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.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 20, 2017

Courageous speakers from dozens of countries described bold, participatory projects. El Museo Reimaginado is a collaborative effort of museum professionals in North and South America to explore museums' potential as community catalysts. I find North American museums to be risk-averse. Pioneers of communitario museums.

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Museum America South America Participatory 40

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

APRIL 2, 2014

It is what it sounds like: a book of original sheet music, beautifully designed and complemented with artwork and text. Beck''s project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. Song Reader didn''t come as a CD, or an LP, or a bunch of digital audio files.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

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. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity.

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

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. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

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.

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Museum Work Social Media History 21

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 22, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we take our interns seriously, give them real responsibility, creative challenges, and meaningful work opportunities. I'm particularly excited about two internships that relate to participatory exhibition design. First, there is the Participatory Exhibit Design Internship.

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Participatory Museum Photography Unconference 37

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 1, 2010

I am putting the finishing touches on another social media lab designed for arts organizations. I had too look no further than Shelley Bernstein's blog over at the Brooklyn Museum to find some thoughtful experimentation and useful examples. In addition, the Museum has taken those tips and created a mashup with the YELP api.

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Museum Mashup Badge Participatory 97

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation."

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This morning, I checked in on the Pocket Museums on our museum's ground floor. This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. The Pocket Museum activity could be more appropriate for women, many of whom carry bags or purses.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

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.

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Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

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

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

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

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

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

APRIL 1, 2010

This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The Participatory Museum. COST: Museum books tend to be expensive - because they are printed in small runs, the price for a 400-page paperback can be as high as $40.

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Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

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

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.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

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. This is a human desire.

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Culture Participatory New Zealand Museum 49

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

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

One, from a museum director. Here, in no particular order, are ten different kinds of quality in arts experiences: AESTHETIC: is it beautiful? PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it? No arts experience hits them all. Heck, no museum exhibition hits them all. Core Museum 2.0 Any questions?

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Pop-Up Museum [n]: a short-term institution existing in a temporary space. Over the past few years, there have been several fabulous examples of pop-up museums focusing on visitor-generated content. Maria Mortati runs the wonderful SF Mobile Museum , which roams the Bay Area showing mini-exhibits on evocative themes.

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Museum Denver Netherlands Classroom 55

Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. The museum selected and is featuring 13 works recently added to our photography collection.

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Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53

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

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. Making co-creation sustainable and powerful.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

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. In this post, Jasper shares some lessons learned from a recent experiment to design a more social comment station.

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Museum Comment Experiment Participatory 34

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2011

We've been offering a host of participatory and interactive experiences at the Museum of Art & History this season. I loved Jasper Visser's list of 30 "do's" for designing participatory projects earlier this month. This isn't even participatory. People will talk about what they are writing or making.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

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

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. They’re tagging with yarn.

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Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

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 Museum directors released Blueprint as a showcase for these plans. Immersive design.

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Museum History Netherlands Create 36

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

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

This week at my museum, as we are wrapping up our current set of exhibitions on collecting, I noticed a simple, subtle example of this that I thought might interest you. Both these lists are interesting, but the "we" list invites spectators into the experience a bit more than the "I" list. that we selected during prototyping.

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Participatory Difference Analysis Museum 39

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. They shared their hopes.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

I'm a huge fan of work and the way she thinks - especially after she road the Scare House ride on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with me and did a brilliant reflection on its design. Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. I've purchase a two copies, one for me and one to give away.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

Ken is a game designer and writer who develops narrative, collaborative augmented reality experiences about serious issues. They asked for an experience that could transform how you perceived the Park – whether you were new or had lived in San Diego all your life. Lessons Learned 3: This is not a museum talking (what a relief!)

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49