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. What do you want to know?

Participatory 48

Participatory San Diego Museum History 48

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. That is more curated.

Museum 43

Museum Story Project Design 43

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 4, 2016

Photo by CLoé Zarifian, MAH Photo Intern We're working with a guest curator, Wes Modes , on an upcoming experimental project at our museum. Wes is an artist, and this is his first time running a museum exhibition development process. This is the question I ask myself anytime I'm working on something with a participatory intent.

Participatory 20

Participatory Question Work Artist 20

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). It is incredibly rewarding work. I feel lucky.

Museum 55

Museum Director Participatory Culture 55

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. COST: Museum books tend to be expensive - because they are printed in small runs, the price for a 400-page paperback can be as high as $40.

Participatory 33

Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

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. This post shares my reflections on the projects and five things I learned from their work.

Participatory 51

Participatory Arts Audience Museum 51

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 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.

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. 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).

Museum 45

Museum Participatory Artist History 45

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.

Participatory 35

Participatory Museum Web Indianapolis 35

Museum 2.0

APRIL 14, 2011

Dear Museum 2.0 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 ). I am closing down my consulting business at the end of April, but the Museum 2.0 Here are a few things that make the MAH an exciting museum to me: It's small.

History 55

History Museum Arts Consultant 55

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. This is a problem for two reasons.

Participatory 50

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. I helped them find funding and partners and time to make amazing work happen. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. Sometimes it is.

Museum 49

Museum Director History Teen 49

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2018

For the past five years, each summer, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has hosted MuseumCamp. You will learn the theory and practice of how to open your organization to robust community participation. Learn more and register here. This retreat is all about learning from each other. Learn more here.

Community 31

Community Participatory Museum Registration 31

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 28, 2013

Earlier in 2013, I was amazed to visit one of the new “Studio” spaces at the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum is no stranger to community collaborations, but we’ve been dipping in our toe a little more deeply when it comes to developing permanent participatory installations.

Denver 35

Denver Museum Arts Collaboration 35

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

Participatory 44

Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 25, 2012

The event involved over fifty artists throughout the building helping visitors make their own paper, write poems, stitch books, etc. We had debated the prompt structure a bit before the event (I thought "learned" was too leading), but giving visitors the choice of prompts let them share what they wanted without too much guidance.

Activities 50

Activities Active Activism Participatory 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. So what did we learn? What is the story with the leaves sticking out of it? Where to now?

San Diego 55

San Diego History Museum Participatory 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 23, 2019

Me with a friend As I keep saying, I’ve been to a few museums of late. In reflecting on the sample, I’ve made some broad reflections on museum workers and visitors. Today, I wanted to think about participatory elements, something so essential to this blog. People go to museums for leisure.)

Museum 35

Museum Participatory Interaction Classroom 35

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 29, 2009

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. Too often, cultural institutions design participatory projects that require visitors to learn new tools or make sacrifices to contribute. Tags: design participatory museum.

Participatory 40

Participatory Project Library Museum 40

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."

Participatory 27

Participatory Design Difference Museum 27

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. All of them are cheap, mostly simple, and occasionally, dangerous.

Design 45

Design Participatory Learning Instruction 45

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

But as a creative type who has recently taken on an executive role, I've been fascinated, shocked even, to learn that the folks in the development department have been singing the relationship chorus for so long. Anyone who has worked in fundraising has likely heard these missives again and again. On the one hand, this is awesome.

Participatory 39

Participatory Practice Fundraising Relationship 39

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.

Museum 41

Museum Technique Taiwan Social 41

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 27, 2017

Our county board of supervisors had brought their official meeting to the museum. The supervisors toured the exhibition with some of the 100+ local partners who helped create it. Then, for an hour, former foster youth who helped design the exhibition shared their stories with supervisors. Nine years later, I still believe this.

Platform 31

Platform Impact Childhood Museum 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. I’ve been using these participatory categories to talk about how we’d like users to participate in different projects.

Model 98

Model Activities Active Activism 98

Museum 2.0

APRIL 18, 2018

Take five minutes and learn how the Science Museum in London created better experiences for deaf visitors. It helps sell more books. When I wrote my first book, The Participatory Museum , I released it concurrently as a paperback and free online. The chapters are short stories, and most can stand alone.

Arts 40

Arts Free Chapter Cleveland 40

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. A few things I learned/observed/was impressed by: A spirit of inclusion, generosity, and welcome permeated the event. The museum itself was well-integrated into the event.

Reflection 43

Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

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. The Museum 2.0 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

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

Jasper Visser and his colleagues at the not-yet-physically-open National Historisch Museum of the Netherlands have impressed me with their innovative, thoughtful approach to developing a dynamic national museum. In this post, Jasper shares some lessons learned from a recent experiment to design a more social comment station.

Museum 34

Museum Comment Experiment Participatory 34

Museum 2.0

JUNE 26, 2018

The talk is a 35-minute introduction to the OFBYFOR ALL framework, with a museum bent given the audience. I don't just want them to learn something from it. To sign up, join in, and help us build a more inclusive world. I realized I was feeling the same fear and excitement that comes with any truly participatory project.

Action 32

Action Video Participatory Global 32

Museum 2.0

JULY 1, 2011

I've now been the Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz for two months. But the point is that the MAH, like just about every other museum in the known universe, was content to define the museum experience as something removed from the outside world, a rarefied church-like space of refined artistic reflection.

Museum 31

Museum History Arts Work 31

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 29, 2012

Last month, MAH curator Susan Hillhouse and I sat down and wrote an exhibition philosophy for our museum. 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.

Museum 38

Museum Artist Participatory History 38

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

Do you dream of a summer filled with learning, community engagement, and sea lions? 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 help make the magic happen. Video/Photo.

Participatory 20

Participatory Community Museum History 20

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

Last week I was honored to be a counselor at Museum Camp , an annual professional development event hosted by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH). Each year they bring together diverse, passionate people for a sleep-away camp for adults where they learn together through active, creative workshops and activities.

Causes 50

Causes Change Museum Social 50

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. Visitor services staff write synopses of weekend days, notable visitor interactions, and events that help me and others get a sense of what''s going on. Would it help with the basic problem we were trying to solve?

Facebook 55

Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

JULY 31, 2013

I spent the weekend queuing up posts for my forthcoming blog-cation--nine weeks of guest posts and reruns from the Museum 2.0 Thank you to everyone who recommended a favorite post from the past or who helped out with a guest post. Blogging gave me a way to formalize out-of-work learning in a format I enjoy.

Museum 35

Museum Participatory Reflection Conference 35

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. gallery closes.

Authoring 53

Authoring Open Experiment Museum 53