Actually, the labels were really bloody good

I should just stop following links through to Judith Dobrzynski's blog on the ArtJournal platform, because they almost inevitably leave me feeling scratchy and combative. There's a mendacious 'gotcha!' tone to many of her posts, an in-the-know way of writing that I often find mean-spirited.

But this post lambasting the labels in the touring Heatherwick Studios exhibition currently on show at the Cooper Hewitt annoyed me so much I felt I needed to write something. Here's what Dobrzynski had to say:

There’s little questions that some museums have dumbed down their labels of late. Granted, people seem to know less and less about art, even as museum attendance seems to be growing. (That may be because there’s so much more to know and to learn about art, what with more museums showing increasingly broad and diverse offerings). For prime evidence of the dumbing down, though, look no further than the Copper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. I was there a week ago to view Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio. Heatherwick’s work is original, innovative and fascinating. But neither the show nor the labels do him justice. 

We’ll stick to the labels here, which are framed as questions. Probably meant to be engaging, to involve viewers, they instead are condescending. The museum feels like a kindergarten.

Now, there's a point here that I agree with. As the offer and the audience at art museums gets broader and broader (and contemporary art continues to become less and less figurative, and an audience's familiarity with Western religious stories, literature and classical subjects can be less and less taken for granted) it *is* becoming harder to write labels that will offer something of value to every visitor. This is why we see museums offering layers of interpretation, often through digital supplements, to try to offer an entry point to an unfamiliar visitor and a new idea to a familiar one.

But I saw Provocations earlier this year, and was actually delighted by the labels. I thought they did a marvellous job of demonstrating to a lay audience how the studio approaches a project - and what makes them unique. Each label starts with the central design problem, posed as a question, and then explicates what the studio settled on as a solution or answer. They captured the playful spirit of the studio's work, and the sense of social engagement I saw in the images and maquettes.

In fact, I thought the labels were so good that I took shitty memory-jogging photos of them:

New London bus

   

 

Hereford Community Centre (unrealised)

'Spun' chair

And here's the text for the Zip Bag:

How can you make objects out of long pieces of zipper? 

Discovering as a student that it was possible to buy a 656-foot-long roll of continuous zipper, Heatherwick began researching ways to use this material to make three-dimensional objects. The studio produced various bags, vessels, and even a dress before approaching Longchamp, the French handbag company, about collaborating. The resulting design incorporates strips of fabric between the toothed edges of the zipper so that the bag could double its size when unzipped. The Longchamp Zip Bag, which began as an experiment in 1993, was retailed worldwide in 2004 and became a bestseller.

You can see for yourself though, as the Cooper Hewitt has posted all the projects with all their labels online. 

Design and architecture shows are the genre of museum display that I struggle most with - the Gehry exhibition I saw at LACMA, for example, was just a sea of plywood and different shades cardboard, which was exhausting on the eyes and hard to imagine as shapes in space. The Heatherwick exhibition in contrast was a joy, from the interactive project at the start that let you print out pieces of tickertape to carry around with you, to the cunning modular display that makes it a good touring show (curated by Cooper Hewitt's Brooke Hodge, the exhibition was organised by the Nasher Sculpture Center and also showed at the Hammer Museum in LA).

In contrast to the Heatherwick labels (condescending to the point of insulting, Dobrzynski concludes) she approvingly cites a 2010 newspaper interview with John Baldessari:

“I don’t think you really have to spoon feed the viewer,” he explained. “You just have to give them something to hang on to and they can begin to unravel it themselves. It’s kind of like reading a detective story, you get a clue, you follow that.”

And I honestly can't see where she finds the distance between that commonplace idea and the Heatherwick labels.

First they take 'curate' away from us ...

... and now it's 'museum' that's been filched by the marketers for their own nefarious practices.*^ The American media has been awash (where 'awash' means 'four articles I have read') with commentary on Glade's Museum of Feelings. From the official listing:

This holiday season, Glade® invites consumers to explore their emotions at The Museum of Feelings, an interactive experience built to showcase the beautiful connection between scent and emotion. Visitors will be taken on a sensory journey through the Museum, where Glade® fragrances act as the muse to inspire visitors to explore their emotions.

A series of five interactive light, sound and scent installation rooms lead the visitor to the gift store, where they can purchase Glade's new scented candle range.

The emotional tone of the commentary quivers between bemused and scathing. From the Village Voice:

Housed in a pulsating cube nestled between a luxury mall and a yacht harbor (just blocks from noted tourist attraction Ground Zero), this paean to...what, really?... is a confusing mix of ambient advertising and immersive art. ... 

The cube’s exterior changes color based on the mood of New York City, which (according to a press release put out by Glade® parent company SC Johnson) is determined by “the sentiment of conversations by New Yorkers on Twitter, coupled with local news and trends including the weather, stock exchange fluctuations and flight delays”. Evidently rage stroke coupled with crippling panic attack is a vibrant teal that undulates into fuschia.

From the NYT:

At the end of the exhibit, Ms. Santoro and Ms. Borghini, who work nearby, were shuffled through a gift store. There were no negative emotions on sale, perhaps because it might be difficult to sell a $9 envy-themed scented candle. 

The two friends were asked to stand in front of a large camera and take a selfie, which was then evaluated and tagged with an emotion. It took a few tries, but in the end, the machine returned its assessment: “Indifferent.”

Jared Keller in the Smithsonian Magazine undertakes a scholarly investigation of the marketing ploy. His headline, Fear and Loathing at the Museum of Feelings, might give you a hint of how that pans out:

Without some level of pedagogical logic and civic intent, is it simply an entertaining art installation, regardless of who foots the bill for its construction? In the eyes of historians like Ward, the Museum of Feelings represents a “clever attempt to conflate itself with something respectable.” 

To Ward, it’s indicative of a larger trend in American culture: a tendency to crowdsource art and culture, to turn things to the masses, in lieu of the careful (if elitist) curation of scholars and academics that imparts museums with the knowledge and sensibility that makes them worthy stewards of the title.“Instead of rationality and pedagogy, we’re getting something closer to a carnival,” says Ward. “There’s no demonstrably larger social significance running through a place like the [Museum of Feelings] … so why are they pretending it’s something it isn’t?”

Gotta love that 'simply an entertaining art installation': clearly, Jared has never tried and failed with a family-focused art exhibition. At the same time there's an effort in the article to untangle where corporate and philanthropic support of a museum meshes with the integrity of its programming.

My favourite piece is probably Dayna Evans for The Awl, kind of a Lena Dunham meets art review:

From the tiny screens of my computer and phone, art looks mostly dull, flat, and familiar, especially when it arrives via jpeg or tinyletter or Tumblr scroll. Only a few weeks before I first heard about the Museum of Feelings, I had ordered a new Rizzoli art book called Feelings: Soft Art, a collection of works by contemporary artists that explore the evocative emotions drawn out by visual art. In many ways, this book is drastically different from what the Museum of Feelings attempts to accomplish—which is, make millennials think Glade airspray is trendy and aware and worthy of use—but in some ways, it is not. When Cat and I tried to figure out how it was we even came to learn about the pop-up museum, we both realized that a lot of our more “arty” friends had said they were attending the Facebook event. It spread virally. We trusted those people’s tastes, so we decided to go. We never really thought to check if it was worthy of praise, or even exactly what it was. 

This is the same principle by which the casual museum attendee learns to namedrop Cézanne and Miró. MoMA is just as much sponsored content as the Museum of Feelings—they’re just sponsored by different power structures.

(Like the Village Voice, Evans identifies the James Turrell / Hotline Bling overtones to the installation's aesthetic, the ubiquity of which is possibly now even further emphasised by Pantone's 2016 Colour of the Year.)

It's all a long way away from Charles Simic's William and Cynthia, which I quoted from three years ago in a presentation where I talked about what I imagined when I thought about a museum of emotions:

Says she'll take him to the Museum
of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.

Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she gets afraid
In the large exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.

Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.

After all this reading, I remain curious about one question. How strong was the pull of that word 'museum'? Was it the selfies on Instagram that got New York's 20-somethings queueing for this experience, or does the word hold some special magic? I'd like to think the latter, in which case I am sure we will survive Glade's assault upon our ramparts, and live to fight in the culture wars on yet another day.

*I mostly joke here. Some of my best friends work in comms and marketing. Hell, I work in comms and marketing, and we're all shameless.
^Also, as I was discussing on Twitter tonight, 'curate' is arguably better understood now than it was before it was co-opted for everything from wardrobes to playlists to friend groups. Prior to that, who could've told you that curating has something to do with making informed selections and publicly presenting them?

Some things change

About once a month I have a mental (or online) rant over the museums-are-changing-for-the-worse meme (dumbing down, too much technology, not enough technology whatevs).

Sometimes its valuable to be reminded of how long-seated some of the 'democratising' efforts at our museums and galleries are. Last week this Art New Zealand article about the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery in 1977 was floating around The Dowse.

Apart from the fact that the build cost less than half a million and that the gallery had only three full-time staff (director Luit Bieringa, Exhibitions Officer Margaret Taylor and secretary Esme Robinson - the writer does note that the MAG had a similar amount of floor space to Auckland Art Gallery, then operating with the princely total of over 20 staff) it's interesting how much the opening displays mirror how the sector still launches today.

Perhaps one difference is the incorporation of craft, much more a feature of the 1950s-1970s era than the 1980s-2000s:

Entering the first gallery space there was a display of weaving and large photo panels, featuring potters at work. In the floor area a loom and two potter wheels plus tables of clay stood to be used in demonstrations.

However, the next section of the install is exactly the kind of experience that would be tweeted heavily for its innovation today:

The gallery opposite was enclosed in a darkened space set up for a TOUCH exhibition. Participants were blindfolded on entry and felt their way along a predetermined path of specially laid carpet. They slowly handled and touched a diverse range of functional, decorative and art objects.

The largest space was dedicated to "contemporary New Zealand painters who had different approaches to their art" (Toss Woollaston, Ray Thorburn, Don Driver, Gretchen Albrecht, Brent Wong, Pat Hanly and Philip Trusttum - not quite the diversity you'd expect today, but interesting for the figures who are left out: McCahon and Walters in particular). A further downstairs space "revealed a bizarre array of hands: skeleton and X-ray hands, wax hands, photographs and other visual material related to hand imagery" - the wunderkammer aesthetic never dies.

It's upstairs where things get gritty though. Climb past the awesome Ian Scott from their collection to discover the mezzanine gallery, where:

... the more vanguard art was shown: a Bruce Barber video tape Hand Game for Artists, Politicians and Solipsists, plus photo pieces, mail art and other contemporary works. In the lecture/film room, Brian McNeill's specially commissioned synchronised tape and slide presentation was shown to curious and aghast audiences. No doubt the title Hand Erotic Moves Divine lured many people to see a technically superb work. Films related to hands also screened, making the entire Show of Hands an exhausting journey through many different approaches and attitudes to art.

This article was written two years before I was born, and yet I recognise everything in it. Right to the last two paragraphs:

At the official opening ceremony on Sunday, 3 July, where politicians stood up and took credit for everything they did not do, Brian Ellwood, the Mayor of Palmerston North, stated a very important principle - this gallery was able to be designed and operated so successfully because of his principle of non-interference. As a local body politician he let the art professionals get on with their job. Such a statement drew much applause from the audience, especially from those in the art world who were suffering, or have suffered, such harassing political interference. David Taylor justly received a rousing ovation as the architect who made the building happen, though he was shyly hiding in the crowd. 

The product of Brian Ellwood's 'non-interference' policy in Palmerston North is the best designed gallery space in New Zealand; and an exhibitions and cultural programme that far outstrips the gallery's meagre budget in terms of imagination and scope.

Bridges, not barriers

One of the things that really struck me on my trip to the States was the segregation between customer service staff and security staff at large American museums. In some cases, the customer services staff are museum employees, while the security guards are from an external firm. The customer services staff at the front desk are friendly, engaging, empowered to talk to visitors: the security guards are silent forms, doing their best to be invisible whilst also being watchful.

As this article about The Broad makes clear, the divisions between the two sets of staff can be very strong, and there's vested interest in keeping the roles separate:

But Stevan Layne, a veteran security consultant to museums and other cultural sites, is not persuaded that pleasant conversation and detailed knowledge about art should be in gallery attendants' job descriptions. To him, it's a way for museums to cut costs by folding separate security and visitor service functions into one. "I'm opposed to doing that," Layne said. "It can be a distraction from the primary mission" of protecting the art.

What bullshit.

Anyway. I started thinking about that again this week when I read this article in the Dallas Morning News about Nasher Sculpture Center guard Patricia Ann Jackson. Now, Jackson sounds like a really great asset for the museum:

Everyone’s a critic. The phrase is not typically meant as a compliment, but for those of us who do the job professionally, it’s not only a badge of honor, but a goal. Building an engaged public is one of our chief responsibilities, and we need all the help we can get.  

At the Nasher Sculpture Center, that help comes from an unlikely source, Patricia Ann Jackson, a native Dallasite who has worked as a guard at the museum for the last three years, mostly in the lower-level gallery, where she has gained a devoted following for her considerable charm and perspicacious, if idiosyncratic, commentary.  

 “If you come into a room and I’m the guard, I should be able to tell you something about the pieces that are in the room, and not just be a piece in the room,” says Jackson, 46.

But the overall tone of the article - which when I read it made it feel like Jackson was being presented almost like a talking dog, a strange and entertaining anomaly - made me feel really uncomfortable. Maybe it's just because my experience in New Zealand has been so different. In the three museums where I've worked FOH, and here at The Dowse, the expectation has always been that you will be engaged, and in turn be engaging. That this is where the job satisfaction is, in a role that otherwise involves a lot of standing around and telling people (a) not to touch that and (b) the toilets are down that flight of stairs and to the left. That American museums are only just coming around to the idea of the people on the floor with the visitors being there to act as a bridge, and not a barrier, astounds me.

Cultural institutions and the social compact

These are notes for a short talk I gave as part of a panel discussion at NSLA's Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship event at the National Library of New Zealand on November 12.

I'm usually a pretty sunny and optimistic person, but this talk as I prepared it took a decidedly bleak turn. It was actually really interesting to write and present something that wasn't exploratory or uplifting, and the resulting questions were more probing than those I usually provoke.

The quality thinking in this piece should be attributed to the cited authors: Cory Doctorow, Maciej Ceglowski and James Bridle. I just stitched it together with some observations from my recent experiences.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I recently returned from a research trip around art museums in the States, looking at, amongst other things, trends in digital development and engagement in art museum.

One strong trend is towards the collection and analysis of visitor data. This isn't through surveys or visitor-trailing, but rather by inducing people to sign up for traditional memberships (where you pay an annual fee for free access to a paid-entry museum) or for a new breed of museum membership, where you trade your data for access and benefits.

The leading exponent of this latter new membership model is the Dallas Museum of Art. Under (soon to depart) director Maxwell Anderson, over the past three years the DMA has removed entry charges and introduced a new Friends programme.

When you sign up for the programme, you give your contact details and your postcode information. In return, you are admitted to a programme where, through various activities, you can gain 'points' that can be traded in for benefits. For example, if you collect sufficient points by entering enough codes from the signs by gallery entrances, you can having your parking charges redeemed. In a city where the car is king, the free parking is a compelling offer. More points get you better access, more special and desirable rewards.

From a body of 100,000 plus Friends, the DMA is able to collect information about which galleries are visited, which programmes are attended, and which rewards are most desirable. Using the postcode information allows them to see where visitors are coming from and, by comparing this information to census data, draw conclusions about which demographics their visitors may represent - at scale.

The DMA is currently using this information to understand which communities they are reaching and not reaching, under-serving and over-serving. The more time that is invested, the more of a data-driven organisation they can become: carrying out targeted programming, marketing and community outreach activities, and measuring whether this has discernible impacts on visitor behaviour.

Now, this can be great. It is all too easy to rely on anecdotal information and your own perceptions of your audience and the success of your initiatives. It can also, I think, get a bit creepy.

We trade our data for convenience, for discounts, and for free things. Who here has bought something on Amazon? Has a Facebook account? Has a loyalty card for which you handed over your email address? We hand over our data merrily and maybe without thought for how this data is being stored, analysed, and shared.

If we look at the DMA's privacy policy, it states

We sometimes provide personal information to other providers of goods and services so that they may assist us in connection with ticket sales, event promotion, fundraising, or otherwise in connection with providing services or merchandise to you. However, we require that those providers use personal information only for that purpose, and we require our providers to provide assurances that they will appropriately protect personal information entrusted to them. 

A growing number of American museums are amping up their collection of data in order to increase engagement for the purposes of visitor acquisition, retention and conversion. One museum I met with was planning on implementing the DMA's software with a new free membership programme, with the same intent of understanding visitor demographics. They also had however a clear plan for using this information - this personalisation - for targeted marketing campaigns, and to convert visitors to shoppers, shoppers to donors: effectively, using the data to maximise revenue.

As well as giving us information to improve the relevance of our programmes, tackle inequality of access, and increase revenue generation, data can sometimes tell us things we'd rather not hear.

Colleen Dilenschneider is a consultant with a company in the States that specialises, among other things, in the application of data analysis in the non-profit sector. She writes and presents regularly on data as it relates to cultural and visitor organisations. One of her most recent blog posts crunched the data on free admission days - those monthly free days many paid-entry museums in the US run in the hopes of reducing the barriers to access for non-traditional visitors (read: those who are lower-earning, more geographically distanced, less educated and from a different racial or ethnic background to your average white middle-class middle-aged museum member).

The data shows that free admission days do not attract underserved audiences. Dilenschneider's research shows that:

1. Admission price is not identified as the chief barrier to access
2. Free access days attract higher earning and higher educated attendees than paid access days
3. Free access days do not tempt non-visitors, but rather accelerate the speed at which an existing visitor revisits
4. Cultural organisations generally don't know how to, or don't effectively, market free access days to underserved audiences but instead use their email databases, social media platforms and regular marketing outlets to tap the people they are already reaching. 

These are unsettling things for very well-meaning people to hear.

Dilenschneider's company generates these insights by buying data from many sources - the data of people just like us. They then analyse this data and sell that analysis and consultancy services back to cultural organisations - just like ours. I should note that Dilenschneider is not at all covert about this, and in fact that her company has been very generous in allowing her to share this data and information as freely as she does.

There's no escaping the fact though that companies are being built and money being made on the back of the landscape of data we are all drip feeding into.

Concern about the collection, security  and use of data - from the outing of philanders on dating sites to a former CIA director's statement "we kill people based on metadata" - are hardly new. As I was preparing for this talk though a number of presentations and articles floated across my radar that shared a common theme - the comparison of data technology to nuclear technology.

In the Guardian in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote:

We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium - it is dangerous, long-lasting and once it has leaked there's no getting it back.

Doctorow at that time proposed that data should be embargoed for 200 years, that anyone who touches or cares for that data over that period must be properly trained, and that businesses and government must be made to bear the costs associated with this.

At the start of October Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski spoke at O'Reilly Media's Big Data conference. Aiming to puncture the bubble of data enthusiasts, he painted a purposefully grim picture of data as, in his words,

not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.

Ceglowski drew an explicit link between data technology and nuclear technology, as two powerful innovations whose, in his words, "beneficial uses we could never quite untangle from the harmful ones."

Like Doctorow, Ceglowski describes the similarity between data and nuclear waste - a material that has the potential to last far longer than the institutions we build to manage it. He stated

information about people retains its power as long as those people are alive, and sometimes as long as their children are alive. No one knows what will become of sites like Twitter in five years or ten. But the data those sites own will retain the power to hurt for decades.

He also noted that data technology is creating a situation where people are reacting to the manipulations of big data, purposefully gaming systems, forcing an ever-evolving arms race between data collectors and data creators that creates more distance between us as humans, not more understanding.

Finally, British artist and technologist James Bridle recently wrote an essay, based on a talk at the recent Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto, that name-checked the two above pieces. Bridle has written and made work extensively about mass surveillance, and in this piece he draws a parallel between the cold war that nuclear technology locked the world into for 45 years and the potential of big data today. Even though the information we collect about human behaviour grows and grows and grows, our sympathy and empathy and connection across politics, races, religions and nations do not leap forward at the same pace.

So, what is my point? We in cultural organisations think of ourselves as the white hats and the good guys. Libraries in particular have a strong ethos of free and protected access to information. The siren call of data is strong however, and we will all soon, if we're not already, have to ask ourselves who benefits from the data we collect, and how we keep each other safe.

Update

At the end of the presentation, someone from the audience asked how exactly we can keep people and data safe. Being no expert myself, I cited the points Ceglowski made himself:

Don't collect it! 

If you can get away with it, just don't collect it! Just like you don't worry about getting mugged if you don't have any money, your problems with data disappear if you stop collecting it.... 

If you have to collect it, don't store it! 

... You can get a lot of mileage out of ephemeral data. There's an added benefit that people will be willing to share things with you they wouldn't otherwise share, as long as they can believe you won't store it. ... 

If you have to store it, don't keep it! 

Certainly don't keep it forever. Don't sell it to Acxiom! Don't put it in Amazon glacier and forget it. 

I believe there should be a law that limits behavioral data collection to 90 days, not because I want to ruin Christmas for your children, but because I think it will give us all better data while clawing back some semblance of privacy.

Museums and the Web and National Digital Forum 2015 talk notes

The following are my notes for talks given in October at Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne, and the National Digital Forum in Wellington.

The talks were my first attempt to synthesise the experiences, thoughts and conversations I had during my recent research trip I took around seven cities in the States, looking at how museums are reaching visitors using digital technology. The trip was generously funded by a Winston Churchill Fellowship, with assistance from Hutt City Council, the core funders of The Dowse Art Museum.

As first attempts, the talk I gave at MWA ran overtime, and I had to skip a few sections at the end. The talk at NDF had a shorter time slot and I trimmed the presentation quite severely as a result. These notes are an amalgam of the two talks, with the addition of some musing on museum stores that didn't make it into either presentation. I'm also adding in some links to extra material that gives more context to the three key experiences that I'm focusing on here: the Pen at the Cooper Hewitt, the Ask App at Brooklyn Museum, and the DMA Friends programme at the Dallas Museum of Art.

I also had time to read an unusual amount while I was travelling. This post brings together some of the articles, reports and presentations behind my thinking.

The talk was originally titled (in abstracts submitted pre-trip), From Podcasts to The Pen: digital adventures in the United States, but for the purposes of this recording, let's call it:

Some context, three experiences, three observations, a concern, two ideas, a tangent, and some thoughts on a museum lead by the values of the web

URL to IRL

Every year, there is a new hotness in our sector. Right now, it's the Pen at the Cooper Hewitt battling it out with the Ask App at Brooklyn Museum, while we also watch to see how the newly opened Broad in LA does, modelling its visitor service experience on the Apple store aesthetic.

The year before that it as the O at MONA and their no-marketing marketing approach facing off against the DMA in Dallas introducing free entry and the Friends programme; before that, Cleveland's wall, the Walker's homepage, Brooklyn's posse, the IMA's Artbabble and dashboard.

The main point of the trip was to try for myself, as a visitor, some of the much-publicised digital projects emanating from US museums. After flirting with all these entities online, now I was going to go and meet them face to face, right where they live.

I Can Break Anything

When I used to do user testing, my least favourite participants were the people who pride themselves on being able to "break anything" and therefore take the most perverse approach imaginable to the task at hand.

The day I arrived in the States the Wall Street Journal published an article by Lee Rosenbaum - a veteran art reporter who also enjoys playing insider baseball - titled The Brave New Museum Sputters Into Life, detailing a trip around a number of museums on a mission very similar to my own.

Rosenbaum wrote:

Surprised by my disappointing experiences with the digital gizmos that others had praised, I could only conclude that some of the proponents hadn’t spent much time using them and observing how others were using them. Intended to inform and delight, these innovations are often unintuitive, inadequately explained, or exasperatingly dysfunctional.

To which my retort is: you aren't a real visitor. Relatively few of the people who visit our places are museum-visiting experts. Fewer still would describe themselves as art experts. Even fewer are visiting with the explicit purpose of critique.

#WeAreNotNormal

So. I am not your normal visitor.

First up: I am not from around here. I purposefully visited cities - Dallas, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and I'll count Brooklyn in here too - that are not on the international tourist museum map. I picked museums that have a emphasis, like The Dowse, on repeat attendance by local residents.

And I am a professional. I was doing what I call a 'View Source' visit. On many of my visits to art galleries, I am so focused on observing floor staff, signage, lighting, hanging fixtures and such like that I sometimes have to remind myself that I'm actually there to look at the art.

I tried really hard on my trip to use these products with optimism and some joy in my heart, rather than being the mendacious mystery shopper.


So I hope you will take my experiences and observations with the honesty and self-acknowledged limitations with which I offer them.

DMA Friends, Dallas Museum of Art

After moving to the Dallas Museum of Art three years ago, director Max Anderson and his head of technology Rob Stein, who followed him from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, introduced free entry to the museum and a new free entry level of membership called the DMA Friends.

The programme has three general aims:

• to promote the gallery to non-visitors
• to increase engagement and repeat visitation
• and to use the data gathered from tracking members of the programme to inform museum operations.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

The best background I've heard on the Friends programme is this Museopunks interview with Max Anderson. 

This article also gives a good brief overview of the project, as does this press release announcing 100,000 Friends. 

A series of Museums and the Web presentations document the project:

• Nurturing Engagement: How Technology and Business Model Alignment can Transform Visitor Participation in the Museum (2013)
• Seeing the Forest and the Trees: How Engagement Analytics Can Help Museums Connect to Audiences at Scale (2014)
• Scaling up: Engagement platforms and large-scale collaboration (2015, detailing the roll out of the platform to other institutions)

Anderson recently announced his resignation from the DMA; the section 'Indianapolis and Dallas' in this earlier blog post brings together a series of articles about the reversal of free entry at the IMA after Anderson's departure. 

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

On the first day that I visited the DMA I watched front of house staff greet visitors to the museum and sell them on the Friends programme. People were remarkably happy to listen to the sales pitch, and I wonder if that’s partly because Texans are very polite, and partly because people still aren’t used to the idea of getting into a major museum without paying.

After lurking for a while I took the plunge and signed up myself. It was quickly clear that the programme was not about international visitors like me.

The system asks for your postcode – a key part of the tracking information, which is used to understand where visitors come from, and can be used to for targeting marketing and outreach. However, there’s no option for international visitors and instead the staffer used the work around he had developed – signing me up under the DMA’s postcode.

We also went through a screen where I was encouraged to choose and avatar. At this point the nice man said to me that I could skip this, because “they” had put in avatars for some purpose that hadn’t been realised, and he didn’t understand why they didn’t just take it out.

The way the programme works for the visitor is that you gather points in order to access rewards. In a city where everyone drives, the first objective is to gather enough points to get your parking at the museum redeemed. The nice man at entered a few cheat codes for me that bumped me immediately up to being up to get a free ruler from the shop.

So, signed up, I started exploring the galleries. 

You gain points in several ways. Each gallery has a sign at its entrance with a code. You text the code to the programme, and it racks up points. You don’t actually have to enter the gallery or engage with the art, and correspondingly, this is a low point activity.

This was where it was reinforced to me that the programme was not for people like me. I stayed on my New Zealand data plan while travelling, and texting to international numbers costs me. Instead, I had to note down each of the codes, and then return to the kiosks in the museum lobby, log in to my account, and add them all manually. 

It was just as well that this was a low value activity though. Because I was there to see the art, I missed most of the gallery entrance codes, which were surprisingly small and discreet. (So discreet, I totally forgot to take a photo.) I was following sightlines into exhibitions, rather than looking at the doorways as I went through them. I also tended to use the stairs that slip you between floors in the museum rather than the formal entries to the galleries, so tracking of my progress through the galleries would have been very inconclusive.

The other main activity that the DMA was offering on the day was a Faves scavenger hunt. I’m going to be frank – I hate scavenger hunts. 

This shows you a Monet in the galleries with a Faves prompt on it. The DMA is enormous. I would have spent nearly four hours walking through it and I know I skipped a couple of ancient culture galleries. By calling them out for the Friends participants, these bright red cues were the only spots in acres of gallery space that were identified as important to the visitor. 

A code for a Fave object earned you more points, but required no extra engagement on your part. 

As I experienced it, the DMA Friends programme requires only modest effort from the visitor, and evoked correspondingly low engagement. The incentives – especially free parking – I can see being conducive towards encouraging people to visit more often. And of course I am now receiving a weekly email from the DMA encouraging me to visit more, spend more, and consider donating.

The Pen, Cooper Hewitt

Next up on my trip was the Cooper Hewitt in New York, and their new Pen. 

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The Pen is the key to the Cooper Hewitt's new door, as this 'new experience' section of their website explains. This video explains how to use the pen (let's call it three-quarters intuitive). 

The Pen received a lot of media attention before and after launch. Here's The Atlantic in January this year. 

The team behind the Pen, led by Seb Chan, communicated the development and intention of the tool extensively. Here's the 2015 Museums and the Web presentation Strategies against architecture: interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt. The project is thoroughly documented on the Cooper Hewitt Labs blog. For example:

• Early concepts for the Pen
• Improving the introduction to the Pen
• The first five months' worth of data

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Unlike the DMA Friends, where the programme is promoted but not a requirement for free entry, the Pen is given to every visitor at the Cooper Hewitt as part of the ticketing project. Every visitor receives a well-honed patter that takes the FOH staff member about 40 seconds to deliver, explaining how they can use the pen during and after their visit.

The pen has two ends: one that you press to an icon on the object labels to ‘collect’ them and then ‘download’ them onto interactive tables, and one that you use to play on the tables.

I loved the pen as an object. The act of pressing the pen to labels brought an extremely pleasant tactile and physical element to my visit which is usually lacking in galleries. I got to use my body (even to a small degree) in a way I don't normally, and the tool was unique and special to that place, not like reusing the device I use ubiquitously in the rest of my life.

Where the pen became a little pesky when I was trying juggle using it, my phone to take photos, and my notebook and pen to make notes about my visit – but once again – not your normal visitor. 

It was when looking at a collection show about the different elements of design that I was really struck by the underlying power of what Seb Chan and his team at the Cooper Hewitt have made. 

 

This is a bad photo taken through a perspex case of an early 20th century bracelet and a early 21st century piece of medical technology used in shoulder reconstruction surgery. The two objects seem very unrelated.

When I read the label though, another layer was revealed to me. The labels includes the tags assigned into the collection database to each item. In the case of the implant, the first two words as aesthetic descriptors: ‘lace-like’, ‘snowflake’. Everyone who’s worked in an art gallery has seen a bit of dumb database curating – we’ll do a show with all the works with fish in them. This was database curating on a very different level.

That moment changed my perspective on the exhibition. A group of things that are ‘blue’ was suddenly a different thing, a much smarter display that indicated to me the underlying power of the souped-up collection database.

During my visit I came to perceive the Pen as the most recent point on a design continuum that stretched from the beautiful historic home the museum is housed in, out through its collections, and up to the contemporary visitor experience. This slightly shitty photo summarises that. I’m standing in the carved teak library, an original part of the building and a glorious bit of craft. In the distance is an Issey Miyake dress. Between me and the dress are two people using the pen on one of the interactive tables. It’s design across the centuries, objects made to be used and enjoyed by humans, design history in action.

Of course, nothing is perfect, I know the team openly acknowledges that touring exhibition pose a problem.

The wonderful Heatherwick Studios touring show is displayed as a series of pods devoted to individual projects: the integration of the pen is limited to panels attached to the walls around the galleries where you could ‘collect’ the various displays. This breaks the user experience pattern set by the rest of the museum, and given that the panels are modest to the point of invisibility, in these spaces I didn’t see anyone else except me – dutiful expert visitor – using their pen.

I also felt that the design interactives on the tables undermined the beautiful insights about design I had had earlier. This observation is also coloured by working with designers over the years. On the tables you can design certain objects (lamps, chairs) by selecting the form and materials and then sketching lines. As you can see above, I chose a lamp and concrete and with two intersecting lines made an elegant form. I felt that an interactive where drawing two shaky lines could design a perfect concrete lamp undersells the true difficulty of the design process.

The very last place I visited was the hands-on design exploration studio on the ground floor of the museum, tucked through a doorway after the tables that I used above. On walking into the room (which was powerfully air-conditioned, and empty) I realised my haptic needs had been met already on my visit. I didn't want to twist cellophane and hessian around wire armatures to make lightshades because I'd already done things like that. I wonder though if this is a #NotNormal experience: the room probably works great for education visits.

I also have to admit to being one of those people who never visited their URL after their visit. I flirted with the idea of doing it for the sake of completeness, but I decided to to stay true to my visitor inclinations. Instead, my online relationship with the Cooper Hewitt continues through all its usual 'micro-touches' we’ve established with each other. I follow the Labs blog and Twitter account, and several staff and ex-staff on social media. Again, this is #NotNormal, but think of the 16,500 people who follow Thomas Campbell on Instagram - these micro-touches are for me are a much more compelling part of my life than a URL.

Ask app, Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum was the last of my three major experiences on my trip.
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Start off your exploration of the Ask app with Nina Simon's interview with Shelley Bernstein and Sara Devine, and follow up with Shelley's recent MuseumNext presentation.

As with the Pen (both projects, it's worth noting, are funded through Bloomberg Connect) the Ask app is part of a wider restructuring of the physical visitor experience. One change by the time of my visit: the mobile desks at which the Ask responders sit had been moved out of the lobby, and into a non-visitor space. I feel this is a real loss in terms of both advertising the app to visitors and to making a statement about the aims of transparency and connection.

Brooklyn Museum staff have been thoroughly documenting the project on the BM's Technology blog; everything from hiring the respondents to using Agile to testing the beacons.
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As I progressed from the DMA to the Cooper Hewitt to Brooklyn, the demands each product placed on me grew: at the same time, the engagement I experienced increased.

Unlike the DMA, where you sign-up on site, and the Cooper Hewitt where every visitor is given a pen, the Ask app is not integrated into the entry process. You download it in advance, or notice a sign in the building promoting you to do so. Uptake is currently low – one or two percent of visitors, I think.


The app lets you live message a group of trained staff with questions as you travel around the museum. They can pinpoint you using beacons, or you can signal your location through text and photos.

This was the product I had to push myself hardest to use. I don’t find on many visits that I naturally have more questions about the art on display. Where the DMA Friends was about picking up breadcrumbs and the Pen was a ‘oh-that’s-interesting-press-press-press’ interaction, to get started with the Ask app I had to think of a question that was worth asking, that hadn’t already been answered by the exhibition labels. I found this strikingly difficult.

My first question was a slightly frustrating experience. I had a very specific question about a particular Gerrit Rietveld chair, and who would have access to buy it. What I was asking was ‘Was this on the general market or did you have to know the designer to get one?’. The answer the Ask team sent me though, in a series of small chunks, gave me context about the chair, the fact that the general public wasn’t interested in avant garde design, and only in the fourth message told me that actually no, only the artist’s mates every got hold of one of these chairs.

I was intrigued by how the app grew on me though. I found that I was generating more questions than usual, and instead of shelving them like I usually do, I asked them.

I also felt like I struck up a rapport with the Ask responder, and I started sending through observations rather than questions. I almost felt like I was visiting with a friend and having discussions in the galleries, rather than having a solitary experience.

Not everything was perfect, of course. The Brooklyn Museum has these odd elevator lobby spaces where they install sculptural works, and they feel like liminal spaces rather than art spaces. 

I almost – bad professional - genuinely thought I could touch on particular sculpture, so I shot that question through to Ask – and didn’t get a reply for another 10 minutes, by which time I was several hundred metres further into the floor. As there is very little seating in the museum's galleries, it was difficult to pause and wait for an answer.

Shelley Bernstein at the Museum acknowledges that one of the areas they need to work on are the question prompts scattered through the galleries to encourage uptake and use of the app.

Where I found myself asking very detailed questions, and a recent blog post from the museum detailed a three-hour long exchange on the symbolism and use of the colour blue in art through the centuries, the question prompts tacked onto cases and walls were dumbed down in comparison to the traditional object labels they were juxtaposed with.

Like the DMA faves, the signs grab your eye, but the tone is the opposite of the experience, and felt patronising or try-hard. They undersold the deep engagement the Ask app delivers.

Another distinctive feature of the Ask app is that when you leave the museum, your conversation disappears. I didn’t even notice this, and when I was alerted to it, I felt like it made sense: that’s how conversations work in real life. Others I’ve talked to want to be able to access this information after their visit. And it is worth noting that the museum is storing and analysing your conversations – even when you don’t have access to them.

So, which is best?

This is the ultimate wrong question. At a fundamental level, there is no point comparing what these three institutions have done. You can compare any number of factors and not come to an answer, because each has been developed in response to a very different question: How can we widen our visitor profile? How can we communicate design in its fullest sense? How can we help people thinking curiously about art?

What I do have though is a few broad observations that developed along my trip.

Observation 1: Global to Local

Where five or ten years ago we were all talking about reaching the whole wide world through the web, today art museums especially are trending from global to local. From thinking about serving the whole world, the focus has shifted to the physical visitor. 

This has happened most clearly at Brooklyn Museum. In April last year Shelley announced a change of focus to the physical visitor, which meant quitting platforms such as Flickr, HistoryPin, FourSquare. A few months later the Posse and the two tagging games were shut down. 

This decision – and the development of the Ask app – was shaped by their observation that earlier digital community engagement projects had been most deeply used by people who lived within 5 miles of the museum. 

At Museums and the Web Asia last week in Melbourne, there was some discomfort about the idea of valuing the in-gallery visitor over the online visitor, and of even drawing a distinction between the two modes and/or groups.

I have a lot of sympathy for this position. 80% of my funding comes from Council, which means from the 45,000 rate-paying households in Lower Hutt. Effectively, each of those households is paying for an annual membership to my museums, and my first duty has to be towards creating value for them from that enforced donation. 

However. I often talk about 1st degree and 2nd degree effects for rate-payers. There are the experiences and benefits they can gain from using the museums as visitors. But there are also the benefits that accrue to ratepayers when their city it is the home of a respected and well-known cultural institution, through venue hire, tourism, media coverage, and that intangible but very real sense of pride.

Observation 2: Digital as USP

That leads to my second observation. Traditionally, a museum’s brand has been built on buildings, collections, and exhibition programmes. 

Something that really struck me on my trip – perhaps because I was looking for it, rather than because it is new – is that digital is definitely the newest way of branding an institution. And unlike buildings, exhibitions programmes, and collections, a new digital brand can be forged relatively rapidly. 

DMA’s digital brand is about a commitment to inclusion – widening their audience beyond the country club that previously felt at home in the museum. 

Cooper Hewitt's brand says that design is an integral part of being human, and each of us has a designer inside us. 

The Brooklyn Museum’s brand says that people are intelligent and curious about art and warrant personal responses to their curiosity. And these brands are being heavily communicated out through messages to members, funders, stakeholders, residents, and the general public.

There is a distinct danger though of your digital brand being, or becoming, disassociated from your physical experience. 

My clearest experience of this was visiting the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A few years ago we had Nate Solas from the web team at the Walker give a keynote at NDF on the Walker’s website redevelopment, which was carried out on a philosophy of unusual generosity and outward-looking-ness, and with the aim of supporting the local art community as well as positioning the museum internationally. I found their way of thinking inspirational, and have tried to follow it in the way we behave online at The Dowse.

Alongside the web redevelopment ran the Open Field programme, where as grassy area in front of the building, intended for a building extension that hadn’t been realised, was turned into a community-focused performance and activity space, hosting everything from yoga classes to internet cat video festivals.

Following all this made me feel really close to the Walker, despite never having visited. And so when I rolled up two weeks ago, I had incredibly high expectations. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful building with really interesting gallery spaces, gorgeous lighting, a great collection, stylish wayfinding. But there was none of that generosity and freshness I felt online. And the biggest surprise was that Open Field had been stopped, most of the staff involved had moved on, and the physical space was literally being dug up in front of my eyes.

One of the greatest attractions of the web is the speed of change and the emphasis on experimentation. We on the web side often joke about museum-time, and the glacial pace of change. Perhaps though we need to think about how we make enduring digital change, where the values of our work can be sustained, even if the forms it takes are constantly evolving.

Observation 3: Web merging with Visitor Services

A third trend that struck me as I travelled from museum to museum was the increasing merger of web teams and visitor services.

Sometimes this was taking a very concrete form: at the Baltimore Museum of Art, for example, Suse Cairns, their digital content coordinator, has just been put in charge of their visitor services team, bringing together the management of online and physical visitor experience.

In another example, I met with six people at the DMA from Rob Stein’s team, and four or five of them recounted the same story. When director Max Anderson arrived at the museum three years ago, gallery attendants were there solely to protect the art, and were actively discouraged from making eye contact or talking with visitors. If a visitor had a question in a gallery, they were to be conducted to the front desk where a qualified person could deal with them.

Nick Poole tweeted this while I was travelling, and the sentiment really resonated with what I was observing. The DMA – like many other US museums – is starting on a backfoot when trying to create a more inclusive and welcoming visitor experience. There’s no way an app can fix that visitor experience on its own.

In fact, by the time I got to the end of my trip, my conclusion was that most museums should be ditching these visitor-focused apps and instead investing in more training, more empowerment, and more autonomy for their visitor services staff. Sadly though, it’s a damn sight easier to get funding for a new app than to pay your front of house staff more.

The other thing I observed was the energy going into studying visitor behaviour, and especially that of members. The DMA Friends programme taps this. At Museums and the Web Asia Diana Pan from MOMA demonstrated the data they’re collecting on their members and the decisions they’re making using it. Mia in Minneapolis is preparing to roll out a major programme around free membership which will collect information about visit frequency, event attendance, shopping and donation habits.

In the States, the word ‘leveraging’ is uttered in conjunction with the word ‘engagement’ much more frequently than it is down here. But in an environment of decreasing public funding, and not-increasing business support, the move towards digitally tracking our visitors so we can study their behaviour is coming to us all. The choice in front of us will be whether our use of this data tilts in favour of creating value for our visitors or for ourselves.

[This is where my NDF talk finished.]

A concern: moonshots

One of the side effects of this shift from global to local is that on my trip I encountered much less talk about moonshots - about big hairy projects that seek to explore the places where museums and everything else blend.

I think partly this was because many of the people I was meeting with were in a heavy implementation phase of their work.

I'm sure many of you will be familiar with the metaphor of the design squiggle - the heady period of ideas, exploration, big claims and false starts you go through before you settle on and refine your final direction. I feel like as a sector we are in a refinement and implementation period, not a design period. Small innovations and tools are piling up on top of each other, but they're not dramatically changing the landscape in even the ways putting our collections online, or adopting social media, did.

I think we need to carve out more space for basic research, that kind of focused noodling around that isn't measured by practicality or applicability, but that opens us to opportunities and big changes. I don't know how we do this, but I do believe it is the responsibility of our national and large institutions, who have the staff resources to make this possible, to be explicitly promoting new, outward looking thinking and activities that might not have an immediately discernible application.

[NB: the presentations I saw coming from science and natural history museums at Museums and the Web seemed more in the mode of moonshots. Maybe it's art museums in particular who seem to be at this stage, or maybe this is just selection bias on my part. I'd love to hear of any projects out there you feel to be moonshots.]

An idea: Doing more with less

[This is possibly where I started slicing sections out of my Museums and the Web talk as I raced towards the end of my presenting time.]

This is at the other end of the spectrum from moon shots: I want to make a call for digital developments focused on improving our productivity.

We have all had quite enough of this phrase, but it's not going away. I know in my own case my annual budget is remaining static at best year on year, and I fully expect to this year be asked to find between 5 and 10 percent savings, while at the same time being expected to increase visitor numbers and do things bigger brighter things.

All of us have invested in being more visitor focused and making our institutions more diverse and accessible. 

How many of us have applied this same level of energy to understanding where the pain points and wasted effort lie in the way we work, and seeking to address this?

I have two modest suggestions for where we can start, both to do with collections management. 

The first is digitising our loan processes. Art museums constantly circulate collection items between ourselves, and the process is frustratingly paper-based and slow. In the age of the API, surely we can band together, pool our pennies, and make something that could largely automate this process, and free up our time for more valuable work?

My second is centralised rights clearance with artists. In a country the size of New Zealand, with an artistic population the size of ours – or even you guys, Australia – it is ridiculous that we are all individually trying to obtain and maintain rights information. We could save so much time and hassle if we could all just cede a little control, and develop a centralised system and either a dedicated or a distributed staff of collection managers and registrars from larger organisations.

An idea: An app for the attendants

One of the many, many, many articles I read about The Broad while I was travelling, one that stood out in particular talked about how their gallery attendants have been trained about the art on display, are allowed to wear their own clothes – as long as they’re fully dressed in black – and how many are art students or teachers. 

The writer stated:

The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia., may be the only other art museum that has attempted to train staffers to fully fulfill the seemingly contradictory functions of keeping the art safe while making viewers feel comfortably at home with it.

I think this is such a dumb dichotomy, but in American museums it is very real. So I want to return to that merger of web and visitor services.

This is a 1991 work by American artist Fred Wilson, currently on view in the new Whitney’s inaugural exhibition. Four headless black mannequins wear the uniforms of the time of security guards at the Met, the Jewish Museum, MOMA, and the Whitney.

Wilson himself worked as a museums guard when he was at university. His work talks about how guards are expected to be anonymous, inconspicuous, to be visible and invisible all at once. Here the guards are the centre of our attention – and yet they can’t look back at us. And they are black, as were the vast majority of the people I saw in the States employed in this entry level, low paying, and largely unempowered role.

I spent a summer working the floor at Te Papa in Wellington and the two weeks training I received there was both the more intensive induction I’ve experienced in a role, and the most diverse team I have ever been part of. Many of the visitor-fronting apps and digital developments we’re seeing today would be rendered redundant if we paid and trained our front of house staff better. 

So – seeing as digital developments are relatively easy to fund, compared to recruitment and staff salaries – could we make an app that empowers our gallery attendants? That gamifies their experience, rather than that of the visitor, a way of recording when and where they talk to visitors, and about what, and then allowing the data that is collected to be used to understand where visitors spend their time, what their questions are about, when different parts of our buildings are used and why – visitor research carried out by every staff member on the floor.

A tangent

This has little to do with my talk's topic, but a lot to do with what I observed on my trip. 

Earlier this year at the Public Galleries Summit in Bendigo, someone said some simple things that completely changed my perspective on museum stores.

Richard Harding, a consultant for museum shops, said two things that really snapped to the grid for me.

First, he pointed out that few people who come to our museums are expert museum-visitors, but most are expert shoppers. The museum store is where they can orient themselves, but also where they will judge your efforts in a much more knowing way than your wayfinding, your lighting, or your interpretation.

Second, a person who is visiting you on purpose – who has researched their trip and is making an effort to come see you – will often visit the store to build their anticipation. And then at the end of the visit – assuming it has gone well – they go back to the store, looking to tie a bow around their experience.

My visit to the States really underlined this for me. The best stores I saw – Mia in Minneapolis, and the American Visionary Art Museum – did more than offer things you'd like to buy. They communicated the personality of the museum, its collections and exhibitions, its community or celebrity connections, the things it valued. 

But the third thing I figured out was this. Much of that deep engagement – long looking, discussion between people, evaluating what you've seen and how you felt about it - naturally occurs in shops. Shopping is for many a social experience, and for most of us a way of testing how our identity is reflected in or measures up against the external world. IIn Baltimore, Nancy Proctor passed on to me an insight from Jon Alexander: We are moving from a consumer culture to a participatory culture: from giving the customer what they ask for, to wrapping an experience around what we have to offer. What if we were to pave the cowpaths, and start looking at our shops spaces as the best-placed sites for enhancing participation and a sense of connection? 

The Dowse's store operates on a very small scale, and is stocked and managed by our front of house team leader, in about ten hours a week max. But we're steadily introducing new ideas for stock and presentation, and using the POS system data to evaluate them, trying to draw a closer connection between the collection, exhibitions and the shop, and the overall message: the beauty of the handmade object, and every visitor's ability to support people who make art. We hope to present on this topic more fully at next year's joint Museums Aotearoa / Museums Australia conference in Auckland. 

In conclusion

I come to museum leadership from the web, and the web is where I learned my working life values.

My inspiration for the way I work comes not from an artist, great museum director, or figure in the humanities. Instead it comes from Tim O'Reilly, publisher of tech books, open web advocate, and populariser of the terms 'open source' and 'web 2.0'.

For O'Reilly, the key to business success is 'creating more value than you capture'. I didn't really understand that until I saw this paragraph in a presentation he gave in 2009 at a Twitter bootcamp

The secret of social media is that it’s not about you, your product, or your story. It’s about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you. If you want to make a positive impact, forget about what you can get out of social media, and start thinking about what you can contribute. Not surprisingly, the more value you create for your community, the more value they will create for you.

I have boiled that down to this ... 

It’s about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you. Not surprisingly, the more value you create for your community, the more value they will create for you.

I believe that those of us who have come of age as museum tech professionals have a unique set of values and approaches to our work that can form the bedrock of the modern museum. 

Usability

Accessibility

Transparency

Openness

Experimentation

Craft

Sharing

Creating value together

The things we hold dear fit seamlessly into the modern museum. I don't believe in sitting around debating how we can be relevant in the 21st century. No one else exists to do the jobs we do. People want to experience what we make, people want to make it with us, people trust and value us. 

So my final question is this: how do you create value? How could you create more? If it's not about digital, if it's all about value - what can you do? What can we all do together?

Thank you

Collections Online

On Friday we launched our project to put The Dowse's collection online, with a kick-off meeting with our development partner Sons & Co. It's really exciting, after years of working on interfaces for large, diverse online collections, to have a chance to work on something that's as tightly scoped (about 3,500 objects, nearly all post WWII, nearly all New Zealand) and as warm and human as our collection.

The timing was perfect, coming off the back of Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne and National Digital Forum in Wellington.  At the conference in Melbourne I was able to catch up with Mitchell Whitelaw and his work on generous interfaces; as he writes in the abstract of a recent paper

Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query.

At NDF several of us from The Dowse were able to listen to George Oates of Good, Form & Spectacle keynote 'Assumptions, Attention, Articulation' on the changes (and not-changes) between the late 2000s and today when it comes to the web, and the way we do - and could - present our collections online. George's keynote was GREAT and you should definitely take the time to watch it.



At the kick-off meeting we bounced around a lot of ideas, from hot-or-not (don't worry, it won't happen) to browse by colour, material, acquisition date, donor/lender, and emotion. We talked about other sources of information we could wrap around the objects in our collections to tell the fuller story of the artists who made them, including Wikipedia and Te Ara, and a couple of other ideas we'll keep up our sleeves for now :)

I think of what George and Mitchell do as 'alt interfaces', and although that undersells the intellectual rigour, it captures some of the sense of personality and opinion I think they bring to this work (more so than the vast majority of institutions are capable of.  I talked at the meeting about various projects by both Mitchell and George.

Mitchell's work has been about how digitised collections can be presented without the demand of the search box - the requirement that you have a research question before you can enter ...

Australian Prints and Printmaking - browse by decade

Experimental interface to the Macaulay Collection of biodiversity audio and video recording

The Nolan Explorer (commissioned by Canberra Museum and Gallery)

The Queenslander (State Library of Victoria)

George's work at Good, Form & Spectacle grows out of her work from the past seven or eight years, with Flickr, Stamen, and the Internet Archive. It has a bit more humour perhaps than Mitchell's work, and she is following a strong process of prototyping near (or close to) museums and collections.

Have a good sift around in the experiments GFNS undertook for the Wellcome Collection. This project introduced George's use of the term 'fat head' to balance the 'long tail' - the fat head is the place where adding editorial can add a lot of interest and value.

The V&A Spelunker is a guerilla interface to this massive collection. I'm crazy about the Date Graph section, which starts to give you a feel for the way the collection has grown over time.

Twoway.St, an alt interface for the British Museum collections, also makes me really happy.  Again, it gives you the beginning of an understanding of the texture of the collection, a way of browsing by travelling along the lines on which it has been assembled.

George also popped up this image in her presentation of something they're playing with - using the dimensions of objects from the collection to create sketches that indicate size, and providing a tennis ball as scale.

Finally, the delightful Small Museum project, all about 'using dumb tools bluntly', and exploring the research question What would a 21st Century cultural institution be like if it was designed today, from scratch? While not directly about online collections, you should check out the idea behind the project here and have an explore. George talks about this project extensively near the end of her NDF talk - that's the best intro.