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

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

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.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place. Despite its long history, few researchers studied the use and impact of citizen science until the 1980s.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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. Yes, this activity is political. But it is political in a way that fits right in with the Museum’s mission and history.

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

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

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

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. How do you experiment and course-correct as people wear their own paths into the space?

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

We decided to show a selection of Danny's lists in a hallway surrounded by a participatory element where we invite visitors to contribute to new lists on evocative themes ("Things we forget," "The best feelings in the world," etc.) that we selected during prototyping.

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Participatory Difference Analysis Museum 39

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

We just started to try to live up to that vision, partnership by partnership, activity by activity. It also feels amazing to see some of my theories validated in this way--that giving people the opportunity to actively participate does really transform the way they see the institution and themselves. It feels pretty amazing.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. This past weekend, in conjunction with our exhibition about Ze Frank's current participatory project, A Show , we hosted " Ze Frank Weekend "--a quickie summer camp of workshops, activities, presentations, and lots of hugging.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

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. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I''ve heard throughout these experiences. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! Yes and no.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

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

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

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

APRIL 10, 2013

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. We have seven participatory elements in our current exhibitions on three floors, ranging from voting to talkback walls to an in-depth "make a memory jar" craft activity.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

Good Pitch is an effort that brings documentary filmmakers together with a wide range of partners in distribution, financing and outreach for activism. But that is only the jumping off point for the inquiry.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

Doing this talk was an incredible experience, both because of the warm and energized response I received at the event and because the format forced me to hone in on what's most important to me these days and share it in a succinct way. The first way we open up is by inviting active participation.

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Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

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

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. With this in mind, when we produce participatory experiences, while our impetus is to serve our power users with extra content or “check for understanding” interactives, there are so many other ways to use interactives.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. 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. Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

Museums have been grappling with this question for years ( here's a 2007 roundup of such projects ), most aggressively in zoos and natural history museums where staff hope to inspire conservation and in history/concept museums that focus on civic engagement and activism. There was no specific instruction with the dots.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47

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

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

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

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. It is incredibly rewarding work.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

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

DECEMBER 14, 2011

It was Friday, a few hours before the drawing activity, and my colleagues were worried that it would be too challenging for people to draw the icons and landmarks selected. We often avoid drawing as a community art activity because visitors can get really judgmental of their own abilities, and our staff just felt that this might be too hard.

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Participatory Classroom Help Artist 43

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. Such participatory activities would be seen as a waste of time. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects. nothing happens.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 26, 2015

I also wanted to experiment with translating some facilitation techniques I use for face-to-face meetings (like sticky note facilitation ) to virtual meetings. Designing A Participatory Hook for a Virtual Meeting. Guidestar has a history of doing walking meetings, especially one on ones and at its Williamsburg location.

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Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

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

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. I''ve never worked in such a supportive, energized, active environment. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. One on side are the conversations we have with our visitors, which mostly focus on engagement experiences.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 21, 2012

At the museum of art and history where I work, we are grappling with the question of how to help people enjoy themselves while keeping the art and artifacts safe. We've increased attendance among people who are new to museum experiences. Many don't have "museum experience" and don't know what we expect. This was amazing.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

I charted them across the year and pledged to try one each month, inviting others to do them with me and blog about the experience. The most surprising thing to me, however, was what she had to say about the experience: Experimonth is like playing for scientists. game guestpost participatory museum Unusual Projects and Influences'

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51