This year the team at Art News New Zealand asked me to fill in a column space for a regular writer who had pulled out; I chose to write about a phenomenon I'd noticed both internationally and very locally. The column might become a regular in 2017.
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Visa Wellington On A Plate took place in August, and two associated events that happened in my neighbourhood really caught my attention.
At Thistle Hall, the small gallery at the top of Cuba Street, the Jelly Archive set up for a week: displays of brightly coloured, intricately molded jellies, accompanied by a ‘Mad Lab’ where you could buy a kit and book a session to make your own. The day I went in there were no other visitors, but in a corner three PR people avidly discussed their Instagram penetration whilst a camera-man filmed the set-up. The event was sponsored by Resene.
Across the street and down a little, in one of Cuba's charming heritage shopfronts, you could find the Whittakers K-Bar pop-up store, a 10-day nostalgia fest modelled on a 1950s milk bar, staffed by female servers in pink frocks and kiss curls and male baristas in white shirts and bow-ties. The cupcakes were wheeled over from Havana Bar's bakery in an on-theme handcart, the milkshakes took their flavours from the chewy confectionery, and the white shelves were piled with the three new blocks of chocolate with their K-Bar fillings. Over the two weekends lines stretched out the door and across the nearby carpark.
I walk along Cuba Street most days, and so these two events were inescapable. What really struck me about them though was their success as ‘immersion marketing’ - and their similarity to the work of museums.
Whittakers tapped into the nostalgia value of the K-Bar, originally launched in the 1950s, and amped that up with retro stylings, criss-crossed with bunting and sealed with scarlet lipstick. The whole pastel-toned experience seemed more reminiscent of a 1950s we've come to recognise from American movies than the real thing here in Aotearoa New Zealand, but watching the shop fit-out and operation was exactly like watching a museum display go up.
Meanwhile, the Jelly Archive (note that last word) co-opted the glass display cases of natural history specimens and called for visitors to contribute their jelly memories: “stories, handwritten recipes, vintage jelly moulds, old jelly boxes/packets, memories, photos. Basically we are after nostalgic stories around jelly to be part of one of the sections within the exhibition.” Mix in the hands-on experimentation and you've got a full social history experience.
Both projects point to a strong trend in product-driven experiential marketing, focused on getting customers to share a brand via social media. In America, the brand of ‘museums’ has been appropriated to form a framework for these ventures, a new evolution of the pop-up. Thus last December we had Glade's ‘Museum of Emotions’, a temporary structure housing a series of sensory displays, offering free entry and an exit through the gift shop, stocked with the company's new line of candles and room fragrances (the Village Voice assessed it as “a confusing mix of ambient advertising and immersive art”). It drew over 50,000 people and earned a Golden Lion in the Cannes Lions international advertising festival. More recently, Dove and Tinder were among the companies behind the ‘Museum of Ice Cream’, Hulu reconstructed Jerry Seinfeld's living room and invited people in to Instagram it, and Cheetos are taking online submissions of unusually shaped examples of the orange snack for a forthcoming offline museum.
The marketers have identified our brand potential as signifiers of desirable and worthwhile experiences and are now, you could say, eating our lunch. As SC Johnson's global chief marketing officer Ann Mukherjee said AdWeek, “How do you get people to remember a smell? Build memories around it. Create an experience. We gave the world a whole new way to look at Glade”. She sounds remarkably like a museum concept developer.
Or perhaps this trend points up an uncomfortable truth. As one visitor to the Museum of Emotions, Dayna Evans, wrote for The Awl, “When [we] 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.”
We've known for a while now that in the great competition for people's leisure time we're up against sport, hobbies, tv and the internet. Now we can add to that list a rival that looks just like us. The challenge then, it seems to me, is: how do we make sure we remain the best at being ourselves?
Showing posts with label Presentation notes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Presentation notes. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 September 2016
Thursday, 23 June 2016
Final report: visitor experience in American art museums
The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.
I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.
Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages)
Preface
In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:
The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.
Areas of focus
My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:
However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.
As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.
Quickfire conclusions
Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:
Digital innovation
Open storage
Membership programmes
Visitor experience
I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.
Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages)
Preface
If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.
In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:
People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977)Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.
The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.
Areas of focus
My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:
- Connecting with visitors through digital technology
- Visible storage displays
- New models of membership programmes
- Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers
However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.
As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.
Quickfire conclusions
Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:
Digital innovation
- Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
- Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco)
- External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy)
- There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center)
Open storage
- Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’
- Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum)
- There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding)
- Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room)
- New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)
Membership programmes
- Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis)
- 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions
- The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA)
- Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used
Visitor experience
- Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession.
- Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
- Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia)
- Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA)
- Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)
Download the full report (49 pages)
Final report: visitor experience in American art museums
The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.
I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.
Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages)
Preface
In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:
The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.
Areas of focus
My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:
However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.
As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.
Quickfire conclusions
Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:
Digital innovation
Open storage
Membership programmes
Visitor experience
I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner: The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.
Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report (49 pages)
Preface
If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.
In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:
People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977)Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.
The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.
Areas of focus
My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:
- Connecting with visitors through digital technology
- Visible storage displays
- New models of membership programmes
- Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers
However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely: exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.
As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.
Quickfire conclusions
Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:
Digital innovation
- Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)
- Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco)
- External funding focused on digitally-enhanced visitor experience at individual institutions may be discouraging collaborative development, and projects focused on online users of museums (Bloomberg Philanthropy)
- There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center)
Open storage
- Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’
- Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum)
- There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding)
- Digital projects are offering alternative ways to blend digitised collections with the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt's Immersion Room)
- New 'orientation' galleries with mixed density displays may offer a more engaging option for contemporary audiences (Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)
Membership programmes
- Free entry-level membership options are being offered in tiered membership programmes to encourage traditionally non-visiting audiences to attend museums, and to increase repeat visitation (DMA and MIA Minneapolis)
- 'Free' membership is often an exchange of the visitor's data for this access; this data can be used in many ways, from better understanding audience demographics to targeting retail promotions
- The introduction of free membership programmes accompanies a revolution in the understanding of the visitor host role (DMA)
- Collection of significant amounts of data from our visitors creates new ethical obligations for museums over how this data is collected, stored and used
Visitor experience
- Major art museums around the United States have astounding collections, but can feel repetitive when visited in quick succession.
- Even small displays that buck this trend for can convey a strong and individual sense of place (BMA)
- Museum stores can play a significant role in communicating the vision and personality of a museum (American Visionary Art Museum, Mia)
- Large museums can induct new visitors and help them to engage with large collections through thematically-curated, cross-collection introductory galleries (Brooklyn Museum, BMA)
- Smaller museums can distinguish themselves by cultivating distinctive personalities and ways of relating to people (American Visionary Art Museum, ASI)
Download the full report (49 pages)
Wednesday, 1 June 2016
Cultural institutions and the social compact
An essay included in the first issue of the New Zealand Emerging Museums Professionals publication, Tauhere | Connections, May 2016
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In August 2015, with the assistance of a Winston Churchill Fellowship, I made a research trip around art museums in seven states in America exploring, amongst other things, trends in digital development and engagement in art museum. In November I was invited to take part in to a panel discussion at the National and State Libraries of Australasia event ‘Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship’.(1)
I used this as an opportunity to investigate a strand of digital practice that had really struck me during my conversations with colleagues in American museums: the increasing collection and analysis of visitor data gathered using digital methods, rather than surveys or visitor-trailing. The key development in this field is the introduction of a new breed of museum membership where, unlike traditional memberships (where you pay an annual fee for free access to a paid-entry museum) you trade your data for access and benefits.
The leading exponent of this new membership model is the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Under (recently departed) director Maxwell Anderson, over the past three years the DMA has removed entry charges from general admission shows at the museum, and introduced a new entry-level ‘Friends’ offer to its membership programme.(2)
When you sign up for the programme, using a kiosk at the Museum, you provide 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.(3) For example, if you collect sufficient points, you can having your parking charges redeemed. In a city where the car is king, free parking as part of your gallery is a compelling inducement to taking part in the programme. More points get you better access, more special and desirable rewards.
From a dataset of more than 100,000 signed-up 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 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 they invest in gathering and interrogating this data, the more of a data-driven organisation they can become: carrying out targeted programming, marketing and community outreach activities, and measuring whether these activities have discernible impacts on visitor behaviour.
On the one hand, I am in favour of, and admiring of, this approach. It is all too easy to rely on anecdotal information and your own perceptions of your audience and the success of your initiatives. However, I also have reservations about these activities that boli down to the risk of them becoming – in a colloquial but accurate wording in terms of the felt affect – creepy.
We have become accustomed to trading our data for convenience and for access. We hand over contact details and dates of birth for loyalty cards at companies that then bombard us with marketing offers. We buy from sites like Amazon, which store our browing and shopping behaviour and use this to tailor the information that is presented to us, and to others. 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
As well as giving us information to improve the relevance of our programmes, tackle inequality of access, and increase revenue, data can sometimes tell us things we'd rather not hear.
Colleen Dilenschneider is a consultant with an American company 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. In a November 2015 blog post she crunched the data on free admission days, the 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).(6)
The data as Dilenschneider analysed it shows that free admission days do not attract underserved audiences. Dilenschneider's research shows that:
These are unsettling things for the very well-meaning people who run museums 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.(7)
There's no escaping the fact though that companies are being built and money being made on the bounty of the ocean 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.(8) But with my heightened awareness due to what I’d seen and heard in America primed me to pay particular attention as I was preparing for this talk to a series of references that 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:
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,
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
Finally, British artist and technologist James Bridle recently wrote an essay, based on a talk he gave at the 'Through Post-Atomic Eyes' event in Toronto, that name-checked the two above pieces.(11) Bridle has written and made work extensively about mass surveillance, and in this piece he drew a parallel between the Cold War that nuclear technology locked the world into for 45 years and the potential of big data today. As he notes, 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.
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?
A coda
When I gave this talk, I purposefully took a cautious attitude towards the activity of data collection by cultural organisations, and painted a dark picture of a field that can be intelligently managed. My concern, as a museum director but also as a technologist at heart, lies with the tendency of people who are not versed in the conversations around data management to fall for vendors’ pitches without applying a sufficiently sceptical lens to their claims. This concern was proved valid when earlier this year I heard a museum director talking about hardware they were about to insert into their gallery doorways, which would collect the IMEI (unique identifier) of every switched-on mobile phone that entered the building. This is vastly appealing to me as a director, for the ability to cheaply and accurately measure how many repeat visitors you have to your museum and how frequently they visit. It is also terrifying to me as a technologist, in terms of the way it invades an individual’s privacy and surveils their physical passage through the world.
At the end of the talk, a member of the audience asked how we could collect and manage data responsibly. I offer up Ceglowki’s advice as a starting point for you:
(1) Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Enabling Digital Citizenship http://www.nsla.org.au/events/linked-loud-and-literate-libraries-enabling-digital-citizenship-wellington-nz
(2) The Dallas Museum of Art Friends programme https://www.dma.org/visit/dma-friends More information about my research into American museum membership programmes is available here http://best-of-3.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/wcmt-acquittal-draft-membership.html, including links to many more articles and sources.
(3) Points can be gained in a multitude of ways: by bringing people to the museum and recruiting them into the programme, by collecting codes posted at the entries to different galleries, by taking part in public programme events, through scavenger hunts, and so on.
(4) DMA Friends privacy statement https://www.dma.org/privacy
(5) Diana Pan and Manish Engineer, ‘The 360-Degree View: Why An Integrated CRM Platform is Important in Growing a Museum’s Membership Program’, Museums and the Web Asia, Melbourne, October 2015 http://mwa2015.museumsandtheweb.com/proposal/the-360-degree-view-why-an-integrated-crm-platform-is-important-in-growing-a-museums-membership-program/
(6) Colleen Dilenschneider, ‘Free admission days do not actually attract udnerserved Visitors’, Know Your Own Bone, 4 November 2015 http://colleendilen.com/2015/11/04/free-admission-days-do-not-actually-attract-underserved-visitors-to-cultural-organizations-data/
(7) See the information page on Dilenschneider’s website http://colleendilen.com/welcome/ and her frequent public presentations
(8) David Cole, ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’, New York Review of Books, 10 May 2014
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/
(9) Cory Doctorow, ‘Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste’, The Guardian, 15 January 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security
(10) Maciej Ceglowski, ‘Haunted by Data’, talk given on 1 October 2015, http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm All quotes from Ceglowski are drawn from this talk.
(11) James Bridle, ‘Big Data, No Thanks’, BookTwo.org, 2 November 2015 http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/
>>>>>>>>>>
In August 2015, with the assistance of a Winston Churchill Fellowship, I made a research trip around art museums in seven states in America exploring, amongst other things, trends in digital development and engagement in art museum. In November I was invited to take part in to a panel discussion at the National and State Libraries of Australasia event ‘Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Libraries enabling digital citizenship’.(1)
I used this as an opportunity to investigate a strand of digital practice that had really struck me during my conversations with colleagues in American museums: the increasing collection and analysis of visitor data gathered using digital methods, rather than surveys or visitor-trailing. The key development in this field is the introduction of a new breed of museum membership where, unlike traditional memberships (where you pay an annual fee for free access to a paid-entry museum) you trade your data for access and benefits.
The leading exponent of this new membership model is the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Under (recently departed) director Maxwell Anderson, over the past three years the DMA has removed entry charges from general admission shows at the museum, and introduced a new entry-level ‘Friends’ offer to its membership programme.(2)
When you sign up for the programme, using a kiosk at the Museum, you provide 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.(3) For example, if you collect sufficient points, you can having your parking charges redeemed. In a city where the car is king, free parking as part of your gallery is a compelling inducement to taking part in the programme. More points get you better access, more special and desirable rewards.
From a dataset of more than 100,000 signed-up 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 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 they invest in gathering and interrogating this data, the more of a data-driven organisation they can become: carrying out targeted programming, marketing and community outreach activities, and measuring whether these activities have discernible impacts on visitor behaviour.
On the one hand, I am in favour of, and admiring of, this approach. It is all too easy to rely on anecdotal information and your own perceptions of your audience and the success of your initiatives. However, I also have reservations about these activities that boli down to the risk of them becoming – in a colloquial but accurate wording in terms of the felt affect – creepy.
We have become accustomed to trading our data for convenience and for access. We hand over contact details and dates of birth for loyalty cards at companies that then bombard us with marketing offers. We buy from sites like Amazon, which store our browing and shopping behaviour and use this to tailor the information that is presented to us, and to others. 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.(4)A growing number of American museums are ramping 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 entry-level membership offer, 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 visitor data to maximise revenue. At the Museums and the Web Asia conference in Melbourne in October 2015, Diana Pan from the Museum of Modern Art showed statistics derived from members’ shopping behaviour, and explained how MOMA had tweaked its retail offer in response to patterns they saw.(5)
As well as giving us information to improve the relevance of our programmes, tackle inequality of access, and increase revenue, data can sometimes tell us things we'd rather not hear.
Colleen Dilenschneider is a consultant with an American company 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. In a November 2015 blog post she crunched the data on free admission days, the 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).(6)
The data as Dilenschneider analysed it shows that free admission days do not attract underserved audiences. Dilenschneider's research shows that:
- Admission price is not identified as the chief barrier to access
- Free access days attract higher earning and higher educated attendees than paid access days
- Free access days do not tempt non-visitors, but rather accelerate the speed at which an existing visitor revisits
- 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 the very well-meaning people who run museums 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.(7)
There's no escaping the fact though that companies are being built and money being made on the bounty of the ocean 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.(8) But with my heightened awareness due to what I’d seen and heard in America primed me to pay particular attention as I was preparing for this talk to a series of references that 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.(9)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.(10)Ceglowski drew an explicit link between data technology and nuclear technology, as two powerful innovations whose ‘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 he gave at the 'Through Post-Atomic Eyes' event in Toronto, that name-checked the two above pieces.(11) Bridle has written and made work extensively about mass surveillance, and in this piece he drew a parallel between the Cold War that nuclear technology locked the world into for 45 years and the potential of big data today. As he notes, 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.
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?
A coda
When I gave this talk, I purposefully took a cautious attitude towards the activity of data collection by cultural organisations, and painted a dark picture of a field that can be intelligently managed. My concern, as a museum director but also as a technologist at heart, lies with the tendency of people who are not versed in the conversations around data management to fall for vendors’ pitches without applying a sufficiently sceptical lens to their claims. This concern was proved valid when earlier this year I heard a museum director talking about hardware they were about to insert into their gallery doorways, which would collect the IMEI (unique identifier) of every switched-on mobile phone that entered the building. This is vastly appealing to me as a director, for the ability to cheaply and accurately measure how many repeat visitors you have to your museum and how frequently they visit. It is also terrifying to me as a technologist, in terms of the way it invades an individual’s privacy and surveils their physical passage through the world.
At the end of the talk, a member of the audience asked how we could collect and manage data responsibly. I offer up Ceglowki’s advice as a starting point for you:
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.
(1) Linked Up, Loud and Literate: Enabling Digital Citizenship http://www.nsla.org.au/events/linked-loud-and-literate-libraries-enabling-digital-citizenship-wellington-nz
(2) The Dallas Museum of Art Friends programme https://www.dma.org/visit/dma-friends More information about my research into American museum membership programmes is available here http://best-of-3.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/wcmt-acquittal-draft-membership.html, including links to many more articles and sources.
(3) Points can be gained in a multitude of ways: by bringing people to the museum and recruiting them into the programme, by collecting codes posted at the entries to different galleries, by taking part in public programme events, through scavenger hunts, and so on.
(4) DMA Friends privacy statement https://www.dma.org/privacy
(5) Diana Pan and Manish Engineer, ‘The 360-Degree View: Why An Integrated CRM Platform is Important in Growing a Museum’s Membership Program’, Museums and the Web Asia, Melbourne, October 2015 http://mwa2015.museumsandtheweb.com/proposal/the-360-degree-view-why-an-integrated-crm-platform-is-important-in-growing-a-museums-membership-program/
(6) Colleen Dilenschneider, ‘Free admission days do not actually attract udnerserved Visitors’, Know Your Own Bone, 4 November 2015 http://colleendilen.com/2015/11/04/free-admission-days-do-not-actually-attract-underserved-visitors-to-cultural-organizations-data/
(7) See the information page on Dilenschneider’s website http://colleendilen.com/welcome/ and her frequent public presentations
(8) David Cole, ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’, New York Review of Books, 10 May 2014
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/
(9) Cory Doctorow, ‘Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste’, The Guardian, 15 January 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security
(10) Maciej Ceglowski, ‘Haunted by Data’, talk given on 1 October 2015, http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm All quotes from Ceglowski are drawn from this talk.
(11) James Bridle, ‘Big Data, No Thanks’, BookTwo.org, 2 November 2015 http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/
Sunday, 3 April 2016
How to Network, in Five Easy Steps
Update: 5 May 2020
I just reviewed this post as I'm planning to re-share it as part of the mentoring sessions I'm currently offering up.
On reflection:
God, I miss writing. Look at all those words! And four years ago they would've rolled out of me effortlessly. I don't have that brainspace any more and I miss it.
Also: Look At All Those Words. I've highlighted a few passages if you're skim-reading.
I still use "I don't know anyone else here. Can I talk to you?" as an opening line.
The single actionable piece of advice I'd still give? Learn to introduce yourself.
I talk about diversity here. At least I had the insight here to acknowledge that. A work in progress.
These notes were posted in advance of a talk I gave at an emerging museum professionals hui. Still one of the most interesting and useful professional events I've attended. I met some awesome people there who I still value having in my network, and I've had great pleasure watching their paths unfold.
Originally published 3 April 2016
This is possibly the most boring thing I've ever written, but maybe it'll be helpful to someone. The title is a tease, of course. It's more like How to discover, after ten years and with little to no strategy, that you are indeed part of a useful and fulfilling network.
Emerging Museum Professionals hui
The EMP group has kindly asked me to give a presentation at their hui the day before this year's Museums Australasia conference in May. I've been given a wide brief ('feel free to speak about any aspect of your career journey thus far that you feel is of interest, relevance and potential benefit to our EMP members') and my talk, and that of the other Australian keynote, will lead into a panel discussion about 'the myths of museum career progression'.
I have a few issues with the 'journey' brief, and I'm also reluctant to hold my career progression up as an example because - frankly - many of my major decisions to date have been driven by shitty moments in my adult life which have miraculously worked out in my favour.
Having said that, I also realised over summer that looking to someone as a role model doesn't mean mindlessly replicating them. In fact, it's more like having the ability to adopt another perspective by thinking through a situation in a 'What Would My Role Model Do?' kind of way.
Having been asked to speak, and having said yes, I'm determined to be useful to the audience. So I emailed out the brief I received to some newer colleagues whose opinions I respect, and asked them what they would find interesting and helpful if they were in the audience.
Networking
The responses really surprised me, because through the back and forth, the strongest theme to emerge was networking. Networking seems to be held out as the silver bullet for progress in a congested sector with little growth in employment numbers that faces new and recent graduates. A post-grad degree only gets you through the first cull of the applications pile. Get the right placement, get endorsed by the right person, form the right network - and that will be the difference between having that degree, and having a job that relates to that degree.
You need to network. It's the bit of advice given to every young striver. But what does it mean? You go to openings and public programme events, but you can hardly just bowl up to senior figures and bust into their cosy, gossipy conversations (Can you?). Ask them out for coffee. Who wants to cold-contact a gallery director or senior curator? What would you say? Find a mentor. How? What does that even mean?
The thing is, when you're at the start of your career, networks seem to be something other people (older and more established people, usually) have. You look upwards, and you see this thing that you're trying to break into.
Since that email exchange, I've been jotting down notes for my talk, but also talking about this networking thing with some of my friends, especially people who I perceive to have great networks. Interestingly, they also viscerally remembered that helpless early career stage, where you seemed to have your nose pressed up against the glass, watching people who had their shit and their networks sorted out get on with their glittering opportunities. They shared that same embarrassment and fear about approaching senior figures. They still, in many cases, feel it.
Change your mindset
But after talking it through, we all agreed on one thing. We had all - after ten, fifteen, twenty years - got ourselves to the point of having solid networks. Those networks occasionally included senior figures, but the strength was actually in being surrounded by your peers.
A lawyer friend told me that when her firm was bringing on with new grads, they encouraged them to network with their peers at other firms. The reasoning was that established staff already had networks with their own peers - the firm needed the next generation to get networked. Rinse and repeat, and one day you look around and figure out you're the establishment. (Now you get to ask yourself how you found yourself in this invidious and privileged position, and not be the douche you perceive the generations before you to have been.)
A dealer gallery friend, when I was talking this same thing over with her, observed time was key. Not time put in attending events and wangling pick-your-brain coffees, but letting time pass. One day (one day ten years on, mind you) you look around, and the people you used to hang out with are now your network. The ones you went to uni with, the ones you've worked with in various organisations, the ones you've been on committees with: they're now the ones you ping when you need some advice, who you find yourself calling to reference-check a job applicant, who you send interesting opportunities you can't use on to.
Your friends and professional acquaintances, over time, become the network you always imagined you wanted. Basic, but true.
You are actually going to have to be gregarious
Did anyone who's not a certifiable sociopath ever stand on the threshold of a room packed with strangers and think Oh goody, this looks like fun?
Unfortunately, while your network will grow organically over time, just like a slow-to-rise sourdough loaf, you still need to feed the starter. That means turning up at things and being friendly.
Every Myers-Briggs (coughbullshitcough) test I've ever done has me hovering right between introvert and extrovert. Professionally, I've learned to turn my extrovert up through sheer willpower. I ignore the butterflies in my stomach and I walk into the room and if I don't know anyone I just pick someone who looks approachable and I go over and start talking to them. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion used 'I don't know anyone here. Can I talk to you for a while?' as my opening line.
I have also convinced myself that at most networking-type events, at least half the people in the room feel the same way I do and will welcome someone else making the first opening.
And sure, over the years I've been frozen out, made a bit of a dick of myself, and felt like I've saddled some poor person with the responsibility of nursemaiding me. But I have survived all these small discomforts and lived to network another day.
Great networkers make connections
The best way of avoiding the hellishness of most networking events is just to stage your own. Talking with my friends, and thinking about those whose seemingly effortless network-enlarging skills I admire, I realised another basic truth. Great networkers make connections, not for themselves, but between others.
I think we start out thinking about networking in a transactional manner. When you've just graduated, all focus is on getting a job. 'Networking' seems crucial to getting a job, and then once you have one, to succeeding in it. You're trying to get into a network so you can milk it for your own ends.
Today, I think about networking more in terms of bringing people together and sharing information, support and opportunities. Maybe I just drank the meet-up kool-aid when I was working on the web, or maybe there's an event organiser inside of me after all, but for the past nearly ten years I've organised or co-organised or publicised or funded all sorts of get-togethers.
The best networkers I know run public or private events that bring people together, not for their own immediate benefit, but for the greater benefit of the group. They build their own networks, they build trust and reciprocity with the members of their networks, and they build communities of interest. Everyone's a winner.
These skilful networkers are also generous with their introductions and recommendations between people, and seem to get a real kick out of introducing people to each other.
Diversity makes great networks
I need to make a pre-emptive statement. My first point above, about networking with your peers, suggests your network could easily become homogenous in terms of age and profession, and potentially gender and culture.
I am particularly fortunate to have been supported throughout my career by more senior professionals. I try to pay this forward now by finding ways of supporting those younger than me. In turn, I'm regularly introduced to new thinking by these younger colleagues, whose education (now that I'm more than a decade out of uni) and generational outlooks are quite different from my own.
I'm also fortunate that by virtue of having worked across libraries, museums and web, and having gotten myself involved in cross-sector activities and topics like Creative Commons and the open data movement, the range of people I know is much wider than it would've been if I had have achieved my dearly held university dream and become a curator. Not getting my dream job actually opened things up for me. (There's a cosmic lesson for you.)
Recently I've started following more Maori and Pacific artists, writers, curators, museum professionals, journalists and media outlets on Twitter, as well as a couple of American collaboratives working on diversity issues in museums. I keep pretty quiet in this world, but I'm learning. Likewise, finally committing to te reo lessons - just through my Council - is widening my network and perspective.
Most of the great networkers I know are part of the web world, and their commitment to accessibility and inclusiveness is fierce. They call out examples of straight-white-ism and they work hard with all they do to not fall into the easy grooves of their own social and cultural backgrounds. They keep themselves honest, and their networks and their outlooks on life are all the richer for it.
Some practical advice
So all of this is great in theory. What can you actually do? Here are four ideas that don't involve having to go on a $3000 leadership course:
Learn to introduce yourself
When people ask me what I do, I say 'Oh, I work in an art gallery'. Which is so dumb, and which I am working on changing to 'I run The Dowse, it's an art gallery in Lower Hutt'. Because the first answer doesn't give the person enquiring any actual information, and puts the onus on them to draw you out. That's lazy and unhelpful.
Read widely
My morning routine is to haul myself through the shower, make us breakfast and coffee, and then spend 45 minutes clearing my feedreader. I subscribe to the Washington Post and NYT culture sections, ArtsJournal's full feed, the tech blogs from Brooklyn Museum, Cooper Hewitt and ACMI, the books section from the Guardian, and about 50 individual blogs. I've done this for about 10 years now, and it helps me not only in my day to day job, but with keeping a finger on the wider arts and tech sectors, so I can think about how they intersect with what I do. It's part of the diversity thing, especially as every interesting person you follow online leads you to another.
Ditto following interesting people using whichever social media network suits you (I'm still totally Twitter and zero Facebook or LinkedIn, YMMV). Twitter has a really lively sub-culture of New Zealand museum people who are sharing and discussing all sorts of interesting topics - I can only imagine that FB has the same. I'm still surprised by how few New Zealand museum people I find on Twitter, compared to, for example, writers and book reviewers.
Find free or cheap things you can attend
I came of age professionally at the beginning of the age of the meet-up, when social media started to support the existing culture of people coming together around special interest topics. Again, the most valuable opportunities for me have always been groups and events that coalesce around interests or topics that cross various industries or sectors. For me, it was things like the Open Data movement, and Creative Commons, along with NDF and Webstock.
I'm a bit out of touch today with regular meet-ups, but try the NDF barcamps around the country, and the Refactor event in Auckland. The forthcoming Women Who Get Shit Done unconference, to be held in May near Wellington, could also be interesting (though less cheap).
Take control of your professional development funding
This is something I never thought of doing before I was in control of my own PD budget, and wish I had. No one gets enough funding in our sector for professional development - the budgets everywhere are pretty miserable, and it's a great shame.
At The Dowse, I've tried to amplify our budget by doing one or two events a year that bring smart people/training opportunities/hui to us so as many of us as possible can attend, rather than sending one or two people away. We've done disaster preparedness training, training with Autism New Zealand, a LEOTC hui, a curatorial hui, and this week's Four Waves of Feminism event, among others: all times where I've used our PD budget to underwrite a training and/or networking opportunity.
There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing. Make the choice, and ask your manager if you can use your allocation this year to organise an event, rather than attend one. Or get together a group and make it happen together. There are all sorts of ways to do this: bring people together for an afternoon to share case studies from their discipline; keep an eye out for visiting speakers (e.g. Museums Aotearoa, NDF, the nearest university) and convince them to add your organisation to their itinerary; approach senior managers or people you look up to and ask them to help you secure speakers and look at something like the Refactor event again as a model. (Remember that if your organisation hosts the event they get to share the glory and count the visitor numbers, so it's all win-win-win.)
Organising events stresses me out. I don't enjoy it at all - in the lead-up or, usually, at the time. But it's been the single best way that I've grown my own network, and when you're running something, you don't have to worry about turning up in a room full of people you don't know, because you've got a job to do. Playing host is also a great way to build your own public speaking confidence.
I just reviewed this post as I'm planning to re-share it as part of the mentoring sessions I'm currently offering up.
On reflection:
God, I miss writing. Look at all those words! And four years ago they would've rolled out of me effortlessly. I don't have that brainspace any more and I miss it.
Also: Look At All Those Words. I've highlighted a few passages if you're skim-reading.
I still use "I don't know anyone else here. Can I talk to you?" as an opening line.
The single actionable piece of advice I'd still give? Learn to introduce yourself.
I talk about diversity here. At least I had the insight here to acknowledge that. A work in progress.
These notes were posted in advance of a talk I gave at an emerging museum professionals hui. Still one of the most interesting and useful professional events I've attended. I met some awesome people there who I still value having in my network, and I've had great pleasure watching their paths unfold.
Originally published 3 April 2016
This is possibly the most boring thing I've ever written, but maybe it'll be helpful to someone. The title is a tease, of course. It's more like How to discover, after ten years and with little to no strategy, that you are indeed part of a useful and fulfilling network.
Emerging Museum Professionals hui
The EMP group has kindly asked me to give a presentation at their hui the day before this year's Museums Australasia conference in May. I've been given a wide brief ('feel free to speak about any aspect of your career journey thus far that you feel is of interest, relevance and potential benefit to our EMP members') and my talk, and that of the other Australian keynote, will lead into a panel discussion about 'the myths of museum career progression'.
I have a few issues with the 'journey' brief, and I'm also reluctant to hold my career progression up as an example because - frankly - many of my major decisions to date have been driven by shitty moments in my adult life which have miraculously worked out in my favour.
Having said that, I also realised over summer that looking to someone as a role model doesn't mean mindlessly replicating them. In fact, it's more like having the ability to adopt another perspective by thinking through a situation in a 'What Would My Role Model Do?' kind of way.
Having been asked to speak, and having said yes, I'm determined to be useful to the audience. So I emailed out the brief I received to some newer colleagues whose opinions I respect, and asked them what they would find interesting and helpful if they were in the audience.
Networking
The responses really surprised me, because through the back and forth, the strongest theme to emerge was networking. Networking seems to be held out as the silver bullet for progress in a congested sector with little growth in employment numbers that faces new and recent graduates. A post-grad degree only gets you through the first cull of the applications pile. Get the right placement, get endorsed by the right person, form the right network - and that will be the difference between having that degree, and having a job that relates to that degree.
You need to network. It's the bit of advice given to every young striver. But what does it mean? You go to openings and public programme events, but you can hardly just bowl up to senior figures and bust into their cosy, gossipy conversations (Can you?). Ask them out for coffee. Who wants to cold-contact a gallery director or senior curator? What would you say? Find a mentor. How? What does that even mean?
The thing is, when you're at the start of your career, networks seem to be something other people (older and more established people, usually) have. You look upwards, and you see this thing that you're trying to break into.
Since that email exchange, I've been jotting down notes for my talk, but also talking about this networking thing with some of my friends, especially people who I perceive to have great networks. Interestingly, they also viscerally remembered that helpless early career stage, where you seemed to have your nose pressed up against the glass, watching people who had their shit and their networks sorted out get on with their glittering opportunities. They shared that same embarrassment and fear about approaching senior figures. They still, in many cases, feel it.
Change your mindset
But after talking it through, we all agreed on one thing. We had all - after ten, fifteen, twenty years - got ourselves to the point of having solid networks. Those networks occasionally included senior figures, but the strength was actually in being surrounded by your peers.
A lawyer friend told me that when her firm was bringing on with new grads, they encouraged them to network with their peers at other firms. The reasoning was that established staff already had networks with their own peers - the firm needed the next generation to get networked. Rinse and repeat, and one day you look around and figure out you're the establishment. (Now you get to ask yourself how you found yourself in this invidious and privileged position, and not be the douche you perceive the generations before you to have been.)
A dealer gallery friend, when I was talking this same thing over with her, observed time was key. Not time put in attending events and wangling pick-your-brain coffees, but letting time pass. One day (one day ten years on, mind you) you look around, and the people you used to hang out with are now your network. The ones you went to uni with, the ones you've worked with in various organisations, the ones you've been on committees with: they're now the ones you ping when you need some advice, who you find yourself calling to reference-check a job applicant, who you send interesting opportunities you can't use on to.
Your friends and professional acquaintances, over time, become the network you always imagined you wanted. Basic, but true.
You are actually going to have to be gregarious
Did anyone who's not a certifiable sociopath ever stand on the threshold of a room packed with strangers and think Oh goody, this looks like fun?
Unfortunately, while your network will grow organically over time, just like a slow-to-rise sourdough loaf, you still need to feed the starter. That means turning up at things and being friendly.
Every Myers-Briggs (coughbullshitcough) test I've ever done has me hovering right between introvert and extrovert. Professionally, I've learned to turn my extrovert up through sheer willpower. I ignore the butterflies in my stomach and I walk into the room and if I don't know anyone I just pick someone who looks approachable and I go over and start talking to them. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion used 'I don't know anyone here. Can I talk to you for a while?' as my opening line.
I have also convinced myself that at most networking-type events, at least half the people in the room feel the same way I do and will welcome someone else making the first opening.
And sure, over the years I've been frozen out, made a bit of a dick of myself, and felt like I've saddled some poor person with the responsibility of nursemaiding me. But I have survived all these small discomforts and lived to network another day.
Great networkers make connections
The best way of avoiding the hellishness of most networking events is just to stage your own. Talking with my friends, and thinking about those whose seemingly effortless network-enlarging skills I admire, I realised another basic truth. Great networkers make connections, not for themselves, but between others.
I think we start out thinking about networking in a transactional manner. When you've just graduated, all focus is on getting a job. 'Networking' seems crucial to getting a job, and then once you have one, to succeeding in it. You're trying to get into a network so you can milk it for your own ends.
Today, I think about networking more in terms of bringing people together and sharing information, support and opportunities. Maybe I just drank the meet-up kool-aid when I was working on the web, or maybe there's an event organiser inside of me after all, but for the past nearly ten years I've organised or co-organised or publicised or funded all sorts of get-togethers.
The best networkers I know run public or private events that bring people together, not for their own immediate benefit, but for the greater benefit of the group. They build their own networks, they build trust and reciprocity with the members of their networks, and they build communities of interest. Everyone's a winner.
These skilful networkers are also generous with their introductions and recommendations between people, and seem to get a real kick out of introducing people to each other.
Diversity makes great networks
I need to make a pre-emptive statement. My first point above, about networking with your peers, suggests your network could easily become homogenous in terms of age and profession, and potentially gender and culture.
I am particularly fortunate to have been supported throughout my career by more senior professionals. I try to pay this forward now by finding ways of supporting those younger than me. In turn, I'm regularly introduced to new thinking by these younger colleagues, whose education (now that I'm more than a decade out of uni) and generational outlooks are quite different from my own.
I'm also fortunate that by virtue of having worked across libraries, museums and web, and having gotten myself involved in cross-sector activities and topics like Creative Commons and the open data movement, the range of people I know is much wider than it would've been if I had have achieved my dearly held university dream and become a curator. Not getting my dream job actually opened things up for me. (There's a cosmic lesson for you.)
Recently I've started following more Maori and Pacific artists, writers, curators, museum professionals, journalists and media outlets on Twitter, as well as a couple of American collaboratives working on diversity issues in museums. I keep pretty quiet in this world, but I'm learning. Likewise, finally committing to te reo lessons - just through my Council - is widening my network and perspective.
Most of the great networkers I know are part of the web world, and their commitment to accessibility and inclusiveness is fierce. They call out examples of straight-white-ism and they work hard with all they do to not fall into the easy grooves of their own social and cultural backgrounds. They keep themselves honest, and their networks and their outlooks on life are all the richer for it.
Some practical advice
So all of this is great in theory. What can you actually do? Here are four ideas that don't involve having to go on a $3000 leadership course:
Learn to introduce yourself
When people ask me what I do, I say 'Oh, I work in an art gallery'. Which is so dumb, and which I am working on changing to 'I run The Dowse, it's an art gallery in Lower Hutt'. Because the first answer doesn't give the person enquiring any actual information, and puts the onus on them to draw you out. That's lazy and unhelpful.
Read widely
My morning routine is to haul myself through the shower, make us breakfast and coffee, and then spend 45 minutes clearing my feedreader. I subscribe to the Washington Post and NYT culture sections, ArtsJournal's full feed, the tech blogs from Brooklyn Museum, Cooper Hewitt and ACMI, the books section from the Guardian, and about 50 individual blogs. I've done this for about 10 years now, and it helps me not only in my day to day job, but with keeping a finger on the wider arts and tech sectors, so I can think about how they intersect with what I do. It's part of the diversity thing, especially as every interesting person you follow online leads you to another.
Ditto following interesting people using whichever social media network suits you (I'm still totally Twitter and zero Facebook or LinkedIn, YMMV). Twitter has a really lively sub-culture of New Zealand museum people who are sharing and discussing all sorts of interesting topics - I can only imagine that FB has the same. I'm still surprised by how few New Zealand museum people I find on Twitter, compared to, for example, writers and book reviewers.
Find free or cheap things you can attend
I came of age professionally at the beginning of the age of the meet-up, when social media started to support the existing culture of people coming together around special interest topics. Again, the most valuable opportunities for me have always been groups and events that coalesce around interests or topics that cross various industries or sectors. For me, it was things like the Open Data movement, and Creative Commons, along with NDF and Webstock.
I'm a bit out of touch today with regular meet-ups, but try the NDF barcamps around the country, and the Refactor event in Auckland. The forthcoming Women Who Get Shit Done unconference, to be held in May near Wellington, could also be interesting (though less cheap).
Take control of your professional development funding
This is something I never thought of doing before I was in control of my own PD budget, and wish I had. No one gets enough funding in our sector for professional development - the budgets everywhere are pretty miserable, and it's a great shame.
At The Dowse, I've tried to amplify our budget by doing one or two events a year that bring smart people/training opportunities/hui to us so as many of us as possible can attend, rather than sending one or two people away. We've done disaster preparedness training, training with Autism New Zealand, a LEOTC hui, a curatorial hui, and this week's Four Waves of Feminism event, among others: all times where I've used our PD budget to underwrite a training and/or networking opportunity.
There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing. Make the choice, and ask your manager if you can use your allocation this year to organise an event, rather than attend one. Or get together a group and make it happen together. There are all sorts of ways to do this: bring people together for an afternoon to share case studies from their discipline; keep an eye out for visiting speakers (e.g. Museums Aotearoa, NDF, the nearest university) and convince them to add your organisation to their itinerary; approach senior managers or people you look up to and ask them to help you secure speakers and look at something like the Refactor event again as a model. (Remember that if your organisation hosts the event they get to share the glory and count the visitor numbers, so it's all win-win-win.)
Organising events stresses me out. I don't enjoy it at all - in the lead-up or, usually, at the time. But it's been the single best way that I've grown my own network, and when you're running something, you don't have to worry about turning up in a room full of people you don't know, because you've got a job to do. Playing host is also a great way to build your own public speaking confidence.
Monday, 25 January 2016
WCMT Acquittal Draft: Membership programmes
I'm currently attacking, chunk by chunk, my acquittal for the funding I received from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for my research trip around American museums last year. It struck me that rather than release it all as one big fat PDF I might try posting drafts of sections here, for any feedback that might be forthcoming. This first post looked at one of my four research areas, visible storage. This second post is on another of those four topics, membership programmes.
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
Museum membership programmes have two main objectives: to generate an unrestricted source of revenue for the museum, and to create a core group of supporters who will attend exhibitions and events, spread the word about the museum's activities, and hopefully come to further contribute to the museum through donations and bequests. Membership levels are generally tiered: at the lowest levels, membership is generally seen as a direct exchange for benefits (free or discounted exhibition entry, parking, merchandise etc) and the cost of acquiring and servicing members usually takes up a significant portion of the revenue generated; at higher levels, the revenue often outweighs the benefits received, and membership is seen as a form of philanthropy.
Museums are increasingly concerned about how to attract new members, and are not seeing younger visitors transition into becoming members in the way their predecessors did. Research has been conducted into 'millennials' attitudes towards museum membership, and shows changing priorities: while free admission is still the highest priority, younger generations are less interested in exclusive access or perks, and are increasingly interested in showing their support for social causes. (Dilenschneider 2012, 2015).
Like many museum directors, I am interested in new approaches to museum membership programmes. Without doubt, the most discussed project in this area in the past three years has been the Dallas Museum of Art's Friends programme. On this trip I both wanted to meet with staff at the museum to learn about how the programme had been implemented and evaluated, and to have the experience of signing up as a member and visiting the museum as a Friend myself.
My own observation is that over the past ten years, with museum's rapid adoption of social media platforms, the concepts of loyalty, friendship and access have changed. Museums now regularly share online the kinds of stories and insights that were once the purview of a museum member on a behind the scenes tour. People follow museums online that may be nowhere near their geographical location, enjoying a sense of connection and support that may never translate into a physical visit.
The Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans programme was an early experiment in museum membership in the online world. The programme, which ran from 2009 to 2012, was designed to appeal to two groups who did not buy traditional museum memberships: regular attendees of their Target First Saturdays (free admission days) and for online fans of the museum. Often described as a 'social media membership', the programme offered access to private channels on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, where exclusive content was shared, and physical meet-up events at the museum, for $20 a year. The creators, Will Cary (Memberships Manager 2008-2010) and Shelley Bernstein (Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology), saw the programme as a way of offering a form of membership that was not about buying cheaper access to the museum, but about a deeper relationship with the museum and greater two-way interaction.
This thinking was very much in the air in 2008 (when the programme was conceived), when museums were moving rapidly into the area of online community management (following the lead of early champions such as photo-sharing site Flickr) and the use of social media to, for the first time, offer large-scale personalised two-way communication between the museum and its audiences. The programme, while loved by its participants, stalled in its growth and moreover did not transition members from this 'beginner' level to higher tiers of membership, a development path that is key to generating the revenue that is, after all, part of the reason for having membership programmes. The programme was shut down in mid 2012.
The Dallas Museum of Art's Friends membership programme could be seen as an evolution of this thinking about what membership looks like in an online world. Where Brooklyn Museum took its model from community management, the web zeitgeist of its time, the DMA's is informed by our contemporary focus on data collection and data mining.
In late 2012, the DMA announced they about to reinstate free general admission to the museum. This in itself was not innovative: approximately one third of American art museums have free admission (although this is most common in organisations located in universities). In the same announcement though the museum announced a new, free level of museum membership, the 'Friends', that would allow participants to collect points that could later been converted into their choice of rewards. At the time of the announcement director Maxwell L. Anderson stated that "“Nobody has ever done this. ... We’re going to build a model for museum engagement that we believe every other museum like us will want to have.” (Granberry 2012)
Anderson has long argued that museum admissions bring only a tiny fraction of museum's earned revenue (2%-5%) while presenting a significant financial and social barrier to attendance, especially to non-traditional audiences. (it is worth noting that the DMA received a US$9 million donation to fund free admission, and to facilitate the digitisation of the permanent collection. As director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art Anderson reinstated free admission with the ambition of removing barriers to access; the Friends programme was the next iteration of this aspiration to expand and diversify museum attendance.
While this was not the message of early announcements, the Friends programme quickly became framed by the museum and by commentators as an exchange of data for access. Within a year, arts commentator Tyler Green described it as a successful "data-for-free-admission deal". (Green 2014) In this way, DMA Friends trades upon our growing comfort with (or resignation to) sharing a little bit of information about ourselves in return for access or convenience: handing over our email address for a discount, using Facebook to create an account on another website, accepting cookies on a newspaper's website. Deliberately or unwittingly, we are accessing the bounty of the internet seemingly for free, but really at the cost of the sharing of information about our age, gender, location, interests, shopping history, and more.
The Friends programme has three main aims:
When the DMA made its double announcement, Anderson was quoted as saying "“When somebody from South Dallas walks up to the front desk, and the person behind the counter says, ‘Welcome to the DMA – are you members?’ What are they hearing? It’s like walking into a country club. It freaks you out. It’s exclusionary. I want everybody to feel they belong here, so I want everybody to be a member.'" (Granberry 2012)
Like all museums, the DMA is seeking to become more relevant to its community, and to attract an audience that more accurately reflects the population that surrounds it than the statistically-typical white, older, more educated, usually female museum visitor. Since the 1970s the museum world has been seeking to break down barriers to access - physical, financial and perceptual - through education, outreach, programming and partnerships. However, the perception of the museum as a place that "not for people like me" amongst non-white, lower income people is still strong. The dual announcement was an opportunity for the museum to reach out to non-visitors with a striking new offer, and to engage with every visitor as they entered the museum in a new way.
In a 2014 presentation, the DMA stated "The DMA staff’s top priority is to increase the number of Friends who come back to the Museum tracked by the program." (Stein and Wyman 2014) Offering free admission enables people to make more frequent, shorter and ad hoc visits, rather than seeing visiting as an investment. While museum such as the Met, the Guggenheim and MOMA are tourist icons and draw a high proportion of visitors from domestic and international tourism, museums in most American (and other) cities are serving an audience largely living within driving distance. This is not to dismiss the important role museums play in promoting the reputation of a city and attracting visitors nationally and internationally, but at the same time, driving an increase in repeat visitation from local is an important goal for museums that want to be valued and valuable civic assets.
Placing an engagement layer over free general admission targets the DMA's goal of increased repeat visitation and engagement. In a 2013 paper, Rob Stein (then Deputy Director at the DMA) and museums consultant Bruce Wyman noted the urgent need for museums to "embrace the culture of participation" and respond to contemporary society's desire to be co-creators of the experiences we encounter, rather than passive consumers. (Stein and Wyman, 2013) They noted that despite significant effort from curators, interpreters and designers to construct defined and engaging exhibition layouts, self-directed visitors often "graze" their ways through museums, not necessarily consuming texts and objects in the order museum staff thought that would be experienced and understood. At the same time, Stein and Wyman noted that people's learning is better and their experience more satisfying when they feel they have actively participated in the museum's offering.
The visitor-facing aspect of the Friends programme therefore seek to create multiple pathways for people to engage with and enjoy the museum. Once a visitor is signed up for the programme (handing over their name, contact details and postcode), they have access to the Friend's 'digital engagement platform'. The platform uses a bespoke digital badging system, and a model familiar to any user of an incentive system: by completing certain activities, the visitor collects points, that can then be redeemed for a reward of their choice. Points are collected by the participant collecting short numerical codes as they visit the museum, either by texting them with their phone, or entering them on kiosks on the ground floor.
These activities take both long-term and one-off forms. A scavenger hunt may be run on a single evening, for example, with visitors solving clues, identifying paintings and gaining points. On the long term side, each gallery entrance in the museum has a code affixed to it denoting the exhibition inside: visitors can gain points by uploading these codes. Other 'challenges' are also available, such as gaining points by signing up a friend as a new Friend on your visit. On this level, the Friends operates within the mode of 'gamification' - the application of elements of game playing (for example, point scoring and unlocking levels) to other areas of activity, including the physical world. Gamification techniques have been adopted by many museums in efforts to make their exhibition "stickier" and provide opportunities for deeper participation.
These kinds of activities are not innovative in themselves. The true innovation behind the Friends programme is the linking of these activities to large-scale data collection about individual visitors, which the museum can then analyse. As Anderson said in a 2014 interview, "We’re trying to incentivize people to represent what they’re doing, where they’re going, and how they’re spending their time." (Tozzi 2014)
In a 2014 paper, Stein and Wyman noted:
On my visit, Rob Stein showed me the visualisations he can perform with this data, contrasting the visitor patterns they are collecting with Census data. This allows them to generate insights such as understanding which neighbourhoods they are serving, over-serving and under-serving. An insight like this might see the museum draw back on marketing that is reaching a community of high visitors in order to reach a community of lower visitors, or experiment with new programmes to attract new audiences and then measure their success through the Friends data. By using the Census data as a proxy, the DMA can also extrapolate an estimate of the demographics (age, ethnicity, education and income) of their visitors at a scale inconceivable from traditional face to face, phone or online surveying.
In a podcast interview, Anderson noted that the data available through the Friends project lent itself to a more rigorous evaluation of the audience appeal of the museum's programming than ever before. (Inscho, Cairns and Anderson, 2014) However, the use of the data extends beyond internal review, and into fundraising. In mid 2015 Anderson noted that the data the museum was collecting was far more valuable than the lost revenue from admission charges. Or in a specific example from 2014:
The DMA's architectural footprint is very large - it spans a full city block, and the ground floor has three entrances located at the south (focused on car parking), west (adjacent to the Nasher Sculpture Center) and north (towards the city centre).
On the first day that I visited the museums I spent some time observing at the north and west entrances. I was immediately struck by the friendliness of the visitor host staff, and their engagement with visitors, greeting them as they entered, ascertaining if they were already members of the Friends, and moving quickly into a sales pitch that was practiced but not robotic if the person was not already signed up.
I was also struck by the visitors' willingness to hear the sales pitch out. This was my first visit to Texas and the state certainly lived up to its reputation for politeness. It was interesting to contrast the speed and precision with which the explanation for The Pen was delivered in New York to the leisurely and conversational manner of the Friends pitch.
This point should not be notable, but one of the visitor hosts I encountered greeting people on the ground floor on my visit used a wheelchair. This is the first time I have seen a front of house staffer with an obvious mobility restriction in a major museum. This gave me a very positive early impression of the DMA and its commitment to supporting staff.
After observing for about thirty minutes I went to sign up myself. The pitch I was given was focused on the transactional benefits I could receive (such as quickly gathering sufficient points to reimburse my parking costs - in a city dominated by cars, this is the most appealing short term reward for visitors and likely the key motivator to participant in code-collecting on an average visit).
The host walked me through the sign-up process on a touch screen. I was asked for my email address, phone number and birthdate. The first stumbling block was when I was asked for my postcode. There is no option to enter another country or international postcode and so the host did what he always did in these situations: used the DMA's own postcode. The museum will need to control for this in their data analysis.
The second stumbling block was the screen which asked me to select an avatar. This is a feature which has not been developed (I expect it is in place for future social/sharing developments) and the host explained to me "That doesn't do anything, they had something planned but it didn't work. I don't know why they don't remove it". When I pressed him gently on this he shrugged it off, saying "I'm just a lowly staff member": it was clear he felt like he could not influence the presentation of the tool he was promoting. His manner was warm and helpful throughout, and this was not delivered as a complaint, but more as a Well, what can you do about folks? observation.
The host explained the rewards system and quickly completed a couple of simple challenges for me, meaning that on my visit I could undertake a smaller number of activities myself and still gather enough points to redeem them for a reward that felt meaningful. doesn't feel like he can influence product but explains and promotes it well.
At this point I moved into the galleries. There were two main ways to gain points on the day I visited: by collecting codes from the entrances to galleries, and by collecting codes from specific artworks that were part of a Favourites scavenger hunt.
Collecting gallery codes is the simplest activity. As they are located at the entrance to the gallery, you do not actually have to enter the space or engage with the exhibits in order to earn the code. This could affect the accuracy of the data, as the assumption is that when a visitor enters a gallery code they do so in good faith (showing that they have visited that exhibit) rather than simply to rack up points. This is a low point activity however: the system is organised so as to reward more effortful engagements with higher rewards.
As I began moving around the galleries it became clear to me that the Friends engagement platform is not targeted to international visitors like me, who remained on their original data plan. The simplest way to gather codes is by texting them to the Friends platform: however, because I would be charged for each text, I had to instead note the codes down and then return to the kiosks on the ground floor and manually upload them. This interfered noticeably with what should've been a low-friction interaction.
I also found the gallery codes to be remarkably discreet in terms of design and placement, and I often missed them when walking into a gallery, as I was following the sightlines into the displays 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.
As part of my visit I also took part in the Faves scavenger hunt. I found that the design of this interaction was quite the opposite of the gallery codes. The DMA is an extremely large building, with four floors and a great number of galleries. Most are painted in muted hues, with equally muted label design. The labels that pick out Fave artworks however are large and bright red - immediately eye-catching when you enter a gallery and visually sweep it. The effect was to draw you to these specific works at the cost of all other works in the same space. The labels carried a code to be entered into the Friends platform to gain points: again, no further interaction or engagement was sought
As I experienced it, the DMA Friends programme requires only modest effort from the visitor, and evoked correspondingly low engagement. As a non-local, one-off visitor it added very little to my experience, and in fact the scavenger-hunt design pattern probably more disrupted than enriched my experience.
However, as a professional observer, I appreciated this. The programme is emphatically designed to increase repeat visitation by local people, and the activities and rewards are geared towards this. If the design had worked for me - a non-target visitor - I expect the experience for the target audience would be less compelling.
One thing I - perhaps naively - did not expect from the programme was to start receiving weekly emails from the museum with news about coming exhibitions and events, donation appeals and special offers. As a non-committed one-off visitor, these emails tend to be deleted immediately, unopened.
Overall visitor experience
Two observations really struck me as I reflected on my visit to the DMA.
The first was that the Friends platform really felt of a piece with the overall ground floor visitor orientation. The tone of communication and the design of the larger challenges (such as bringing friends with you to the museum) was aligned to the overall communication to visitors. Visiting guidelines at the museum, for example, emphasise "doing things right" rather than "don't do this" and are posted as very large signage on the inside doors of elevators. The building has very good wifi, and the ground floor's main feature (aside from the cafe) is an interactive creativity centre that is strongly appealing to adults as well as children. While the upper three floors are 'standard museum layout', the ground floor provides a coherent and friendly orientating experience that I think would be appealing to people who are new to, and possibly unsure about, visiting museums, and to family groups.
The second thing was the friendliness and engagement of the visitor hosts. I interviewed eight staff members in my time at the DMA and of these six told me - without prompting - that the most dramatic change in Anderson's time at the museum was the way visitor hosts roles were defined.
Barbie Barber, the head of visitor services, described this as a transformation from security culture to a hospitality culture. Staff who had previously been hired and trained to perform a security role - and explicitly discouraged from interacting with visitors - were now trained to think of themselves as hosts. Job descriptions were rewritten, with the mission put at the top, and training on the mission was instated.
New ongoing training was instituted: visitor hosts now attend training every Friday morning from staff throughout the museum. Visitor host staff can now take on training roles themselves, and a previously missing element of career progression has been built into the role. Visitor host staff have also been given more authority: for example, the complaint form has been removed, and visitor hosts encouraged to resolve problems on the spot themselves or take responsibility for following complaints up.
In a 2014 presentation, Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman emphasised the importance of this transformation:
In 2013 the DMA, together with partners from the Denver Art Museum, Grace Museum (Abilene, Texas), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia), was awarded a National Leadership Grant for US$450,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to pilot a version of the Friends software in each of the partner museums.
On my research trip I visited Mia, where excitement about the opportunities afforded by the software, coupled with work on their customer relationship management software and a realignment of their membership programme to introduce a free entry level with benefits (a US$5-10 gift per month is encouraged; the next level begins at US$150/year).
At Mia I heard a strong focus on tracking and sharing visitors' consumer behaviour as well as as their visit behaviour. This accords well with the data presented by Diana Pan of MOMA at Museums and the Web Asia on members' shopping behaviour and the museum's action to maximise revenue. Staff at Mia were particularly interested in how visitors who signed up for free membership could be engaged in a more philanthropic mindset and moved on to a paid level of membership or encouraged to donate regularly to museum activities.
Over the duration of my trip, and then at the Museums and the Web Asia and National Digital Forum conferences, I became increasingly discomforted about some of the conversations I had had relating to the collection and use of visitor data. The phrase 'if you're not paying for it, you're the product' has been much bandied about the internet over the past five years, and has become increasingly familiar to those of us who use free services, such as Facebook and Twitter, with the lurking - or overt - knowledge that access to our attention is being sold to advertisers.
I am not suggesting that museums are taking a malicious or exploitative approach to data collection, or storing and using this data in anything but an honourable and secure manner. However, I am strongly swayed in my thinking about my sector's use of data by thinkers such as Cory Doctorow and Maciej Ceglowski, who have likened our current approaches to data collection and retention to the nuclear waste industry:
It is not difficult, in a time of falling public funding and increased competition for the philanthropic dollar, to imagine a future scenario where selling the data we collect on our visitors to third parties becomes an appealing - or necessary - scenario. I believe it behoves us, as institutions trusted for centuries now to collect, manage and preserve our society's material culture and expressions of creativity and knowledge, to apply the same forethought and ethics to the data we collect from and use on behalf of the public, and ensure we are always acting in the best interests of the people we exist to serve.
What impresses me about the DMA Friends programme is the rigour and ambition of the thought behind it. The programme is designed to address many of the central questions facing museums today: How do we reach out to non-visitors? How do we create engaging experiences? How do we know who is visiting us, and what they're doing? How do we provide information to current and future funders on our performance? It does this in a manner that is scalable, and that draws on many parts of the museum, from education to visitor hosts.
New Zealand is fortunate in that our publicly funded museums operate largely on the basis of free entry, meaning this barrier to access has been far less significant in our history. There is much we can learn however from American museums' approach to membership programmes, especially as they seek to move on from a transactional to an engagement model.
In the time since I returned to New Zealand, both Maxwell Anderson and Rob Stein have resigned from the DMA. The pair came to the museum together from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) where they evolved much of the thinking that went into the DMA's programmes, including free admission and data collection. Since Anderson moved on from the IMA the decision has been to reinstate charged entry, on the basis that the draw-down on the museum's endowment was too great to sustain the loss in admissions revenue.
It has become clear to me that innovation in the digital realm is strongly driven by individual personalities and aspirations. The digital world moves swiftly - especially compared to the "museum world", which is a steady and slow-paced beast. With driving figures such as Max Anderson and Rob Stein moving on, I will be watching with interest to see whether the changes in culture and operating they introduced become embedded in the DMA's DNA, or if the institution morphs again under a new leadership team.
On the Dallas Museum of Art's Friends programme
https://www.dma.org/friends.
See also
Michael Granberry, 'Dallas Museum of Art takes bold step of offering free general admission AND free memberships', The Dallas Morning News, 27 November 2012 http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2012/11/dallas-museum-of-art-takes-bold-step-of-offering-free-general-admission-and-free-memberships.html/
Michael Granberry, 'DMA thrives during 2013 with free admission, new revenue', The Dallas Morning News, 27 December 2013 http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/arts/columnists/michael-granberry/20131227-art-notes-dma-thrives-during-2013-with-free-admission-new-revenue.ece
John Tozzi, 'Dallas Museum of Art Trades Memberships for Data', Bloomberg Business, 20 February 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-02-20/dallas-museum-of-art-trades-memberships-for-data
Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman, 'Nurturing Engagement: How Technology and Business Model Alignment can Transform Visitor Participation in the Museum', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Portland, 2014 http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/nurturing-engagement/
Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman, 'Seeing the Forest and the Trees: How Engagement Analytics Can Help Museums Connect to Audiences at Scale', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Portland, 2014 http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/seeing-the-forest-and-the-trees-how-engagement-analytics-can-help-museums-connect-to-audiences-at-scale/
Director Maxwell Anderson interviewed by Jeffrey Inscho and Suse Cairns, 2014 https://soundcloud.com/museopunks/014-the-economics-of-free
'Dallas Museum of Art’s DMA Friends Program Home to 100,000 Members', press release, Dallas Museum of Art, 16 April 2015 https://www.dma.org/press-release/dallas-museum-art-s-dma-friends-program-home-100000-members
Rob Stein, Emerald Cassidy, Jonathan Finkelstein, Andrea Fulton, Douglas Hegley, Amy Heibel, Shyam Oberoi, Kate Tinworth, and Bruce Wyman, 'Scaling up: Engagement platforms and large-scale collaboration', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Chicago, April 2015 http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/scaling-up-engagement-platforms-and-large-scale-collaboration/
On free entrance, repeat visitation and membership programmes
On Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans programme https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/category/1stfans/
American Museums Memberships Conference proceedings http://americanmuseummembership.org/resources
Maxwell L. Anderson, 'Metrics of Success in Art Museums', Getty Leadership Institute, 2004 http://cgu.edu/pdffiles/gli/metrics.pdf
'Going Free? Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and General Admission Fees', Office of Policy and Analysis, Smithsonian Institute, April 2007 https://www.si.edu/Content/opanda/docs/Rpts2007/07.04.Admissions.Final.pdf
Nina Simon, '1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum', Museums 2.0, 12 February 2009 http://museumtwo.blogspot.co.nz/2009/02/1stfans-audience-specific-membership.html
Julie Rega, 'Museum Membership Programs: Innovation in a Troubled Economy', MA thesis, Seton Hall University, 2011 http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1210&context=theses
Ford W. Bell, 'How Are Museums Supported Financially in the U.S.?', Embassy of the United States of America, March 2012 http://photos.state.gov/libraries/amgov/133183/english/P_You_Asked_How_Are_Museums_Supported_Financially.pdf
Shelley Bernstein, 'A sunset for 1st Fans', 11 May 2012 https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2012/05/11/a-sunset-for-1stfans
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'How Gen Y is changing museum and non-profit memberships', 30 October 2012 http://colleendilen.com/2012/10/30/how-gen-y-will-change-museum-and-nonprofit-membership-structures-data/
Lee Rosenbaum, 'Dallas Fallacy: Should Museums’ Admission Be Free?', CultureGrrl, 3 December 2012 http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2012/12/dallas_fallacy_should_museums.html
Elizabeth Olsen, 'Looking for Ways to Groom Repeat Visitors', New York Times, 20 March 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/museums-look-for-ways-to-groom-repeat-visitors.html
Tyler Green, 'Why more art museums will be free – and soon', Modern Art Notes, 8 January 2014, http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2014/01/why-more-art-museums-will-be-free-and-soon/
Mostafa Heddaya, 'The Price of Admission: The New Whitney and Museum Tickets in New York', Bloiun ArtInfo, 11 May 2015 http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1152388/the-price-of-admission-the-new-whitney-and-museum-tickets-in
Amy Langfield, 'Art museums find going free comes with a cost', Fortune, 1 June 2015 http://fortune.com/2015/06/01/free-museums/
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'How Free Admission Really Affects Museum Attendance', 12 August 2015, http://colleendilen.com/2015/08/12/how-free-admission-really-affects-museum-attendance-data/
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'The membership benefits that millennials want from cultural organizations', 21 December 2015 http://colleendilen.com/2015/12/21/the-membership-benefits-that-millennials-want-from-cultural-organizations-data/
'Art museums by the numbers', Association of Art Museum Directors, 7 January 2016 https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Art%20Museums%20By%20The%20Numbers%202015.pdf
For concerns around data collection and retention
Coy Doctorow, 'Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste', The Guardian, 15 January 2008 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security
Maciej Ceglowski, 'Haunted by Data', paper given at the Strata+Hadoop World conference, New York City, 1 October 2015 http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
James Bridle, 'Big Data? No Thanks', paper given at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference in Toronto, October 2015, published 2 November 2015 http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/
Courtney Johnston 'Cultural institutions and the social compact', paper given at the National and State Libraries of Australasia digital citizenship conference, Wellington, 12 November 2015 http://best-of-3.blogspot.co.nz/2015/11/cultural-institutions-and-social-compact.html
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
1.1. Introduction
Museum membership programmes have two main objectives: to generate an unrestricted source of revenue for the museum, and to create a core group of supporters who will attend exhibitions and events, spread the word about the museum's activities, and hopefully come to further contribute to the museum through donations and bequests. Membership levels are generally tiered: at the lowest levels, membership is generally seen as a direct exchange for benefits (free or discounted exhibition entry, parking, merchandise etc) and the cost of acquiring and servicing members usually takes up a significant portion of the revenue generated; at higher levels, the revenue often outweighs the benefits received, and membership is seen as a form of philanthropy.
Museums are increasingly concerned about how to attract new members, and are not seeing younger visitors transition into becoming members in the way their predecessors did. Research has been conducted into 'millennials' attitudes towards museum membership, and shows changing priorities: while free admission is still the highest priority, younger generations are less interested in exclusive access or perks, and are increasingly interested in showing their support for social causes. (Dilenschneider 2012, 2015).
Like many museum directors, I am interested in new approaches to museum membership programmes. Without doubt, the most discussed project in this area in the past three years has been the Dallas Museum of Art's Friends programme. On this trip I both wanted to meet with staff at the museum to learn about how the programme had been implemented and evaluated, and to have the experience of signing up as a member and visiting the museum as a Friend myself.
1.2 Museum memberships in the internet age
My own observation is that over the past ten years, with museum's rapid adoption of social media platforms, the concepts of loyalty, friendship and access have changed. Museums now regularly share online the kinds of stories and insights that were once the purview of a museum member on a behind the scenes tour. People follow museums online that may be nowhere near their geographical location, enjoying a sense of connection and support that may never translate into a physical visit.
The Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans programme was an early experiment in museum membership in the online world. The programme, which ran from 2009 to 2012, was designed to appeal to two groups who did not buy traditional museum memberships: regular attendees of their Target First Saturdays (free admission days) and for online fans of the museum. Often described as a 'social media membership', the programme offered access to private channels on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, where exclusive content was shared, and physical meet-up events at the museum, for $20 a year. The creators, Will Cary (Memberships Manager 2008-2010) and Shelley Bernstein (Vice Director of Digital Engagement & Technology), saw the programme as a way of offering a form of membership that was not about buying cheaper access to the museum, but about a deeper relationship with the museum and greater two-way interaction.
This thinking was very much in the air in 2008 (when the programme was conceived), when museums were moving rapidly into the area of online community management (following the lead of early champions such as photo-sharing site Flickr) and the use of social media to, for the first time, offer large-scale personalised two-way communication between the museum and its audiences. The programme, while loved by its participants, stalled in its growth and moreover did not transition members from this 'beginner' level to higher tiers of membership, a development path that is key to generating the revenue that is, after all, part of the reason for having membership programmes. The programme was shut down in mid 2012.
The Dallas Museum of Art's Friends membership programme could be seen as an evolution of this thinking about what membership looks like in an online world. Where Brooklyn Museum took its model from community management, the web zeitgeist of its time, the DMA's is informed by our contemporary focus on data collection and data mining.
In late 2012, the DMA announced they about to reinstate free general admission to the museum. This in itself was not innovative: approximately one third of American art museums have free admission (although this is most common in organisations located in universities). In the same announcement though the museum announced a new, free level of museum membership, the 'Friends', that would allow participants to collect points that could later been converted into their choice of rewards. At the time of the announcement director Maxwell L. Anderson stated that "“Nobody has ever done this. ... We’re going to build a model for museum engagement that we believe every other museum like us will want to have.” (Granberry 2012)
Anderson has long argued that museum admissions bring only a tiny fraction of museum's earned revenue (2%-5%) while presenting a significant financial and social barrier to attendance, especially to non-traditional audiences. (it is worth noting that the DMA received a US$9 million donation to fund free admission, and to facilitate the digitisation of the permanent collection. As director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art Anderson reinstated free admission with the ambition of removing barriers to access; the Friends programme was the next iteration of this aspiration to expand and diversify museum attendance.
While this was not the message of early announcements, the Friends programme quickly became framed by the museum and by commentators as an exchange of data for access. Within a year, arts commentator Tyler Green described it as a successful "data-for-free-admission deal". (Green 2014) In this way, DMA Friends trades upon our growing comfort with (or resignation to) sharing a little bit of information about ourselves in return for access or convenience: handing over our email address for a discount, using Facebook to create an account on another website, accepting cookies on a newspaper's website. Deliberately or unwittingly, we are accessing the bounty of the internet seemingly for free, but really at the cost of the sharing of information about our age, gender, location, interests, shopping history, and more.
1.3 DMA Friends programme - objectives, implementation, and philosophy
The Friends programme has three main aims:
- to promote the museum to non-visitors
- to increase engagement and repeat visitation
- to use the data gathered from tracking members of the programme to inform museum operations.
When the DMA made its double announcement, Anderson was quoted as saying "“When somebody from South Dallas walks up to the front desk, and the person behind the counter says, ‘Welcome to the DMA – are you members?’ What are they hearing? It’s like walking into a country club. It freaks you out. It’s exclusionary. I want everybody to feel they belong here, so I want everybody to be a member.'" (Granberry 2012)
Like all museums, the DMA is seeking to become more relevant to its community, and to attract an audience that more accurately reflects the population that surrounds it than the statistically-typical white, older, more educated, usually female museum visitor. Since the 1970s the museum world has been seeking to break down barriers to access - physical, financial and perceptual - through education, outreach, programming and partnerships. However, the perception of the museum as a place that "not for people like me" amongst non-white, lower income people is still strong. The dual announcement was an opportunity for the museum to reach out to non-visitors with a striking new offer, and to engage with every visitor as they entered the museum in a new way.
In a 2014 presentation, the DMA stated "The DMA staff’s top priority is to increase the number of Friends who come back to the Museum tracked by the program." (Stein and Wyman 2014) Offering free admission enables people to make more frequent, shorter and ad hoc visits, rather than seeing visiting as an investment. While museum such as the Met, the Guggenheim and MOMA are tourist icons and draw a high proportion of visitors from domestic and international tourism, museums in most American (and other) cities are serving an audience largely living within driving distance. This is not to dismiss the important role museums play in promoting the reputation of a city and attracting visitors nationally and internationally, but at the same time, driving an increase in repeat visitation from local is an important goal for museums that want to be valued and valuable civic assets.
Placing an engagement layer over free general admission targets the DMA's goal of increased repeat visitation and engagement. In a 2013 paper, Rob Stein (then Deputy Director at the DMA) and museums consultant Bruce Wyman noted the urgent need for museums to "embrace the culture of participation" and respond to contemporary society's desire to be co-creators of the experiences we encounter, rather than passive consumers. (Stein and Wyman, 2013) They noted that despite significant effort from curators, interpreters and designers to construct defined and engaging exhibition layouts, self-directed visitors often "graze" their ways through museums, not necessarily consuming texts and objects in the order museum staff thought that would be experienced and understood. At the same time, Stein and Wyman noted that people's learning is better and their experience more satisfying when they feel they have actively participated in the museum's offering.
The visitor-facing aspect of the Friends programme therefore seek to create multiple pathways for people to engage with and enjoy the museum. Once a visitor is signed up for the programme (handing over their name, contact details and postcode), they have access to the Friend's 'digital engagement platform'. The platform uses a bespoke digital badging system, and a model familiar to any user of an incentive system: by completing certain activities, the visitor collects points, that can then be redeemed for a reward of their choice. Points are collected by the participant collecting short numerical codes as they visit the museum, either by texting them with their phone, or entering them on kiosks on the ground floor.
These activities take both long-term and one-off forms. A scavenger hunt may be run on a single evening, for example, with visitors solving clues, identifying paintings and gaining points. On the long term side, each gallery entrance in the museum has a code affixed to it denoting the exhibition inside: visitors can gain points by uploading these codes. Other 'challenges' are also available, such as gaining points by signing up a friend as a new Friend on your visit. On this level, the Friends operates within the mode of 'gamification' - the application of elements of game playing (for example, point scoring and unlocking levels) to other areas of activity, including the physical world. Gamification techniques have been adopted by many museums in efforts to make their exhibition "stickier" and provide opportunities for deeper participation.
These kinds of activities are not innovative in themselves. The true innovation behind the Friends programme is the linking of these activities to large-scale data collection about individual visitors, which the museum can then analyse. As Anderson said in a 2014 interview, "We’re trying to incentivize people to represent what they’re doing, where they’re going, and how they’re spending their time." (Tozzi 2014)
In a 2014 paper, Stein and Wyman noted:
"In the first year, nearly 50,000 individuals have joined the program, with a running average of 900 new friends per week, primarily from a local audience. Becoming a DMA Friend requires direct on-site enrollment and connection to Museum staff, making the enrollment statistics an important measure of local adoption. The Museum has awarded over 343,000 badges for participation during the launch year and has given away nearly 12,000 rewards connected to points earned in the program.
In addition to providing a means for the staff of the Museum to structure and measure its performance for generating engagement, the DMA Friends program also generates copious amounts of data about the behavior of individuals as they connect with the Museum’s collections and programs. Truly one of the few big data problems in the museum-space, the Friends program generates more than 21.8 million discrete fields of data annually."This data not only allows the museum to measure what events and exhibitions Friends members attend, when, and how often (on the assumption Friends are diligently gathering points as they visit): the museum can also associate this visitation data with the postcode information collected at sign-up.
On my visit, Rob Stein showed me the visualisations he can perform with this data, contrasting the visitor patterns they are collecting with Census data. This allows them to generate insights such as understanding which neighbourhoods they are serving, over-serving and under-serving. An insight like this might see the museum draw back on marketing that is reaching a community of high visitors in order to reach a community of lower visitors, or experiment with new programmes to attract new audiences and then measure their success through the Friends data. By using the Census data as a proxy, the DMA can also extrapolate an estimate of the demographics (age, ethnicity, education and income) of their visitors at a scale inconceivable from traditional face to face, phone or online surveying.
In a podcast interview, Anderson noted that the data available through the Friends project lent itself to a more rigorous evaluation of the audience appeal of the museum's programming than ever before. (Inscho, Cairns and Anderson, 2014) However, the use of the data extends beyond internal review, and into fundraising. In mid 2015 Anderson noted that the data the museum was collecting was far more valuable than the lost revenue from admission charges. Or in a specific example from 2014:
"... we have 10,000 corporations headquartered in the Dallas area, we’re about to embark on a robust new recruitment drive around corporate membership. For the first time, we’re going to be literate about who their potential customers are and whom we’re serving. Obviously, we’d never divulge individual data, but now we can say to corporate philanthropy executives, ‘This is whom we’re reaching, and here’s how it’s relevant to you.’" (Green, 2014)
1.4 DMA Friends - my experience
The DMA's architectural footprint is very large - it spans a full city block, and the ground floor has three entrances located at the south (focused on car parking), west (adjacent to the Nasher Sculpture Center) and north (towards the city centre).
On the first day that I visited the museums I spent some time observing at the north and west entrances. I was immediately struck by the friendliness of the visitor host staff, and their engagement with visitors, greeting them as they entered, ascertaining if they were already members of the Friends, and moving quickly into a sales pitch that was practiced but not robotic if the person was not already signed up.
I was also struck by the visitors' willingness to hear the sales pitch out. This was my first visit to Texas and the state certainly lived up to its reputation for politeness. It was interesting to contrast the speed and precision with which the explanation for The Pen was delivered in New York to the leisurely and conversational manner of the Friends pitch.
This point should not be notable, but one of the visitor hosts I encountered greeting people on the ground floor on my visit used a wheelchair. This is the first time I have seen a front of house staffer with an obvious mobility restriction in a major museum. This gave me a very positive early impression of the DMA and its commitment to supporting staff.
After observing for about thirty minutes I went to sign up myself. The pitch I was given was focused on the transactional benefits I could receive (such as quickly gathering sufficient points to reimburse my parking costs - in a city dominated by cars, this is the most appealing short term reward for visitors and likely the key motivator to participant in code-collecting on an average visit).
The host walked me through the sign-up process on a touch screen. I was asked for my email address, phone number and birthdate. The first stumbling block was when I was asked for my postcode. There is no option to enter another country or international postcode and so the host did what he always did in these situations: used the DMA's own postcode. The museum will need to control for this in their data analysis.
The second stumbling block was the screen which asked me to select an avatar. This is a feature which has not been developed (I expect it is in place for future social/sharing developments) and the host explained to me "That doesn't do anything, they had something planned but it didn't work. I don't know why they don't remove it". When I pressed him gently on this he shrugged it off, saying "I'm just a lowly staff member": it was clear he felt like he could not influence the presentation of the tool he was promoting. His manner was warm and helpful throughout, and this was not delivered as a complaint, but more as a Well, what can you do about folks? observation.
The host explained the rewards system and quickly completed a couple of simple challenges for me, meaning that on my visit I could undertake a smaller number of activities myself and still gather enough points to redeem them for a reward that felt meaningful. doesn't feel like he can influence product but explains and promotes it well.
At this point I moved into the galleries. There were two main ways to gain points on the day I visited: by collecting codes from the entrances to galleries, and by collecting codes from specific artworks that were part of a Favourites scavenger hunt.
Collecting gallery codes is the simplest activity. As they are located at the entrance to the gallery, you do not actually have to enter the space or engage with the exhibits in order to earn the code. This could affect the accuracy of the data, as the assumption is that when a visitor enters a gallery code they do so in good faith (showing that they have visited that exhibit) rather than simply to rack up points. This is a low point activity however: the system is organised so as to reward more effortful engagements with higher rewards.
As I began moving around the galleries it became clear to me that the Friends engagement platform is not targeted to international visitors like me, who remained on their original data plan. The simplest way to gather codes is by texting them to the Friends platform: however, because I would be charged for each text, I had to instead note the codes down and then return to the kiosks on the ground floor and manually upload them. This interfered noticeably with what should've been a low-friction interaction.
I also found the gallery codes to be remarkably discreet in terms of design and placement, and I often missed them when walking into a gallery, as I was following the sightlines into the displays 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.
As part of my visit I also took part in the Faves scavenger hunt. I found that the design of this interaction was quite the opposite of the gallery codes. The DMA is an extremely large building, with four floors and a great number of galleries. Most are painted in muted hues, with equally muted label design. The labels that pick out Fave artworks however are large and bright red - immediately eye-catching when you enter a gallery and visually sweep it. The effect was to draw you to these specific works at the cost of all other works in the same space. The labels carried a code to be entered into the Friends platform to gain points: again, no further interaction or engagement was sought
As I experienced it, the DMA Friends programme requires only modest effort from the visitor, and evoked correspondingly low engagement. As a non-local, one-off visitor it added very little to my experience, and in fact the scavenger-hunt design pattern probably more disrupted than enriched my experience.
However, as a professional observer, I appreciated this. The programme is emphatically designed to increase repeat visitation by local people, and the activities and rewards are geared towards this. If the design had worked for me - a non-target visitor - I expect the experience for the target audience would be less compelling.
One thing I - perhaps naively - did not expect from the programme was to start receiving weekly emails from the museum with news about coming exhibitions and events, donation appeals and special offers. As a non-committed one-off visitor, these emails tend to be deleted immediately, unopened.
Overall visitor experience
Two observations really struck me as I reflected on my visit to the DMA.
The first was that the Friends platform really felt of a piece with the overall ground floor visitor orientation. The tone of communication and the design of the larger challenges (such as bringing friends with you to the museum) was aligned to the overall communication to visitors. Visiting guidelines at the museum, for example, emphasise "doing things right" rather than "don't do this" and are posted as very large signage on the inside doors of elevators. The building has very good wifi, and the ground floor's main feature (aside from the cafe) is an interactive creativity centre that is strongly appealing to adults as well as children. While the upper three floors are 'standard museum layout', the ground floor provides a coherent and friendly orientating experience that I think would be appealing to people who are new to, and possibly unsure about, visiting museums, and to family groups.
The second thing was the friendliness and engagement of the visitor hosts. I interviewed eight staff members in my time at the DMA and of these six told me - without prompting - that the most dramatic change in Anderson's time at the museum was the way visitor hosts roles were defined.
Barbie Barber, the head of visitor services, described this as a transformation from security culture to a hospitality culture. Staff who had previously been hired and trained to perform a security role - and explicitly discouraged from interacting with visitors - were now trained to think of themselves as hosts. Job descriptions were rewritten, with the mission put at the top, and training on the mission was instated.
New ongoing training was instituted: visitor hosts now attend training every Friday morning from staff throughout the museum. Visitor host staff can now take on training roles themselves, and a previously missing element of career progression has been built into the role. Visitor host staff have also been given more authority: for example, the complaint form has been removed, and visitor hosts encouraged to resolve problems on the spot themselves or take responsibility for following complaints up.
In a 2014 presentation, Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman emphasised the importance of this transformation:
"Believing that the ultimate success of an engagement platform in museums rests on the positive interactions visitors have with museum staff, the DMA chose to reorient its staff in anticipation of the program. This internal realignment is one of the most critical factors in the program’s success to date.
To start, an existing force of gallery attendants were relocated from the Security department to the Visitor Services department and retrained to focus on hospitality. A warm and sincere welcome is the first interaction a visitor should have with the Museum. The newly minted Visitor Services Attendants embraced the change warmly and grew to see it as their primary role to ensure that the entire city of Dallas would feel a part of the Museum when they arrived. Additionally, small teams of Visitor Services Attendants were redeployed to act as ambassadors for the DMA Friends program. Their goals were to inform new visitors—asking them to join if interested—and welcome return visitors with a smile. Team members began to challenge themselves to hone their “pitch” for DMA Friends and used simple graphs and charts to track their progress each day and week. The positive competition proved infectious and resulted in significant gains seen in new DMA Friends recruitment that continues to this day." (Stein and Wyman, 2014)
1.5 Future rollouts
In 2013 the DMA, together with partners from the Denver Art Museum, Grace Museum (Abilene, Texas), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia), was awarded a National Leadership Grant for US$450,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to pilot a version of the Friends software in each of the partner museums.
On my research trip I visited Mia, where excitement about the opportunities afforded by the software, coupled with work on their customer relationship management software and a realignment of their membership programme to introduce a free entry level with benefits (a US$5-10 gift per month is encouraged; the next level begins at US$150/year).
At Mia I heard a strong focus on tracking and sharing visitors' consumer behaviour as well as as their visit behaviour. This accords well with the data presented by Diana Pan of MOMA at Museums and the Web Asia on members' shopping behaviour and the museum's action to maximise revenue. Staff at Mia were particularly interested in how visitors who signed up for free membership could be engaged in a more philanthropic mindset and moved on to a paid level of membership or encouraged to donate regularly to museum activities.
1.6 Data concerns
Over the duration of my trip, and then at the Museums and the Web Asia and National Digital Forum conferences, I became increasingly discomforted about some of the conversations I had had relating to the collection and use of visitor data. The phrase 'if you're not paying for it, you're the product' has been much bandied about the internet over the past five years, and has become increasingly familiar to those of us who use free services, such as Facebook and Twitter, with the lurking - or overt - knowledge that access to our attention is being sold to advertisers.
I am not suggesting that museums are taking a malicious or exploitative approach to data collection, or storing and using this data in anything but an honourable and secure manner. However, I am strongly swayed in my thinking about my sector's use of data by thinkers such as Cory Doctorow and Maciej Ceglowski, who have likened our current approaches to data collection and retention to the nuclear waste industry:
"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, 2008)
"I ... ask you to imagine data not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.
In particular, I'd like to draw a parallel between what we're doing and nuclear energy, another technology whose beneficial uses we could never quite untangle from the harmful ones.
A singular problem of nuclear power is that it generated deadly waste whose lifespan was far longer than the institutions we could build to guard it. Nuclear waste remains dangerous for many thousands of years.
... The data we're collecting about people has this same odd property. Tech companies come and go, not to mention the fact that we share and sell personal data promiscuously.
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." (Ceglowski, 2015)
It is not difficult, in a time of falling public funding and increased competition for the philanthropic dollar, to imagine a future scenario where selling the data we collect on our visitors to third parties becomes an appealing - or necessary - scenario. I believe it behoves us, as institutions trusted for centuries now to collect, manage and preserve our society's material culture and expressions of creativity and knowledge, to apply the same forethought and ethics to the data we collect from and use on behalf of the public, and ensure we are always acting in the best interests of the people we exist to serve.
1.7 Conclusion
What impresses me about the DMA Friends programme is the rigour and ambition of the thought behind it. The programme is designed to address many of the central questions facing museums today: How do we reach out to non-visitors? How do we create engaging experiences? How do we know who is visiting us, and what they're doing? How do we provide information to current and future funders on our performance? It does this in a manner that is scalable, and that draws on many parts of the museum, from education to visitor hosts.
New Zealand is fortunate in that our publicly funded museums operate largely on the basis of free entry, meaning this barrier to access has been far less significant in our history. There is much we can learn however from American museums' approach to membership programmes, especially as they seek to move on from a transactional to an engagement model.
In the time since I returned to New Zealand, both Maxwell Anderson and Rob Stein have resigned from the DMA. The pair came to the museum together from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) where they evolved much of the thinking that went into the DMA's programmes, including free admission and data collection. Since Anderson moved on from the IMA the decision has been to reinstate charged entry, on the basis that the draw-down on the museum's endowment was too great to sustain the loss in admissions revenue.
It has become clear to me that innovation in the digital realm is strongly driven by individual personalities and aspirations. The digital world moves swiftly - especially compared to the "museum world", which is a steady and slow-paced beast. With driving figures such as Max Anderson and Rob Stein moving on, I will be watching with interest to see whether the changes in culture and operating they introduced become embedded in the DMA's DNA, or if the institution morphs again under a new leadership team.
1.8 Further information
On the Dallas Museum of Art's Friends programme
https://www.dma.org/friends.
See also
Michael Granberry, 'Dallas Museum of Art takes bold step of offering free general admission AND free memberships', The Dallas Morning News, 27 November 2012 http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2012/11/dallas-museum-of-art-takes-bold-step-of-offering-free-general-admission-and-free-memberships.html/
Michael Granberry, 'DMA thrives during 2013 with free admission, new revenue', The Dallas Morning News, 27 December 2013 http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/arts/columnists/michael-granberry/20131227-art-notes-dma-thrives-during-2013-with-free-admission-new-revenue.ece
John Tozzi, 'Dallas Museum of Art Trades Memberships for Data', Bloomberg Business, 20 February 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-02-20/dallas-museum-of-art-trades-memberships-for-data
Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman, 'Nurturing Engagement: How Technology and Business Model Alignment can Transform Visitor Participation in the Museum', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Portland, 2014 http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/nurturing-engagement/
Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman, 'Seeing the Forest and the Trees: How Engagement Analytics Can Help Museums Connect to Audiences at Scale', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Portland, 2014 http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/seeing-the-forest-and-the-trees-how-engagement-analytics-can-help-museums-connect-to-audiences-at-scale/
Director Maxwell Anderson interviewed by Jeffrey Inscho and Suse Cairns, 2014 https://soundcloud.com/museopunks/014-the-economics-of-free
'Dallas Museum of Art’s DMA Friends Program Home to 100,000 Members', press release, Dallas Museum of Art, 16 April 2015 https://www.dma.org/press-release/dallas-museum-art-s-dma-friends-program-home-100000-members
Rob Stein, Emerald Cassidy, Jonathan Finkelstein, Andrea Fulton, Douglas Hegley, Amy Heibel, Shyam Oberoi, Kate Tinworth, and Bruce Wyman, 'Scaling up: Engagement platforms and large-scale collaboration', paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Chicago, April 2015 http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/scaling-up-engagement-platforms-and-large-scale-collaboration/
On free entrance, repeat visitation and membership programmes
On Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans programme https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/category/1stfans/
American Museums Memberships Conference proceedings http://americanmuseummembership.org/resources
Maxwell L. Anderson, 'Metrics of Success in Art Museums', Getty Leadership Institute, 2004 http://cgu.edu/pdffiles/gli/metrics.pdf
'Going Free? Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and General Admission Fees', Office of Policy and Analysis, Smithsonian Institute, April 2007 https://www.si.edu/Content/opanda/docs/Rpts2007/07.04.Admissions.Final.pdf
Nina Simon, '1stfans: An Audience-Specific Membership Program at the Brooklyn Museum', Museums 2.0, 12 February 2009 http://museumtwo.blogspot.co.nz/2009/02/1stfans-audience-specific-membership.html
Julie Rega, 'Museum Membership Programs: Innovation in a Troubled Economy', MA thesis, Seton Hall University, 2011 http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1210&context=theses
Ford W. Bell, 'How Are Museums Supported Financially in the U.S.?', Embassy of the United States of America, March 2012 http://photos.state.gov/libraries/amgov/133183/english/P_You_Asked_How_Are_Museums_Supported_Financially.pdf
Shelley Bernstein, 'A sunset for 1st Fans', 11 May 2012 https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2012/05/11/a-sunset-for-1stfans
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'How Gen Y is changing museum and non-profit memberships', 30 October 2012 http://colleendilen.com/2012/10/30/how-gen-y-will-change-museum-and-nonprofit-membership-structures-data/
Lee Rosenbaum, 'Dallas Fallacy: Should Museums’ Admission Be Free?', CultureGrrl, 3 December 2012 http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2012/12/dallas_fallacy_should_museums.html
Elizabeth Olsen, 'Looking for Ways to Groom Repeat Visitors', New York Times, 20 March 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/museums-look-for-ways-to-groom-repeat-visitors.html
Tyler Green, 'Why more art museums will be free – and soon', Modern Art Notes, 8 January 2014, http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2014/01/why-more-art-museums-will-be-free-and-soon/
Mostafa Heddaya, 'The Price of Admission: The New Whitney and Museum Tickets in New York', Bloiun ArtInfo, 11 May 2015 http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1152388/the-price-of-admission-the-new-whitney-and-museum-tickets-in
Amy Langfield, 'Art museums find going free comes with a cost', Fortune, 1 June 2015 http://fortune.com/2015/06/01/free-museums/
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'How Free Admission Really Affects Museum Attendance', 12 August 2015, http://colleendilen.com/2015/08/12/how-free-admission-really-affects-museum-attendance-data/
Colleen Dilenschneider, 'The membership benefits that millennials want from cultural organizations', 21 December 2015 http://colleendilen.com/2015/12/21/the-membership-benefits-that-millennials-want-from-cultural-organizations-data/
'Art museums by the numbers', Association of Art Museum Directors, 7 January 2016 https://aamd.org/sites/default/files/document/Art%20Museums%20By%20The%20Numbers%202015.pdf
For concerns around data collection and retention
Coy Doctorow, 'Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste', The Guardian, 15 January 2008 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/15/data.security
Maciej Ceglowski, 'Haunted by Data', paper given at the Strata+Hadoop World conference, New York City, 1 October 2015 http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
James Bridle, 'Big Data? No Thanks', paper given at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes conference in Toronto, October 2015, published 2 November 2015 http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/
Courtney Johnston 'Cultural institutions and the social compact', paper given at the National and State Libraries of Australasia digital citizenship conference, Wellington, 12 November 2015 http://best-of-3.blogspot.co.nz/2015/11/cultural-institutions-and-social-compact.html
Monday, 18 January 2016
WCMT Acquittal Draft: Visible Storage
I'm currently attacking, chunk by chunk, my acquittal for the funding I received from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for my research trip around American museums last year. It struck me that rather than release it all as one big fat PDF I might try posting drafts of sections here, for any feedback that might be forthcoming. This first posting looks at one of my four research areas, visible storage.
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
Open collections, or visible storage, is a general term used to describe public displays within museums where the emphasis is placed upon access and serendipitous discovery rather than a curated, white-wall experience. Visible storage is a way of giving museum visitors a feeling of being 'behind the scenes' in the normally off-limits art collection store, and addresses the oft-heard complaint that museums only display a tiny fraction of their permanent holdings at any given time.
Visible storage displays began being introduced in the mid 1970s, as museums moved towards a more educational and audience-focused mission. In these space, objects are usually displayed in fairly functional cases and shelving, closely grouped. Objects may be minimally labelled, or described through numbering, and handbooks or database access is provided to assist the visitor to learn more: lengthy descriptive labels are rare. Objects do not tend to be moved or exchanged often, although items may be withdrawn for exhibition or loan. Small temporary display spaces may be built into the larger space, offering the opportunity to create 'focus' exhibitions on certain groups of objects with more interpretation.
Sculpture, ceramics, glass, design objects, furniture and paintings are well suited to this form of long term display. Light-sensitive materials such as textiles and watercolours are rarely displayed in this manner, as the conservation risk is too high.
In American museums, visible storage ranges from small galleries, almost like nooks (such as that at the Dallas Museum of Art displaying ceramics and glass) to large purpose-built spaces that may include space for researchers to work. It is worth noting that while these study centres are presented as 'uncurated' spaces (suggesting that the objects on display have not been selected with the same level of curatorial decision-making as objects in a normal gallery exhibition, and that the display has not been designed with the same level of aesthetic attention) there is a strong shared visual language and interpretation approach to visible storage. A virtue is made of providing only minimal labelling or interpretation, meant to encourage browsing and a visual, rather than textual, engagement with the objects. Objects are grouped by medium, size, type, or place of origin (carved wooden toys / furniture / large sculpture / metalwork) as opposed to chronologically, thematically, or by artist, as a visitor would expect in a normal exhibition. Display cases and racks are functional (glass and metal cases, or large heavy drawers) or old-fashioned (small, wooden): white plinths of the sort used in collection or temporary galleries are rarely employed. The overarching narrative is that visible storage encourages unmediated access where visitors are free to make their own observations and engage in slow, close looking: this is, of course, as conscious a curatorial and design choice as any other arrangement of objects into a gallery display.
Between 1985 and 2001 the Henry Luce Foundation, through its American Art Program, gave significant amounts of funding to four museums to create visible storage spaces.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries/the-american-wing/774
In 1985 the Met received the first Luce Foundation grant to create a visible storage center. The 16,000 square foot facility named the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, opened in 1988 and displays a significant portion of their American fine art and decorative art collection (over 10,000 objects). Items are grouped by material (painting, sculpture, furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, silver and metalwork) and within those categories by date. Light-sensitive works such as textiles and watercolours are not on view but can be seen by appointment.
New York Historical Society
http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
The NYHS was the second recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage. In this instance, rather than fitting out a display space, the grant was used to create views into actual storage spaces, giving visual access to approximately 40,000 objects. This facility, the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, opened in 2000. The Center is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.
Brooklyn Museum
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/luce
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/small_wonders
The Brooklyn Museum received a $10 million grant in 2001 towards a reinstallation of their permanent collection galleries displaying their American Art collection, and a visible storage center. The Luce Center for American Art is a 5,000 square foot space displaying approximately 2000 objects, from Tiffany glass to contemporary furniture, and with nearly 600 paintings on rolling racks. Space is set aside for small feature exhibitions and representative selections of Native American and Spanish colonial objects are included. Database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
http://americanart.si.edu/luce/index.cfm
SAAM received a $10 million grant to create the Luce Foundation Center in 2001; $7 million towards the development of the Center and $3 million towards an endowment to support ongoing staffing and programmes. A library within the museum's 19th century building - previously the National Patents Office - was renovated to create the Center. Approximately 3,3000 objects are spread over three levels: large sculptures on the bottom floor, and then paintings and objects in cases cases and pneumatic drawers on two mezzanine levels. Objects on display vary from portrait miniatures to Roman glass vessels to folk art paintings. The drawers make it possible to display some light sensitive materials, as they are climate controlled and only lit when opened.
The Luce Conservation Center is adjacent to the space, allowing behind-the-scenes view of conservation procedures. Study tables and some database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
I first visited the Luce Foundation at SAAM in mid 2013. At the time I found the experience engaging; the eclectic mixing of objects, the lack of overt supervision which created a more intimate sense as a visitor - like browsing in someone's house while they were in another room. There was no-one to discourage photography on either visit, and the setting - wooden balustrades, large chandeliers, small staircases between floors - lends to the old-fashioned, romantic atmosphere - almost like a very good antique store.
The experience is however becoming tired. I did not notice any changes having taken place in the two years between my visits, and in fact a set of the pneumatic drawers that had were not functioning in 2013 were still out of order in 2015.
The database stations are becoming outmoded and the research space is basic. The Center was unstaffed on the weekend that I visited. While the bones are in place for a rich experience, my second visit to the space was curiously unengaging; this was a surprise to me, because my own tendencies as a visitor incline me towards galleries like this.
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art is entered off the permanent galleries displaying the American Art collection - being redesigned in early 2016, these galleries displayed American art, design and craft along with Native American and Spanish colonial-era art in eight thematic displays that were highly designed, richly coloured, and mixed objects from different genres in each display.
The Luce Center had a strikingly different aesthetic. The back of the space - behind a glass wall - is devoted to painting racks, of which only the first row is visible. The rest of the space is full of tall, multi-level glass and steel cases, giving a warehouse-like atmosphere. Lighting is kept dim, and many cases have a flashlight attached to them to allow for better inspection. The objects vary greatly in size, from jewellery in drawers to large statues in their own cases. Database access is provided through screens affixed to the sides of cases with a metal chair provided. The overall effect was more dramatic and contemporary than SAAM, but the space also felt dim, cool, and not conducive to lingering, compared, for example, to recent work done at the Museum to make the foyer a more hospitable space, with comfortable seating with inbuilt device chargers.
I met with the exhibition designer who had originally worked on the construction of the space. The industrial materials were chosen to be cost-effective, but also to contrast to the curated galleries. The brief sought to communicate the sense of the wealth and diversity of the collections, and this is achieved. The lighting is in need of renewal, but this is not a priority, and hence the space is darker than intended - with the spartan furnishings, the overall effect is a space rich for exploration, but not comfortable to spend time in.
While at the Brooklyn Museum I also visited Double Take: African Innovations, a temporary display of objects from the museum's African Art collection. This is the second shorter term exhibition of this collection, undertaken during a longer term renovation of the museum's first floor galleries.
The main gallery displays nearly 40 collection items arranged in 15 pairs or small groups, each exploring subjects, themes and artistic techniques that recur throughout African history: the emphasis is on continuity and innovation. Each display encourages viewers to draw connections between the artworks they are looking at. In an adjacent gallery, a further 150 items are displayed in what the curator describes as an 'unstructured sampling': the display method is more closely packed and presented with less interpretation than the next door gallery, but is still displayed in more a a 'gallery' aesthetic than the Luce Center. Visitors are encouraged to make their own new pairings of these objects through an interactive display, and share them on social media using a hashtag.
I found this mixed display - a modernist hang, where artworks are given a great deal of space and interpretation, alongside a denser, compacted display of multiple items on a similar theme - to be the most successful of the visible storage approaches I saw on my visit. Despite coming to this gallery at the end of my seven-hour visit to the museum, I was still pulled in to both the artworks and the pairing-making activity. The contrast between overtly curated display and ostensibly random sampling gives the impression of both an experience that has been created for you as the viewer, and an experience that is handed over to you to serendipitously explore, and to respond to in a concrete way. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/double_take_african_innovations
Visible storage and digitised collections have evolved alongside each other as responses to the constraint of physical space, and museums' inability to ever properly display more than a small percentage of their holdings in curated exhibitions. While the area of digital developments is extremely well documented, there is little research or evaluation generally available on the history, trends, and visitor experience of visible storage.
The general trend for new and planned visible storage spaces is to take a more dramatic or overtly designed approach to the design of displays, contra to the earlier emphasis on evoking or replicating the functional design of actual storage spaces.
For example, the York Museums has recently opened the Centre of Ceramic Art. The museum holds Britain's most significant collection of British studio pottery, and its building was recently redeveloped to create this centre. A large number of collection items are presented in a variety of ways: the 17-metre long Wall of Pots contains over 1000 objects from the Roman era to the present day, currently organised by colour; two domestically-scaled rooms have been created to display the collection of Anthony B Shaw, mingling objects with bookshelves; and for the opening of the centre ceramicist Clare Twomey was commissioned to create Manifest: 10,000 Hours, a towering installation of 10,000 identical white slip-cast vessels. http://www.centreofceramicart.org.uk/
In another example, the New York Historical Society (a previous recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage) is currently renovating its fourth floor galleries. Opening in January 2017, the renovated floor will include a gallery designed by architect Eva Jiřičná dedicated to the Tiffany lamp collection; the newly established Center for the Study of Women’s History, which will present exhibitions and public programmes along with an 'immersive multimedia film', and a and a 're-imagined display of collection highlights' in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
An alternative approach is evinced at the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The architectural conceit of this building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is of the 'vault and the veil'. The building, wrapped in a striking articulated fibreglass-enriched concrete mesh, is constructed around a large central well which forms the collection storage space. Windows are let into the public access staircase and the first floor, allowing visitors to peek into the working storage space. While convincing as a design notion, the actual visitor experience is of small apertures in out of the way locations, that do not provide large or comfortable views. The windows, let into corners on the staircase, are surprisingly easily missed and uncomfortable to linger at, as there is nowhere to lean or sit, or to avoid becoming an obstruction to other visitors' progress. http://www.thebroad.org/building
An interactive display at the Cooper Hewitt offers another alternative for mass-access to a collection, through digitisation rather than display of objects. In the immersion room, visitors can access the museum's extensive collection of wallcoverings. Using an interactive table, visitors can browse through wallpapers and project them onto the walls of the small gallery. Visitors can also use the collection items for inspiration for their own designs, which they can create on the table and project. The Immersion Room is not only popular with visitors, but a strong attractor for social media engagement, through the sharing of photos taken in the gallery. Much like the Brooklyn Museum's African art display, the room enables exploration of a large collection, visitors' own creation and then subsequent sharing; its very positive reception suggests these could be key features in future developments of such spaces. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/immersion-room/
Visible storage spaces tend to be heavily invested in upfront and then not updated for a considerable period of time: any area of a museum that is left unloved for too long inevitably begins to convey some sense of that neglect to visitors, like a room in a house that is never aired out.
My experiences on this research trip suggest that the 'behind the scenes' aesthetic is beginning to pall, and that "mixed-density" displays, combining the familiar aesthetics of both gallery exhibition and collection storage, with a higher level of interpretation and greater opportunity for visitor interaction, are becoming more appealing.
Visible storage is also an area of museum practice that is ripe for more research into visitors' interest, expectations, and actual experience. This is especially so in a digital age where access to a museum's holdings through technology (be that an interactive screen, table, or personal device)is becoming the default setting, at the same time that museums employ more and more design techniques to create immersive and spectacular displays in order to remain compelling in an increasingly visual and design-driven world.
Henry Luce Foundation American Art Program http://www.hluce.org/americanart.aspx
Celestine Bohlen, 'Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public', New York Times, 8 May 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/arts/museums-as-walk-in-closets-visible-storage-opens-troves-to-the-public.html?pagewanted=all
Elizabeth Cooper, 'Letting Some Light Into the Attic', New York Sun, 13 January 2005 http://www.nysun.com/arts/letting-some-light-into-the-attic/7674/
Georgina Goodlander, 'Overview of the Luce Foundation Center', presentation notes, 25 November 2009 http://www.slideshare.net/georginab/luce-foundation-center-overview-presentation-notes
Jori Finkel, 'LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display', Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2013 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/20/entertainment/la-et-cm-lacma-broad-museum-storage-20130721
Cameron Maynard, 'Turning museums inside out with beautiful visible storage', Atlas Obscura, 24 September 2014 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/turning-museums-inside-out-with-beautiful-visible-storage
I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.
1.1 Introduction
Open collections, or visible storage, is a general term used to describe public displays within museums where the emphasis is placed upon access and serendipitous discovery rather than a curated, white-wall experience. Visible storage is a way of giving museum visitors a feeling of being 'behind the scenes' in the normally off-limits art collection store, and addresses the oft-heard complaint that museums only display a tiny fraction of their permanent holdings at any given time.
Visible storage displays began being introduced in the mid 1970s, as museums moved towards a more educational and audience-focused mission. In these space, objects are usually displayed in fairly functional cases and shelving, closely grouped. Objects may be minimally labelled, or described through numbering, and handbooks or database access is provided to assist the visitor to learn more: lengthy descriptive labels are rare. Objects do not tend to be moved or exchanged often, although items may be withdrawn for exhibition or loan. Small temporary display spaces may be built into the larger space, offering the opportunity to create 'focus' exhibitions on certain groups of objects with more interpretation.
Sculpture, ceramics, glass, design objects, furniture and paintings are well suited to this form of long term display. Light-sensitive materials such as textiles and watercolours are rarely displayed in this manner, as the conservation risk is too high.
In American museums, visible storage ranges from small galleries, almost like nooks (such as that at the Dallas Museum of Art displaying ceramics and glass) to large purpose-built spaces that may include space for researchers to work. It is worth noting that while these study centres are presented as 'uncurated' spaces (suggesting that the objects on display have not been selected with the same level of curatorial decision-making as objects in a normal gallery exhibition, and that the display has not been designed with the same level of aesthetic attention) there is a strong shared visual language and interpretation approach to visible storage. A virtue is made of providing only minimal labelling or interpretation, meant to encourage browsing and a visual, rather than textual, engagement with the objects. Objects are grouped by medium, size, type, or place of origin (carved wooden toys / furniture / large sculpture / metalwork) as opposed to chronologically, thematically, or by artist, as a visitor would expect in a normal exhibition. Display cases and racks are functional (glass and metal cases, or large heavy drawers) or old-fashioned (small, wooden): white plinths of the sort used in collection or temporary galleries are rarely employed. The overarching narrative is that visible storage encourages unmediated access where visitors are free to make their own observations and engage in slow, close looking: this is, of course, as conscious a curatorial and design choice as any other arrangement of objects into a gallery display.
1.2 Henry Luce Foundation support
Between 1985 and 2001 the Henry Luce Foundation, through its American Art Program, gave significant amounts of funding to four museums to create visible storage spaces.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/museum-map/galleries/the-american-wing/774
In 1985 the Met received the first Luce Foundation grant to create a visible storage center. The 16,000 square foot facility named the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, opened in 1988 and displays a significant portion of their American fine art and decorative art collection (over 10,000 objects). Items are grouped by material (painting, sculpture, furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, silver and metalwork) and within those categories by date. Light-sensitive works such as textiles and watercolours are not on view but can be seen by appointment.
New York Historical Society
http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
The NYHS was the second recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage. In this instance, rather than fitting out a display space, the grant was used to create views into actual storage spaces, giving visual access to approximately 40,000 objects. This facility, the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, opened in 2000. The Center is currently undergoing an extensive renovation.
Brooklyn Museum
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/luce
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/small_wonders
The Brooklyn Museum received a $10 million grant in 2001 towards a reinstallation of their permanent collection galleries displaying their American Art collection, and a visible storage center. The Luce Center for American Art is a 5,000 square foot space displaying approximately 2000 objects, from Tiffany glass to contemporary furniture, and with nearly 600 paintings on rolling racks. Space is set aside for small feature exhibitions and representative selections of Native American and Spanish colonial objects are included. Database access points are built into the space.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
http://americanart.si.edu/luce/index.cfm
SAAM received a $10 million grant to create the Luce Foundation Center in 2001; $7 million towards the development of the Center and $3 million towards an endowment to support ongoing staffing and programmes. A library within the museum's 19th century building - previously the National Patents Office - was renovated to create the Center. Approximately 3,3000 objects are spread over three levels: large sculptures on the bottom floor, and then paintings and objects in cases cases and pneumatic drawers on two mezzanine levels. Objects on display vary from portrait miniatures to Roman glass vessels to folk art paintings. The drawers make it possible to display some light sensitive materials, as they are climate controlled and only lit when opened.
The Luce Conservation Center is adjacent to the space, allowing behind-the-scenes view of conservation procedures. Study tables and some database access points are built into the space.
1.3 Visits
Smithsonian American Art Museum
I first visited the Luce Foundation at SAAM in mid 2013. At the time I found the experience engaging; the eclectic mixing of objects, the lack of overt supervision which created a more intimate sense as a visitor - like browsing in someone's house while they were in another room. There was no-one to discourage photography on either visit, and the setting - wooden balustrades, large chandeliers, small staircases between floors - lends to the old-fashioned, romantic atmosphere - almost like a very good antique store.
The experience is however becoming tired. I did not notice any changes having taken place in the two years between my visits, and in fact a set of the pneumatic drawers that had were not functioning in 2013 were still out of order in 2015.
The database stations are becoming outmoded and the research space is basic. The Center was unstaffed on the weekend that I visited. While the bones are in place for a rich experience, my second visit to the space was curiously unengaging; this was a surprise to me, because my own tendencies as a visitor incline me towards galleries like this.
Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art is entered off the permanent galleries displaying the American Art collection - being redesigned in early 2016, these galleries displayed American art, design and craft along with Native American and Spanish colonial-era art in eight thematic displays that were highly designed, richly coloured, and mixed objects from different genres in each display.
The Luce Center had a strikingly different aesthetic. The back of the space - behind a glass wall - is devoted to painting racks, of which only the first row is visible. The rest of the space is full of tall, multi-level glass and steel cases, giving a warehouse-like atmosphere. Lighting is kept dim, and many cases have a flashlight attached to them to allow for better inspection. The objects vary greatly in size, from jewellery in drawers to large statues in their own cases. Database access is provided through screens affixed to the sides of cases with a metal chair provided. The overall effect was more dramatic and contemporary than SAAM, but the space also felt dim, cool, and not conducive to lingering, compared, for example, to recent work done at the Museum to make the foyer a more hospitable space, with comfortable seating with inbuilt device chargers.
I met with the exhibition designer who had originally worked on the construction of the space. The industrial materials were chosen to be cost-effective, but also to contrast to the curated galleries. The brief sought to communicate the sense of the wealth and diversity of the collections, and this is achieved. The lighting is in need of renewal, but this is not a priority, and hence the space is darker than intended - with the spartan furnishings, the overall effect is a space rich for exploration, but not comfortable to spend time in.
While at the Brooklyn Museum I also visited Double Take: African Innovations, a temporary display of objects from the museum's African Art collection. This is the second shorter term exhibition of this collection, undertaken during a longer term renovation of the museum's first floor galleries.
The main gallery displays nearly 40 collection items arranged in 15 pairs or small groups, each exploring subjects, themes and artistic techniques that recur throughout African history: the emphasis is on continuity and innovation. Each display encourages viewers to draw connections between the artworks they are looking at. In an adjacent gallery, a further 150 items are displayed in what the curator describes as an 'unstructured sampling': the display method is more closely packed and presented with less interpretation than the next door gallery, but is still displayed in more a a 'gallery' aesthetic than the Luce Center. Visitors are encouraged to make their own new pairings of these objects through an interactive display, and share them on social media using a hashtag.
I found this mixed display - a modernist hang, where artworks are given a great deal of space and interpretation, alongside a denser, compacted display of multiple items on a similar theme - to be the most successful of the visible storage approaches I saw on my visit. Despite coming to this gallery at the end of my seven-hour visit to the museum, I was still pulled in to both the artworks and the pairing-making activity. The contrast between overtly curated display and ostensibly random sampling gives the impression of both an experience that has been created for you as the viewer, and an experience that is handed over to you to serendipitously explore, and to respond to in a concrete way. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/double_take_african_innovations
1.4 Recent developments in visible storage
Visible storage and digitised collections have evolved alongside each other as responses to the constraint of physical space, and museums' inability to ever properly display more than a small percentage of their holdings in curated exhibitions. While the area of digital developments is extremely well documented, there is little research or evaluation generally available on the history, trends, and visitor experience of visible storage.
The general trend for new and planned visible storage spaces is to take a more dramatic or overtly designed approach to the design of displays, contra to the earlier emphasis on evoking or replicating the functional design of actual storage spaces.
For example, the York Museums has recently opened the Centre of Ceramic Art. The museum holds Britain's most significant collection of British studio pottery, and its building was recently redeveloped to create this centre. A large number of collection items are presented in a variety of ways: the 17-metre long Wall of Pots contains over 1000 objects from the Roman era to the present day, currently organised by colour; two domestically-scaled rooms have been created to display the collection of Anthony B Shaw, mingling objects with bookshelves; and for the opening of the centre ceramicist Clare Twomey was commissioned to create Manifest: 10,000 Hours, a towering installation of 10,000 identical white slip-cast vessels. http://www.centreofceramicart.org.uk/
In another example, the New York Historical Society (a previous recipient of a Luce Foundation grant for visible storage) is currently renovating its fourth floor galleries. Opening in January 2017, the renovated floor will include a gallery designed by architect Eva Jiřičná dedicated to the Tiffany lamp collection; the newly established Center for the Study of Women’s History, which will present exhibitions and public programmes along with an 'immersive multimedia film', and a and a 're-imagined display of collection highlights' in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibits/all/about/0/table/paged/title
An alternative approach is evinced at the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The architectural conceit of this building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is of the 'vault and the veil'. The building, wrapped in a striking articulated fibreglass-enriched concrete mesh, is constructed around a large central well which forms the collection storage space. Windows are let into the public access staircase and the first floor, allowing visitors to peek into the working storage space. While convincing as a design notion, the actual visitor experience is of small apertures in out of the way locations, that do not provide large or comfortable views. The windows, let into corners on the staircase, are surprisingly easily missed and uncomfortable to linger at, as there is nowhere to lean or sit, or to avoid becoming an obstruction to other visitors' progress. http://www.thebroad.org/building
An interactive display at the Cooper Hewitt offers another alternative for mass-access to a collection, through digitisation rather than display of objects. In the immersion room, visitors can access the museum's extensive collection of wallcoverings. Using an interactive table, visitors can browse through wallpapers and project them onto the walls of the small gallery. Visitors can also use the collection items for inspiration for their own designs, which they can create on the table and project. The Immersion Room is not only popular with visitors, but a strong attractor for social media engagement, through the sharing of photos taken in the gallery. Much like the Brooklyn Museum's African art display, the room enables exploration of a large collection, visitors' own creation and then subsequent sharing; its very positive reception suggests these could be key features in future developments of such spaces. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/immersion-room/
1.5 Conclusion
Visible storage spaces tend to be heavily invested in upfront and then not updated for a considerable period of time: any area of a museum that is left unloved for too long inevitably begins to convey some sense of that neglect to visitors, like a room in a house that is never aired out.
My experiences on this research trip suggest that the 'behind the scenes' aesthetic is beginning to pall, and that "mixed-density" displays, combining the familiar aesthetics of both gallery exhibition and collection storage, with a higher level of interpretation and greater opportunity for visitor interaction, are becoming more appealing.
Visible storage is also an area of museum practice that is ripe for more research into visitors' interest, expectations, and actual experience. This is especially so in a digital age where access to a museum's holdings through technology (be that an interactive screen, table, or personal device)is becoming the default setting, at the same time that museums employ more and more design techniques to create immersive and spectacular displays in order to remain compelling in an increasingly visual and design-driven world.
1.6 Further information
Henry Luce Foundation American Art Program http://www.hluce.org/americanart.aspx
Celestine Bohlen, 'Museums as Walk-In Closets; Visible Storage Opens Troves to the Public', New York Times, 8 May 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/arts/museums-as-walk-in-closets-visible-storage-opens-troves-to-the-public.html?pagewanted=all
Elizabeth Cooper, 'Letting Some Light Into the Attic', New York Sun, 13 January 2005 http://www.nysun.com/arts/letting-some-light-into-the-attic/7674/
Georgina Goodlander, 'Overview of the Luce Foundation Center', presentation notes, 25 November 2009 http://www.slideshare.net/georginab/luce-foundation-center-overview-presentation-notes
Jori Finkel, 'LACMA, Broad, other art museums work to put storage on display', Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2013 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/20/entertainment/la-et-cm-lacma-broad-museum-storage-20130721
Cameron Maynard, 'Turning museums inside out with beautiful visible storage', Atlas Obscura, 24 September 2014 http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/turning-museums-inside-out-with-beautiful-visible-storage
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