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Great Participatory Processes are Open, Discoverable, and Unequal

Museum 2.0

He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum.

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A Decade of Museums and Museum Work

Museum 2.0

I was thinking I’d do a few alternative histories of museums for the first post of the last month of the decade. As I imagined a world without the many museum tech projects of the decade, I felt inherently sad about the imagining away the successes that friends and colleagues have enjoying. But I couldn’t get there.

Museum 21
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Museum 2.0 Rerun: Inside the Design of an Amazing Museum Project to Capture People's Stories

Museum 2.0

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
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Postcards as a Call to Action: A Powerful, Political Participatory Experience at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

Museum 2.0

The best participatory projects are useful. Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity.

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The Participatory Museum Process Part 4: Adventures in Self-Publishing

Museum 2.0

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.

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What Could Kill an Elegant, High-Value Participatory Project?

Museum 2.0

It's my "artistic rendering" of one of the most inspirational participatory projects I know of--the Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost book drops. These tags would be added to the books in the catalog to build a kind of recommendation system. To do this, the library didn't create a complicated computer system or send people online.

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Put Down the Clipboard:Visitor Feedback as Participatory Activity

Museum 2.0

What we do know is that this is a vastly improved feedback system. As we try to build a brand for "3rd Friday" as an ongoing museum series, I feel like these photos, more than any other collateral, will help people understand what the event is like and what they might get out of it. Maybe this is good fodder for a future Museum 2.0