Museum 2.0

APRIL 2, 2014

Beck''s project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. In his thoughtful preface to this project, I reconnected with five lessons I''ve learned from participatory projects in museums and cultural sites. Constrain the input, free the output.

Participatory 52

Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

It gave me a chance to really think about how we have been opening up our museum and what it means for our community. Museums can be incredible catalysts for social change. We can change that by embracing participatory culture and opening up to the active, social ways that people engage with art, history, science, and ideas today.

Museum 55

Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I was thinking I’d do a few alternative histories of museums for the first post of the last month of the decade. As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying. But I couldn’t get there.

Museum 21

Museum Work Social Media History 21

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs. The purpose of my thesis was two-fold: To research and analyze community and civic engagement practices, methods, theories and examples in other museum programs.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2010

As many of you know, I've been working for the past year+ on a book about visitor participation in museums, libraries, science centers, and art galleries. The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to visitor participation. The Participatory Museum is an attempt at providing such a resource. Want to buy a book

Participatory 30

Participatory Museum Vietnam Netherlands 30

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. When activities were not facilitated, people were often too timid to interact.

Participatory 51

Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes , on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. This is the question I ask myself anytime I'm working on something with a participatory intent.

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Participatory Question Work Artist 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

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). It is incredibly rewarding work. In the meantime, here are some of the.

Museum 55

Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Lovely grounds.

Participatory 35

Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

Dear Museum 2.0 As of May 2, I will be the executive director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA (here's the press release ). I am closing down my consulting business at the end of April, but the Museum 2.0 Here are a few things that make the MAH an exciting museum to me: It's small.

History 55

History Museum Arts Consultant 55

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

LinkedIn has a new feature where people can congratulate each other on work anniversaries. It has some of the same feel as the disconnected affection of people wishing you a happy birthday on Facebook, with professional reflection baked in. We have an incredible group of people working together at the MAH right now.

Museum 49

Museum Director History Teen 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. 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. This is a problem for two reasons.

Participatory 50

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Pop-Up Museum [n]: a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. a way to catalyze conversations among diverse people, mediated by their objects. Over the past few years, there have been several fabulous examples of pop-up museums focusing on visitor-generated content. The goal is promoting conversations.

Museum 55

Museum Denver Netherlands Classroom 55

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

Engaging new people. Engaging more diverse people. Engaging people actively in the arts. One, from a museum director. INTERPRETATIVE: can people understand it? EDUCATIONAL: can people learn from it? RELEVANT: can people relate to it? PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it?

Participatory 55

Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

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. There are so many more people who join social networks, who collect and aggregate favored content, and critique and rate books and movies.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 29, 2014

I would guess that most people have no idea that this work is happening at zoos. In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. We give people content and then we say, "you decide." I certainly didn''t. This can sound disingenuous.

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Action People Conservancy Africa 46

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.

Measure 47

Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations. Who are all of these people?

Denver 35

Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

Jasper Visser and his colleagues at the not-yet-physically-open National Historisch Museum of the Netherlands have impressed me with their innovative, thoughtful approach to developing a dynamic national museum. Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam.

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Museum Comment Experiment Participatory 34

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

JULY 8, 2015

I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. In the last week: 10,000ish people saw the blog post on the web or as an email. 3,125 people viewed the game. 610 people played the game. 20 people commented on it.

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Game Museum Participatory Comment 20

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 Why should institutions engage with people in this way? In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what." How could staff members justify these approaches to their managers?

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

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

DECEMBER 6, 2009

This post was written by Jaime Kopke , the founder/director of the Denver Community Museum , a pop-up community-generated institution that ran from Oct 2008-April 2009. The Denver Community Museum (DCM) was a grassroots operation in almost every sense. By far the most important elements though were the stories people shared.

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Denver Museum Community Participatory 29

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. If you don't have a sense of an outcome--whether that be internal research, community conversation, or something else--you can't decide how or whether contributions should be documented or archived.

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Participatory Music Project Video 48

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. An estimated 400,000 people attended the event over two weeks, of which 47,000 cast at least one vote. The Brooklyn Museum just finished the public stage of GO , a "community-curated open studio project." 1,708 artists participated.

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Arts Artist Museum Award 47

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. We wanted to share with people, in as clear and transparent a format as possible, our approach to developing exhibitions. We discussed research about how visitors experience museums.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

JULY 12, 2011

A museum holds a free program in a semi-public space. Fifteen people engage in the prescribed activities. Approximately 100 people walk by while the program is going on. How many people participated? Last weekend, my museum did a little pilot of a new program, Downward Draw. People looked and talked and pointed.

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Participatory Museum Measure Activities 41

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

Any place with people working different schedules in different parts of the building suffers from it. At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. Would people feel pressured to post and follow? Would enough people use it to make it work? This problem is nothing new.

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 9, 2017

I imagined an academic conversation stuffed with arcane, impenetrable vocabulary. The problem, of course, is when you choose not to participate, most people don't see it as a noble protest. Most people don't notice at all. In other cases--like when I was asked to write a "fun" etiquette guide on how to visit museums--I said no.

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Participatory Museum Voice Press 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

You tell people they can''t take photographs in the gallery or the performance, but the phones sneak out , covertly or defiantly, to reassert personal control of the experience. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The museum invites art-making in the elevator.

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

Three of them are being hosted at my museum , and one at a mystery location. You Can't Do That in Museums Camp - July 10-12, 2013. In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Last week, I was in Minneapolis for the American Association of Museums annual meeting. Kathleen McLean led a terrific session called "Dangerous Ridiculous" about risk-taking in museums. Interestingly, at my museum, our team is naturally better at ridiculous than we are at dangerous. I found this idea really powerful.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

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.

Design 49

Design Participatory Children Museum 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 19, 2016

Consider whether you want a bonded group (people who are like each other) or a bridged group (people who are different from each other). Bonded groups are useful if you want to understand people's existing attitudes and impressions. If you are building something new and want people's ideas, go for bridging.

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Build Community Museum Participatory 35