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

History 55

History Museum Arts Consultant 55

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. But not so much in the men's bathroom.

Museum 47

Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

MARCH 29, 2011

Last month, I learned about a fabulous, simple participatory experiment called “Case by Case” at the San Diego Museum of Natural History that uses visitor feedback to develop more effective object labels. How are bees, wasps, and hornets different? What is it made of and how was it made? How old is it…or…is it a fossil?

San Diego 55

San Diego History Museum Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2015

This week marks five years since the book The Participatory Museum was first released. I thought the pinnacle of participatory practice was an exhibit that could inspire collective visitor action without facilitation. Over the past four years, I''ve been running a small regional art and history museum in Santa Cruz, CA.

Participatory 20

Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

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?

Museum 36

Museum History Netherlands Create 36

Museum 2.0

JUNE 24, 2010

She did several things over the course of the tour to make it participatory, and she did so in a natural, delightful way. and then recounted some related fact or history. But Vi's tour also reminded me how dramatically different a community museum is from a typical institution. But participatory facilitation can be taught.

Museum 51

Museum Participatory Model Seattle 51

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.

Museum 29

Museum Difference Participatory History 29

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.

Museum 53

Museum Product Participatory Community 53

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.

Museum 49

Museum Program Participatory Community 49

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 do we have to do differently?" Yesterday, a lovely article came out in the local paper about what we're trying to do to become a thriving community hub. Let me know what you think and what this brings up for you.

Museum 31

Museum History Arts Work 31

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.

Model 98

Model Activities Active Activism 98

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.

Museum 45

Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

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. To celebrate political differences. To recreate childhood photographs.

Museum 45

Museum Participatory Artist History 45

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

INTERNSHIPS If you want to join us in Santa Cruz for more professional learning, consider an internship at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. There are five different types available , and you are welcome to apply for more than one. We''re offering internships this summer in: Participatory Exhibition Design.

Participatory 20

Participatory Community Museum History 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."

Design 45

Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

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.

Museum 35

Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

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 difference in what we contribute is in the design of the invitation conferred onto us. I know that not all public participation is substantive.

Museum 55

Museum Open Charlotte Participatory 55

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.

Question 49

Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

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 debated the relative merits of different forms of interactivity.

Museum 38

Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. People answer questions differently in harshly lit interrogation rooms than they do in welcoming therapists' offices or in the privacy of their own computer terminals. A lone "What do you think?"

Design 31

Design Goal Difference Platform 31

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.

Facilitation 50

Facilitation Virtual Arts Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection. Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums.

Artist 49

Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 11, 2012

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. The team developed some highly innovative digital projects and approaches to history. While not wholly explored, that question reverberates throughout a new book, Blueprint , that shares the plans for the Dutch Museum of National History.

Museum 34

Museum North America Netherlands History 34

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 30, 2013

I talked with Tiffany, and also with Hazel Markus and Alanna Connor, Stanford social psychologists who recently co-authored a pretty fascinating pop-science book about understanding cultural difference. And then I started talking with Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a UC Berkeley psychologist who blogs under the title Are We Born Racist?

Measure 47

Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

This project wove together many different participatory threads. It taught me that exhibitions can make a real and measurable difference in how a community tackles its biggest issues. Short story: we learned a lot. We wrote a toolkit about our process. You can download it for free right now. What did we learn?

Issue 45

Issue Childhood Community Create 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). When the opportunity to design my own two-hour museum adventure at the American Museum of Natural History presented itself, I jumped at the chance. Today on Museum 2.0, an interview with Dustin Growick.

Museum 55

Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

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.

Museum 55

Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 18, 2012

There are many participatory experiences that appeal primarily to adults, and they are designed distinctly for adults. There's a huge difference between the edgy, DIY beauty of Candy Chang 's participatory urban artworks and the dayglow colors, exclamatory language , and preschool fonts of most museum interactives.

Interaction 47

Interaction Design Museum Participatory 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.

Museum 51

Museum Arts History Columbus 51

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. design new programs with a focus on history. I promise--after this post, I'll stop writing about this.

Museum 47

Museum History Arts Artist 47

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.

Museum 49

Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

This argument became one of the foundations of The Participatory Museum. This is the participatory platform model. It flexes new muscles, requires different skill sets. Museums could make the platforms for those experiences. There is power IN the platform--power to shape the way people participate.

Platform 31

Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

Attendees brought up questions about how they can get more involved with financial discussions in their institutions, how we can change the ways we approach fundraising, how we can think about earned income differently. In particular, we had a great group of 15 talking about participatory history experiences on Sunday.

Reflection 43

Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

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. Lesson: what myths are working for you in your game or participatory project? Was it too weird?

Lesson 49

Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2017

A cheerful curly-haired deli owner stands in front of 30 of us and shares a quote he loves: "Artists live in the present and write detailed histories of the future." It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. A vision is a detailed history of the future. This is a detailed history from the future.

Pennsylvania 26

Pennsylvania History Michigan Indiana 26

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 20, 2009

A Brief History of Hash Tags Chris Messina ( @chrismessina) is credited with starting hashtags and has written about how to make them most useful. Nonprofit Use #1: Events and Conferences Since those early days, hashtags have been used in different ways by nonprofits. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post.

Twitter 95

Twitter Foundation Effective San Diego 95

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 26, 2012

This article sparked some interesting discussion online with colleagues from natural history museums, which deal with damage and touching very differently than art institutions do. What happens to objects when they are no longer art? How should (and do) we treat them?

Denver 33

Denver Museum Arts Participatory 33