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

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. But people have participated in completely different ways. Here are three possible explanations for this gender divide: Men and women use bathrooms differently.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

I am fascinated by the incredible differences in what people contribute based on format and phrasing of the invitation to participate. This activity has been incredibly popular, and about every three weeks we replace one of the lists with a fresh copy so there is always space for some new contributors.

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Participatory Difference Analysis Museum 39

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

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 ). Because of the increased workload I expect in the months to come, as well as the likely possibility that we will start a Museum of Art & History blog, I'm lowering my Museum 2.0

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History Museum Arts Consultant 55

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

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? History Museums OPPORTUNITIES - History museums are in many ways the best-suited for visitor participation.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

The new building was designed to meet neighborhood needs--not just in the content covered, but in the inclusion of spaces made for particular kinds of activities sought by locals (i.e. She did several things over the course of the tour to make it participatory, and she did so in a natural, delightful way. The exhibits are exciting.

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

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

JULY 23, 2014

The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. The Derby Silk Mill folks have a different tack: they define the Silk Mill as being about making. A strong participatory process is not a loosey-goosey, open the doors and do whatever strategy. Or silk production.

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

For the past two years, I''ve been working on a project to activate the concrete space adjacent to our museum as a vibrant, community plaza. We are hiring a temporary contract curator to activate the plaza this summer with 25+ cultural events. creative placemaking design Museum of Art and History programs public space'

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

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. Different activities need different levels of materials to appear "open for business."

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

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. Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian''s excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title. It looks different in different types of institutions.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

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. The first way we open up is by inviting active participation. The difference in what we contribute is in the design of the invitation conferred onto us.

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Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." I eagerly read about a new social psychology research study in which whites, Asians, and Latinos engaged in a simple collaborative activity--making a music video together. I wanted to know more.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

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? The common museum knowledge on this issue is that adults are timid, that we have lost some of the wonder, impulsiveness, and active creativity of childhood days.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. They understand we are different, but they don’t see us in competition with each other. But, while adjacent, museums differ from formal classrooms in numerous ways. Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian's excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title. In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 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). We interacted with the art and with each other through dynamic photo challenges, kinesthetic activities, and conversations. A new company in New York, Museum Hack , is reinventing the museum tour from the outside in.

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Here's the short version (read the whole thing here ): The Museum of Art & History is committed to creating exhibitions that inspire our diverse audiences to engage deeply with contemporary art and Santa Cruz County history. We see our visitors as partners in actively interpreting and exploring exhibition content.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. Depending on the number of people in your group, there are different ways to facilitate the report out. The features include being able to easily create different color sticky notes and type in notes and move them around the board. Design must comes first.

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. This is the participatory platform model. Our staff could never produce all this activity on our own. And it puts the MAH at the center of the web of activity, as a valued partner and platform provider. Nine years later, I still believe this.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We went through a dramatic financial turnaround and redefined our relationship with our community through a series of experimental participatory projects and new programmatic approaches. 85% of our visitors attend through events.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 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. actively sought out community needs to respond to. design new programs with a focus on history.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

It's a little living room in a lobby area that invites people to lounge on comfortable chairs, leaf through magazines and books related to art and Santa Cruz history, and generally hang out. Lisa and I have fundamentally different ideas of what a "good" museum experience is. The area that houses the Creativity Lounge also shows art.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

Seeing so many cheerful one-liners in my inbox made me think about how different my work situation is today than the last time I reflected on it in public in 2012, at my one-year anniversary. I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. Making co-creation sustainable and powerful.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 7, 2017

On a beautiful location in a former jazz-era night club, a committed team works on storytelling activities to bring different communities in the city together, and contribute to a happier, more engaged city. The neighborhood is a mix of people and communities by design and has a rich social history.

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Storytelling Story Photography Museum 39

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

Using facial morphing software to change a player''s avatar to a different ethnicity, we fed the game with hundreds of photos that were judged in a "hot or not" type interface and gave players a view of how intelligent, attractive, and trustworthy others perceived them to be as two different ethnicities.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2012

It was fascinating to see people--across social differences--responding to representations of love in the paintings, images, objects and narratives that were part of the installation. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement.

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Participatory Museum Blackboard Game 51

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. What's the value of this activity? But watch visitors move around a museum, and you'll quickly see the activity flare up around specific exhibits and not others. To me, emulation is a kind of learning activity.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I love alternative history novels. 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 Nina Simon ’s Participatory Museum , I felt sad about all the visitors whose voices (and post-it note comments) weren’t honored.

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Museum Work Social Media History 21

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. We bridge with people who are different from us.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 20, 2016

They catered to different audiences. I never felt like I stumbled into the gallery where no one else dares to tread (as I often feel when I enter the dioramas in many natural history museums, or the period rooms of art institutions). Both institutions made good use of their very different spaces. These displays were memorable.

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Museum Audience Music Arts 20

Museum 2.0

JULY 7, 2010

Most of my work contracts involve a conversation that goes something like this: "We want to find ways to make our institution more participatory and lively." It requires trading a certain history for an uncertain future--a nerve-wracking prospect no matter the situation. Fabulous!" "But This is incredibly scary.

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 20, 2013

The majority of our public programs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History are created and produced through community collaborations. We realize collaboration differs greatly for each individual and organization. Share your resources and connections that can help make their activity/collaboration stronger.

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Collaboration Community Tools Museum 55

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2011

We're seeking great folks for public programs, participatory exhibit design, online marketing, 3D design, and whatever else you might have to offer. I often feel like I spend every day relearning that people think differently from each other. Not everyone wants a super-unstructured internship.

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Museum Student Participatory Structure 35

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2009

MuseumNext had four main sections: Interactive activities , including an opening workshop with a group of designers associated with an extremely wonderful exhibition called Doing it for the Kids featuring sustainable toy designs. Vary the activities. Facilitator bits.

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Facilitation Reflection Museum Participatory 32

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I used the example of two very different exhibitions that solicited visitor-contributed content: Playing with Science at the London Science Museum, and MN150 at the Minnesota History Center. The Minnesota History Center team solicited visitor nominations for exhibition topics and then built an exhibition out of those contributions.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22