Museum Techmuse

Museums and the Web 2005 Presentation

How can we use the Web to encourage post-visit learning in exhibits? Paula Sincero and I explored this topic in our presentation at the Museums and the Web 2005 conference in Vancouver. The paper is: “Using Museum Websites to Change Visitors’ Real-World Behavior.”

A few points that we focused on:

1. We propose this guideline: “An exhibit website should actively support at least three hours of activity done away from the computer in the real world.” (This is our major point).
2. Identify the audience and suggest a path to follow
3. Structure the Website for behavioral change
4. Make specific behavioral change a designed-for outcome
5. Provide “I can do that!” imagery
6. Use the dynamic duo: Flash and PDF

Denver Art Museum, Amish Quilts

A pleasure to install Storytelling Kiosk in the Denver Art Museum's Amish Quilts exhibit. We want to provide a place where visitors build their own connections to the exhibit, and where they talk with each other about these connections. Within the first hour of installation, staff were recording stories about quilts in their lives – a quilter who is saving parts of her daughter’s clothing through the years to make a quilt symbolic of her growth, another person who found a quilt at a Grateful Dead concert and is still searching for the owner.

The Museum itself is actively building new ways of connecting with visitors, innovating with architecture, technology and public programming. I feel this momentum talking with staff at the Museum, and am eager to see the outcome of this when their new building opens in the next year.

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