Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 10, 2016

Museum technology nerds: this post is for you. I've been thinking recently about distributed content experiences--ways for people to interact with museum content (art, history, science, etc.) as they make their way through the world outside the museum. At the museum? but none of them are great. Who's tackling them?

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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. That's why I asked.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2008

One of the surprise benefits of Saturday's Museums and Civic Discourse session was the chance to sit down with Mitch Allen of Left Coast Press (formerly AltaMira press), publisher of the Museums and Social Discourse journal among many, many other museum publications. To his credit, Mitch didn't take offense. Are We There Yet?

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Forum One

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

In June 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and in subsequent years we saw the rise of apps as a competing method to websites for how people interact with organizations. For organizations using both apps and websites, there were challenges in seeing how the data interacts—are web visitors the same people using the app? Implement it.

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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. The most reliable question I'm using works in art museums.

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Technique Design Question Develop 52

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 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. The outcome of our conversations is dependent on the diversity of designed environments in which they occur. "Where were you last night?" If someone asked you that question, how would you answer?

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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 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. This post shares her reflections on the project, its design, and its impact. The Denver Community Museum (DCM) was a grassroots operation in almost every sense.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 30, 2008

Dear Museums on Twitter, Thanks for experimenting in a new and largely uncharted online environment. So here is a list of suggestions that hopefully will improve the way your museum thinks about using Twitter. Or it's rainy so you suggest I visit the museum? I am a museum of Native Cultures and Art!" You could do better.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 8, 2010

It drives me nuts that it's being called "groundbreaking" in the realm of human-to-human interactions. Chatroulette exacerbates the perception that stranger interactions are uncomfortable, weird, and often sexual in nature. The interactions are private, which means there's no external social pressure to conform.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 11, 2010

While it hasn't happened here in awhile, a new Museum 2.0 They may be parks, cafes, bars, hair salons--any place that is conducive to informal, welcoming, creative interaction. Oldenburg celebrates places that are less structured, less designed, less facilitated, and less content-rich than most museums want to be.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 5, 2009

I've been designing game-like experiences with museums for a long time. But this week, I participated in a game design workshop with Ken Eklund that totally changed my perspective. My starting point is interactive exhibit design; Ken's is game design. We rarely talk about this when we design museum exhibits.

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Collection-tagging projects (in which visitors assign keywords to items in a collection) have always left me cold. Tagging is such a functional activity, and if you don't see direct benefit from doing it, the interest in it as a fun afternoon activity is pretty low. But I do it because it's useful to me as an organizational tool.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2006

has gone on to build other games and tutorials, but their bread and butter is the crafting of honest, successful "interactive conversation interfaces." What's an "interactive conversation interface"? In short, it's a killer interactive. In short, creating a consistent, positive environment for user interaction.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 10, 2008

In the final installment of Museum 2.0’s s four part series on comfort in museums, we get down to the basics: creature comfort. When it comes to content , programs , and interactives (parts 1-3 of the series), the challenge is to push the barrier towards less comfort, not more. Why are museums so darn uncomfortable?

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 20, 2008

When I talk about the hierarchy, I use the theoretical construct of an issue-based museum exhibit. At level one, the museum preaches to visitors about the issue. At level two, the visitor has some interactive experience (pushing buttons, etc.) This post provides a tangible example for the why behind that argument.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 28, 2009

What role does “promoting human happiness” play in the mission statements and actions of museums? That’s the question I’m pondering thanks to Jane McGonigal and the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM). Earlier today, the CFM offered a free webcast of Jane McGonigal’s talk on gaming, happiness, and museums.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 27, 2009

This week, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened a new temporary exhibition called The Psychedelic Experience , featuring rock posters from San Francisco in the heyday of Bill Graham and electric kool-aid. It is an incredible museum experience. The interactive experiences in Side Trip are superlative.

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 30, 2010

Let's say you're a young person eager to break into museums. Over my first year in museums, I worked at five different institutions as an educator, exhibit builder, exhibit cleaner, art model, and whatever else I could find. Now, several years of full-time museum work later, I'm consulting.

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Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2008

When you design a new interactive, talkback station, or traditional exhibit for your museum, what best practices and design requirements do you consult? Museums don't have a well-developed body of industry-wide best practices. This creates two design problems. To a user, interacting with Yahoo!

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Museum 2.0

MAY 26, 2009

On a recent trip to DC, an old friend showed me around a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide. It's a small space that features stories of recent and current genocides and encourages visitors to "take action" via an interactive pledge wall.

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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.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 20, 2008

How do you design an object experience that encourages participation among visitors? This blog often analyzes how websites, designed spaces, even dogs promote participatory experiences among users. Today, we look inward for a how-to on one type of participatory design as applied to museum exhibits.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 23, 2007

Also found in the NpTech tag stream and a good backdrop to this conversation is " When the best tool for the job. context: How are museums encouraging stickiness and user investment in their proposed and in some cases, already developed, post 2.0 situation unless museums can get the ???stickiness??? public information???

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Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2007

A quickie today, a quirky little wandering game in the Things Came up to my brain museum. These kinds of flash games are like a slice of theater; with a few sketched lines and simple interaction, you're immersed in a world. How wondrous and under-utilized in museums, the design strokes that do more with (distinctive) less.

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Game Museum Flash Brain 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 12, 2010

For example, just take a look at the explosion of mobile apps for museums. Tags: mobile. But using the service to create the application is only one third of the process. You need to get it approved and published on iTunes for distribution and, of course, you have to promote outside of the iTunes.

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Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2010

Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. During the ensuing discussion, one woman asked, "Which audiences are least interested in social participation in museums?" So what's a museum to do--especially one that is funded to encourage youth and teen participation?

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2007

We looked at the museum map on the wall. There was a recent post on the ASTC listserv from a museum planning to revamp their wayfinding system. The wayfinding question in museums—or any complex space—is multifaceted. At the Spy Museum, our content is separated into two sections, School for Spies and Secret History of History.

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Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2007

In January, I interviewed Sibley about the potential use of virtual worlds and Second Life by museums, but in the four months since then, the virtual world platform--and the hype around it--has exploded. It seems that Second Life is both the closest and farthest thing from many museum professionals' minds. Collaborative Experience.

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Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 11, 2007

This is not an analytical post (primarily); it's an announcement and invitation to join the new project I've been working on with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. But this is not just for The Tech; our grant mandates that this project be a service to the museum community at large. A contractor, Involve Inc.,

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

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. To understand more, I turned to Elaine Gurian's article The Molting of Children's Museums? Why the uniformity?

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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. I was there for a think tank about the reinstallation along with a handful of designers and academics.

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Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2007

Gamasutra has a feature up entitled Game Design Essentials: 20 Open World Games. In it, John Harris provides a whirlwind tour through arcades, Ataris, and Nintendos, discussing the design principles and evolution of video games described as “open world” or “exploration." The site will be active until Oct 16, so keep the ideas coming!

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Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 26, 2009

This guest post was written by Ruben Huele and describes the scenario-based strategic process used at the Dutch Natural History Museum, Naturalis , to innovate the redevelopment of their permanent collection. The new building of Naturalis, the Dutch National Natural History Museum, opened in 1998. It should not surprise the Museum 2.0

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Museum 2.0

MARCH 25, 2008

For years, we'd discussed getting tattoos instead of rings to memorialize a marriage commitment, and last week, wedding over, design concept in hand, fears somewhat in check, we finally put ink to skin and made it official. I'd love to see a museum offer temporary tattoos instead of stickers at entry. People ask questions.

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Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2008

This week marks one month of live activity for the Tech Virtual Museum Workshop , a collaborative, online platform for exhibit development. The result is a focus on designing spaces, workshops, and social experiences that facilitate creative sharing. But museum folks, no matter how much we want to collaborate, don't move quickly.

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