Museum Techmuse

Refugee Life Exhibit

"Torn From Home," the exhibit on refugee life developed at the Lied Discovery Children's Museum, opened last week, and I'm pleased to have developed a StoryKiosk installation for this groundbreaking exhibit. Visitors experience walking through a refugee camp, and at the end they record their reflections on the experience.

It is a challenging topic: visitors generally come to museums to learn and enjoy their time together in exhibits, so an exhibit on refugee life would seem from the start to be at odds with that experience. But the exhibit manages to strike a masterful balance between providing a novel experience and introducing a topic of international concern. Families can create a shelter together: an intriguing challenge that is engaging, and at the same unsettling as you imagine families living in this structure. The display of toys created by kids in refugee camps is inspiring as you see the creativity that went into their creation and disturbing as you imagine the circumstance of the child who created the toy.

Thanks and appreciation to Stacey Mann, Elaine Bole, and the team at Lied who helped create the exhibit. More info here, and at the Website we developed for the exhibit.

 

ACM session: Web 2.0 Parent Connections

Attended a very interesting session at the Association of Children's Museums conference in Denver...Rick Winefield, Exec. Director at the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito and Tim Olson, who heads the interactive technology team at PBS station KQED in San Francisco, gave an overview of technologies they believe museums can be exploring to more effectively connect with their audiences.

Some of these technology tools included:

• Yelp (see how your museum is reviewed locally)
• Youtube Nonprofit Channel (walking tour of your exhibits, etc)
• Blogs (behind the scenes info about museum)
• Eventful/Upcoming/Helios and other calendar and event sites
• Discussions (Yahoo Groups, Public Action, etc)
• Flickr (embed a "badge" of latest photos of museum on your site)

I also thought it was interesting that the title of the session focused on parents (rather than kids) as the audience. This reinforces a point I made in my recent article for Hand to Hand that we should think of our primary children's museum Web audience as parents, who can be active participants in a Web 2.0 environment...

AAM session: museum video onscreen at ATM machines

I was struck during today's presentation on "The Current State of Exhibit Media" at the AAM conference by some stunning videos from that National Palace Museum in Taiwan. Here are a couple samples below (I heard a translated version, and I think the first had to do with Buddhist text in the calligraphy as interpreted by a video artist. The second includes 3D characters that come to life from exhibits.)

These are high-end productions that would be difficult/expensive for most museums to produce. But what struck me most is that the museum is looking for wide ways of distributing the videos, from display in bus stations, on subway cars, and on ATM machines. (Yes, ATM machines -- they made arrangements with a local bank to display short excerpts as people get cash...).

Very smart -- distributing content beyond the usual screens in exhibits and on the Web. It's one of the major considerations: how else can we connect with visitors in their daily lives?

MW2008: Notable sessions on community

It's been a couple weeks since the Museums and the Web 2008 conference now. Here are two sessions that I'm still thinking about: Peter Samis' presentation of their findings at SFMOMA of visitor text comments posted from the exhibit to a blog, and Gail Durbin's session about their experiences with Web 2.0 projects at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The two compliment each other well: raising questions about visitor voices in exhibits, and providing some potential answers.

Peter's presentation raises questions about the visitor voice based on experiences in their fascinating exhibit of Olafur Eliasson's work. Visitors could type in comments on the works while in the museum. The comments included reflection on visitors' experience, but were characterized generally as a "mixed bag" of responses (ie, "cooooooollllllll!!!!!!!!!!!"). An issue: how much weight do we give to visitors' comments, many of which did not involve much consideration?

The project that caught my attention in Gail Durbin's presentation focused on the V&A's World Beach Project which allows users to submit photos of installations of stone they create on beaches. The project provides an extraordinary structure allowing visitors to collaborate with the museum in parallel to an exhibit.

A thought: visitors don't have much time to create media while in the museum, and we need to ratchet up the filtering process to get at the gold (which _will_ be there), or scaffold more tools to support visitors' expressions. But post-visit creative opportunities (such as the World Beach Project) offer even more options for significant visitor involvement.
 

VT Interstate 89 rest stop: water from the toilets

OK, the title of this entry is misleading, but only a little so. I'm driving through Vermont on my way to Museums and the Web in Montreal, and about an hour ago passed by the most amazing rest stop I've been to (near Sharon, VT). Beautiful scenic views from large windows (it must be a LEED certified building)...But what is so outstanding is the way they are reusing waste water from the toilets and sinks.

Water goes through a process with the help of living plants to filter the water. And it feeds a gorgeous greenhouse connected to the rest stop. It truly is restful and beautiful to walk into the greenhouse to break the monotony of a long drive.

As you walk out, there are three large coffee urns -- free coffee to all travelers. And, here's where I'm being a little misleading. The filtration system doesn't really feed the coffeepots, but I thought -- what if it did?  What if you could demonstrate to visitors the power of this living system by offering them free coffee brewed from the outflow from the toilets? Wow -- what a memorable experience that would be, balancing the desire to consume with tangible ecosystem considerations.

Nonetheless, the rest stop is extraordinary -- highly recommended to anyone interested in ways public buildings can demonstrate concepts of reuse and recycling.

What makes a good community website for museums?

With the rise of social media and community sites (such as Facebook, Flickr and an ocean of blogs), I've been wondering: what factors lead to a "successful" community site? How can we tell if a museum community site is working? Here are a few things that come to mind:

• Quality of visitor postings.  Not just "that's a great photo!", but responses that evoke a sense of the person who is writing, that he or she is fully engaged in the topic.
• Sizable number of participants. "Community" implies number, and although it's arbitrary, it seems you'd want at least 10-15 people regularly responding and posting; could well be in the hundreds for a larger site.
• Multiple authors. If a museum has just one author, potential for community is limited to a particular voice and vulnerable to staff changes.
• Structure for participation. Does the site have a clarity and appeal that draws you in and makes you want to participate?
• Impact. Is there evidence that participants do anything differently outside the forum as a result? (My thanks to Bruce Wyman for flagging this). Museums are increasingly called to add value to their communities at large -- do they use online community to support this? At minimum, do they encourage new experiences?

What have I missed? Any other thoughts?

Museum websites and real-world activity

I've had a longstanding interest in how we can use websites to encourage museum visitors to explore the "real world" -- especially the world of natural environments such as local parks, arboretums, and nature centers. How do we encourage this real-world exploration? Some of my thoughts are in this previous blog entry.

Here's a great example of a site that does this that I came across linked from the Association of Children's Museum's "Good to Grow" initiative: the National Wildlife Federation's Green Hour site. This site is well-designed from the ground up to encourage real world activity: it includes simple and concrete activities to get started, a community and blog to allow users to contribute content, and even a "NatureFind" tool to locate parks near you. This site provides a good model, all wrapped into the larger concept of spending a "green hour" of activity per day.

And here's a screenshot from our project with Smithsonian's National Zoo. We found PDF activity sheets (which lend themselves to being printed and carried away from the computer) a powerful component of the overall site:
(Click to enlarge)

the Boston Museum: Choosing to Participate

Last night was the debut of our latest StoryKiosk booth, installed in the "Choosing to Participate" exhibit at the Boston Public Library. The installation provided an interesting first for me: it exists and is running even before the museum itself (the Boston Museum) has been built. It is up and running and gathering stories about choosing to engage in the community based on powerful examples in the rest of the exhibit, which was developed by the acclaimed Facing History and Ourselves educational organization.

It's an interesting use of a media installation: to use it to as part of a way to demonstrate the type of engagement an upcoming museum will have with its community. My appreciation to Katy Abel at the Boston Museum, David Michaud who designed the booth, and the team at Facing History.

(click to enlarge images)

Is there anything to learn from slot machines?

Last week I had a meeting on the Refugee Life exhibit for the Lied Discovery Children's Museum in Las Vegas. And while in Vegas, I couldn't help but participate a bit in the overarching economic powerhouse for the region. I played a few slot machines.

Things have come a long way from the "one-arm bandits" I remember. Most slot machines are pushbutton installations. (Even as we in museums tend to veer away from old-school pushbuttons toward more interesting real world interfaces, slot machines are successfully going the other direction). And the interface leaves much to be desired for newcomers -- there are a variety of options for multiple "lines" that you can play, and multiple winning pattern matches that vary from machine to machine. I gave up trying to figure out what was a "winner," and just trusted the machine to tell me when I won.

So why are they so successful? Stacey Mann, developer for the Refuge Life project and former Exploratorium staffer, points out how the whole environment is designed for extended involvement, from a lack of clocks to immersive visuals and sounds (including the pre-recorded sound of coins dropping, which doesn't really happen in the modern ticket based system). But also sheer motivation comes into play -- people like to win and make money, and even if it happens only occasionally the promise of it will be enough.

In exhibits too often we assume visitors have an intrinsic interest in the topic, and we ignore some of their more basic interests and motivations.  These include motivations for:

• Winning things
• Shopping and eating (this is coming into play in a cultural exhibit I'm consulting on)
• Saying funny things to the person next to them
• Being seen by others as attractive and interesting

Many years ago, I proposed to a museum in Mexico a plan to use a giant spinning wheel (like "Wheel of Fortune") as an interface to an interactive program on cultural exploration. The budget unfortunately never panned out, but I'm sure it would have been popular. It might even have been effective.

There. Now I can justify the $40 I lost to the machines last week.

Visitor-created art: Young at Art

Finished the Storykiosk installation at Young At Art museum in Davie Florida last week. I'm delighted to see the variety of images created by visitors when given a palette of backgrounds and tools to create something with.

The interesting challenge: how do we build a structure to support visitors' creativity in a very short period of time (5-10 minutes) in a way that allows them to take ownership of their creation and make it an expression of themselves? Allowing them to talk about their creation (and record their statement about their art) is one of the key steps. Then, after recording their statement, visitors can print their art out in the gift shop for $5.