Museum 2.0

MARCH 12, 2009

April 5 is the first day of a class I’m teaching called Social Technology, in which we are focusing on designing an exhibition that features social objects , that is, exhibits or artifacts that inspire interpersonal dialogue. For example, my dog , while a highly evolved social matchmaking device, is not deliberately designed for that task.

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Design Experiment Seattle Social 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2009

On Monday, I gave the keynote at the Museums in Conversation conference in Tarrytown, NY. Greed, because creative greediness motivates us to hunt down and steal the best design techniques the world has to offer, and generosity, because giving those great ideas and applications away is the only way to change the larger cultural landscape.

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Museum Conversation Columbus Local 20

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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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

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. The paper is perforated with one section for the promise, which visitors keep, and another section for a signature, which visitors leave at the museum.

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Pledge Museum Digital Indianapolis 23

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! Me: Have you ever been to this museum? meetup for Elite Yelp!

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22

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. There are so many more people who join social networks, who collect and aggregate favored content, and critique and rate books and movies.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Imagine that your museum is ready to start creating content on a small-scale in Web 2.0. Imagine you are the Boston Museum of Science, and you are ready to make some videos to post on YouTube. When I search for "Boston Museum of Science" on YouTube, I find 83 videos. You're ready to make a few videos to post on YouTube.

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Museum Technorati Boston YouTube 22

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. Which exhibits allow them to aggregate selections from a group?

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Profile Audience Participatory Tools 26

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

APRIL 11, 2008

Digital Creative Thinkers Information Designers Cybrarians Electronic Preservationists Telecollaborators Situated Teacher & Learner I think in those last few labels I was getting at what Steve Rubel defined as "Digital Curator. Steve Rubel called them "Aggregators." The other terms.

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Digital Aggregator Listserv Stream 50

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 5, 2006

Seb Chan of fresh + new, the blog from the Powerhouse Museum in Australia, ran with this idea to comment on the impact of disaggregation on the way that visitors use museum collections available on the web. I'd like to approach this concept from a physical, in-museum perspective. Aggregation is often a very personal thing.

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Aggregator Museum Structure Music 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 3, 2009

We tried this at the Denver Art Museum last week, and it is incredibly challenging—you can’t just put out a box of chocolates and expect people to talk. I will aggregate the results for later discussion on the blog. Virtual-to-real design workshop at Museums and the Web—Friday, April 17 in Indianapolis.

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Experiment Seattle Indianapolis Denver 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 4, 2007

whose applications are designed to be simple enough for anyone to use—is a term that mostly confuses and overwhelms people. Many in-museum 2.0-style It’s easy to aggregate lots of them into a larger collection. Many museums have created short-term mapping or timeline projects that are post-it based. It's messy.

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Generation Tools Museum Wiki 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2009

There is a simple leaderboard and each player's cards are aggregated on a personal dashboard. The thing that excites me about this is not the opportunity to use all the weird-colored cardstock hanging around the supply cabinets of most museums. If Signtific just asked the "What if?" machines) for informal learning environments?

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Game Experiment Participatory Museum 24

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 2, 2008

Today, Museum 2.0 I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 dynamic content aggregation and network machines)." I started the Museum 2.0 dynamic content aggregation and network machines)." and watched the Museum 2.0

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Museum Voice Minnesota Participatory 20

NonProfit Hub

APRIL 8, 2014

But this is a social media platform designed to be all about you. It’s a news aggregator that pulls from your social media feed to create an e-newspaper that you can send out. Check out the San Francisco Ballet Tumblr site, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see how nonprofit organizations are using the site. Basically, About.me

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NPO Social Media Site Social 57

Museum 2.0

APRIL 13, 2007

This year, one of the keynotes at the Interactive festival was delivered by Will Wright, legendary game designer who created Sim City, the Sims, and now, the forthcoming Spore. When I read this speech, I wonder, where do museum experiences fit in? How often do museum visitors wonder what will happen next?

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Game Story Museum Movie 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.

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Museum Participatory Artist Arts 24

Museum 2.0

MAY 23, 2007

They learn from and interact directly with their users (and more specifically, provide services to individual users that benefit from the aggregate interaction of the system with all of its users.) In related news, I've spent the past two years developing a "live" addition to the International Spy Museum, Operation Spy.

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Web Museum Aggregator Press 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 4, 2007

There's a game design source I used extensively at the beginning of development for Operation Spy: Gamasutra. If anyone out there is considering creating an industry catch-all site for museum-related content, I highly recommend Gamasutra as a model. Can museums afford to indulge in this kind of fantasy? Where am I?

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Game Storytelling Lesson Museum 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 22, 2007

I created a directional pyramid to make a point about social content in museum; namely, that museums are not offering networked, social experiences—and therefore will have a hard time jumping to initiating meaningful social discourse. And I’m not advocating that the dream museum would be all level 5 experiences, all the time.

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Taxonomy Museum Social Wikipedia 20

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).

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Interview Museum Culture Sound 20

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 three, the visitor is polled about the issue and sees her result compared to the cumulative aggregate. with the issue. Why do you oppose flag-burning?

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Poll Interaction Museum Social 22

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 23, 2007

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??? Seb Chan, of the Fresh + New Blog, raises an interesting question about web site stickness in a web2.0 era websites. I expect it isn???t stickiness???

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Social Network Nptech Tag Summary 50

Museum 2.0

MARCH 23, 2007

It requires Firefox, and yes, it does track every website you go to and then gives you gamer-spoof designations based on that tracking. Worse, the data accumulated about me is (in an aggregated form) available to other players. You can view a video of Justin talking about his theory here, or you can take the plunge and sign up.

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Game Online Aggregator Track 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

YBCA:YOU is an intriguing take on experiments in membership and raises interesting questions about what scaffolding people need to have social and repeat experiences in museums. But we were convinced that no survey, questionnaire, or aggregated data could provide the nuances and subtleties that come with a face-to-face meeting.

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Personal Museum Program Arts 50

Museum 2.0

APRIL 26, 2010

When a technologist calls me to talk about their brilliant idea for a museum-related business, it's always a mobile application. There are lots of wonderful (and probably not very high margin) experiments going on in museums with mobile devices. Most visitors to museums attend in social groups.

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Museum Group Mobile Project 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 29, 2008

How can you make your museum website more effective in driving traffic and raising awareness of your institution? Most people think this requires designing more sophisticated content (and it can). But there is a simpler, more impactful way for museum websites to become more visible, cited, and visited in the online landscape.

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Museum Websites Flash Images 20

Museum 2.0

MAY 14, 2009

I've become convinced that successful paths to participation in museums start with self-identification. The easiest way to do that is to acknowledge their uniqueness and validate their ability to connect with the museum on their own terms. Who is the "me" in the museum experience? Not so at museums.

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Museum Personal Experiment Profile 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 10, 2010

I spent last week working with staff at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) on ways to make this encyclopedic art museum more open to visitor participation across programs, exhibitions, and events. All artworks delivered to the museum during the submission period will be accepted and presented; no one is turned away.

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Participatory Museum Arts Artist 46

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Last week, I was reintroduced to Scratch , a graphical programming language designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. In this post, a look at the intentional design choices that make ScratchR work. If you designate someone as your "friend," that just means that you link to their projects from your page.

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Education Generation Remix Community 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 11, 2007

On Musematic , Holly Witchey has rigorously recorded her recent experience at WebWise, a " IMLS/RLG/OCLC/Getty sponsored conference" on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World that was held March 1-2. To museum ears, this is fairly blasphemous--the idea that people want to use our content, not our exhibits. content providers.

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Library Museum Arts Aggregator 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 15, 2009

They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it. Not everyone comes back to read the evolving comment stream, but the aggregate is always valuable to the next visitor. The bathroom wall was "anything goes" by design.

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Advice Museum Facilitation Student 31

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 7, 2009

Every time a colleague tells me her museum has just hired a "community person," a part of me cringes. Left on my own, I put on my best cheerleader face and cultivated a couple volunteers to help manage a growing community of amateur exhibit designers. I've been this community manager and know these problems first-hand.

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Community Management Museum Aggregator 40

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 23, 2009

You may also want to improve your organization's reputation as an expert by being consistently involved in discussions on topics or aggregating information that are relevant to your organization. Beth Kanter, Social Media Strategy Is Everywhere in the Organization - Indianapolis Museum of Art. Tactics and Tools.

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Social Media Map Strategy Media 106

Museum 2.0

JULY 3, 2008

I've written before about techniques for talking to strangers, looking at how buttons , buses , and dogs and can all be tools for participatory design. I used that instruction recently to kick off a meeting at a museum planning a participatory education space. There was a self-aggregating group who toured an art exhibition.

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Participatory St. Louis Museum Game 20

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

s Hawaiian son as applied to museums. Consider these two stories of museum-related wikis that struggled. In May of 2007, Woody Sobey released a wiki for science museum educators to share their demos. Woody had seeded the site with about 12 demos from his own museum, but the wiki never took off. What's a wiki?

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Wiki Wikipedia Museum Doc 23

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2008

Every museum has a number for its operating cost per visitor. Most museums don't strategically set this number--too many operating costs are fixed by building needs--but they can use it to assess how expensive each visitor interaction is and evaluate the efficacy of programs. So where do online initiatives fit in?

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Virtual Museum North Carolina Evaluation 20