Museum Techmuse

Mercer Museum demo at ASTC: Shoe Stories

What fun to demo our installation for The Mercer Museum at ASTC in Baltimore. In the exhibit, we ask visitors: "What stories do you shoes have to tell?"  With camera mounted at foot-level, visitors pose their shoes and tell their story, often from the perspective of their shoes, and sometimes even in a special shoe voice.

Some great stories at ASTC, from salt-encrusted shoes intent on giving blisters, to the attitude of a pair of city slicker cowboy boots, to diversions at home regarding the price paid for shoes at an outlet store.

Amazing, the power of asking an intriguing question and providing a forum for answers. And there's a special dynamic when visitors have an object on hand to talk about.  (Oop -- should have said "...on foot to talk about".  So bad...)

Going out to the community: Civil War Roadshow

Pleased to have developed a custom installation of our StoryKiosk software for the Civil War Roadshow, an exhibit traveling to communities in Pennsylvania for four years in a 53-foot tractor-trailer.  Visitors are invited ahead of time to bring an artifact that they'd like to talk about. They take snapshots of the object at the video station then record their story, which is then uploaded to the Roadshow website.

It's an approach I'm seeing more and more of: traveling out to community events to reach the public beyond the walls of the museum (see our recent StoryKiosk installation in New Zealand). Visitors and their stories of course live outside the museum, and it isn't practical to ask visitors from far away to bring their valued objects to the museum.  Having an object to show and talk about is one of the factors in my experience that greatly increases the power of collected stories.

A pleasure to be called onto this project by Fred Brink and and company A More Perfect Union. And another pleasant surprize that I didn't realize until nearly the end of the project: the whole exhibit was designed by longtime colleague and friend Aaron Goldblatt at Metcalfe Architecture and Design.

Remote Connections: Storykiosk installation in New Zealand

I've been logging in remotely to our Storykiosk installation in New Zealand -- (sadly I didn't get to travel in person). But I'm primed about the installation: it's on the road, traveling in a truck around the country gathering rugby stories, part of the Oranges at Halftime exhibit and REAL New Zealand Festival.

We put this together in a pretty short period of time using our ready-to-go rental platform after being contacted by Morgan Davie at Eklektus Inc. in NZ a couple months ago.  (The world being what it is these days, Morgan found me and connected up initially via my twitter Techmuse account).  A pleasure to work with Morgan and team -- they recorded national NZ sportscaster Keith Quinn inviting visitors to record their stories, some of which may be broadcast on his radio program at the conclusion of the exhibit tour.

Visitor Stories as the Link to Other Cultures

Here we come to the topic that launched me into this fascinating career: uses of technology that encourage compassionate awareness of other cultures. It's the bridge that carried me from Harvard Ed School to Boston Children's Museum, through the Teen Tokyo and Kids' Bridge exhibits.

Visitor-created media is on the rise -- we're acknowledging as a field that the visitor's own experience is an essential part of the exhibit.  This experience, and the stories that come out of it, I think are the link sought after in so many children's museum cultural exhibits.

For the "Take Me There: Egypt" exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, we ask visitors to choose a photo from the exhibit and talk about it, emailing their story home or to a friend. And for "Song of Korea" at the Austin Children's Museum, we invited families to sing a song in their native language. One of my all time favorite visitor-recordings was in Playspace at Boston Children's Museum: a mother and pre-school daughter from Taiwan sang a traditional tune together, the daughter spontaneous and free spirited as the mother sang in the background scaffolding her daughter's exploration. Translates well no matter what language you speak...

 

 

AAM10 Notes: Exhibits that Change Lives

Went to the session "Changing Places: Exhibition as a Catalyst for Community Engagement" yesterday. It's something many of us feel and more of us are talking about: we want exhibits to change lives. Not just increase understanding or awareness, but actually result in positive changes in the community served by the museum.

The Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte is a museum that is doing that.Their IMLS funded exhibit focusing on cultural change in an increasingly diverse South is used by local businesses as a training ground for workplace diversity training. Over 110 groups have participated in Dialogues programs facilitated by the exhibit. One visitor was inspired to organize a march for justice and peace.

It's hard to point to a single factor that seems to have led to that success, but the starting point seems to be the museum's stated mission: to use history to build community. I was fortunate to participate in the exhibit developing the story booth used to gather visitor stories, reflected on the museum's YouTube channel and exhibit website. Lots to learn from the exhibit team, including Emily Zimmern, Tom Hanchett, Darcie Forhrman, Pamela Grundy, Holly Andrews and many others...

AAM10 Notes: Visitor Stories in the L.A. Zone

Enjoyed stopping in the California Science Center Monday night, and especially enjoyed seeing stories left by visitors on the story kiosk in the L.A. Zone exhibit, part of the Ecosystems exhibit. (I have to admit bias: it's one of our installations designed to encourage visitor storytelling). The station asks visitors questions like "Where have you seen wildlife in L.A.?", "What do you think of L.A.'s smog?", and "What kinds of things are you doing to improve the environment?"

My favorite is the question about wildlife observations in L.A.  There's the story of the woman who left her kitchen windows open and walked in to discover three raccoons in her kitchen eating cat food.  And the man who raises pigeons and trains them to flip in midair while flying. (Seriously -- and apparently training pigeons to flip is something of a sport where he grew up in Birmingham.  Who would have known?)

This all points to the potential for rich, unanticipated content that is possible when visitors have the opportunity to participate (a special word this year) in the exhibit process.  As well, visitors are building their own connections to the exhibit topic, verbalizing their experience and making it personally meaningful. And fascinating.

From Museum to YouTube to PBS

We had the pleasure of doing a StoryKiosk installation at the Levine Museum of the New South, an innovative IMLS funded museum in Charlotte focused on recent cultural history in Charlotte and the South. A central goal of the installation was to provide a place at the end of the exhibit where visitors could contribute their own stories to questions like "Which part of the exhibit did you find especially moving? Why?", and "What advice would you give to someone moving to this region?"

Select stories are displayed in a large screen animation outside the booth. But the visitor stories get high visibility playback outside the exhibit as well. The Museum is uploading compiled stories to their YouTube Channel. And, in a unique relationship with their local PBS station WTVI, select stories gathered in the exhibit booth are broadcast in a special series WTVI is doing throughout the year on cultural change in the Charlotte area.

The installation points to the potential for extending the reach of visitor-created media, from exhibit to social sites like YouTube, to local PBS stations.

CSI installation: Dublin

I'm back, with jet lag, from the StoryKiosk installation in "CSI: The Experience" in Dublin. The installation is part of the popular exhibit developed by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History a couple years ago, now on its parallel tour through Europe.

Very interesting to see how museum exhibits can fan their way out into other public venues beyond museum walls. In Dublin, the exhibit is running at the Ambassador Theatre, a historic building tracing its roots back to 1764, now a venue for special events. And soon it will open at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Very interesting indeed, as we think about new types of venues for popular exhibits.

For me, the project was a dream come true -- I started in the museum field a couple decades ago with a special interest in uses of technology that encourage communication across cultures.  Now I've got my radar set on projects that include international teams focusing these topics...

Health Education: post-visit behavior change

Gave a presentation at the annual National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) conference recently, and it struck me that few groups are as focused on the mission to encourage long-term behavior change among visitors as health education centers. By it's very nature, "health education" depends on behavior change.

I had three main points to my presentation:

• We need to design with post-visit behavior change in mind. (This built off the paper Paula Sincero and I presented at Museums and the Web a few years ago).
• We need to plant a seed for later followup during the visitor's museum experience. Based on our work with StoryKiosk where visitors create stories, art works, and videos for upload, visitor creativity is that seed.
• We can tap into existing online community structures to nurture that seed. Visitor postings to Flickr for example can help maintain involvement, with a few caveats about the signup process...

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.