Webstock 2016

Wellington's Webstock conference - which last week celebrated its 10th birthday - has been incredibly important to me. In a very real way, Webstock + Foo Camp (an annual invitation-only unconference held in Warkworth and headed by Nat Torkington) have been my second university education: places of deep learning, points of entry to communities of people who continue to enrich me, and insights that have shaped how I see and act in the world.

Mike Brown and Tash Lampard continue to craft Webstock with loving attention to every detail - an approach that years ago inspired me when I was working on the National Digital Forum conference: to host visiting speakers in such a way that they became our biggest international advocates; to build programmes that were consciously inclusive of gender, culture, and level of speaking experience; to encourage talks that dive deep into the technical details and talks that lift our eyes to our values and our aspirations; to care about icecream and coffee, because that means caring about manaakitanga.

I have grown up with Webstock. It's been slightly nostalgic and rather heartwarming to read blog posts (blog posts! like the olden days!) from first-time attendees, which describe how out of the ordinary this event is:

Taking stock: A first-timer's take on Webstock 2016
Webstock 2016: Wild, wonderful and 100% worth it
Webstock 2016 - Celebrating the web's values

I went back to Webstock this year for the first time since 2013. I went on my own dime, not The Dowse's, because I know that being in the museum sector for more than  three years now has narrowed my lens on the world, and I wanted to open that aperture back up with a flood of new perspectives delivered by the smartest people it's possible to gather in a room. 

Past Webstocks have dramatically widened my lens. Here's what I wrote about Webstock in 2008 (I think this would have been the first I attended). Here are the notes from just one workshop in 2009. In 2012 I was still banging away, writing about design and craft and finding your joy and strategic creativity. 

I have looked to Webstock for many things. There have been presentations by extremely smart people about how they do the work they do: my stand-out talk will always be Cal Henderson, then at Flickr, in 2008 on 'Building big on the web'. There are people like Heather Champ and Kathy Sierra, who showed me how to take a principled, imaginative and empathetic approach to your work. There have been presenters who showed me a vision of the socio-technical future - Matt Jones on 'The demon-haunted world' in 2009, Adam Greenfield on the networked environment in 2010. Webstock has historically been the place I go to find out what might be going to happen to our culture next.

As the conference, the organisers, and the industry has matured, there has been an increasing amount of reflection. Speakers like Bruce Sterling have been folded in to give us a bracing critique of the world digital technology is building; artists and activists have been invited as well to show us, perhaps, the signal that can still shine through the internet noise.

And there has been a trend towards speakers sharing their own personal reflections and learning. As speakers have been invited to return for repeat presentations, they have often moved from practitioner-based talks to more personal philosophical explorations: I think of Michael Lopp, Amy Hoy. At times, I have found these talks illuminating and moving. Matt Haughey in 2012, for example, gave a talk titled 'Lessons from a 40 year old' where he spoke about the personal cost of pursuing the start-up dream. But Derek Handley spoke that same year about 'Doing well and doing good', and that was when I began to tip. Handley is a successful entrepreneur, but I found his talk that year sophomoric - in the sense that I felt I had sat in the corridors of my university hostel and fiercely debated the same points with a bunch of 18 year-olds who had just encountered the principles of philosophical thinking.

This year at Webstock there were a number of presenters who spoke eloquently and passionately of the personal experiences that have shaped them. Their professional achievements formed the platform from which they spoke, but it was their own life stories that they primarily shared. And I found myself longing for the old days of the practitioner-led conference, when I would be lit up by people talking about what they had built, the how and the why, the challenge and the opportunity, and the principles - technical, aesthetic, social - that they followed.

Mulling on this, I wondered if the conference reflects the same evolution that is happening in museums, from education to engagement. Over the past ten years, I feel like I have seen a change in the way speakers approach their task: from the audience's expectation to be informed, to an expectation to not only be informed but moved. And certainly in the past Webstock has done that to me: I have been enlightened, enraged, moved to tears.

It's also worth noting that a single-stream format (rather than the multi-streams staged when the conference was at the Town Hall) mean less opportunity to split off niche topics into smaller rooms. I certainly noticed this year that the Webstock audience has diversified: it seems younger (though maybe I'm just older), more equal in its gender split, and less programmer-heavy (she says, judging primarily by clothing cues, but also conversations I had with people). A diverse audience is terrific, but it also possibly means that presenters feel the need to make their talks less technical in order to appeal to the most people possible. This certainly happened with CSS expert Harry Roberts who, instead of delivering a technical talk, felt he needed to give a more accessible talk, and wound up with a grab-bag of travel tips, cocktail lessons, and British pop-music. This was a case where even though I wouldn't have fully comprehended a deep dive into CSS, I think I still would have learned more than I did from his generic presentation. 

It's safe to say that I have changed more than Webstock has. For one thing: when I worked in government, I badly needed that annual lifting of spirits and ambitions that Webstock provided me with - that sense, communicated by all those posts listed above, of being part of a community that aspired to being a better force in the world than simply adding more apps and websites to the internet. Today, my life is pretty much exclusively devoted to questions about how to support artists, how to create meaningful encounters between people and art and history, how to build a team culture based on excellence and generosity, how to make a difference locally, regionally and nationally. It is demanding and enriching and so very worthwhile, and I know not everyone gets to say that about their source of income.

Secondly, events in my own life mean that currently, I'm not a good audience for talks about overcoming challenges and living a better life. Having been through this process over the past nearly four years myself, it's not that I can't empathise: it's more that I want recovery and resilience and remaking of personal identity to be less of a focus in my own life.

Writing the above - and struggling to find the right tone - showed me that Webstock is truly more than a conference: no mere conference makes you question how you've changed over the past decade. Having said that, this year I found I had to sift harder to find the nuggets that will expand my thinking. Several of the talks that I have chewed over most vigorously - both inside my own head and through haranguing friends at the conference - were not ones where I learned something that will significantly enlarge my thinking, but ones where I disagreed with the speaker's central premise. A couple of talks gave me a few bright moments of insight. Two really stood out.

Here are my notes - the Webstock speaker blurb appears in italics first for longer entries.

Short takes (small insights from a variety of talks)

Heather B. Armstrong - the creator of Dooce.com talked about how her career as a writer who makes her living online has evolved (and impacted on her children and her ethics). Armstrong startd her 'mommy blog' in 2001. In 2005 she joined Federated Media, who placed banner ads on the site - within a few years she was making enough from this advertising to support herself, her family, and a staff of four. From 2009 onwards, with the rise of Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat, and the mainstreaming of Facebook - all systems designed to keep you within their content walls - the bottom has fallen out of the web advertising industry, and now her income is in sponsored content. I've thought quite a lot about how the broadcast of the web is turning into the narrowcast of fragmented channels, but not from the point of view of someone who makes their living from their online production.

On a side-note, I noticed that the Twitter stream for #webstock was quite quiet, and talks that in my past experience would have raised controversy or condemnation were largely skimmed over. This made me wonder if negative opinions (or even just most group conversations) have moved over to Slack or back to texting over the time I've been out of the loop. It may also be that the seating in the venue (St James Theatre) is less conducive to having your laptop open and therefore less typing goes on.

Luke Wroblewski - spoke about screen time, the freakish increases in the sheer amount of glass screens sold year on year, and designing for the diversity of screen sizes out there. He also told the story of Corning Glass's 'Gorilla Glass', the ultra-light, ultra-strong glass used for the first iPhone screen, which originated in 1952 when a malfunctioning temperature gauge lead to a kiln being run 300 degrees hotter than intended and a new form of synthetic glass ceramic being discovered. My lightbulb moment with Wroblewki's talk wasn't from his ideas about responsive design or even the startling stat that 50% of download traffic in the States is attributed to Netflix and Youtube combined: it was that I have high awareness of the Corning Museum of Glass, due to its refurbishment and extension last year, but the fact that the museum was established in 1951 by a glass-making company had completely passed me by.

Michael Lopp - a 5th-time speaker at Webstock, Lopp noted at the start of his talk that he had again decided to talk about poetry not practice. His talk however was about the practice of writing, for his own blog and books. I was impressed by the rigour with which he approaches writing: 5-6 hours of writing for a 1000 word post, 1-2 hours of editing, and an external reviewer. I empathised with his starting-writing process, which is very much like mine (make your second cup of coffee, open a buttload of browser tabs, and read until something ticks up in your brain that you need to investigate further yourself). But most of all I took away from his talk his conscious commitment to writing, and the satisfaction and utility he finds in committing to turning inchoate thoughts into a coherently arranged argument. This chimed with my own renewed commitment to thinking through things on this site. Now to squeeze in that editing time ...

Askew One - Graffiti and the Internet

Askew’s talk centres around the relationship graffiti has had with the internet – both good & bad. Where graffiti was a very localised phenomena pre-internet, various online platforms have enabled it to thrive and evolve, and enabled people, like himself from an isolated country, to have an international career.

Askew One (aka Elliott O'Donnell) showed me the recent history of Auckland through the lens of abandoned and run-down infrastructure of bus depots and train tracks, remade in the pre-internet age as a place to travel, congregate, and express yourself through visual imagery. (I could say 'pre-internet tumblr' but that would be glib compared to the depth with which he spoke.) His ideas about graffiti as a mode of transmission - of South Auckland as a bright bead in a necklace of connected cities around the Pacific Rim - and how the internet has amplified and enhanced (and occasionally detracted from) this transmission, would make a freaking awesome exhibition.

Anab Jain - Rockets of India

A few months ago I roamed the streets of India with tiny Mars probes, speaking to strangers about space missions, aliens, climate change and nationalism. It was the start of a thrilling adventure exploring the history and future of India’s space program within the context of global geopolitics, militarization and cultural imperialism. From astronauts to afronauts, from cosmonauts to vyomanauts, how can deep space exploration inspire us to create more democratic future visions?

This was *the* presentation of the conference for me. I can't even pretend to have absorbed let alone understood everything. But this is what I took out of it (for now, and until I re-watch the presentation).

I have been thinking a lot, over the past six months, about how Western the values of the mainstream web and web culture are: personal exceptionalism, massive growth, reducing the friction of everyday life. Even all the extremely well-intentioned, and often necessary, drives for inclusion result more in making space for the 'outsider' in the mainstream, not changing the mainstream's core aspirations or assumptions. (I think of how a speaker I heard at MOMA last year, a black lesbian feminist academic who studied hip hop, told the audience that 'Capitalism takes our difference and sells it back to us'. I can't stop thinking about that sentence.)

In her talk, Jain showed us - among other things - how different cultures in different countries have imagined space travel and undertaken space missions, focusing on India (where she was born). The audience giggled when she showed a photo of a space probe being moved in a ox-drawn cart, but I saw something I was hungry for: a glimpse of another way of making the future.

Jain also observed that space programmes are moving from being nation-state aspirations to private endeavours: Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. This observation joined itself in my mind to James Surowiecki's New Yorker column 'In defence of philanthrocapitalism', where he wrote:

Philanthropies, by contrast, have far-reaching time horizons and almost no one they have to please. This can lead them to pour money into controversial causes, as Zuckerberg has with education reform. But it also enables them to make big bets on global public goods. There is a long history of this: the Rockefeller Foundation funded the research that produced a vaccine for yellow fever. The Gates Foundation, since its founding, in 2000, has put billions of dollars into global health programs, and now spends more on health issues than the W.H.O. 

It’s been suggested that if we just taxed billionaires more there’d be more money for promoting social projects globally. But it’s far likelier that those projects would just go underfunded.

That article broke my mind: by which I mean, an easily-made assumption got challenged by a new idea and my thinking was better for it. Likewise, Anab Jain gave me a new lens for looking at the world around me, and that is what I go to Webstock for.

Nick Gray - Museums are F***ing Awesome

A lot of people do not enjoy museums. Some millennials find them old, boring, irrelevant and lacking in entertainment. Museum Hack is a company from New York City out to change all of that. The live, in-person guided adventures that Museum Hack produces are advertised as “Not your Grandma’s museum tour” and have become a top way to experience some of America’s best museums. Big companies like Google and eBay and Facebook regularly hire Museum Hack to produce their company events at museums in NYC and San Francisco. Museums have also been collaborating with Museum Hack for workshops, consulting, and membership work.

Nick will talk about how he started Museum Hack, what makes his tours different from all other museum experiences, and why museums matter. Note: This speech contains adult language. Like fuck.

To be honest, I went into Webstock primed to hate all over this presentation. As it was, I found Gray to be a delightful presenter and a very powerful storyteller.

The way I look at it, Museum Hack is an example of private enterprise making use of the museum-as-platform: the buildings, artworks, and existing research and interpretation as effectively an API that Museum Hack calls on to run their paid-for tours and team building exercises. Gray noted that last year the company made $1.3M and returned $200K to museums, but it was unclear whether this was simply in entrance fees, or whether there was an additional payment being made (effectively like venue hire).

I think this is a healthy model (healthier if the payment being made to the museum is more than just counting admission fees). One American museum professional I talked to recently about the company regarded them as a threat - Museum Hack has moved into an market (young, affluent, urban, disinterested) we should be in ourselves. Personally, I see the company as taking on the risk (staffing and marketing and R&D costs vs revenue) that we could not, so more power to them. The kicker is that while we focus on access for people who face other barriers to access than lack of interest (lack of awareness, geographical distance, the lower socio-economic pointers associated with lower use of community facilities, a sense of genuine exclusion), Museum Hack is homing in on the audience that might help us pay our way in the future. This may mean the key is actually in the handover, in trying to convert the Museum Hack attendee into an independent museum-goer.

However. A big key to the marketing drive of Museum Hack is downgrading the museum brand (old, stuffy, boring, disconnected) to promote their own product (fun! communal! active! irreverent!). I'm just so over this dumbass dichotomy that, as the kids say, I can't even. Could you please just quit negging on us already?

Anna Pickard - Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements, Writ Large (aka Humorous Self-Flagellation and the Multiple Benefits of Being Old On The Internet)

Somehow, improbably, the release note — that little space used by apps to describe their latest updates – has become a remarkable, human way for the creators of software to communicate with their users, and Slack (where Anna words*) has been at the forefront of the movement to turn that microcopical nugget of technical documentation very few people bother reading into (basically) a new literary genre. This little revolution didn’t happen by accident though: it’s the result of a fortunate series of events, a short list of values about how to behave as a company, and a long trail of people feeling out what it means to be oneself on the interweb.

*intentional

Anna Pickard was like old-skool Webstock for me. In talking about how Slack uses the release note to communicate with users in ways that surprise, delight and inform, she took us right inside Slack's values and how these values permeate every decision and interaction. In talking about how every time we find a new place to write things down, it changes how we write, she reminded me how my own writing had its own series of growth spurts with blogging, web content crafting, and tweeting. In the end, Pickard reminded me that what I learned from writing on the web was, ironically, to be as human as I can be. 

Reading list, 13 February 2016

Earlier this week I published a post, thinking through what the words 'engagement' and 'experience' mean in current museum dialogue, and where they've come from. There's nothing more pleasing than seeing something you've written spark something in someone else's mind, and so seeing my friend Nat Torkington take that post as a springboard for his own exploration of similar shifts in schools and education design.

Andy Baio's 'Never trust a corporation to do a library's job' handily articulates beautifully some of the concerns about placing so much of the responsibility for preserving our creative and technological achievements into the hands of companies who aren't incentivised to do this job. (No regret for using the word 'incentivised there, it might be the only time I've used it without triggering a game of bullshit bingo.)

I still need to read this properly, but Wired's coverage of Quartz's new text-message style news delivery points to something intriguing.

More heritage doom and gloom, this time around closures of regional museums in Britain #ongoingsaga #nothtefunkindofsagaeither

New Zealand type designer Kris Sowersby is featured in this year's Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial: here's the NYT review of 'Beauty'.

And for your nostalgic pleasure: Winona, Forever

The engagement era - and the artist's place within it

As I continue pecking my way through my WCMT research report (see the drafts on open collections and museum memberships) I find myself repeatedly wrestling with the ideas of 'engagement' and 'experience', two words that are constantly in use in contemporary museum speak but which I still find very floppy in their definition.

One framework that I've found really useful as I try to organise my thoughts about what characterises the urgent issues and highest priority activities in art museums today is that advanced by Seph Rodney. In a recent piece on Hyperallergic, Rodney traces a progression from the final decades of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th century, when museums focused on 'centralization, specialization, and classification of a collection' and any benefits gained by visitors were largely a by-product of that concentration , to a post WWI era where visitor education becomes the main cause of the museum, meaning that by the end of the 20th century 'one could have expected to enter a museum to have an explicitly educational experience, that is, the success of the visit would have been defined largely by how effectively information was transferred to the visitor, largely through didactic texts.'

Over the past 25 years, Rodney argues, political and economic changes have created a new era of the visitor as 'consumer', and a environment in museums where 'personalisation' has succeeded 'education':

Now, in the 21st century, with the inauguration of a new museology, and the engulfing of the civic culture by capitalism with its handmaidens, consumerism and heightened competition, museums have begun to recognize that in order to survive they must cultivate new and repeat visitors. Three key means of accomplishing this is first, recognizing visitors’ capacity to make meaning for themselves; two, partnering with them to discover what they personally want from the museum; and lastly, mobilizing the museum’s resources to meet these needs. These tasks can be met by, among other things, new curatorial strategies through which museums partner with visitors to develop activities and events: co-curation projects, and crowdsourcing exhibition content.

The hallmark of this new museum is the interactive and participatory activities that have emerged over the past quarter-century in exhibition design, but underlying these is 'an institutional recognition of the visitor as an independent maker of meaning who uses the museum in a variety of ways to fulfill particular, individual needs and desires.' You can read a longer version of Rodney's argument - which is the basis of his recent Ph.D thesis - on the CultureCom website.

I don't think we can deny that there *has* been a change in thinking. Here's a pretty specious piece of evidence based on Google's ngram viewer:

Instances of the phrase 'visitor engagement' in the Google Books corpus, 1950-2008

Rodney's way of looking at 'engagement' and 'experience' is informed by the study of changes in museum philosophy, as well as governmental cultural policy and shifts in marketing trends. Another trend emerging in museums' internal understanding of themselves and their relationship to visitors is that advanced by Jon Alexander of the New Citizenship Project, who has worked with a number of media companies and art museums, including the Baltimore Museum of Art. Alexander is promulgating a shift from thinking of the visitor (or individual, beyond their visiting potential) as consumer to the visitor as citizen: less about targeting individuals through a better understanding of their personal needs and wants, more about appealing to them as people who wish to be better participants in their society.

The #CitizenShift, as the New Citizenship Project terms the 'emerging era of the citizen' maps reasonably well to Rodney's 'collections > education > engagement' model, as this 'quick concepts' diagram from their publication shows:

One of the reasons why I find the words 'engagement' and 'experience' so hard to grapple with is that I instinctively conflate them with the theories and practices of the contemporary internet and web worlds that I professionally came of age in. The practice of user experience design underpins the way I approach working in a museum: as Wikipedia defines it, 'the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product'. Previously applied to the relationship between user and hardware/software, those practices can be expanded out over any interaction between the individual and the physical world. The strong emphasis upon accessibility and usability - which were 'inclusive' before that word became on-trend in wider discourse - in particular maps well to today's museum.

I find it natural, therefore, to see the changes over the past 25 years in museums as being at the very least influenced by the rise of the internet; not just the way that the web has amplified the voice and abilities of the individual, but also the theorising of the internet. And the most outwardly-visible changes in museum in this period - the introduction of digital interactives, the uptake of social media, the free wifi networks, the adoption of all things 'crowd' - have indeed looked very internetty. Let's zip back almost exactly five years, for example, to an interview with Thomas Campbell, who had by this time been running the Metropolitan Museum for three years. Much is made of the difference in style between Campbell and his predecessor, Philippe de Montebello:

The difference was certainly evident in a recent interview in the director’s office, where Mr. de Montebello used to preside with baronial aplomb behind his desk. Mr. Campbell instead pulled up a chair around a conference table and talked with boyish enthusiasm not just about art but also about the kinds of things that increasingly accompany it in 21st-century museums. The Met has created its first app, to accompany the guitar show. It is embarking on the daunting task of wiring its huge building for Wi-Fi, he said, so that patrons will eventually be able to read and watch videos about art museumwide on their phones and tablet computers. And it is venturing as never before into the rapidly evolving field of what museum administrators call “visitor engagement”: a social science aimed at trying to reach every patron, from the first-timer to the seasoned scholar.

Such ambitions for the Met might not sound revolutionary, especially after the kinds of grand expansions and acquisitions that more than doubled the museum’s size during the de Montebello years, leaving little room for his successor to start putting his stamp on the place. 

But in two wide-ranging interviews over the last month Mr. Campbell said that he did not see it that way and that he viewed the museum’s next frontier to be less physical than philosophical and virtual: a change in the Met’s tone and public face, making it a more open and understandable museum, largely by thoroughly rethinking the way it uses technology.

“It’s not sexy and glamorous, like building a new wing,” he said, “but I think it’s a fundamental part of our responsibility to our audience.” 

If you'd like to see an apoplectic hot-take on this interview, check out Charlie Finch's reaction from the time on Artnet, and his screech that Campbell is about to 'trap, fold and mutilate every poor soul who arrives with something called "Visitor Engagement".' Today, the Met has come from behind to be doing some of the most innovative online work in the world.

Most leaders in museums today (I hope) have figured out that touchscreens and Snapchat ≠ 'engagement', but rather that it's the shift in thinking that characterises the new museum. This is a point that people like Seb Chan are particularly good at articulating. In his end of year post for 2015, Chan wrote:

Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. Sure, we might change work practices along the way, but really digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s.

Here we see again that shift from 'education' to 'engagement'. (It struck me just now that we can throw in another 'e': 'empowerment'. Such a fortuitous vowel.) Recently Suse Cairns took this point by Chan (and Rodney's piece above) for a walk in a post titled 'Transforming audiences, transforming museums'. Cairns picks up on a distinctive theme of Chan's piece: what 'audience transformation' means in the American museum sector, where the funding and oversight of museums comes largely from private individuals and philanthropic or corporate supporters. Thinking about contemporary audience development, she also cites Rob Stein:

Now that museums are beginning to have the tools and expertise at their disposal to monitor, track, record, and analyze all the various ways that the public benefits from their work, the real task begins to redesign the process and program of museums and to embed impact-driven data collection into every aspect of our efforts.

Cairns identifies this as the "crux of this digital transformation/audience transformation question. As we can measure our audiences in new ways, we expect to be able to measure how we impact and affect them, in order to respond to them differently."

One way I have been trying to re-phrase 'engagement' inside my head (and 'experience' to, because all museums are and have always been designed as experiences) is as 'visitor-led': as in, we have moved from being educationally-driven (you will learn about this and that and come out better for it) to being 'visitor-led' (how can we better understand you and meet your expectations so you enjoy your time here?). Another way is to think of museums as switching from an impersonal omniscient narrator to a first person point of view, where the visitor is constantly asked to bring their own history and context to their museum encounter. Museums still tell a story through their arrangement of spaces and objects and accompanying interpretative devices: however our assumptions of, and responses to, our visitors' desires have changed.

All the drivers above either come out forces surrounding the museum - new technology, new cultural policies, new marketing tactics - or from museology itself. What I think much of this discussion about the new museum experience and visitor engagement often leaves out is the influence of changes in artistic practice.

Let's look again at Seb Chan paragraph cited above, this time with the final sentence appended:

Digital transformation is really about something else that often isn’t openly talked about – transforming audiences. Sure, we might change work practices along the way, but really digital transformation efforts are really in the service of visitors wherever they might be. In that sense, ‘digital transformation’ follows in the footsteps of the education-led museology of the 1990s. You can sense this in Nicholas Serota’s recently published “commonwealth of ideas” speech about a new Tate.

Serota's speech (printed in The Art Newspaper) identifies a 'profound shift in the expectations and behaviour of audiences in museums' initiated yes, by digital transformation, but also by shifts in artistic practice. He opens by reflecting on unexpected visitor behaviour in installations in the Tate's Turbine Hall:

For me, this first became evident in the response to Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003. People took over the space and used it as an arena for their own experience, so that the work gained an unanticipated performative aspect. Similar unprogrammed responses were prompted by Carsten Höller’s Test Site in 2006 and by Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth in 2007. 

In his essay from last year 'After the white cube' Hal Foster tracks some of the issues I'm grappling with here: the adaptive cycle (or arms race) between museum architecture and artistic practice, the 'activation' of the viewer, the society of spectacle. When we survey visitors on what they'd like to see more of at The Dowse, one of the things they cite are experiential or participatory exhibitions we have staged in the past, such as those by Peter Robinson in 2013/14 and Scott Eady in 2011/12. The appeal of these exhibitions is strong and - in those one of those phrases you never want to be documented using - they tick so many boxes. Families love them, funders love them, the media love them, and they photograph so damn well. In fact, you can sit at your desk and draw up just the perfect exhibition for your gallery, that will have all the necessary elements of hands-on interaction and Instagram appeal, and then lament the fact there's no artist you know making exactly that thing so you can just programme it in.

Which is not to demean those artists who are working in a manner that invites, or needs, participation from the viewer. But we're working in an era where it's increasingly hard to differentiate experience design from artwork. (And maybe we don't need to - and maybe I'm retrograde for thinking we do - but I still think it matters.) The Rain Room sits squarely in the middle of this conundrum - exhibited at leading art museums around the world, described as an 'immersive environment', but somehow not quite art to my mind. Glade's 'Museum of Feelings' - which coopts the experiential museum visit to sell scented candles - squats malevolently at the fringes. And then there's the 20 works developed by the 400-member Japanese technology-art collective teamLab for Pace's new Art+Technology program at Menlo Park. As Pace president Marc Glimcher said himself of first seeing teamLab's work:

I was like, ‘This is not art,’ and realized I was having an authentic art experience,” he says. “It’s something that we have to open up what our definition of art is, so I had my own conversion experience.”

Unusually for a dealer gallery presentation, you have to buy tickets to see what this actually is.

Serota says in that piece above that the future of museums is being driven by 'a combination of curatorial vision, artistic innovation and the demands of audiences'. At this point, are we dealing with artist-led experience, or visitor-led design? I can't answer that question - and I'm not even sure I'm asking the right one. So I'd love to see some pieces of writing that track the hand-in-hand development of participatory art practices and the museological interest in visitor experience: the co-creation, so to speak. I'm sure they're already out there, so please, send them my way.

References

Seph Rodney, 'The evolution of the museum visit, from privilege to personalized experience ', Hyperallergic , 22 January 2016 http://hyperallergic.com/267096/the-evolution-of-the-museum-visit-from-privilege-to-personalized-experience/

Seph Rodney, 'How museum visitors became consumers', CultureCom, 28 August 2015 http://culture-communication.fr/en/how-museum-visitors-became-consumers/

'This is the #CitizenShift', The New Citizenship Project, (undated) http://issuu.com/newcitizenshipproject/docs/ncp_report/1

Seb Chan, 'Since we last spoke: Rounding up 2015', Fresh + New(er,) 10 January 2016 http://www.freshandnew.org/2016/01/roundup2015/

Robin Kennedy, 'The Met's plans for virtual expansion', New York Times, 12 February 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/arts/design/12campbell.html

Suse Cairns, 'Transforming audiences, transforming museums', Museum Geek, 27 January 2016, http://museumgeek.xyz/2016/01/27/transforming-audiences-transforming-museums/

Nicholas Serota, 'The 21st museum is a commonwealth of ideas', The Art Newspaper, 5 January 2016 http://theartnewspaper.com/comment/comment/the-21st-century-tate-is-a-commonwealth-of-ideas/

Hal Foster, 'Beyond the white cube', London Review of Books, 15 March 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/hal-foster/after-the-white-cube

Julie Baumgardner, 'A Very Different Kind of Immersive Art Installation', The New York Times Style Magazine', 4 February 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/t-magazine/art/teamlab-living-digital-space-future-parks-pace-gallery-california.html

Unconnected

One of the most puzzling conversations I had while I was visiting museums in the States was at the MuseumNext conference in Indianapolis.

I was really lucky at that conference to intersect with Frith Williams from Te Papa (who was in America at the same time on a Fulbright). After two weeks of intense travelling and observing it was wonderful to spend time with someone who knew my local context and could help me process all the things I'd seen and heard.

At the drinks after one of the days of the conference, Frith and I got talking to two local post-grad Museum Studies students, who were volunteering at the event. They were agreeing vociferously with one of the speakers (I forget which) about the need to reach out to millennials (or whatever we want to call the current college-age population). I didn't dispute that we can't use "the same old channels" to reach this audience*, but it was when we pushed these two young women that things got interesting. They didn't read print newspapers or watch broadcast tv. But nor did they use Facebook, Twitter, or visit the websites of local museums. At this point Frith and I were quite puzzled - how did they track the world around them and talk to their friends? Well - mostly by texting, apparently.

I was kind of dismayed by this conversation. The marketing/comms side of me was dismayed by the narrowing of access points to these young viewers. How can you tell people about something they might enjoy - or something you've tried to make for them - if you can't reach them? And partly because two post-grad students who want to work in museums and live in the most vibrant museum country in the world were somehow proud of the fact that museums couldn't reach them - and unconcerned that they weren't being at all active about seeking information about what was happening at their local cultural institutions.

I was reminded of that conversation and my mixed feelings by this article by Felicity Duncan on The Conversation. She mixes anecdotal observational of her students (studying comms and social media) with recent research releases and writes:

Today, however, the newest data increasingly support the idea that young people are actually transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat. Instead of posting generic and sanitized updates for all to see, they are sharing their transient goofy selfies and blow-by-blow descriptions of class with only their closest friends.

Duncan concludes (by way of a rather strange segue into how this is scarier for parents because they can't monitor their kids):

The great promise of social media was that they would create a powerful and open public sphere, in which ideas could spread and networks of political action could form. If it is true that the young are turning aside from these platforms, and spending most of their time with messaging apps that connect only those who are already connected, the political promise of social media may never be realized.

*I would love to get some real research into how different age, geographic and cultural groups do and do not find out about arts events in their locations and nationally. I know in Lower Hutt, for example, that readership of the local print newspaper is still very high, and I wonder if that is reflected around the country, or varies region by region and age group by age group.

Reading List, 6 February 2016 (Waitangi Day)

Make some coffee and settle in with Andy Horwitz's 'Who Should Pay for the Arts in America?' in The Atlantic:

The fact that minority and community-based groups are “plagued by chronic financial difficulties” is undisputed. But what isn’t being acknowledged is that these difficulties are the result of systemic economic inequality. It should come as no surprise that people in minority, disenfranchised, and rural communities don’t usually have access to millionaires and billionaires who they can cultivate as donors. Nor should it shock that these organizations will suffer if the public-funding system that was helping them build capacity, gain cultural legitimacy, and become sustainable is decimated.

Shorter: an interview with Alistair Hudson, director of MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) on his idea of the 'useful' contemporary art museum.

Recursive reading lists: the reading list for the American Museums and Race conference.

A quite amazing project from the New York Times, who are releasing unpublished images with in-depth coverage for Black History Month.

Art Basel director Marc Spiegler's 'Ten questions all gallerists should be asking themselves now' for The Art Newspaper. Sample: although the goal of most successful artists used to be a MoMA retrospective at 50, many artists today focus on a career patterned on that of a football player or supermodel. Many young guns monetise their market moment, not trusting the art world to support them all the way to that MoMA show.

On visibility and invisibility

Over the weekend I started listening to a new podcast, For Colored Nerds, beginning with this long interview with Kimberly Drew, who started the Black Contemporary Artists tumblr and now works in social media for the Met.


The podcast starts slowly with some well-trodden observations about the changes wrought by social media. (I've read that post and sat in that conference room and given that interview answer myself far too many times to be able to engage with that topic with anything more than weariness.)

It got interesting, to me, when Drew started talking about why she founded the Tumblr account. She had interned in the office of Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum, while at university and that had opened her eyes to the world of black contemporary art. She started the tumblr as a place to store and share her own process of seeking out black artists. When it comes to platform of choice, Blogger was the past and Instagram didn't exist. As she says in the podcast, she wasn't aware of other channels where this was happening, so she struck out on her own: she would learn of an artist, search tumblr for them, repost images if they were available, and create original posts if they were not.

The fact that Drew took her content from across the internet and then shot it out through this channel (which with time became very influential) speaks to the fact that the documentation was out there - she just wasn't able to see it. And to her mind - validly - if it was visible on Tumblr then wasn't visible to the 'creatives'. It was when I started thinking about this that I reflected on the fact that we have to make art and artists visible over and over and over again. A show or a catalogue or a newspaper article or a Wikipedia page is not enough. For example, I have no idea what's going on in Tumblr. I tried to use it - unsuccessfully - years ago, and it is totally invisible to me (and most of the search-based internet as well, as like Pinterest, it doesn't flag up well on Google). I consider myself reasonably well schooled in the art world / social media intersection, but this is the dark web for me.

In fact, Drew came to my attention via the Lenny newsletter, which is a channel I don't enjoy, exactly, but follow because it brings to me a worldview (a particular brand of young, successful, motivated American women with a concern for social justice and fashion and twee illustration) that I don't pick up in my other sources. (Or possibly filter out of them: I really am not a fan of twee illustrations.) I have started listening to the For Colored Nerds podcast - and the About Race podcast - for a similar reason. All the podcasts I listen to are hosted by white (almost all straight) Americans. Most make an effort to bring in more diverse guests, especially when talking about topics like the current #OscarsSoWhite debate, but the podcasts hosted by people of colour, speaking to people of colour, and locating 'white people' as 'other', helps me see things that are invisible to me.

And I appreciate the Tusk website, run by a small group of early career New Zealand arts workers, in much the same vein. Through their eyes I am seeing my field afresh, and palpably noticing some of the changing concerns between me, in my mid 30s and fairly advanced in my career, and them, in their 20s and finding their strides. Through Tusk I'm seeing the social justice motivations of this generation - and also the playfulness, the ability to move between different timbres, that I find to be quite different from the irony of Gen X, which I tried to emulate but never quite felt part of. (Poor little old me - not quite Gen X, not quite Millenial, most accurately categorised by the notion of Generation Jordan Catalano.)

Hypnotic

On Polygraph: Billboard's 'Hot Rap Songs' chart from 1989 to 2015. From the same guy that brought you rapper's vocabularies.

Reading list, 30 January 2016

Over the long weekend I was pondering the shortlived journals of the 1980s and 1990s - Ascent, Midwest, Antic, And, Parallax - and that brought me to Thomasin Sleigh's detailed assessment of Art New Zealand; from 2013 but still very good reading. (N.B. Has anyone done a concerted piece of research on those journals? I'd like to read one.)

The history of art from the nineteenth century to the 1960s is above all a history of objects, but since the 1960s, thinking of Lucy Lippard’s landmark book The Dematerialization of Art, we also have a history of non-objects. And we have Michel Serres’ theory of the quasi-object, an object which only gains significance when interacted with. And now, living in the Anthropocene, we know that everything is interdependent, and that leads us to a history of hyper-objects, as Timothy Morton calls them.

Elvia Wilk talks to Hans Ulrich Obrist about outing the archive - a brief complement to last week's annoying Quartz article.

Hyperallergic summarises a recent report from Larry's List and Arton on private museums around the world - includes a link to the original report.

On Artnet - a truly disturbing rundown of Getty Images' 'Creative in Focus' report on trends in stock photography (and consumer wants, needs, and triggerable desires). Read it but be prepared to feel icky.

And in 'Transforming Audiences, Transforming Museums', Suse Cairns summarises and points to a number of fascinating pieces of writing on the 'experience' based, 'engagement' led museum: two words I'm trying to nut out at the moment.

Snake boyfriends and more

If you've ever questioned the value of releasing images of artworks that are in the public domain, you should probably look at Mallory Ortberg's art columns for The Toast, fuelled by Wikimedia Commons

Women With Snake Boyfriends In Western Art History based on Category: Paintings of women with snakes

Women Trying To Say “No” Politely In Western Art History based on Category: Couples in art and Category: Touching in art 

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.

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