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 root of my frustration with the book is not that the project never came to fruition.

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Museum History Netherlands Create 36

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. I hope you are as inspired as I am by this project! Our problem is this.

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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.

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Participatory Museum Empowerment Facilitation 20

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. MuseumCamp is a professional development experience that is part retreat, part unconference, part adult summer camp. Develop compelling, powerful participatory offers and promises for your prospective partners.

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Community Participatory Museum Registration 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. 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

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MAY 7, 2010

Nina has written a fantastic book engagement called The Participatory Museum. Imagine sitting around a conference table planning an upcoming project that involves user-generated content. A third argues that the project won’t be truly participatory unless users get to define what content is sought in the first place.

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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. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I''ve heard throughout these experiences. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments! Yes and no.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 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

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 19, 2014

His project, Is It Necessary? It''s a powerful experience for those who participate. Do I worry that a visitor might see what''s happening in Rocky Lewycky''s project at my museum and be confused about our museum''s approach to protecting artwork? Sometimes, Rocky lets visitors join in on the smashing. Definitely. Absolutely.

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Museum Arts Artist Participatory 50

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 11, 2012

I can't say that any one experience--working on a collage with other visitors, swinging on a hammock, discovering a participatory display for pocket artifacts in the bathroom--directly contributed to increased attendance and giving. They all have in concert, and they build on each other. Trust and love from our old friends.

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Audience Museum Participatory History 47

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. 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. Yes and no.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

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.

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Museum Difference Participatory History 29

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

This summer, we''re offering some amazing museum internships, as well as MuseumCamp : a weekend-long professional development experience that is part retreat, part conference, part summer camp. You can learn a lot more about that experience and how to apply here. Museum of Art and History professional development' Video/Photo.

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Participatory Community Museum History 20

Museum 2.0

APRIL 10, 2013

The weather is hopefully the least of the reasons you should want to come work with us here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. These are unpaid, part-time internships in which you will make a significant contribution to our work, and at the same time, learn a heck of a lot about participatory design and community engagement.

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San Francisco Participatory Artist Museum 23

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

It's a working document, and we mean to put it to work planning new projects with our partners. 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.

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Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 2, 2013

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere , a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.

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Artist Museum Proposal Participatory 49

Museum 2.0

APRIL 4, 2012

Museums have been grappling with this question for years ( here's a 2007 roundup of such projects ), most aggressively in zoos and natural history museums where staff hope to inspire conservation and in history/concept museums that focus on civic engagement and activism. No small task for a museum exhibition.

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Story Participatory Museum History 47

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. With this in mind, when we produce participatory experiences, while our impetus is to serve our power users with extra content or “check for understanding” interactives, there are so many other ways to use interactives.

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Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

They spoke powerfully and painfully about their experiences. The Lost Childhoods exhibition is a platform for 100+ partners to share their stories, artwork, ideas, projects, volunteer opportunities, and events. In it, I argued that museums could give up control of the visitor experience while still maintaining (a new kind of) power.

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Platform Impact Childhood Museum 31

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.

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Museum Interview New York Interaction 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 25, 2011

One of the most compelling products of the Producers Institute is a project associated with the award-winning film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , which depicts the genocidal civil war in Guatemala. With a project like Granito, the film is only the beginning and serves as an invitation for everyone to share their story.

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Guatemala Movie Artist Award 93

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

FEBRUARY 15, 2012

We've gotten a little more organized at The Museum of Art & History , and we've now released opportunities for summer internships. These are unpaid part-time and full-time opportunities to help design public programs, develop new uses for the museum, perform visitor research, and pursue unusual projects.

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Museum Participatory Arts Attitude 34

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. We had over 400 successful bangers with no injuries.

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Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

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

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

OCTOBER 30, 2013

At my museum, we pride ourselves on developing programming in a collaborative way that emphasizes diversity and intentionally encourages social bridging by bringing people together from different walks of life around cultural experience. inclusion Museum of Art and History research social bridging Unusual Projects and Influences'

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Measure Arts People Museum 47

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 19, 2012

We're looking for an Exhibitions Manager to join our team here at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. day event in July of 2013 at which participants work in teams to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you are interested, please apply soon ! This camp will be a 2.5

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Participatory Museum Blended History 32

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

OCTOBER 30, 2009

A Learning History of the CARE LAC - Institute for Strategic Clarity Guatemala Poverty Project. Experience working with people around the world proves that even relatively complex systems with even a couple of hundred nodes can be understood by people with very limited education. Key is a participatory development process.

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Map System Profit Guatemala 86

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 14, 2013

In this post, she writes about Experimonth, an intriguing set of crowd-sourced projects that connect scientists with research participants in surprising ways. I charted them across the year and pledged to try one each month, inviting others to do them with me and blog about the experience. The project blew away our expectations.

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Museum Roles Game Participatory 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

This simple participatory project invites visitors to contribute their own small objects in little alcoves in our bathrooms. We have seven participatory elements in our current exhibitions on three floors, ranging from voting to talkback walls to an in-depth "make a memory jar" craft activity.

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Museum Difference Examples Participatory 47

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 14, 2009

For this reason, I spoke specifically about how to make dream projects possible at real institutions. Pick apart your mission statement, and look for the words and phrases you can connect your project to. What new projects might allow you to better reflect those aspirations? Or you can read this condensed version of the talk.

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Project Museum Teen North Carolina 22

Museum 2.0

MAY 9, 2012

This woman is killing it when it comes to developing in-gallery interactive experiences around permanent collections. Testing, refining, experimenting, and doing it all with style. The lead photo on this post is from a project I saw when I visited last spring. Participatory art and co-creation on the rise.

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Reflection Columbus Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

MAY 24, 2011

Ken is a game designer and writer who develops narrative, collaborative augmented reality experiences about serious issues. An official-looking decal for the “GISKIN ANOMALY SURVEY PROJECT” appeared on a window in the park. it takes you a couple hours to experience it all. Now, that game, GISKIN ANOMALY , is live. Intriguing!

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Lesson Game San Diego Design 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

There are many participatory kiosks that are functional black holes--visitors make videos or draw pictures or write stories, drop them in a slot, and. Such participatory activities would be seen as a waste of time. This sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way many museums approach participatory projects. nothing happens.

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Participatory Museum Rate YouTube 35

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. When I look back at some recent projects that I''m most excited about (like this teen program ), I realize that I had very little to do with their conception or execution. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive.

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Museum Director History Teen 49