

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. Whose vision of downtown are we designing for? What amenities does it need? What amenities does it need? And that led to two conclusions.

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Community Build Arts Museum 34

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2016

Here's one of my favorite stories about the London Science Museum and their work to make their science shows relevant to families with deaf or hearing-impaired family members. Think of the Subjects to Change teen program, or the free lunches at the Cleveland Public Library. This chapter appears midway through the book.

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Museum Arts Chapter Language 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 9, 2007

Last week, Elaine Gurian and I talked about radical change in museums. Former museum start-up queen, Jen is taking a small organization whose goal is to promote girls’ involvement in math and science through research and programming to new, innovative, exciting places. Braincake isn’t some fakey attempt to pander to teens.

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Interview Museum Teen Myspace 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 24, 2007

This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum , "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors.

People 20

People Museum Chapter San Jose 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. I worked on one project in which the client institution thought they wanted unfettered teen expression.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2008

Museums (and libraries) are trusted sources of information. In February 2001, AAM commissioned a study about the trustworthiness of museums and found that "Almost 9 out of 10 Americans (87%) find museums to be one of the most trustworthy or a trustworthy source of information among a wide range of choices.

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Participatory Museum Teen Voice 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 19, 2015

One of my favorite comments on the first post in this series came from Lyndall Linaker, an Australian museum worker, who asked: " Who decides what is relevant? Community First Program Design At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History , we've gravitated towards a "community first" program planning model. My answer: neither.

Teen 20

Teen Museum Voice Community 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 5, 2009

I just returned from the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia. I led two sessions, one on visitor co-created museum experiences, and the other on design inspirations from outside museums. what is the value of the exhibition experience to non-participants, that is, regular museum visitors?

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Slides Museum Participatory Children 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 3, 2009

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses ) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission.

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Community Museum San Diego Participatory 22

Museum 2.0

JUNE 13, 2007

A museum experience I’ll always remember: In 2002, I worked at the Boston Museum of Science with a program in which high school students from a nearby charter school spent half their school time at the museum. They took regular classes, museum-specific classes, and had internship-style museum jobs.

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Lesson Museum Content Experiment 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 4, 2007

On Tuesday, I reviewed Elaine Gurian’s essay, Choosing Among the Options , on museum archetypes and self-definition. Next Tuesday, we'll look at chapters 16 and 17, on the merits and limitations of the team approach to exhibition design.) What if you don’t want to be identified as one type of museum? It did that more than once.

Museum 20

Museum Change Puerto Rico Arts 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2007

The essays in this section, on “Expressing and Co-Creating,” present projects in which visitors create exhibition content, contribute to its creation, or get a heavy done of meaning-making in their experience of museum content. Who controls the content in the museum? Who controls the museum experience? First, museum content.

Voice 20

Voice Create Museum Arts 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2008

Every museum has a number for its operating cost per visitor. Most museums don't strategically set this number--too many operating costs are fixed by building needs--but they can use it to assess how expensive each visitor interaction is and evaluate the efficacy of programs. So where do online initiatives fit in?

Virtual 20

Virtual Museum Flickr Evaluation 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2010

You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 This space definitely looked like a third place this past Wednesday night when we hosted an overnight teen event designed to help teens see how they can make a difference in the world. note: I've written about innovation at COSI before here.)

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Place Discussion Columbus Teen 23