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 had some money.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. 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).

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

Two weeks ago, my museum was featured in a Wall Street Journal article by Ellen Gamerman, Everybody''s a Curator. I''m thrilled that our small community museum is on the map with many big institutions around the country. I''m glad to see coverage about art museums involving visitors in exhibitions. Community is not a commodity.

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Journal Participatory Museum Community 54

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 21, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 I''ve been thinking recently about how I originally got interested in talking to strangers in museums. Working in museums as floor staff cracked open the social stranger door for me. blog posts from the past. This post was requested by a long-time reader. It was blue.

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Museum Tools Participatory Massachusetts 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 13, 2014

I first learned about this technique from Sam Kaner''s excellent book, Facilitator''s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Tag Team the Facilitation. To me, this is analogous to the benefits of having multiple staff members engaged with community partners on participatory projects. Yes, it can be inefficient.

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Facilitation Professional Learning Participatory 36

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

I'm thrilled to share this brilliant guest post by Marilyn Russell, Curator of Education at the Carnegie Museum of Art. In a straightforward way, Marilyn explains how her team developed a participatory project to improve engagement in a gallery with an awkward entry. It is great to feel more of a part of the museum!" "All

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

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 History 29

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

Last week I facilitated the “ Impact Leadership Track ” at the NTEN Leading Change Summit with John Kenyon, Elissa Perry, and Londell Jackson. Here’s what I learned: Facilitation Teams. Often, facilitation teams are brought together by an event host. Photo by Trav Williams. Do you have a preferred method?

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Reflection NTEN Change Exercise 127

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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Nina Simon, the executive director of the museum, is an expert in participatory design and fantastic facilitator.

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Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 20, 2010

On a recent trip to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, I noted a discussion board in the "Nursery" gallery. For the Nursery discussion board, it's other adult visitors to the Children's Museum. Every adults who takes a child to a Children's Museum cares about his or her identity as a caregiver.

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Museum Children Discussion Childhood 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 24, 2012

I like to ask myself this question periodically, challenging myself to find substantive ways for visitors to contribute to our museum. To that end, our exhibitions are full of participatory elements. 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.

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Platform Open Museum Participatory 41

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2008

There's a tag applied to many Museum 2.0 Posts under that tag tend to examine non-museum things, from malls to games to ad campaigns , and draw some design lessons for museums from their foreignness. What aspects of that socialness are desirable in museums (and how might we mirror buses or trains to promote them)?

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Participatory Design Museum Childhood 20

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

MARCH 27, 2013

There's a constant dialogue in participatory work about how to make peoples' contributions meaningful. I've written about different structures for participatory processes (especially in museums), and recently, I've been interested in how we can apply these structures to the design of public space.

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Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 23, 2010

I met Mazarine Treyz 3 years ago in Portland, Oregon when I facilitated a one-day social media and nonprofit workshop for the Meyer Memorial Trust. 9 The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon. We were lucky enough to have Nedra stop by the Zoetica Salon and share some thoughts about how to measure social media outcomes.

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Amazon Social Media Nonprofit Oregon 119

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

This project wove together many different participatory threads. The facilitation was as chaotic and fragile as a spiderweb. Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. You can download it for free right now. What did we learn? We co-created it from start to finish with community partners.

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 10, 2008

Thank you to Susan Spero and all the folks at JFKU and Left Coast Press for starting a highly stimulating conversation this weekend at the colloquium on Museums and Civic Discourse. There were, as we say in the museum business, some good aha moments. What role should museums play in promoting discourse?

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Museum Site Participatory Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

Roberto Bedoya : The "Yes And" Argument and its Civic Implications Bedoya, the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, makes a beautiful statement that arts administrators need to facilitate a multiplicity of leading voices, or as he puts it, "the courage of imagination and the plural."

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Arts Museum Artist Tucson 45

Museum 2.0

MAY 19, 2016

For example, when we held community meetings about the development of a new creative town square next to our museum, a group of middle/upper-class moms talked about not feeling safe downtown. The best book I've read on the topic is Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Sam Kaner.

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Community Build Museum Participatory 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2015

There are lots of great science museum resources, but not where these kids can walk after school. Part of this is practical: you can''t facilitate making and tinkering for 30 kids if you have to hand them everything they need. Any big museum has barriers and limitations to full community ownership. Really interesting.

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Green Interview Share Community 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 1, 2010

You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 Like many museum and library professionals, I am enamored of the idea of cultural institutions as “third places” – public venues for informal, peaceable, social engagement outside of home or work. This is the only post written by me, Nina Simon.

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Place Discussion Culture Museum 41

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 29, 2010

Now, after attending with museum friends from around the country, I'm hooked. Unlike most museum experiences, where people quietly absorb the work in a room, people were very comfortable pulling each other to specific pieces and extolling their merits or less inspiring qualities. Very few wrote in typical museum or even gallery-speak.

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Arts Experiment Artist Social 52

Museum 2.0

APRIL 15, 2015

But I couldn''t fully imagine how a museum or an arts center could embody it. While "final" versions of these prototypes would need to stand alone on the sidewalk, the best prototypes are facilitated. Facilitation has a dual function: the artists learn what worked and didn''t, and visitors learn what the projects are all about.

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San Francisco Arts Design Marketing 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 18, 2009

I've been thinking recently about how I originally got interested in talking to strangers in museums. Working in museums as floor staff cracked open the social stranger door for me. My first museum job was working on the floor at the Acton Science Discovery Museum in Massachusetts. It was blue. It was polyester.

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Tools Museum Participatory Massachusetts 34

Museum 2.0

APRIL 22, 2008

Why discuss gifting on Museum 2.0? One of my greatest interests is the "p articipatory museum," in which there is substantive, unfacilitated visitor-to-visitor interaction. When I heard the tollbooth story, I started thinking about gifting as a model for participatory experiences in museums. Ideas participatory museum.

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Gift Participatory Museum Model 23

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2011

This expresses itself most powerfully in museums when we talk about building relationships with visitors over time. But museums are one-night stand amnesiacs in the relationship department. This is terrible, both for the visitor and for the museum. I expect you'll remember some basic things about me--say, my name. We hang out.

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Relationship Museum Game Celebrate 46

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2009

Two weeks ago, I conducted a participatory exhibit design workshop with staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Between the giant squid brainstorming and experimentation, I gave a talk to the larger Smithsonian Institution about multi-platform museum experiences. The slides are also available for download.

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Slides Process Video Open 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2009

Facilitated/Unfacilitated Blend When we started this course, I really pushed the students to think about ways to induce unfacilitated interactions among strangers. I love facilitated experiences, but I worry that they aren't scalable to every visitor. This is a good lesson for museum talk-back design.

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Advice Museum Student Facilitation 31

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 10, 2009

This can be an incredibly technical topic, as it focuses on the ways that platforms (online, exhibits, museums) can harness the individual activities of many visitors and create meaningful experiential outputs that connect people to each other. But designing an entire museum that functions this way probably isn't your goal. exhibition.

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Social Network Tech Network Museum 22

Museum 2.0

JUNE 2, 2010

This year, the American Association of Museums annual conference was in Los Angeles (my hometown). I hosted two sessions, one on design for participation and the other on mission-driven museum technology development. He started with museums as a "place to go"--to see things, consume experiences. In this case, a heck of a lot.

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Slides Museum Los Angeles San Jose 22

Museum 2.0

JULY 22, 2008

A platform for museum staff to serve as facilitators of safe spaces for difficult conversations? The Living Library was conceived in Denmark in 2000 as a way to engage youth in dialogue about ending violence by encouraging people to meet their prejudices and fears in a safe, fun, facilitated environment. I think so.

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Library Model Museum Europe 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2009

The point of this experiment is to play with design conditions that support both facilitated and unfacilitated engagement with strangers. 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.

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Design Experiment Seattle Social 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. I came out of it truly amazed by the power of the museum—not just to elicit laughter, but also to induce bizarre and voluntary acts of silliness in front of and with strangers. By sending people on missions.

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Program People Museum Lecture 20

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

They edit the conversations into radio shows, which are then made available as a podcast (you can listen to episode featuring me, #89: Museum Secrets, here ). I still get fidgety listening to the podcast, but now I see it as an artifact of a supremely conducted participatory project rather the sole product of the process.

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2007

The gym staff aren’t offering instruction or serving as users’ partners; instead, they facilitate connections among the users. I got thinking about this the other day with regard to museums. Floor staff are limited by time—they can’t possibly interact with all or even most of the people in the museum at any given time.

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Museum Tools Participatory Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 16, 2007

Out on the boardwalk, or at the zoo or a museum, there's a common experience of the sights, sounds, smells, activities of the place. It's also a reason that people will game with strangers; in that case, the games' rules form the partial barrier that facilitates social interaction. Tags: Core Museum 2.0

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Museum Participatory Teen Game 20