Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. The Santa Cruz Surfing Museum recently loaned us some fabulous surfboards that tell the co-mingled history of surfing and redwood trees in Santa Cruz. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way.

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

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 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

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. As one participant said, "the museum feels friendly in a way it usually doesn't."

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2014

During a workshop on museum visitor participation, someone spoke up and objected: "this might work in California, but it will never work in Texas." I saw how participatory techniques were working in diverse museums around the world. What plays well at one museum may fall flat a few miles away. To pose with them.

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Culture Participatory New Zealand Museum 49

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.

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act , about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. I've often been asked about examples of participatory practice in theater, dance, and classical music, and this report is a great starting point.

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Participatory Arts Report Case Study 50

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?" In Your Face ).

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

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. And second, what techniques can help us find more?

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Technique Question Design Develop 52

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? Teens are a known (and somewhat controllable) entity. The first of these reasons is practical.

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Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

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

JULY 20, 2016

When we say we want our museum to be "audience-centered," what do we mean? My career first got moving at a brilliant example of the customer-centered museum: the International Spy Museum. Many of my favorite museums, libraries, and zoos are customer-centered places. They care about visitor comfort.

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Museum Audience Music Arts 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

For years, I'd give talks about community participation in museums and cultural institutions, and I'd always get the inevitable question: "but what value does this really have when it comes to dollars and cents?" We're hearing on a daily basis that the museum has a new role in peoples' lives and in the identity of the county.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 7, 2007

And, there was a protest against Target using that technique (holding signs) although it was not on flickr: [link]. What creative twist could your organization do with this technique and support your cause/work? I read a post about user-generated content from the fresh+new blog which is focused on new media in museums.

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Meme Participatory Campaign Flickr 50

Museum 2.0

MARCH 5, 2014

Consider three very different talkbacks in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History''s fall exhibition, Santa Cruz is in the Heart: cocktail napkins, rear view mirrors, and refrigerator certificates. design evaluation Museum of Art and History participatory museum usercontent' Total number across all three talkbacks: 0.

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Test Museum Participatory History 43

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. As we start the process at our museum of updating our permanent history gallery, one of our specific goals is to increase intergroup understanding in our community. Implicit Associations test.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. They provide detailed case studies of projects in each area, including project descriptions, informal science education goals, participant training techniques, and evaluation outcomes.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 23, 2010

I love the checklists, her thoughts about the impact of social media and behavior change, and the DIY market research techniques. 9 The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon. Her book is fantastic workbook that will lead you through six fail-proof steps to social marketing success. The book is available on Amazon.

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Amazon Social Media Nonprofit Oregon 119

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 1, 2006

Ready to turn your institution into a site of participatory engagement? specializes in designing museum experiences and exhibitions that are community informed, socially stimulating, technologically ambitious, and intriguingly experimental. Want to bring the spirit of this blog to your colleagues and projects?

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Museum Professional Service Participatory 21

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

The Leading Change Summit was more intimate (several hundred people), participatory and interactive, intense, and stimulating. Are there facilitation skills/techniques that you enjoy and are great at doing? Are there facilitation skills/techniques that you want to improve or work on? Do you have a preferred method?

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Reflection NTEN Change Exercise 127

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 30, 2009

Dear Museum 2.0 readers, I'm almost done with the first draft of The Participatory Museum: A Practical Guide , a book that explores the theory, practice, and design techniques for involving visitors and community members in the creation and sharing of cultural content. Tags: participatory museum.

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Help Participatory Museum Wiki 28

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Imagine that your museum is ready to start creating content on a small-scale in Web 2.0. Imagine you are the Boston Museum of Science, and you are ready to make some videos to post on YouTube. When I search for "Boston Museum of Science" on YouTube, I find 83 videos. You're ready to make a few videos to post on YouTube.

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Museum Technorati Boston YouTube 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 15, 2010

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. It's not the extent to which they are participatory. I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum.

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Support Museum St. Louis NSF 41

Museum 2.0

APRIL 8, 2010

Many of the talks are related to The Participatory Museum and I will have books for sale on all of these forays. Here's the list for the next two months: April 14-17 - Denver for Museums and the Web conference. I'm giving a workshop on design techniques for encouraging user participation (sorry, it's full). May 17 - NYC.

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Los Angeles Museum Participatory Minneapolis 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

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

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

It started as a handout for a session that Stacey and I are doing at the California Association of Museums, and then I realized it was so darn useful that it was worth sharing with all of you. The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

This technique was used in the Slavery in New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society and continues in the popular StoryCorps project. 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."

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2017

It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. Use the "hot pen" or automatic writing technique. A SIMPLE WAY TO TRY IT This week, we experimented with visioning at my museum in an all-staff meeting. We learned how to write visions, how to use them, and how to share them with others.

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Pennsylvania History Michigan Indiana 26

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 Participatory Museum Children 20

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. To me, this is analogous to the benefits of having multiple staff members engaged with community partners on participatory projects. Tag Team the Facilitation. Yes, it can be inefficient.

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Facilitation Professional Learning Participatory 36

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 San Francisco 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2009

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. I want to connect these students to a larger group of people interested in exploring topics around social technology in museums.

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Design Experiment Seattle Social 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 7, 2008

This is a long post focused on strategic uses of listening rather than specific techniques. For many museums, visitor research--how people use the museum, navigate exhibits, and understand content--may be an equally important arena in which to adopt groundswell listening techniques. Good listening breeds potential.

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Museum Teen Second Life Discussion 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social. Tagging in Art Museums. Maybe it is more like moment capture. 3) Links can get lost in email. (4)

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Screencast Instructional Instruction Tag 50

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

As many of you know, I’m writing a book about participatory design for museums. The book is intended to be a practical guide to participatory museum experiences focused on design strategies, case studies, and activities. The WHY of participatory design is really important. And there’s a third reason.

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Participatory Design Museum Wiki 26

Museum 2.0

APRIL 19, 2010

"How often do we hear colleagues from museums and galleries stating as their fundamental reason for working co-creatively with audiences that they want to make a great piece of museum work, rather than primarily for reasons of social inclusion or democracy?"

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Arts Participatory Museum Artist 22