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.

Museum 46

Museum Twitter Open San Francisco 46

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?

Design 31

Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

APRIL 23, 2007

and with it flocks of museum studies / education / exhibit planning graduate interns. I’m always curious when I meet these folks, who are about my age, choosing a different entry path into the museum world. The value proposition of museum grad programs is cloudy in my mind. Sure, it’s great to learn museum theory and history.

Museum 51

Museum Program Student Skills 51

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. I know this sounds strange coming from someone writing an admittedly self-expressive blog post, but hear me out. 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

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. I know this sounds strange coming from someone writing an admittedly self-expressive blog post, but hear me out. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. This is a problem for two reasons.

Participatory 44

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 2, 2009

How would you design a recommendation system for a museum? When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour. When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour.

System 22

System Design Movie Museum 22

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.

Design 21

Design Participatory Social Museum 21

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

I've long believed that museums have a special opportunity to support the community spirit of Web 2.0 This month brings three examples of museums hosting meetups for online communities: On 8.6.08, the Computer History Museum (Silicon Valley, CA) hosted a Yelp! To some people, these events may sound like losers.

Museum 22

Museum Hosting Model Community 22

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!

Museum 20

Museum Game Open Map 20

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.

Second Life 20

Second Life Museum Life Virtual 20

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?

Classroom 22

Classroom Children Museum Model 22

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.

Experiment 44

Experiment Lesson Learning Museum 44

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 7, 2008

I have seen the future of interpretative design, and that future is data visualization. And yet, over the last few years, as the web has unlocked piles of information, a quiet group of math-minded designers are figuring out how to interpret the vast impersonalness of data and make it both beautiful and meaningful. Huge swaths of words.

Design 20

Design Data Artist New York 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2007

Inventory isn't a museum activity that inspires curiosity in many visitors. This summer, the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art ( Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde) is trying to change that. People often talk about non-collecting museums as the museums of the future.

Museum 20

Museum Conservancy Registration Project 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2007

But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. MOMA has standard art museum labels. When I asked an art museum educator about this (“How should I look at art?”) Sounds great. The review was harsh.

Arts 30

Arts Museum Artist Audio 30

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2008

There's a tag applied to many Museum 2.0 Posts under that tag tend to examine non-museum things, from malls to games to ad campaigns , and draw some design lessons for museums from their foreignness. What design elements make buses more social than trains? People talk.

Participatory 20

Participatory Design Museum Childhood 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 7, 2006

"Putting Fun into Functional" is a really fabulous powerpoint presentation by Amy Jo Kim of shufflebrain , a unique game design company. There have got to be some great ways to apply these mechanics to museums. Collecting: Some museums are using barcodes or RFID to track what exhibits the visitor uses. This may sound gross.

Museum 20

Museum Game PowerPoint Myspace 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Museum professionals tend to think this is OK because they think of the contributory act as the important part of the participation. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects. I think this is why the Top 40 exhibition at the Worcester City Gallery and Museum was such a success.

Participatory 35

Participatory Museum Rate YouTube 35

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

Can designers pull this off with physical spaces? But it's not so easy to integrate into larger-scale museum writing. And if you try to write this way without sincerity, it will sound as flat as other text. Have you ever walked someone, a non-museum professional, through an exhibition you have or are working on?

Museum 20

Museum Model Voice Storytelling 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 23, 2008

I've written before about three types of museum users: contributors, lurkers, and judges. It can be enticing to design experiences that will encourage visitors to "level up" from spectator to creator, or in my terms, from lurker to contributor. These are the exhibits and design types that we should pay more attention to.

Profile 26

Profile Audience Participatory Tools 26

Nonprofits Source

JANUARY 23, 2023

If outsourcing the work sounds like an offer you can’t refuse, take the time to find an agency that offers the exact services and expertise your team needs. Using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, they’ll keep you in the loop on performance by creating live dashboards and reports that you can reference at any time.

Grant 52

Grant Google Management Guide 52

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2008

On Monday, David Klevan (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and I spoke at the MAAM Creating Exhibitions conference about Web 2.0 and museums. framework, and David shared lessons learned from the huge range of projects the Holocaust Museum has initiated. I provided the Web 2.0 and sniff around.

Web 44

Web Time Museum Audio 44

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Last week, Jim Richardson and I hosted MuseumNext , a 24-hour workshop for museum professionals focused on bringing new, wild museum projects into the world. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.

Facilitation 32

Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. This may sound obvious and natural, but it’s easy to underestimate the power of institutional culture.

Project 22

Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

MARCH 20, 2009

In my continuing quest to find elegant ways to integrate technology into the museum experience, we come to interpretative material and the simple question, "How can you create natural ways for visitors to retrieve the information of most interest to them relative to an artifact or exhibit?" Here's one lovely answer: Meta.L.Hyttan.

Environment 20

Environment Content Model Sweden 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 9, 2007

I'm gearing up for some conference talks next month, and one of these is part of a very cool session, Eye on Design, at the Western Museums Association conference. The coordinator asked several folks to pick a design trend from outside the museum world and discuss how they might be applied to museum design.

Museum 20

Museum Participatory Interaction Captivate 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. Between the giant squid brainstorming and experimentation, I gave a talk to the larger Smithsonian Institution about multi-platform museum experiences. The slides are also available for download.

Slides 20

Slides Process Video Open 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 15, 2006

Games often get a bad rap in the museum world. There are thousands of game developers out there creating unusual, beautiful, fascinating games that have changed the way I think about museum exhibits and game/play spaces. Today, two games about navigating non-linear narrative spaces, The Telephone and The Museum of Broken Memories.

Game 20

Game Museum Flash Captivate 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 3, 2009

Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses ) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission.

Community 22

Community Museum San Diego San Francisco 22

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 8, 2006

Today, a conversation with Elisa Giaccardi , from the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at University of Colorado , Boulder. Elisa’s focus is interactive arts, media design, and cultural management, and she has been involved in many pertinent projects, such as MUVI (the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lombardia).

Interview 20

Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 19, 2007

She told me an anecdote about an experience with the Stanford Art Museum exhibition, Question , which included a keyboard where visitors could type their own thoughts about art, to be projected on a wall along with quotes by famous people. My impression is that most such exhibits are designed to be inputter-focused. It depends.

Audience 20

Audience Museum Music Awareness 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 25, 2009

There are interpretative trails and helpful staff to aid visitors in tuning in to the bird sounds and identifying the native animals now thriving in the preserve. I hope that I will one day walk into an archive or history museum and feel the same sense of urgency, purpose, and progress that I felt at Zealandia.

Action 20

Action New Zealand Hints Project 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 20, 2007

This is the final installment of Museum 2.0’s s book club on Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions , a collection of essays edited by Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean. Ultimately, the arguments against including visitor voices come down to a lack of respect for visitors as meaning-makers in museums.

Voice 20

Voice Case Study Museum Analysis 20

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 8, 2007

There’s a new word in the experience design lexicon: sticky. Museums can’t be viral. So where should sticky live in the museum? I sat here for awhile trying to think of museum experiences I’ve seen that are sticky, not gimmicky. Core Museum 2.0 Ideas design. Tags: web2.0 And it keeps. Coming back.

Museum 20

Museum Map Captivate Second Life 20

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2006

Jellyvision has now released a list of Jack Principles on Interactive Conversation Interface design. There's nothing too shocking in this design list, but it's a great alternate view into the window of interactive exhibit design. Everyone who walks up to a museum kiosk knows it isn't "alive". That's right, Calder mobile.

Interaction 20

Interaction Game Conversation Guidelines 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 16, 2008

I've written before about the inspiring work that the Brooklyn Museum of Art is doing with their community-focused efforts. Click is an exhibition process in three parts: The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

Museum 24

Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

MARCH 18, 2008

In the museum world, we often talk about lowering barriers to entry, helping people get through the door. And so today we look at an educational facility (not a museum) that swabs the deck with these barriers. If it were just an amazing pirate store, 826 Valencia would be a nice design inspiration. It makes them walk the plank.

Education 21

Education Museum Audience Design 21