Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

In 2009 , students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. This post shares my reflections on the projects and five things I learned from their work.

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. People go to museums for leisure.)

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. I know this sounds strange coming from someone writing an admittedly self-expressive blog post, but hear me out. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. This is a problem for two reasons.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

In this post, Ken shares some surprising lessons learned so far. What are the lessons learned? Lessons Learned 1: Build it, and they will come We thought GISKIN was cool and different, but was it cool and different enough to actually attract people to the Park? Lessons Learned 3: This is not a museum talking (what a relief!)

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

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Question Participatory Museum Vietnam 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 16, 2010

How do you find your way around a multi-faceted museum? I spent some time playing with this question last week at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a large general museum that is moving toward redesign of the permanent galleries. We quickly learned a few things: You really can't guess what people will like. Get deliciously lost?

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Experiment Lesson Museum Learning 44

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

When talking about active audience engagement with friends in the museum field, I often hear one frustrated question: how can we get adults to participate? In children's museums and science centers, this relationship is at its most extreme. And yet in the museum world, we still see interactives as being mostly for kids.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 9, 2017

Hosted by a sound art collective, Ultra-red, the 2015 event promised "to investigate listening as a political activity and to interrogate the stakes of participation in neoliberalism." Instead, I had a powerful learning experience--one I'm still grappling with over a year later. At first, I thought it was a joke.

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Participatory Museum Voice Press 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 29, 2014

Last week, I learned that ninety-six elephants are killed every day in Africa. I learned this at a conference for directors of American zoos and aquaria (I was there to give a talk). In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. But it''s true.

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Action People Conservancy Africa 46

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. The Brooklyn Museum just finished the public stage of GO , a "community-curated open studio project." There are surely some people who didn't want to go through the hassle of registering and learning the rules of voting. Full stats here.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

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. Non-Participation 6.

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Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother. It''s impossible to process everything I am learning from these four psychologists in just one blog post. I realize that I may sound like a college freshman who just discovered Psych 101, but heck.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

Apple calls this program “one to one” learning, meaning not one instructor but one computer per child. I was fascinated by our discussion, and Bob came to mind last month, when I was asked to write an article for the Association of Children's Museums quarterly journal, Hand to Hand , about children's museums and Web 2.0.

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Classroom Children Museum Model 22

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

MAY 23, 2008

There are different learning styles. And now, the research group Forrester provides new insights about different kinds of participatory styles among users of social media sites. I've written before about three types of museum users: contributors, lurkers, and judges. There are group and individual experiences.

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Profile Audience Participatory Tools 26

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2007

I got my copy of the fall issue of Museums and Social Issues this week. The theme is "Civic Dialogue," and the journal includes articles on the historical, cultural, media, and museum practice of getting people talking to each other (including one by me about such endeavors on the web). A place many museums are not.

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Museum Lecture Denver San Francisco 22

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Audience segmentation and research has become a hot topic in museums, especially when it comes to crafting appealing offerings that are customized to different kinds of visitors. I sat down with Kristen Denner, Director of Membership and Annual Fund, to learn more about the program's development and the museum's goals for its future.

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Interview Director Museum Arts 46

Museum 2.0

JUNE 18, 2014

If you are reading this outside the United States, this sounds ridiculously basic. I got into museum work because learning happens in many places and many ways. People at work with the games running in the background on their computers. Conversations about the tournament on the street. Constant radio coverage.

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Arts Build United States Audience 47

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

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. This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements.

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Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

This month we’ve been thinking about “What is a museum?” (I'm I’ve been visiting museums my whole life. Does that make me the best judge of museums? People are the defining characteristics of museums. I’ve worked with and at plenty of museums that can sometimes feel empty. I'm not alone there.

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Museum Place Ohio Life 36

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 20, 2017

I learned a ton at Skid Row School, but the lesson that still keeps me up at night is this one: when you want to scale and spread a model, you have to distill it to its essence. As Becky and Joe noted, it can sound like taking your amazing craft beer and distilling it into a Bud Light. Treating the museum as a community platform?

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Turkey Model Museum Delicious 26

Museum 2.0

APRIL 16, 2008

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. Click is an exhibition process in three parts: The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

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Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

JUNE 6, 2008

On June 4, we opened The Tech Virtual Test Zone , a new 2000 sq ft gallery at The Tech Museum of Innovation featuring exhibits on the theme of art, film, and music that were originally developed in Second Life by a community of creative amateurs. Some museum pros have been puzzled by this.

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Virtual Tech Lesson Second Life 21

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors." This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums.

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

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

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 San Francisco 22

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Dial-A-Stranger is what it sounds like. 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 ). And they made me appreciate them as superb facilitators as a particular kind of participatory experience: conversation with strangers.

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Reflection Museum Podcast Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 17, 2010

This is the second in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. Several hundred people contributed their opinions, stories, suggestions, and edits to The Participatory Museum as it was written. Check out the other parts here. What did they do? Why did they do it? What did they get out of it?

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Participatory Museum Process Experiment 32

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 7, 2008

Charlene and Josh relate listening to research, and since they focus on business examples, they are primarily talking about market research: the way a business learns what people think of their brand, their products, and their potential. Here's what I learned: the Exploratorium is inundated by kids (source: Yelp!

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Museum Teen Second Life Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 16, 2009

Sounds good? 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. Imagine making and playing together. Imagine bonfires, musical jam sessions, and iron chef exhibit design.

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Collaboration Registration Brain Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Today, the Luce Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is launching what they claim is the first ever alternate reality game (ARG) in a museum. Why would an art museum create an ARG? And the "stuff" of the game is real stuff, artifacts created by players and sent to the museum. To expand their audiences.

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

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? But for museum and art wonks, it could be. Will the bureaucracy of the institution drown the artists in red tape?

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Artist Museum Project Public 39

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 2, 2008

They demonstrate that the blog is a more participatory vehicle than other kinds of media. They are reading it to read it--to learn, absorb, and gain awareness of new things. Museum 2.0's I'm writing to learn, and hopefully to connect with you through that experience. They prove that the conversation is two-way.

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Comment Museum Blogger Reflection 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2013

Any job with the word “coordinator” in it sounds like you might spend your time sorting socks into pairs. But this job is really important to the future of our museum, and I’m hoping that you or someone you know might be a great fit for it. Not all learning happens in school. The application period closes on Monday, July 29.

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Program Museum Work History 39

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