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

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

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2014

But not enough people care about it anymore, and the museum is fading into disrepair. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. The Silk Mill is part of the Derby Museums , a public institution of art, history, and natural history. What do you do?

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Museum Product Participatory Community 53

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." We want to cultivate a more diverse audience, especially younger people, and we want to do it authentically." Audience development is not an exercise in concentric circles.

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Audience Museum Oakland Participatory 40

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. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION 1. The Museum 2.0

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

I've now been the Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz for two months. What motivates people to come to the museum is not the idea that there's something that's open for the next three months and they can come any time. Lots more on this in the months to come, but I thought you might like to read the article.

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Museum History Arts Work 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 11, 2012

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Ze Frank is a participatory artist who creates digital projects that are explicitly about creating and enhancing authentic interpersonal connections. Ze's community is worldwide people who self-select to engage with strangers online.

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

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 20, 2016

When we say we want our museum to be "audience-centered," what do we mean? They catered to different audiences. You could come for the Scottish first peoples or the World War II art or the dinosaurs or the collection of funny shoes. They taught us something new. They prompted dialogue and a desire to keep looking.

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Museum Audience Music Arts 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION 1. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences.

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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). Dustin: About a year ago I met a couple of people from Museum Hack at a conference. Who is the audience for Museum Hack? Today on Museum 2.0, an interview with Dustin Growick. How do you advertise Museum Hack?

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

They are hosting performances, exhibitions that morph over time, artists who work in practice-based media, who break the fourth wall with the audience, who invite participation, and who deliberately disrupt museum conventions. Throw in a few participatory elements, and suddenly you have visitors trying to arbitrate amongst themselves.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

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

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

We wanted to share with people, in as clear and transparent a format as possible, our approach to developing exhibitions. If you are working with us as an artist or contributor to an exhibition, you should expect that museum staff will create multi-modal, interdisciplinary, participatory, immersive, and social experiences around your work.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

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. People wanted a fire festival, so we did a fire festival. were shamelessly resourceful.

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Museum History Arts Artist 47

Museum 2.0

MARCH 14, 2017

This is the second installation in a series of posts on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH)'s development of Abbott Square , a new creative community plaza in downtown Santa Cruz. The MAH fundamentally has two jobs: we bring art and history out into our community, and we invite our community in.

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Public Museum Arts History 27

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? There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate. This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. This is the participatory platform model. They've created powerful learning experiences, diverse audiences, and new program formats. 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. It is incredibly rewarding work.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

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

MAY 24, 2011

Today, a guest post from one of the people who inspires me: Ken Eklund. When I worked briefly with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative to conceptualize a mobile phone-based game to connect visitors to the park to its cultural institutions and history, I knew Ken would be the perfect person to make it happen. Mysterious! Intriguing!

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

It was terrific to have a packed room and a long, open conversation (we split the session into half presenting, half audience discussion) about these issues. A couple of weeks ago, I posted on this blog that I was interested in meeting some new people at the conference. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

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. Focus on family audiences. Art, however, does not come to museums pre-hardened.

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Museum Denver Artist Milwaukee 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 20, 2009

It is also a Twitter term that describes a keyword, prefixed by that symbol, that helps people track conversations on Twitter. A Brief History of Hash Tags Chris Messina ( @chrismessina) is credited with starting hashtags and has written about how to make them most useful. Photo by Mansikka. What is a #HashTag?

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Twitter Foundation Effective San Diego 95

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

to experiment with different kinds of events (time of day, audience, size, type) and get a sense of how we can best program the space in the longterm. The ideal candidate has a good grasp of our local artistic assets in Santa Cruz County, a knack for participatory placemaking, and enthusiasm about putting on a show.

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Public Activities Active Activism 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

” The following games are expanding the reach of various nonprofits and helping them connect with audiences in meaningful ways. government and encouraging participatory democracy. Kennedy (EMK) Institute to support it in educating the public about U.S.

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Game Tech Support Module 50

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

A national election is the ultimate participatory project. As Jane McGonigal has written , "the chance to be part of something bigger" than yourself is one of the four things that make people feel happy and fulfilled. Granted, I know that people still want the great experiences that our organizations provide.

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Product Build Museum Arts 51

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

You''re in for a treat, with upcoming posts on creativity, collections management, elitism, science play, permanent participatory galleries, partnering with underserved teens, magic vests, and more. I''ve struggled with some of the "celebrity" aspects of having a big audience. I''ve never taken a break from blogging before.

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Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

What values change in that not so subtle shift between people, things, and the common space shared between them? Over time the movement and arrangement of things trails a layered aesthetic that convey histories and narratives of changing communities passing through this unfolding three-story artwork.

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Collaboration North Carolina Museum Artist 36

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 28, 2010

Every once in a while I come across a project I wish I could have included in The Participatory Museum. an exhibition produced with schoolchildren at the Wallace Collection in London, is a lovely example of co-creation that demonstrates the multiple benefits of inviting audience members to act as partners in arts organizations.

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Children Museum Create Project 46

Museum 2.0

MARCH 28, 2012

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we've started experimenting with a "community first" approach to program development. C3 invites people to cross-pollinate and share ideas--the most promising of which we will follow up on to plan new programs. We made people write things down constantly.

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Program Community Design Museum 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 31, 2012

In July of 2013, the MAH will host our first You Can't Do That in Museums Camp (or better name to be suggested by you), inviting 80 creative people to collaborate on an experimental exhibition. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. and this one is going to be awesome.

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Professional Develop Museum Arts 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

Among other things, I led a workshop on "social objects" --artifacts and exhibits that inspire people to point, discuss, snap photos, and generally share their experience both with friends and strangers. It's not topic-specific; I've done these exercises with art, history, science, and children's museums to useful effect.

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Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

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. It is a group of people connected by something shared.

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Build Community Museum Artist 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 20, 2009

While the majority of experience-based museums like children's and science museums have unrestricted noncommercial photography policies, many collections-based art and history museums continue to maintain highly restrictive photo policies. If people can take their own photos, they won't buy them in the gift shop.

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Museum Photo Policy Open 54

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. You have an audience need and an institutional value, and now you just need a verb that connects them. I get impatient with long complicated processes that require buy-in from hundreds of people.

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Slides Process Video Open 20

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 18, 2008

People who engage deeply in any online community, whether a bulletin board or social networking site, want to meet in person. 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.

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Museum Hosting Model Community 22