Museum 2.0

JUNE 25, 2014

A man walks into a museum. Two years ago, we mounted one of our most successful participatory exhibits ever at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: Memory Jars. Two years later, this project is still one of the most fondly remembered participatory experiences at the museum--by visitors and staff.

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Participatory Evaluation Project Museum 52

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Visitors bond and bridge through participatory experiences at MAH. I chose to focus my thesis on Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs. The purpose of my thesis was two-fold: To research and analyze community and civic engagement practices, methods, theories and examples in other museum programs.

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Museum Program Participatory Community 49

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. how did they ride the plank?” "how

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Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

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? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 1, 2014

Recently, we''ve been talking at our museum about techniques for capturing compelling audio/video content with visitors. It made me dig up this 2011 interview with Tina Olsen (then at the Portland Art Museum) about their extraordinary Object Stories project. We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead. Photos are fun.

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Museum Story Project Design 43

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. I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! The Museum 2.0

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

MARCH 3, 2011

In 2009 , students built a participatory exhibit from scratch. This year, we took a different approach. Thirteen students produced three projects that layered participatory activities onto an exhibition of artwork from the permanent collection of the Henry Art Gallery. People make the museum friendly, not activities.

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Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

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. The content focuses on the question of WHY we collect and how our collections reflect our individual and community identities.

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Participatory Museum History International 44

Museum 2.0

MAY 2, 2012

Today is my one-year anniversary as the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A year ago, I put my consultant hat on the shelf and decided to jump into museum management (a sentence I NEVER would have imagined writing five years ago). I'm open to any questions you want to raise in the comments.

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Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 3, 2014

During a workshop on museum visitor participation, someone spoke up and objected: "this might work in California, but it will never work in Texas." I saw how participatory techniques were working in diverse museums around the world. Cultural differences can play out on local levels as well. This is a human desire.

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Culture Participatory New Zealand Museum 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 7, 2009

Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. But the difference between the two examples teases out a problem in differentiating "participatory design" from "design for participation."

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Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

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. That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (s ee minute 2:20, above).

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Museum Participatory Artist History 45

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. In the meantime, here are some.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 20, 2009

I just got home from the Museums and the Web conference in Indianapolis. 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. Instead, I found a standard art museum. Impersonal guards.

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Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 10, 2014

Any questions? One, from a museum director. The question that comes up every time, the question so big it deserves the impropriety of all caps: BUT WHAT ABOUT QUALITY? Quality Shakespearian theater is different from quality contemporary dance. PARTICIPATORY: can people get involved or contribute to it?

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Participatory Museum Arts Culture 55

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act , about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. It is framed as a kind of study guide; pop-outs provide questions that tease out opportunities and tensions in the narrative. What do you get out of the report?

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Participatory Arts Report Case Study 50

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 3, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0 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. too teacherly).

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Technique Question Design Develop 50

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. Questions and answers rolled in. How are bees, wasps, and hornets different? Off-color and off-topic notes (i.e.,

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San Diego History Museum Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 11, 2012

Once there was a project to design a national history museum in the Netherlands. While not wholly explored, that question reverberates throughout a new book, Blueprint , that shares the plans for the Dutch Museum of National History. I chose this book for our next Museum 2.0 I chose this book for our next Museum 2.0

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Museum North America Netherlands History 34

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. Rick wanted a better way to describe what kinds of projects led to different community outcomes.

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Model Activities Active Activism 98

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 Museum directors released Blueprint as a showcase for these plans. Where would you start?

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Museum History Netherlands Create 36

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 16, 2010

I spent last week in the glorious country of Taiwan, hiking, eating, and working with museum professionals and graduate students at a conference hosted at the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts. 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

JULY 8, 2015

I wanted to open up conversation about how we judge the relative ethics of various sources of museum revenue--all of which have moral grey areas. We ask: how can we create different pathways to participation for people with different motivations? On platforms with many participatory options, more people are more active.

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Game Museum Participatory Comment 20

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. I love this question. First, what do the right questions look like?

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Technique Design Question Develop 52

Museum 2.0

NOVEMBER 22, 2010

And this leads to a basic question, one I haven't figured out: how do you encourage visitors to participate when they speak different languages? Many fabulous participatory projects--like the Johnny Cash Project or the Art Gallery of Ontario's " In Your Face "--don't require language.

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Museum Work North America Language 38

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 13, 2010

On October 20, a young woman named Kate will move into Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and live there for a month. This post is not about the Month at the Museum concept or implementation. Instead, this post focuses on a fascinating aspect of Month at the Museum: the video applications. That will come later.

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Museum Contest Video Chicago 34

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

If someone asked you that question, how would you answer? Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. We have different conversations on the phone than we do in person or in internet chat rooms. "Where were you last night?"

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 9, 2017

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't really thought about these questions before the Against Participation symposium. I've met too many young, talented people of color who want to work in museums but feel belittled, tokenized, or unsupported in their careers. The 2016 US election dredged up these questions for me once again.

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Participatory Museum Voice Press 20

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. The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother.

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 22, 2009

What does the word "participatory" mean to you? This isn't just a rhetorical question. The various definitions of participatory projects can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. How do we define and talk about these different kinds of participation? Fortunately, science has a (partial) answer.

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Public Research Participatory Report 36

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? In children's museums and science centers, this relationship is at its most extreme. And yet in the museum world, we still see interactives as being mostly for kids.

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Interaction Design Museum Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 9, 2011

Two weeks ago, we inaugurated a Creativity Lounge on the third floor of our museum. Lisa was thrilled that her work was on display at the museum. We started a pretty fascinating (and yes, a little frustrating) dialogue about the puzzle and the question of what constitutes desired engagement in the museum.

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Museum Arts History Columbus 51

Museum 2.0

MAY 22, 2013

Think about the difference between Pacman and Grand Theft Auto. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. And so I humbly submit two questions to ask yourself when thinking about user participation: What is our negotiating stance in developing this relationship with participants? The more open, the more agency.

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Game Artist Museum Participatory 40

Museum 2.0

JULY 12, 2011

A museum holds a free program in a semi-public space. This is the question I've been toying with this week. This is the question I've been toying with this week. Last weekend, my museum did a little pilot of a new program, Downward Draw. Ready for a math problem? Fifteen people engage in the prescribed activities.

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Participatory Museum Measure Activities 41

Museum 2.0

MARCH 13, 2013

Visitor-contributed photos surround a collection piece in Carnegie Museum of Art's Oh Snap! It can be incredibly difficult to design a participatory project that involves online and onsite visitor engagement. The museum selected and is featuring 13 works recently added to our photography collection.

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Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53