Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 19, 2017

I had designed the leadership workshop on resilience to include a lot of solo and peer reflection time and small group work and some small amounts of presentation and context to do the exercises. What was your experience? What to do? Have you ever had to do a room hack?

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Lecture Classroom Experiment Learning 91

Museum 2.0

JUNE 19, 2013

A few years and a few hundred open mics into that experience, it became obvious that some venues fostered amazing poetry communities, others, not so much. The whole experience welcomed newcomers while helping them understand what "value" constituted in that community. One of my favorite open mics was at the Cantab in Cambridge, MA.

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Participatory Process Open Proposal 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Would you design an interactive exhibit that only 1% of visitors would want to use? Consider a mural.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

This person is writing about a participatory element (the "pastport") that we included in the exhibition Crossing Cultures. Crossing Cultures features paintings by Belle Yang that relate to her family''s immigration experiences. In my experience, offering many different forms of participation garners more quality interactions.

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Participatory Museum History Arts 45

Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

How do you measure the value of that experience? Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. From the beginning, we observed pretty amazing experiences happening with the Memory Jars. A man walks into a museum. He shares a story.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Museum 52

Museum 2.0

APRIL 2, 2014

It is what it sounds like: a book of original sheet music, beautifully designed and complemented with artwork and text. Beck''s project is unusual because he deliberately resurrected a mostly-defunct participatory platform: sheet music for popular songs. They are designed to do different things. That''s expected.

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Participatory Arts Music Learning 52

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation. In the first case, you are making the design process participatory.

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Would you design an interactive exhibit that only 1% of visitors would want to use? Consider a mural.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

This exhibition represents a few big shifts for us: We used a more participatory design process. Our previous big exhibition, All You Need is Love, was highly participatory for visitors but minimally participatory in the development process. We focused more on design. We had some money.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 22, 2012

I'm particularly excited about two internships that relate to participatory exhibition design. First, there is the Participatory Exhibit Design Internship. These interns work with our curatorial team to develop interactive and participatory components for upcoming exhibitions.

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Participatory Museum Photography Unconference 37

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. HUMANS ARE THE BEST AGENTS OF PARTICIPATION When I wrote the book, I was coming from the perspective of an exhibit designer. Those people are driven not by the design precept of participation. Humans empower each other. Invite each other in.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

In 2009 , students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. As it turned out, the experiment pushed everyone's abilities and comfort levels.

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

Grantees, Experts, and Partners at the end of the Brainerd Foundation’s 21st Century Advocacy Design Lab. What if they used a design thinking process to not only get feedback from grantees but as a way to develop a more agile way of working? Why Use One? Notes from the presentations as well as photos can be found here.

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Design Strategy Facilitation Advocacy 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

Major research studies by the NEA and others demonstrate that adults well into their 60s are highly motivated to participate actively with cultural experiences. It's possible--likely even--that today's adults are more motivated by interactive experiences than generations past. They're going to trivia night. They're playing video games.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? The first of these reasons is practical.

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Teen Participatory Experiment Museum 24

Top Nonprofits

AUGUST 3, 2021

Then one of the last arriving students, typing their name into the designated row, somehow deleted the whole roll sheet. It can be inclusive and participatory. My goal is to design virtual experiences to be as inclusive and participatory as possible. I was about to talk through the syllabus and course objectives.

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Virtual Track Student Virtual Classroom 52

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 29, 2010

This question is a byproduct of the reality that most participatory projects have poorly articulated value. When a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. The project is designed to scale. What's the "use" of visitors' comments?

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Participatory Music Project Video 48

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 18, 2011

We’ve been doing a little experiment at our museum with labels. They’re no longer “an exhibit” per se—more of an evocative design element that hints at an important story told elsewhere in the museum. We decided to approach the label-writing for these boards in a participatory way.

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

The Storytelling Non-profit

JANUARY 12, 2022

A narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale. It’s participatory. When we tell a story, we are providing context that allows others to interpret our unique experiences. According to Dictionary.com , there are few definitions of a story.

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Story Storytelling Profit Participatory 89

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 13, 2011

The best participatory projects are useful. The participatory activity in question is part of the new Unfinished Business gallery, a room in which the museum engages with a contemporary issue related to the passion and work of Jane Addams and the historic Hull-House activist residents.

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Participatory Museum Action Experiment 44

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

The institution is community-funded, staffed, and designed. 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. But participatory facilitation can be taught. What if it isn't what I expected?

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Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

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. This isn't even participatory. People will talk about what they are writing or making.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggl es with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. questions that draw from personal experience, not abstraction.

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 15, 2012

The project is under the visionary leadership of Cheryl Francisconi who is the director of IIE’s office in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and has vast expertise in developing, designing, and implementing transformative leadership programs for several decades. Needless to say, I learned a lot! Documentation of the Visioning Process.

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Rwanda Social Media Training Train 113

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.) One of the collections on display is a set of "found lists" collected by a local farmer, Danny Lazzarini.

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Participatory Difference Analysis Museum 39

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they learned some unexpected lessons along the way. Also, on a personal level, I had this really powerful experience with my mother in a Storycorps booth in Grand Central years ago that had a profound impact on me.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2014

I saw how participatory techniques were working in diverse museums around the world. While they may not be as comfortable as Americans with "me" experiences, they are much more up for "we" activities. In this frame, any kind of participatory activity could work, anywhere. For years, I''ve heard some version of this refrain.

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Culture Participatory New Zealand Museum 49

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

Ken is a game designer and writer who develops narrative, collaborative augmented reality experiences about serious issues. They asked for an experience that could transform how you perceived the Park – whether you were new or had lived in San Diego all your life. it takes you a couple hours to experience it all.

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. If the participatory instructions were integrated into the standard black labels, visitors would not be as aware of the commonalities across the interactive art pieces.

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Participatory Arts Design Museum 20

Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. We don't have control over whether or not a visitor participates, but we can control the participation environment so it is a delightful experience. gallery closes.

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Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

Here, in no particular order, are ten different kinds of quality in arts experiences: AESTHETIC: is it beautiful? PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it? No arts experience hits them all. A community-based exhibition, full of life but rife with amateur design and poor editing. Core Museum 2.0

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 23, 2014

If you want to a chance to win, leave a comment on this post sharing something that you’d like to learn about Impact Leadership or some wisdom from your experience about practicing impact leadership! One of our first design tasks as facilitators was for all of us to get clear on what we mean by “Impact Leadership.”

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Registration Leadership Impact Change 128

Museum 2.0

APRIL 28, 2009

On Friday, I offered a participatory design workshop for Seattle-area museum professionals ( slides here ). We concluded by sharing the tough questions each of us struggles with in applying participatory design techniques to museum practice. It frames and personalizes the exhibit experience. instead of what is?)

Technique 52

Technique Design Question Develop 52

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I’d never attended before and was impressed by many very smart, international people doing radical projects to make museum collections and experiences accessible and participatory online. Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? You join the Brooklyn Museum’s posse.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2010

This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The Participatory Museum. From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to license The Participatory Museum using Creative Commons and give away the content for free online. Why Self-Publish?

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Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2008

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? The repeat experience is progressively familiar, so I feel like I am entering a space with known faces.

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Participatory Design Museum Childhood 20

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