Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2012

Imagine you've just been tasked with developing an innovative, future-thinking national museum for your country's history. Blueprint is the story of a group of people who tried to create a Dutch Museum of National History (INNL). The early participatory projects are terrific. Where would you start?

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Museum History Netherlands Create 36

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2011

The best participatory projects are useful. Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. But it is political in a way that fits right in with the Museum’s mission and history. Yes, this activity is political.

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. They invite people to participate: in design , prototyping , artifact interpretation , collections preparation , audience development. And it leaves me with just one question. It''s serious. Invested at all levels.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

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. And to cut to the end of the story first, yes, we are creating a project together, yes, you can participate, and yes to whatever other questions this brings up in your head. In other words: I have a lot to learn from him.

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

It also complicates the question of what is acceptable in a museum. They are hosting performances, exhibitions that morph over time, artists who work in practice-based media, who break the fourth wall with the audience, who invite participation, and who deliberately disrupt museum conventions.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

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

DECEMBER 23, 2014

They give high-energy, interactive tours of the Metropolitan Museum and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). When the opportunity to design my own two-hour museum adventure at the American Museum of Natural History presented itself, I jumped at the chance. Who is the audience for Museum Hack? That’s a tough question.

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2012

But we've just compiled all our attendance data for the past year at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (our fiscal year ends on June 30), and several people have written to me asking for the numbers behind our turnaround. But we tried never to create an event without partners or audiences who were invested in what we were making.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. It’s been a wild and wonderful year—without question, my most challenging and stimulating yet. I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments. It is incredibly rewarding work. I feel lucky.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Yet our posts contain similar phrases such as “21st century museums,” “changing museum paradigms,” “inclusiveness,” “co-curation,” “participatory” and “the museum as forum.” We urge museums to consider these questions by first looking within. How do these issues relate to the mission and audience of your museum?

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Museum Blogger Cleveland Missouri 52

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? There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

When I worked briefly with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative to conceptualize a mobile phone-based game to connect visitors to the park to its cultural institutions and history, I knew Ken would be the perfect person to make it happen. They leave LOTS of room for the audience to ask their own questions and fill in their own answers.

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

It was terrific to have a packed room and a long, open conversation (we split the session into half presenting, half audience discussion) about these issues. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. I''ve struggled with some of the "celebrity" aspects of having a big audience. I''ve never taken a break from blogging before.

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

I used to think these were easy questions to answer. At the museum of art and history where I work, we are grappling with the question of how to help people enjoy themselves while keeping the art and artifacts safe. Focus on family audiences. What if you WANT them to touch certain things? This was amazing.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

to experiment with different kinds of events (time of day, audience, size, type) and get a sense of how we can best program the space in the longterm. The ideal candidate has a good grasp of our local artistic assets in Santa Cruz County, a knack for participatory placemaking, and enthusiasm about putting on a show.

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect. This museum was unusual in that the lobby area had a high concentration of pop art meant to appeal to a wide audience. Read about the Human Library in chapter 3 of The Participatory Museum by searching that term here.)

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other people submit questions they'd like to have answered by strangers. Mercedes and Zachary pick people randomly out of the database, call them, and ask a contributed question. 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

MAY 29, 2009

Two weeks ago, I conducted a participatory exhibit design workshop with staff at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. You have an audience need and an institutional value, and now you just need a verb that connects them. Tags: participatory museum professional development.

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Slides Process Video Open 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 5, 2009

Visitor Co-Created Museum Experiences This session was a dream for me, one that brought together instigators of three participatory exhibit projects: MN150 (Kate Roberts), Click! Some of the most interesting questions included: how do you verify the accuracy and authenticity of visitor-contributed content?

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Slides Participatory Museum Children 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 29, 2015

These are the slides and notes for the talk I gave at the American Alliance of Museums conference on Monday, April 27 about the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. When I became the director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History four years ago, I took this work with me. Our programming isn't for target audiences.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

If museums get involved in these online-offline partnerships, we can bring new audiences through our doors, familiarize them with museum-going in a comfortable way, and reap the benefits of their online musings about their real-life experiences. But these events have benefits both in terms of audience development and word-of-mouth marketing.

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

If someone asked you that question, how would you answer? Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, you can only respond with 140 characters. "Where were you last night?"

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

MAY 3, 2011

They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they made some unexpected decisions along the way. And we realized of course that the majority audience would be watchers, not storytellers. How and why did Object Stories come to be?

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Story Interview Museum Audio 53

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Our museum in Santa Cruz has been slammed by those who believe participatory experiences have gone too far. We always knew that the inclusion of participatory and community-centered practices in arts institutions was controversial. To me, the backlash against participatory and community-centered experiences is not surprising.

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Participatory Museum Arts History 53

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

I had heard some influential museum leaders raise the question of what a wiki museum might look like, and I wanted to explore that and related concepts. at the Brooklyn Museum , Tech Virtual at The Tech , and MN150 at the Minnesota History Center. (By Excellent new blogs focused on the field like Museum Audience Insight and Useum.

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Museum Voice Minnesota Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 15, 2008

Usually, when I start posts with a question in the title, it's a cheat. The exhibition uses the stories of three remarkable children in history as a launching point for a platform on which kids and families can make “promises” for how they will impact or change the world. In this case, it's debatable. Excited to do it yourself?

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Museum Social Network Case Study Discussion 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 8, 2013

We''re more successful when we target particular communities or audiences and design experiences for them. In the past, I''ve subscribed to the theory that an organization should target many different groups and types of people to serve a constellation of specific audiences across diverse affinities, needs, and interests.

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Museum Social Arts History 55

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 coincides with the identification of 20- and 30-year-olds as an audience targeted for growth in attendance. Our colleagues in the Museum of Natural History were eager collaborators.

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Museum Arts Problem Design 45

Museum 2.0

JUNE 2, 2010

Kathleen McLean (Independent Exhibitions), Dan Spock (Minnesota History Center), and Kris Morrissey (University of Washington) all shared thought-provoking and useful insights on visitor participation in museums, but Mark Allen and Emily Lacy brought down the house with their bluegrass rendering of the Machine Project and its engaging, quirky work.

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Slides Museum Los Angeles San Jose 22

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

This is a question I've been puzzling over now for a few months, both professionally and personally. Museums and other venues are offering special programs for teens, for hipsters, for people who want a more active or spiritual or participatory experience. What will it take for you to do it again? How do you form an arts habit?

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Arts Museum Music Calendar 50

Everyaction

OCTOBER 5, 2016

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialogue and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. It is our turn to make history. General / #NI16 / @netimpact.

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Conference Calendar DC Washington 111

Museum 2.0

MAY 15, 2008

Near the end of the talk, an audience member asked, How do you choose which level to approach a topic when your listeners range from people who know nothing to people who know all too much? We have a show coming up right now about synthetic biology, where engineers are building life forms that are new to existence, new to the history of life.

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Conversation Arts Museum Voice 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 28, 2014

I cut out from the meeting by myself to check out an exhibition called Open House, if These Walls Could Talk at the Minnesota History Center. I keep in my head a Venn diagram that has three circles--one is passion, the second is funding, and the third is audience. Is there a target audience for the project? If so, whom?

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Help Museum eBook Project 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 30, 2016

Our entire strategy at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is rooted in community participation. It's a good question. You can show up to a public meeting and ask a question. They can attend first as audience members or spectators, checking out the space and getting comfortable. Printmakers leading workshops.

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Community Museum Local Participatory 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 6, 2019

Their questions made me think about a blog post I wrote in 2008, The Future of Authority. While I originally wrote this post to advocate for more participatory practice (i.e. One of the primary fears museum professionals (and all professionals) have about entering new relationships with audiences is the fear of losing control.

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Authoring Share Museum YouTube 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 17, 2008

MN150 is a newish permanent exhibition (opened in Oct 2007) at the Minnesota History Center that marks the sesquicentennial of Minnesota with 150 of “the most influential forces in the state’s history.” I was really surprised by the range and just how much people know about history. None of that made sense.

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Interview Minnesota Museum History 21