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Center for the Future of Museums [AAM]
Badging in Baltimore: Report from the Annual Meeting
May 28, 2013 - 1:15pm
In the spirit of “practice what you forecast,” CFM experimented with digital badging at the annual meeting last week. With the help of LearningTimes, we offered a badge to attendees who attended & commented on at least four sessions featured in our annual “Guide to the Future.” Fifty people registered on the badge site, submitting ~90 comments, and 17 attendees earned the Future Traveler Badge.
I wanted to promote sharing of content, so from my point of view the resulting submissions were mixed, ranging from “awesome!” (appreciated, but a little more concise than I’d hoped for) to critiques of format (also welcome, but more appropriately directed as session feedback in the annual meeting app).
There were some highly readable, and shareable insight, submitted as well. Here is a selection, in case you want to eavesdrop on highlights of the sessions:
City History Museums: Canaries in a Coal Mine“The idea of engaging people in a local history museum by reversing the timeline to show current events first and then related them to the past seems at once brilliant, obvious, and deceptively simple to do. Still, it seems to me that is the only way a city museum can behave if it wants to remain relevant.”
Horizon Report, Museum EditionHolly Witchey made an excellent point that is often overlooked or not clearly articulated by museums that are anxious to engage with audiences online: "social media" and "social networking" are not necessarily the same thing. Using the web as a social medium is about more than just collecting "friends" and pushing out bits of content to garner "likes". It is about museums participating in conversations with their audiences as learners, not just teachers.
I also liked this gem
“Struck by Nik Honeysett's anecdote about his children's non use of the term technology. Am reminded that my generation used something called "magic markers" and my son wanted to know what was "magic" about them” [#anachronisms]
Keeping Museums Young: Best Practices for Out-of-School Teen Programming“There we're lots of great ideas shred (sic)* in this session. My break out group was very beneficial. Two of the women in my group worked at institutions with long standing teen docent programs and we want to start one at my organization which is why I attended. I also loved the Teen Historian Program, especially the state history exam review the teens developed for other teens, very creative and useful. The Historical Tweets were great " Guys, Guys let's just compromise so we can pass SOMETHING! #freemaine #slavemissouri #3630latitude #The_great_compromiser March 3, 1820". Need I say more?”
[*I know this was a typo, but I love the phrase “idea shreds.” May have to use that intentionally.]
Magnificent Masters of Museum Mysteries: Narrative Games in Museum Contexts“I have been thinking about creative inspiration that comes from outside museum staff and so my ears perked up when Georgina recommended getting game designers to come to your museum, touring your space, and offering their fresh wacky ideas.”
“Keep the games simple because learning the rules to the game is 50% of the struggle. Games with complex rules and/or open-ended games have not worked well in the past, and this is known because failure, testing, and retesting are important parts of creating narrative games.”
Museum Teen Summit: Teens Share Expert Advice“According to Museum Teen Summit surveys teens identified the three following qualities for teen programming in museums: 1. Engagement (challenging programs and activities) 2. Diversity (teens want to meet teens with different backgrounds and interests) 3. Interaction (lively conversations with museum staff and program attendees)”
“Will work for food" seemed to be the motto for these teens. Payment for consultant services was not a motivator - their passion for improving museums and making them more teen friendly was the driver. The Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is creating a teen pass program - allowing teens free access to museums - promoted via a teen council. The Cultural Alliance is paying these teens a stipend. After attending this session, now I am wondering if this could be setting up a negative rewards system”
Museums & Homeschool Learners: A Story in the Making“My main takeaway here is that homeschool audiences aren't going to fit into predetermined programming plans, and we shouldn't try to force that fit. They'll arrive late and/or early, they'll benefit from longer programs, they don't need as much historical content as school groups, and they'll definitely have breast feeding moms. Know these things and plan for them.”
“I heard a number of ideas that debunked some of the things we were doing at my previous institution that I will carry to my new institution and programming including: offer a timed organized curriculum - 3 hours - versus a whole day festival style program. Develop pre aad post activity materials and get into the hands of families. Homeschool parents will use and prepare their families for a visit. The museum can build relationships with these families and watch whole families grow up in the museum. Let the parents do some of the teaching.”
No Walls? No Problem: Taking your Mission to the Streets“The big takeaway from this session for me was that museums do not have [to] wait until they are in some dire circumstance to begin to take their missions to the street. Be everywhere. Share with your community where they live and work. Let them get to know what you have and invite them to visit and learn more.”
“My favorite quotes from this session: "meet the community where they are;" "come across exhibition spaces by chance." I also appreciated the extensive web presence of the Chandler Museum.”
On the Edge: A Museum Talk Show about Risk and Reward “My major takeaway here is Nina Simon's reminder that in the museum field, we're lucky enough that the potential fallout from risky endeavors that flop is usually much smaller than our anxiety over taking that risk in the first place. Take the risks!”
Rethinking Museum Membership: How Participation and Philanthropy can Impact Visitor Engagement“I'm excited to see where DMA will be with this a year from now. I remember when we implemented an admission fee at our museum, after being free for the first 13 years of its existence, we saw an immediate impact on how our visitors valued their experience - they stayed longer during their visits, bought more memberships, and started buying tickets to public programs that had previously languished. This session helped me see the transactional nature of that relationship with our visitors and brings into question how fully we are capitalizing on the potential for visitors to be partners in our mission. The data-driven approach to relationship building through the Friends program is an interesting angle on CRM.”
And finally, a comment on the TrendsWatch 2013 presentation that Phil Katz and I gave, that makes me feel good about our work:
“Keeping an eye on the future is essential for museums survival, but it's sometimes difficult to pull our heads up from the work of keeping things running in the moment. This session provided a lot of food for thought - where can we leverage our core strengths to take advantage of trends and lay down foundations for future success instead of just running after the next shiny thing. I'm particularly excited about the role we play as educational institutions; the power of informal learning experiences SHOULD be applied to tangible outcomes, like getting a job, and the faster we can demonstrate our value in the real world through micro credentials, the better. I think there's great potential here to support adults in their second (or third or fourth) careers, not just college-age individuals. In our rapidly changing economy, where new skills are continuously emerging as essential, museums can be a safe and supportive learning environment to help adult learners accumulate the demonstrated experience they need to transition into new careers. Thanks for a very thought provoking session!”
This was very much a "toe in the water" experiment for me, to see what it would be like, technically and logistically, to offer digital badges at the annual meeting. If we do it again, I will try to make the assignments more rigorous--demonstrating some mastery of content, or contributing material relevant to the topic at hand. If you have any experience with badging at meetings, or thoughts on whether or how you would like to use such microcredentialing. I would love to hear from you.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Stories in the Art Museum
May 21, 2013 - 8:30amThe theme of this year’s Alliance annual meeting is “storytelling.” However, if you are attending the meeting in Baltimore today, you probably aren’t reading the Blog! For those of you who can’t join us this year, recurring CFM guest blogger Zoe Mercer-Golden shares some thoughts on the power of storytelling, based most recently on her experience with Yale University Art Gallery
From the time I was small, I was teased about my love of stories: I eavesdropped on conversations at the grown-up table, snuck books into bathrooms when I became bored at parties, and acted in plays that I wrote with friends. Stories that I read and told shaped my life and continue to be central to who I am today.
I now tell stories in a different context: art museums. For the last three years, I have spent hundreds of hours researching and designing tours that tell the stories behind and around art objects. I share anecdotes about artists and the realities of their lives, and explain the political and social narratives surrounding different objects. If the piece in question makes reference to a particular text, myth or legend, I discuss the larger symbolic importance of that narrative to a people or a nation. These stories help the objects come alive for visitors, who are often looking for points of access for objects that come from unfamiliar cultures or time periods.
This past year, I have begun telling a new set of stories on my tours: the story of how objects entered museum collections. Within the clean, well-lit halls of art museums, we (those who work in art museums and those who visit them) tend to imagine that the stories behind the objects’ presence are as unmarked as the museums’ walls. The reality is far more complicated—often, in fact, quite distressing.
Last summer, I visited many of Europe’s greatest museums, principally in former imperial capitals. While the objects that I studied mostly had been removed from their countries of origin in the last three centuries, some had been removed even earlier. “Art appropriation,” the blanket term for the removal of objects or artistic styles from their original contexts, is by no means a new phenomenon: the ancient Mesopotamians practiced it, as did the Greeks, Romans and ancient Chinese. For the last three hundred years, art appropriation has been largely (though not exclusively) conducted by Western powers inside their colonial territories. Humans took and continue to take the artwork of other countries and cultures both to prove “I was here” and to signal their own cosmopolitan taste. Art appropriation demonstrates political power, social prestige and the capacity to mobilize on a massive scale.
The end result of these appropriations are massive museum collections full of objects that were stolen or purchased at absurdly low prices. While some objects were lovingly excavated by knowledgeable archeologists, many were excavated by under-trained researchers who were out for quick cash; others were simply lifted by wealthy travelers looking for souvenirs. Few objects and sites were left unscathed by dynamite and axes. War and colonialism left a bloody legacy behind, and facilitated the violent removal of beautiful works of art.
Contemporary museum collections thus present a serious problem: our museums contain objects that, for their educational and aesthetic value, we are loath to give up. Yet it is hard to avoid experiencing at least some residual feelings of guilt or shame when thinking about the way in which these objects entered museum collections. We now care about objects we don’t want to return that signal histories of oppression in which the museums that house them are implicated. How, then, can museums reconcile these histories with our current tortured awareness?
I have found that story-telling, and other self-reflective educational practices, while not a permanent or complete solution to this problem, is at least a beginning. People everywhere, most especially teachers and students, struggle with how to discuss the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Telling stories in museums tied to concrete objects is a useful way to start difficult conversations about the parts of history many would like to efface or ignore.
Good facilitators of this conversation will make clear the strong arguments on both sides of the debate: those who demand the right of return did suffer violence and destruction, and have a strong claim to their cultural heritage; yet if we believe that cultural heritage is a global inheritance, we also acknowledge that all people have a right to learn from all cultures, and that global museums are rare places of cross-cultural dialogue. Sending all appropriated objects home would diminish museums in general, and might even harm the objects in question, even if maintaining the status quo seems unjust. 
Assyrian Relief, Yale University Art GalleryIn the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, we have a number of objects that can be used to as points of departure for these discussions, especially our ancient Assyrian reliefs from the palace of Assurnasirpal II in Kalhu. Removed by Protestant missionaries trying to prove the literal truth of the Book of Isaiah, the reliefs pay testament to a difficult time in American and European history—and to the continued heightened emotions that many people feel about that part of the world. My job as a teacher becomes using these reliefs to explain the many different imperial and cultural histories that are attached to these panels, and to the ways in which they have been re-purposed for centuries to mixed effect.
Art museums therefore become spaces in which conflicting claims to stewardship and ownership can be raised, in which objects take on significance greater than aesthetic or cultural symbolism. The stories that we tell in art museums don’t have to be simple: they can question the very fabric of museums themselves. Unless they acknowledge the complex histories of the objects they contain, museums will remain the conservative bastions they are often accused of being, and miss an opportunity to educate and people at home and abroad. Storytelling becomes a safe way for museums to engage with their own histories, and indeed, a way for museums to move forward with self-awareness and dignity.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Futurist Friday: Bits to Bytes to Bits
May 17, 2013 - 8:30amYour Friday viewing assignment: a video from the Smithsonian flaunting their 3D scanning and printing chops. These projects, tackling objects ranging from orchids to gunboats, show how this rapidly accelerating technology can be harnessed for both research and public access. [< 4 minute vid.]
Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo, both featured in this short, will be joining us at the 3D printing demonstration CFM is hosting in the Alliance Showcase section of MuseumExpo at the annual meeting next week. They'll be there all afternoon on Monday, May 20, and giving a brief talk at 1:30 pm on their work in the Showcase Theater. They will also tweet with us from the Alliance's Social Media Desk from 9 - 10 am Monday morning--you can follow the discussion and tweet questions and comments using #AAM2013.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Relentlessly Social at the Annual Meeting
May 16, 2013 - 8:30am
Guzel duChateau, the Alliance's New Media Manager, dishes on how we are going social in Baltimore.
This year the Alliance is doing something new at the Baltimore Annual Meeting. 
For the length of the conference we’re running a Social Media Desk on Twitter. “What does this mean?” you may ask. For those joining us in Baltimore, there will be a physical desk in the Pratt Street Lobby with two computers and a large monitor displaying the #aam2013 Twitter feed. You’ll also find the daily line-up of scheduled conversations interspersed with open hours for drop-ins and the more organic conversation.
Through these conversations individuals, whether in Baltimore or afar, will be able to share insights from sessions, sparks of new ideas and discuss topics of broader interest to the museum field.
Our own Elizabeth Merritt, will be joining us twice. On Sunday, 10–11 a.m. ET, she and I will discuss futurism broadly. We’ll discuss some of the this year's sessions featured in CFM's Guide to the Future and share resources related to those topics. If you have questions about futurism and museums, or just question for Elizabeth, tweet them at us! Then on Tuesday at 9 a.m., Elizabeth will be joined by Rob Walker, author of Significant Objects, warming up for their 10:15 a.m. session exploring objects, and stories, and value. This is a great opportunity to ask questions about the project and what it means for museums.
We’ll also be taking the desk into the General Session and live tweeting Ford Bell’s speech and the remarks from Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, our keynote speaker.
What do we want from you?
We want participation! Join the conversation, tweet questions at us. We have hours dedicated to Alliance programs (MAP, Accreditation), audience engagement, the sexy topic of 3D printing and even why it’s important to be involved in your local and regional museum communities. If you aren't able to make it to Baltimore, here’s your opportunity to engage, ask questions, share your knowledge and learn from others. If you are in Baltimore, please stop by! Sign up for a time slot to lead your own conversation, check out the Twitterfall and see what others have to say about the meeting (and perhaps get meta and tweet a picture of your tweet on the monitor), or just take advantage of the comfy seating near the desk. (We’ll be near windows!)
This project comes to us courtesy of Adam Rozan (@adamrozan), director of audience engagement, Worcester Art Museum, Mass. (@worcesterart) and is being run in collaboration with Guzel duChateau (@guzelfrances and the voice behind @AAMers), new media manager, American Alliance of Museums.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Earn Your Future Traveler Badge in Baltimore
May 14, 2013 - 9:32am
Ready for the road to the Alliance annual meeting? Podcastsloaded for the journey? Plane/train readingall picked out? One last thing--take a minute to learn about a new way to share some of the great stuff you are going to hear, and earn a badge, to boot.
LearningTimes, sponsor of CFM's digital badging project, has set up a BadgeOS site just for the annual meeting. Attend any four of the sessions listed in the 2013 edition of CFM's "Guide to the Future at the Annual Meeting," submit an insight, favorite quote or key take-away, and you will earn an awesome Future Traveler Badge. Here's how:
- Use your mobile device to log on to CFM-aam.org (you will be invited to download an app—I recommend you accept. The one I put on my iPad has a nice, clean interface.)
- The first time you come to the site, select "Register" to pick a username & password, and provide an email to which your badge will be sent.
- The site lists all 21 sessions eligible for badging points. When you are ready to submit your insight, select the appropriate session, enter your text in the Submission Form box and hit the submit button. (Note you can upload a file instead of or in addition to the text in the box.) That's it!
- After you submit insights from at least 4 sessions, you will receive an email awarding your badge via Credly, which you can share via any digital platform (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).
Get a head start and visit Credly now to set up a free account, if you don’t have one yet. (Use the same email address when registering for Credly as for the app to make receiving your sharable badge fast and easy.)
After the meeting, I’ll mine your collected wisdom to compile a blog post featuring highlights of these futures-oriented sessions. Thank you, in advance, for sharing some of what you learn in B'more.
If you have questions about how to earn, and use, your Future Traveler Badge, or about badging in general, visit Credly’s booth, #1066, in MuseumExpo™.
Badge On!
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Futurist Friday: Stranger than Fiction
May 10, 2013 - 8:30amLooking for content to listen to on the way to the Alliance annual meeting? Slate magazine recently launched a six episode podcast--"Stranger than Fiction." Each week, Tim Wu, a Future Tense Fellow at the New American Foundation, will ask a contemporary science fiction author "are we living in the future?"
The first episode features Neal Stephenson, author of one of my favorite pieces of futurist fiction. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer envisions the disruptive effects of a "book" that shapes itself as a personalized tutor to whatever child opens it first. Some of Stephenson's other imaginings have come to pass, and I think this one may as well! Highly recommend.
In the second episode, Wu hosts Cory Doctorow, digital rights activist, co-editor of BoingBoing, and author of several science fiction novels. I'm currently reading "Makers" in which two inventors create an "open source" museum-cum-amusement park ride that visitors add to and reshape. Also worth a read.
The third episode will be available this coming Monday.
The hashtag for annual meeting is #AAM2013 --if you do listen to this series on the way to Baltimore (or back home in your office) tweet comments!
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Make Art, Meet Strangers
May 9, 2013 - 8:30amHere’s a story that demonstrates the power of social media to create community: I met Jeff Greenspan via Twitter after I retweeted Michelle DelCarlo (@popupmuseum) when she wrote “Creating communal rather than 'in tandem' experiences - Selfless Portraits http://flip.it/YRmOY.” I’d been keeping an eye on Selfless Portraits already, a non-profit undertaking which describes itself as “a collaborative art project aiming to bridge the gap between technology and humanity by encouraging small, creative gestures between strangers across the globe.” I think it holds many lessons for museums, as an intriguing example of a) fostering interactions between strangers (something museums often struggle to achieve) b) encouraging people to make art and c) harnessing the best aspects of the digital realm to the world of physical objects. Jeff, it turns out, is chief creative officer at Buzzfeed, and he has a long history of spawning cool projects. I invited Jeff to tell museumers more about Selfless Portraits, and how he envisions it might intersect with our work.
On February 12th, my creativepartner Ivan Cash and I emailed about 150 friends asking them to participate in an online project we were launching. It was called Selfless Portraits,and the premise was simple: draw a randomlyassigned stranger’s Facebookprofile picture and submit yourown to be drawn by another strangersomewhere in the world.
Two and a half months later, over 27,000 people have submitteda drawing of a completestranger’s Facebook profilepicture to SelflessPortraits.com. These creative interpretations can all be seen alongside the original profilepics that inspired them by visiting the Gallery sectionof the site.
Submissions range from simple stick figures to highly thoughtfulinterpretations in a multitude of mediums. Visitorscan also search the Galleryby country of drawer/drawee. For example, one could find drawings those from Brazil have done of people from France. People can also becomeFacebook friends with those they've drawn or have been drawn by, and we're excited people are actually forming connections this way.
Even though Facebookconnects people all across the world, there's something a little impersonal about having to do so from behind a screen.This project encouragespeople to look closely at another human being, ponder their face, then go away from their computerand use analog tools and creativity to recreate their likeness. To us, this feels like a unique mix of high techand human touch.
To build this project, we relied upon the guidanceof our Producer, Luis Peña, and the talents of our development team at Rally Interactive. These collaborators haven’tjust built Selfless Portraits, but in essence have adopted it, putting in many hours out of a sheer passion for the project. What makes it so worthwhilefor our whole team is seeing participants tweet and make Facebook commentsabout how they felt making art. So many people shared how they didn’t think could draw, weren’t creative or weren’t artistic.However, once they drew someonethey were able to appreciate their creations and be less self critical. Many claimed they’ve been inspired to keep on drawing. Others felt this was the perfect excuse to pick up a crayon or paint brushafter resigning these tools to in the backs of closets and tail ends of childhoods. While we don’t feel people need an excuse to create, we’re happy to have providedone.
This project has helped us connect with members of the museum and arts communities. We’ve discussed how Selfless Portraitscould be used to help museum attendeesgain a better appreciation for not only portraiture, but also the creative process in general.One suggestion we’ve heard was to have some of the sidebysides from the Galleryat SelflessPortaits.com be projectedonto the walls of a museum. These projections would be accompanied by “stations” (laptopswith SelflessPortraits loaded up) and art supplies.An expert on portraiture could then be guide the group through the process, helping participants focus their observations of their subjects and their process. Or, an event like a SelflessPortraits DrawaThon could be a way to bring techcentric teenagers into a deeper relationship with their local museum.
So far, peoplefrom over 115 countries have delved into SelflessPortraitsand emerged with a creation sharedin the site's Gallery. We hope it inspires many more peopleto discover their own talentsas they bridge the gap between the virtual and the real.Should any museum orspace devoted to the arts want to explore a collaboration with SelflessPortraits, please email the project at SelflessPortraits@gmail.com.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Art, 3D Printing & Collections: Museums in the Post-Audience Era
May 7, 2013 - 8:30am
For the past three years CFM has sponsored an “artist interpreting the future of museums” in the AAM Showcase. (In 2010 it was the The Pinky Show, 2011 Tracy Hicks, and in 2012 the Drawing Club.) This year we are doing something a little different: demonstrating 3-D printing as a technology that may change how artists interact with museums, their data and their collections. (It may also have a profound impact on other areas of museum operations, including preservation, research, exhibit fabrication and teaching.) Jonathan Monaghan will join us as our “featured artist,” and provides a little background on his work today on the blog. Jonathan will be available in the Alliance Showcase in Museum Expo™ to talk about his use of 3D scanning and printing and what these technologies might mean for museums.
One of the most popular video games of all times, Counter-Strike, was developed by a small group of individuals in their spare time, as a hobby, for fun, with almost no financial incentive. As a kid who played Counter-Strike, I soon discovered these online communities of developers and began to learn how to work with computer graphics software to make custom video game content. I did this simply because I enjoyed making video games rather than playing them. I was certainly not alone in this tendency, and I think digital technology has brought with it a certain creative capacity. YouTube, Minecraft, Wikipedia, Facebook, memes, Instagram; the content consumers are also the content producers. We build, share, repeat; it is the post-audience era. What is also interesting is that when we do this we tend to remix, respond to and reinterpret other creations and popular culture. So what does this have to do with museums?
Objects in museums can often feel static or frozen in time. It can be difficult to translate our wealth of artistic and cultural production into the digital age of active participation. However it is important to do so: if we can reconcile our past and present, perhaps we can gain some critical insights on the apparently seamless condition of our lived experience. I think this is something artists have picked up on since the digital age began to take shape. In Sweet Dreams, Contemporary Art and Complicity, art critic and UCLA professor Johanna Drucker describes the tendency in art since the 1990’s to maintain a kind of complicity and even enthusiasm for contemporary culture. She describes how artists today regard popular culture and new technologies as no lesser a source of artistic reference than great works from our art history textbooks and museums.
From the Met HackathonAs an artist with a background developing video games, combining high-end 3D technologies and their aesthetics with historical works of art was a natural impetus and is the basis for much of my work. “Life Tastes Good” for instance draws on references ranging from Coca Cola commercials to Zurbarán. As a result museums have always been a valuable resource for me and so when I was asked to participate in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 3D Hackathon in June of 2012, I jumped at the opportunity to continue mediating and re-interpreting great works of art through new digital technology.
Life Tastes GoodI, along with a number of other digital artists and programmers, descended upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two days snapping photos of museum objects and converting the images into 3D models. The artworks were digitized via a process called photogrammetry by utilizing the free, cloud-based software called Autodesk 123D Catch. The results were refined and uploaded to Thingiverse with their catalog information. The next day this same process was repeated by individuals in their local museums from all over the world. Almost immediately the web was flooded with a wealth of museum objects. While this certainly offers a whole new way to experience historic works of art, it also provides a valuable creative resource. Build, share, repeat. The museum objects are no longer frozen or static, they are downloadable and remixable; active content from which build on. As a result we may be able to learn from these museum objects more about our current culture than from the culture they came from.
3D print derived from scanned classical sculpture
Don Undeen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Liz Neely from the Art Institute of Chicago, Adam Metallo and Vince Rossi from the Smithsonian Institution, Miriam Langer from New Mexico Highlands University, James Maza from the Walters Art Gallery and Baltimore-based artist ToddBlatt will be taking shifts in the 3D demo in the Showcase—I hope you stop by to get a glimpse of how 3D scanning and printing works, and schmooze with our guests about how their institutions are using this emergent technology.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Futurist Friday: Robo-bees to the Rescue
May 3, 2013 - 8:30amThis post from Scientific American paints a lovely picture of the future of disaster response.
"Consider a rescue worker with a box full of 1,000 RoboBees—a package that would weigh less than a kilogram. The RoboBees could be released at the site of a natural disaster to search for the heat, sound or exhaled carbon dioxide signature of survivors. If only three of the robots accomplish their task while the others fail, this is a success for the swarm. The same cannot be said about the current generation of $100,000 rescue robots."
Maybe not as macho as human-scale rescue bots, but more elegant.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
MOOCs and the Museum
May 2, 2013 - 8:30amAre you paying attention to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? You should be. These courses, offering free education on an enormous scale, are a bright spot in the dark landscape of rising educational debt. While they are still very early in the process of maturation (grappling with finding business models to support free or low cost learning, debating appropriate goals for completion rates, arguing about the effectiveness of online instruction) MOOCs have the potential to be a transformational force in the future of learning.
So I’m pumped that Coursera has announced the launch of professional development courses to facilitate lifelong learning for teachers, and to support this new curriculum, a new set of partners that includes three museums: The American Museum of Natural History, the Exploratorium, and the Museum of Modern Art. These are the first “informal education” providers to join Coursera’s long and illustrious list of content providers. (Note the page that lists these museums is titled “universities.”)
This development is a significant signal of potential futures in the ecology of learning. Coursera, which launched only last year, already has 62 partner organizations, offers over 100 courses, enrolled over a million students across 196 countries, and is working with the American Council on Education to offer transferable college credit for its offerings.
Reasons this is news is important for museums:
- MOOCs can accelerate the mainstreaming of museum content into education
- Partnering with Coursera, along side universities such as Brown, Columbia, Duke and Stanford, raises the profile of our education work
- MOOCs provide a way to scale up the impact museums have on education overall
Here are videos introducing courses from each of the new museum Coursera partners. Take a look, and please let me know if your museum intends to foray into the MOOC arena.
American Museum of Natural HistoryGenetics and Society: A Course for EducatorsThis video features museum staffer Rob DeSalle summarizing the biotechnologies and ethics issues that will be covered in the course. This is one of three teacher training courses AMNH is currently offering through Coursera.
ExploratoriumIntegrating Engineering Into Your Science ClassroomThe video below is about the on-site teacher training, and notes that in the past they had to turn away 2 out of 3 teacher applicants, but that in their new site they will be able to triple the number of teachers they train. How will offering this content through Coursera increase their reach, and will it have comparable impact?
Museum of Modern ArtArt and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for Your ClassroomThis video previews the online format and the kind of videos that will be presented in the course, and tells teacher-learners what to expect from the experience.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
On Objects, and Storytelling
April 30, 2013 - 8:30am
Rob Walker
The theme for this year's annual meeting is Storytelling, and we've recruited Rob Walker, co-designer of the Significant Objects project, as a thought leader to help us explore how stories add tangible value to the objects they are connected to. You can join me on Tuesday, May 21 from 10:15 – 11:30 am for a conversation with Rob about Significant Objects. I invited him to share a bit about the project here on the blog, both to prime us for the meeting, and to share a bit about his work with those who won’t be able to join us in Baltimore.
Every object has a story, right? Actually, I’d argue that’s a bit limiting: Every object has multiple stories. We know the significance of a thing is often linked to its provenance — who made it, out of what, when, and where. But ownership stories matter, too. In fact, who owned and used a thing can completely alter our perception of it. A mass-produced doodad suddenly becomes much more interesting to scrutinize when we learn it was once the property of Andy Warhol, Margaret Thatcher, or Billy the Kid. Ownership stories also come in very personal varieties. The trunk in my home office will never be displayed in a museum, but it means quite a lot to me because it belonged to my father, and his father. The trunk’s connection to my own life story is what makes it a significant.
Thinking about all this led to an experiment that I was involved in with writer and editor Joshua Glenn. We set out to explore another variety of object story: the conjectural, speculative, imagined and outright fictitious. Our hypothesis: Narrative can be such a profound driver of meaning that even an openly false story could add value — measurable value — to an object.
The original Significant Objects experiment involved 100 deliberately low-value, basically meaningless, profoundly insignificant doodads, rounded up from thrift stores, yard sales, and flea markets, at a total cost of $128.74. We recruited 100 writers and storytellers — from best-sellers such as William Gibson and Meg Cabot to literary up-and-comers to television writers, comedians, cartoonists and anyone we believed had an interesting imagination. Each invented a tale concerning one item from our menagerie of ashtrays, coffee mugs, piggy banks, figurines, and the like. Finally, object and story were paired on eBay, with the original thrift-store price as the minimum bid. (It’s important to note that this was not a hoax or other attempt to mislead: Every listing included a prominent notice explaining that “the significance of this object has been invented” by the relevant author, along with a link back to our site for full details.) 
The results: Our stuff sold for $3,612.51 — a whopping “significance premium” of just 2,700%. Every single object sold for more than we’d paid; the top price was $192, the average $36. (The money went to the writers.)
Why did this work? Of the many possible answers to that question, I think there’s one worth zeroing in on here, partly because it involves a development we did not anticipate: The project itself became a kind of story, one that people not only wanted to enjoy, but to shape. We had assumed it would be an enormous challenge, for instance, to persuade writers to participate in this scheme. We were surprised when those we solicited said yes — but outright startled when people began approaching us, volunteering to take a crack at making some bit of yard sale detritus “significant.”
Meanwhile, buyers were sending us pictures of Significant Objects in their new homes, or anecdotes about toting the things to readings by our contributing writers. We realized that on some level owning one of our objects was like buying a souvenir of our experiment. In retrospect this makes perfect sense: A visitor’s inquiry about some tacky statuette in the living room would prompt a pretty great story, after all. 
Significant Objects at MOMA
Post on HiLoBrowThus we learned that the project had taken on a life of its own — and kept going. We bought more objects, recruited more writers, and converted our operation into a fund-raiser, donating thousands of dollars to nonprofits like 826 National and Girls Write Now. Ultimately publishing more than 220 stories, we played with variations on our theme — selling a “mystery object,” or having three writers invent stories about identical objects, or presenting a multi-object story over several days. We organized an “object slam” as part of San Francisco’s Litquake festival, where audience members invented competing stories about a single thing. I helped organize an event at the Museum of Modern Art, titled The Language of Objects, that involved some of our contributors and other friends responding imaginatively to the museum’s “Talk to Me” exhibition, which concerned human-object communication.
Most recently, when Fantagraphics published a book collecting 100 of the project’s finest pieces, the public radio program Studio 360 invited its listeners to invent stories about three objects that host Kurt Andersen and I picked from a New York City thrift store. There were more than 300 entries.
The lesson in all this for us was that the speculative form of story we’d set out to explore offered a different form of engagement. Imagination led to participation; boundaries got blurred, and our objects turned out not to be an end point, but a starting point.
As a result I’ve paid closer attention to other experiments, by museums and others, to open up the notion of objects as communicative prompts that invite audience involvement. One interesting example is the Object Ethnography Project, which involves trading objects for stories; through a series of exchanges, each thing acquires up to three distinct narratives. Our friend Paul Lukas, a New York-based writer and overseer of various creative projects, has hosted a series of “Show & Tell” events, which invite attendees to tell a personal story about an object they’ve brought along. Most recently, The Museum of Contemporary Craft, in Portland, has supplemented its exhibition “Object Focus: The Bowl” with a Tumblr dedicated to stories about bowls. Some are commissioned, but many come from the general public, submitting a variety of tales and even poems.
What matters here is that in all cases, stories are both an end and a means. Significant Objects resulted in an impressive outpouring of narrative creativity, and the book version stands not only as a document of the project, but also a tour de force of imaginative thinking inspired by objects – it’s amazing to experience the range of strategies our writers employed to make readers re-consider these previously overlooked things. In other words, the stories could stand on their own.
But the pleasant surprise (and noteworthy takeaway) was that the stories helped make the original experiment something people wanted to be a part of, not just observe. That’s what gave Significant Objects a life beyond what we ever could have imagined — and gave us a pretty good story to tell in the bargain.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
The Membership Game
April 25, 2013 - 8:00amYesterday I attended an event at the Hirshhorn organized by the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access, exploring the use of digital badges in museums. It was a great session, and you can watch a recording of the whole thing here.
However, while I attended to hear about digital badging (since we're about to launch CFM's own digital badging prototype, with the help of our volunteer test pilots) what I want to share now is what Max Anderson had to say about DMA Friends, the Dallas Museum of Art's new membership program.
You can read more about the DMA's membership experiment here. Basics are:
- Admission is free
- Basic membership level is free
- Visitors are encouraged to sign up for a free membership, and provide contact info
- Visitors can earn points, and badges, from various forms of engagements
- Engagement can be tracked when visitors scan their membership card to check into various locations, including specific galleries
- Points can be redeemed for a variety of things, right up to spending a night in the museum.
Some things that caught my interest:
About the points awarded for engagement:
- The points DMA awards for participation truly are turning into an "alt currency" that has real world value. The higher level of DMA membership (Museum Partner) costs $100, but visitors can "earn" the membership with points rather than plonking down the cash. They also can redeem points for things like free admission to ticketed special exhibits and free parking. They have given away over 7.7 million points since they started.
- These points have their own, unique value—Anderson noted "even wealthy people want points!"
- Anderson proposed that in the future, these points might become a shared currency between museums that opt into a kind of currency exchange: I could redeem my points earned at the DMA, for example, for perks offered by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Could this be the museum equivalent of Bitcoins? (Hopefully without the crash.)
- This system facilitates targeted communications: for example, emailing people who have amassed enough points for free admission to a special exhibit, to remind them of the opportunity and invite them to come.
- It provides opportunities for spontaneous and personalized feedback. Staff, for example, can award a visitor with points for asking a great question.
- DMA uses a zip code search to track where people are from, and cross-references that with the Census data to get a demographic snapshot. This data can tell them not only who is (and isn't) attending, but when, and what parts of the museum they are visiting. True, many museum have long collected this kind of data, but DMA's membership structure is designed specifically to capture as many people, and as much data, as possible, and mine that for all it is worth.
- Real time data from the swipe cards facilitates improvisation. For example, if staff notice that a critical mass of people have swiped into a given gallery, they can send a text message offering a guided tour. (Contrast this with the pre-scheduled "There will be a gallery talk at 2 p.m." dang-I-missed-it experience.
- Points, and how they are redeemed, gives the museum real and immediate feedback on what people would like to receive points for—what motivates them?
- DMA has decided to value participation first, and trust that cash will come along with that
- Behind that general optimism, however, lies the shrewd observation that "the true currency of participation does not cost that much to offer." In other words, much of what a museum friend earns with points costs the museum nothing (extra) to provide
- And often people who redeem the points for things like free admission to special exhibits bring along (paying) guests
- In any case, the museum had already figured out that any membership that cost less than $100 was a net loss, since it cost more to support than it brought in
- This system of data collection enables them to compile a detailed and compelling story to tell funders about who the DMA is serving, how they engage with the museum and what they learn
My big three take-aways:
- It's about creating a system that addresses the two things CFM lecturer Jane McGonigal noted museums usually are bad at: providing clear instructions and good feedback
- Its all about the data—data will, in one way or another, prove to be the most valuable thing you can ask for as an entry level of engagement—more valuable than cash for a ticket or a basic membership fee
- Its about building a business model based on the long-term payoff of relationships, rather than immediate exchanges of money for goods or services
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Art Viewing and Mindfulness Meditation
April 23, 2013 - 8:48am
Of the six trends we feature in TrendsWatch 2013, one that has generated the a lot of feedback so far is “Disconnecting to Reconnect”—our exploration of how people are going to great lengths to “unplug.” One of the people I connected with in the ensuring commentary is Clare Kunny, founding director of Art Muse Los Angeles (ALMA). In speaking of opportunities for museums to provide off-line experiences, Clare told me, “My question is: what aspects of mindfulness meditation can inform and enrich the museum experience and how do we apply them?” In this guest post, Clare shares a recent program she co-designed to help people disconnect from their mobile devices, and reconnect with art.
In recent years, there has been a tendency for museums to emphasize visitor engagement that can be experienced only through technology or social media, dis-connecting the visitor from a real-time experience. Some museum professionals, however, have pushed back against this trend, preferring to encourage people to reconnect with art and each other when they visit the museum. A recent CFM post by Andrea Michelbach discussed the importance of mindfulness meditation as a way for museum staff and visitors to reconnect. Not long before that, an article in the New York Times delved into the values and limits of mindfulness meditation in a fractured and information-overloaded world. These discussions caught my attention, because I was in the midst of final preparations for a 3-hour workshop on mindful art-viewing.
The workshop was the result of my years of working in art museums as an educator as well as a recent experience at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles—a 75-minute contemplative art-viewing session. I was skeptical, but curious to learn, first-hand, whether mindfulness meditation could enhance art-viewing. I went away from the session convinced that mindfulness meditation has something to offer museums—particularly art museums. Iwondered what might happen if a longer session took place in a gallery setting. Could we dig deeper into the relevance of mindfulness to the museum context? Could I collaborate with a mindfulness educatorto bring two areas of expertise (art, meditation) into one program? 
The result of these musings was the experimental workshop “Art in the Heart: The Heart-Mind Connection in Viewing Art” that took place at ESMoAin El Segundo, California, on April 9. The workshop was developed in partnership with mindfulness educator Mitra Manesh, founding director of Rumi Rooms. Our goals for the workshop were to make attendees aware of the mindfulness meditation practice in the context of an art space and to provide them with a new approach to viewing and experiencing art.
Mindful Walking at ESMoA WorkshopThe workshop was hosted by ESMoA, a newly opened, non-profit art laboratory that proved an ideal setting. The inaugural exhibition in their 2,000 square foot space consists of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and photographs eccentrically installed in clusters without labels. On a day when ESMoA was closed to the public, we set up chairs in a semi-circle and, in the course of several hours, Mitra guided 10 participants—museum educators, docents and artists—through mindfulness meditation, mindful art viewing, walking meditation, and discussion. All attendees had some experience with meditation practices, and several in the group were acquainted with mindfulness meditation. Alice Cisternino,in a blog postfor Art Muse Los Angeles wrote about her experience in the workshop, observing that:
“Looking at art readily lends itself to this sustained consideration. Art is a visual language and words can offer entry points into its content but never completely define it. This mystery encourages the viewer’s search and reminds us that some of the most meaningful experiences cannot be articulated.”
Another participant noted the walking meditation was a reminder that walking is an essential activity while visiting a museum and makes you pay attention to your presence in the physical space shared with the art.
Although the workshop came near to meeting our goals we set, there is more work to be done. My partner, Mitra Manesh, and I intend to offer a series of 3-hour “Art in the Heart” workshops in the coming months to continue to explore how mindfulness meditation can be woven into the art viewing experience to enrich it. Furthermore, we’ll continue to explore what components of this meditation practice can be integrated into museum work through staff training, program development, and interpretation and presentation of art.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Your Guide to the Future at the 2013 Alliance Annual Meeting
April 18, 2013 - 8:58am
Once again, I’m sharing a selection of futurist picks for the upcoming Alliance annual meeting. The advance registration deadline is April 26, so if you are not signed up yet, jump online!
First, an overview of what CFM is up to in Baltimore (besides the sessions mentioned in my list below):
- We are hosting a 3-D Digital Scanning and Printing Demonstration in the Alliance Showcase in MuseumExpo. With equipment loaned by MakerBot Industries, and the help of staff from the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, New Mexico Highlands University, and others we will be exploring this emerging technology profiled in CFM’s TrendsWatch 2013 report and how it may shape museum research, conservation, packing & shipping, exhibit production and public engagement. The demo will be operating during the open hours of MuseumExpo. (We would welcome more volunteers to help with the demo—for more information email me.)
- I’ll be interviewing Rob Walker, co-instigator of the brilliant Significant Objects project, on Tuesday, May 21, from 10:15–11:30 a.m. Museum folk know objects derive their power from the stories associated with them. What if those stories are fictional? Rob and his colleague, Joshua Glenn, invited master storytellers (best-selling novelists, television writers, comedians, up-and-coming literary talents) to create stories for "insignificant" objects acquired at thrift shops and yard sales, and then tracked how these stories increased the objects’ value when they were resold. What lessons can museums learn from this escapade?
- Liz Dreyer and Richard Evans will offer applicant counseling for museums interested in applying for funding in round 3 of the MetLife-funded Innovation Lab for Museums, a joint project of CFM and their organization, EmcArts. (Contact Liz to set up a time.)
This year, CFM is offering these session recommendations with a twist: LearningTimes, sponsor of the 2013 CFM Digital Badging experiment, will use a mobile app called Credly to offer digital credentials for participation in live events. Interested in helping us try it out? Here’s the deal: if you download the app, attend any of the recommended sessions and submit a brief and pithy insight summarizing what you heard, you’ll earn credit towards a CFM Badge. (The badge can be shared with your employer, included on your digital resume or on social media or on your blog or institutional web site.) I’ll draw on your insights for a blog post reporting out on the annual meeting. You can get a head start by creating an account at www.credly.com.
A future blog post will give instructions on how to participate in badging at the meeting, but for now, check out this year’s futurist picks:
Sunday 2 p.m. Embracing Access for All: Children with Autism and Museum Experiences. In an increasingly neuro-diverse future, museums have the opportunity to create experiences tailored to audiences with a variety of particular needs. Presenters include staff from the Warhol Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Walters Art Museum as well as a researcher from Johns Hopkins.
Museum Teen Summit: Teens Share Expert Advice. Who better to tell us how teens can use museums to build their own personal learning platforms than teens themselves? Marit Dewhurst, associate professor of Art & Museum Ed at the City College CUNY Art History and Museum Studies Program, moderates the discussion by 10 teen presenters.
3:30 p.m.
2012 Horizon Report Museum Edition. If you aren't familiar with this annual forecast of emerging technologies, and their potential impact on and use in museum education and interpretation, well, you should be. Join Alex Freeman and Holly Witchey for a showcase of micro-presentations projects utilizing new technologies highlighted in this year’s report.
Or, in this same time slot, you can choose between two sessions on participatory engagement:
Democratization of Content in Art Museums, sharing lessons from projects at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wis.
and
If You Build It…Creating Community Space in the Museum chaired by all-round smart cookie and small-museum maven, Janice Klein.
Monday
8:45 a.m.
TrendsWatch 2013 (CFM Session)—Phil Katz and I romp through a brief overview of CFM’s new trend report, punctuated by examples that have come up since we published it all of two months ago (by the time of the session).
Museums and Homeschool Learners: A Story in the Making. Did you know the number of children being homeschooled in the U.S. is comparable to the number who attend charter schools? And yet charter schools seem to get all the attention. When it comes to forecasting the future of education, I think there is as much, or more, to learn from people who have opted out of the public education system as from those trying to innovate from within.
Shared Guardianship and the Future of Collecting in Museums. This looks like it will be an interesting glimpse at a new model for shared ownership of 21st century museum collections. The program description says the session will examine recent news in repatriation, digitization and joint purchases that may be early signals of a significant trend.
1:45 p.m.
Ethics Smackdown. This debate, moderated by Sally Yerkovich (direct of the Institute for Museum Ethics) grew out of the Forecast of the Future of Museum Ethics CFM coordinated for IME last year. Two champions from the museum field will square off over the resolution “Whereas, cultural, financial, technological and political trends are changing the world in which museums operate, American museums should revisit the Code of Ethics for Museums and relax the restriction on the use of funds from the sale of deaccessioned collections.” Your vote on who wins the debate may influence whether and how our field tackles revisions to the Code.
No Walls? No Problem: Taking your Mission to the Streets. How can I resist a session that riffs on the “pop-up culture” trend we featured in TrendsWatch 2012? Staff from the Wolfsonian at FIU, the Sandy Spring Museum and the Chandler Museum share stories of taking their mission beyond the museum walls.
3:30 p.m.
The Inclusive Museum and Active Citizenship Forum. For those interested in continuing to explore the challenges CFM described in Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums.
Tuesday
8:45 a.m.
On the Road: Two Years of a Teacher Training Program. How can museums scale up their educational impact to be major players in the American learning landscape? One promising avenue: train the trainers. This session looks at the National Museum of American History’s national teacher training programs.
Rethinking Museum Membership: How Participation and Philanthropy can Impact Visitor Engagement. I’ve been watching with interest the Dallas Museum of Art’s experiment combining membership, gamification and digital badging to create a new economic model for members and income. This is your chance to hear about it first hand from DMA staff.
10:15 a.m.
Diversifying the Museum Field: Transdisciplinary Education for Museum Professionals and Students. You may have read one of my soap box rants about the need for museums to develop non-traditional pipelines if they truly want to build more diverse staff. From the description, sounds like this session may explore one such experiment, a collaboration between Morgan State University’s Center for Museums and Historical Preservation and the James E. Lewis Museum of Art.
1:45 p.m.
Keeping Museums Young: Best Practices for Out-of-School Teen Programming. See all my notes above on the importance of exploring the future of education! This looks like another good session on that theme.
Magnificent Masters of Museum Mysteries: Narrative Games in Museum Contexts. In CFM’s inaugural lecture, Dr. Jane McGonigal contended that “Gaming is the Future of Museums.” In this session staff from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art share how their organizations used narrative games to bring their collections to life. If you miss this, (or want to explore the topic in more depth) check out the session in the next time slot:
3:15 p.m.
Gamification and Museums. I can’t tell for sure from the description, but it sounds like this might take a more general approach to using the principles of games design to make compelling museum experiments, not just games per se.
Magnetic Museums: Stories of Engagement. Phil and I highly recommend! Beth Tuttle and Anne Bergeron will share results from their research into the factors that combine to create high-performing museums.
City History Museums: Canaries in a Coal Mine. This session promises to explore “hybrid institutions that are part community center, part contemporary art space, part digital information hub and part city plaza.” I approve, as I'm in favor of museums getting over their rigid concepts of self-identity and doing what needs to be done.
Wednesday
8:45 a.m.
Direct Care: Pushing the Exterior Envelope. For those of you who don’t recognize the phrase, “direct care” are the waffle words the AAM Code of Ethics uses to delineate the allowed use of funds from deaccessioning, if a museum isn't going to use those funds to buy more stuff. This could be a good follow-up for those of you who come away undecided from the Ethics Smackdown on Monday.
10:15 a.m.
On the Edge: A Museum Talk Show about Risk and Reward. I can sneak this one in under the general CFM charge to encourage risk taking and innovation. But honestly I’m listing it because—a conversation between Kathy McLean and Nina Simon, how can it not be awesome?
Nude Pregnant Women with Animal Heads and Chippendale Chairs. Which gets my vote for best session title of the entire conference. It also happens to be apropos of CFM trendswatching as it explore how Winterthur loosen the grip of curatorial authority a bit, and let artists go behind the scenes to create a special exhibition.
There are many other fabulous sessions, of course, but this is diverse selection complements many of the trends we are following in CFM scanning and research.
When I am not otherwise assigned, I will be in the Alliance Showcase in MuseumExpo, hanging out with the 3-D printing demonstrators. Stop by for a chat—I would love to hear your feedback on the work of CFM, and your ideas for what we might do next.
Yours from the future.
Elizabeth
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
2014 TrendsWatch Contenders
April 16, 2013 - 8:56am
With TrendsWatch 2013 hot off the digital presses, Phil and I are already scanning for early signals of the trends we will feature next year. When it comes to scanning, more eyes = better results! We are fortunate to have a growing cadre of proto-futurists to help with our forecasting. In this week’s guest post,John W. Jacobsen, president of White Oak Associates, Inc, and CEO, The White Oak Institute, weighs in on his early picks for 2014.
Inspired by Elizabeth and Philip's excellent trend forecast (“TrendsWatch: 2013 Back to the Future”), I realized that some of next year’s trends are bound to be bouncing around already in our international museum planning work. There’s a lot of pent up creativity out there among museum professionals – ideas have been brewing during the Great Recession, and now, just maybe… Here are some of the contenders for 2014 that we’ve a) seen already in our planning work with museums; b) appear to lie ahead; or c) may be fertile ground for innovation.
a. Trends already affecting some museums
- Multi-mission Museums: Some museums welcome their richness of community services by recognizing their multiple purposes, rather than just one role as their “core mission” and calling all the rest “ancillary” or “mission-supporting.” Museums provide lots of community and individual benefits. Our mission may be most important to us, but other services we provide are important to the people who pay our bills. In the new economy, we have to get off the high horse of solitary mission, and focus on providing a variety of good value services that are needed enough to be funded by the community. With multiple funding sources, this means being intentional about serving multiple missions.
- Cultural Accommodation: I knew we would need to add prayer rooms to our project in Kuala Lumpur, but what a surprise that we might want to consider it in Edmonton! Immigration is turning growth cities like Edmonton global, bringing new expectations for human interaction, food choices, propriety, language, gender sensitivity, ‘family’ membership definitions and numerous other cultural accommodations way beyond writing labels in two languages.
- Grrrovernance (how Millennials, Boomers and their metrics are upsetting traditional board/staff territory lines): It used to be simple in theory: Boards set policy, raised money and hired and fired the director. Staff developed and implemented the strategies to carry out the policy, and staff delivered summary reports at quarterly meetings. Then came the demand for metrics and policy indicators from younger board members. During the white water of the recession, the indicators that mattered to the
board members we worked with were financial. Then came CEO dashboards that monitored how the museum was scoring at achieving policy, and then, soon thereafter, came transparency. Now, board members used to monitoring financials, can see your dashboard live, in real time. “Why were the membership renewal numbers down last week?” To staff, this looks a lot like micro-managing. To board members, it feels like responsible oversight. Middle ground is not yet in sight on this one.
- Boomer Volunteers (Yikes, they have purposes of their own!): Speaking as one, we Boomers have always been full of ourselves, and we will bring that bravado to our volunteer work. When it becomes our turn to give back – and most of us are in denial about when that will be -- we’ll attach strings. We’ll want to address some of the societal needs we feel are important, and we’ll want to hang with interesting people. Should museums offer volunteers more structured opportunities where they can pursue their own thing using the museum’s platforms?
- The Food, Diet and Fitness Craze: Currently a top-of-mind public topic, judging by media attention - Celebrity chefs… Food fights on TV! And sex and food share the supermarket magazine rack. We run our own expensive arms race spending on both kitchen and exercise equipment. From on high, we get food and fitness pronouncements from Michele Obama, Mark Bitman and Bill Clinton. The topic is inherently multi-disciplinary, and most categories of museums can find a way in: “The Science of BBQ and Beer;” “Stories from the Grave: Exercise in Colonial New England;” “The Art of Buff: Nudes from Rubens to Mapplethorpe;” and “ObesityWorlds” – lots of possibilities….[For more on this emergent trend, see CFM’s “Feeding the Spirit: Museums, Food & Community” initiative, and the White House’s “Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens” campaign.]
c. Macro trends seeking museum innovations
- GPSification and "Placebook": The crowdsourced story of an exact spot is already possible, and may allow open-source interpretation. An object on display has GPS coordinates that tomorrow’s mobiles can find, read and then add virtual post-its and links to that spot's "Placebook" page. At a fine-grain resolution, folks nearby or in South Africa could tune into the Hope Diamond, or at a larger resolution, to a house and its stories. Elaine Gurian envisioned this in her “Essential Museum” article, which talked about opening up collections for user-based exploration and comment. Certain sites, like the Freedom Trail in Boston, might collect a sufficiently robust set of comments that people could filter by their interest: architectural details; Italian food sources; Patriots and Tories, etc.
- Brain Science is the New Space Race: Obama's push for neuroscience research may offer major opportunities for museums. The human brain will reveal new information about how our brains work and how they can get stronger. There will be new self-tests and exercises that will be both fun and helpful, and museums can position themselves as places of structured stimulus - a mental Nautilus. How does your brain react to different exhibits? Different stories? Can you curate a gallery of paintings that will boost seratonin levels? Do you want visitors to bookmark the museum moments that most quickened their pulses? Remember how many planetariums were funded during the space race in the 60’s and 70’s?
If you are advancing or experiencing any of these "trend contenders," please use the comment section, below, to share with me and with the CFM crew.
Thanks, John
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Museums are the Future of Education
April 11, 2013 - 9:40am
Earlier this year, I shared some thoughts regarding the future of education with face-to-face and on-line attendees at Museums Advocacy Day. My thesis, which I’ve advanced on this blog before, is that we are on the cusp of transformative change in the U.S. learning landscape, and that museums have the opportunity, through advocacy and action, to help create a more equitable and successful educational system in which they play a starring role in. We recorded the presentation, and I share it with you here in the hopes you will use it to spur thinking in your own organizations about the kind of future we want to live in, and what you can do to help make that future come to pass.
30-minute video. Schedule a brownbag lunch. Make popcorn. Hit “play”
Here is the CliffsNotes version for those of you who prefer reading to viewing:
One goal of strategic foresight is spotting the end of major eras and foreseeing the nature of the next age. Many signals suggest the American educational system is on the cusp of transformative change. Our last era was based on a “factory” model of education designed to prepare a workforce prepared for the 20th century economy. The forces that shaped that era are fading away and new drivers of change are pushing us in a different direction. What might the new era of education look like? We can begin to outline potential scenarios of the educational future by looking at the forces—trends and events—that will shape our path forward. These include:
Trends:
- Rising dissatisfaction with performance of primary, secondary schools
- Increased experimentation with alternatives (charter schools, homeschooling, unschooling)
- Rising cost of higher education, escalating debt, low rates of post-graduation employment
- Burgeoning online educational content, including MOOCs
- Accelerating in development of micro-credentialing
- 1983: A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence)
- 2002: No Child Left Behind
- 2011: HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning Competition, supported by Mozilla, Gates funding for Badges for Lifelong Learning, supporting 30 development grants
The MAD audience overwhelmingly voted for A Vibrant Learning Grid as the future in which they would rather live and work. But (reality shock) they felt that, of these two scenarios, A Fractured Landscape is much more likely to come to pass. See if you agree.
And I issue the same challenge to you that I threw down to the MAD attendees: if you see a gap between the future you feel is probable and the future you prefer, this is your space to act. This is where you can exert the third driver of change—personal action—to shape the world we will live in. Once you have identified your preferred future, ask yourself every day, every week, every year, what can I do to make it the future you and your children will actually live in?
Read more about the trends shaping the future of education in the past two CFM reports: TrendsWatch 2012 and TrendsWatch 2013, as well as in the 1KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning, particularly the “Vibrant Learning Grid” scenario from which I borrowed elements for this talk.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Reports of Losing Your Museum Job to a Robot have been Greatly Exaggerated.
April 9, 2013 - 9:36am
Forecasting is about exploring “fringe futures” as well as more probable outcomes. Part of the art of futures studies is casting your imagination out to the edges of the Cone ofPlausibility, but also knowing when to reel it back in. This week Alliance board member Nik Honeysett, head of administration at the J. Paul Getty Museum, pulls us back into the mainstream, in this response to my recent post on the potential effects of automation on museum jobs. 
Image from Cauldrons & CupcakesRemember Expert Systems? In the 80’s, Expert Systems were going to change the way we worked, technology was going to take over and do our job better. Never heard of them? That’s because everyone got upset and thought they were going to lose their job, oh and there was the tiny issue that they weren’t very “expert”. They went through a rebranding exercise to “knowledgebase” and as a tool to assist us in our jobs.Technology is replacing jobs, but that’s been happening for centuries, but the number one motivator is for it to provide some kind of return on investment – productivity or reduced costs, but not always an improvement in service. Travel agents are a good example, they’re replaceable by technology because we don’t really need them – one never needed a travel agent to book a holiday, one needed a travel agent to work the system that booked the holiday. Similarly Estate Agents (Realtors) are destined to be replaced by technology, because we don’t really need them either.Call centers are another sector that, until recently, were being replaced by technology in the form of voice recognition. Like expert systems, this technology is not yet good enough. In fact talking to an automated system is a death spiral of pain and frustration resulting in some form of self-harming, and by “self” I mean the nearest manifestation of said technology. Automated answering systems for companies that pride themselves on customer service are going the way of expert systems, and while the ROI of these may have been about reducing costs, customers are turning away in droves.So that brings us to the issue of technology replacing jobs in museums where customer service and a sense of the physical and visceral is tantamount. Oh and all those volunteers who are the heroes of our operations including our (customer-facing) visitor engagement. My main question is what ROI calculation would provide a net benefit to replacing a costless employee with a technology investment? Not to mention that most of us don’t have the technology infrastructure, people or money to support this, expertly summarized in the 2012 Horizon Report – Museum Edition: “#2: Funding for technology projects, even those for interpretation and exhibition, continues to fall outside core operational budgets.” And if that weren’t enough of a challenge, try convincing your board that its worth it: “#4: Boards of Trustees and executive management too often do not recognize the importance of technology in generating financial or mission return on investment.” There’s no question that technology will replace some jobs in some museums, I’m just really skeptical that it will replace a lot of jobs in a lot of museums. To deploy technology in museums requires an existing technology infrastructure and management of the data that the technology is going to replace. I'll admit that a couple of museums will deploy some kind of interpretive robot soon, just as Seb* says, but that requires a infrastructure and support. For the vast majority of us, it’s much easier to continue with our docent core providing a personalized teaching experience, or issuing and tearing tickets, or...
*Seb Chan, in a comment on the CFM Blog Post “Will You Lose Your Museum Job to a Robot?”
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Keeping up with the 2013 Trends
April 4, 2013 - 4:15pmI hope you've had a chance to download TrendsWatch 2013, which we released last month. Phil Katz and I did a Town Hall webcast last week, presenting a brief overview of the report--you can access a recording of that event here.
I hope you will follow along with us in the coming year as we track the six trends pegged in the report:
- The Changing Shape of Giving (#philanthropy)
- 3-D Printing (#3Dprinting)
- The Great Unbundling--the rise of microcredentials in education (#futureofeducation)
- When Stuff Talks Back--the so-called Internet of Things (#iot)
- Disconnecting to Reconnect--unplugging from our hyperconnected world (#digitaldetox)
- The Urban Renaissance (#urbanfutures)
- Follow CFM on Pinterest. We have created a board for each trend, and will related images as we come across them. (Remember, these images link back to the original sources, so you can track back to the full stories they represent.)
- Follow CFM on Twitter. I'll tweet links to stories. Many of these will not appear in our weekly e-newsletter, Dispatches from the Future of Museums, because if we fill Dispatches with stories related to the TW '13 trends, we won't have room for the stories that may become TW '14! But I do also encourage you to
- Subscribe to Dispatches, because we will feature some stories related to the TW '13 trends. Besides, you can start helping us think about what we should highlight next year.
- Keep an eye on this blog. I will be inviting guest bloggers from inside and outside the museum field to write posts digging into each of the trends in more detail. (Heck, take a moment to "become a member." I'm not sure what that does for you, exactly, but I enjoy seeing the faces of our readers in the right hand navigation bar.)
- Come to the Alliance annual meeting: Phil and I will present a session on TrendsWatch, and CFM is organizing a 3-D printing demo for the Alliance Showcase in MuseumExpo (more on that in future posts). Also, I will post my yearly "Guide to the Future at the Annual Meeting" highlighting sessions related to the trends.
- Watch for future Town Hall webcasts on the trends related to philanthropy, microcredentialing and the urban renaissance. Schedule coming soon.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff
Museo-Mindfulness
April 2, 2013 - 9:27am
CFM’s newly released TrendsWatch 2013 highlights the growing desire of people to disconnect from our perpetual tether to technology in general and the Internet in particular. This led to a Twitter exchange with Andrea Michelbach, a Masters candidate in museology at the University of Washington, who is working on research about the well-being of museum professionals. I asked Andrea to share her thoughts on the subject of unplugging, sparked by a course she took on “Information and Contemplation” through the Information School at UW.
“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” –JON KABAT-ZINN 
Photo Credit: Andrea Michelbach
Photo Credit: Andrea Michelbach Rightnow, museums seem to be operating in the mode DavidLevy characterizes as “more-faster-better,” especially when it comes to technology. Perhapsit is time for museums to take a step back and become a cultural force for mindfulness, providing refugee in the melee rather than contributing to it.
Granted, museums may already be a force for mindfulness in today’s busy world. In Lois H. Silverman’s The Social Work of Museums (2010), she points out the ability of museums to “foster health by providing relief from physical tension and mental anxiety”—a claim akin to those made about Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Silverman goes on to reference the attention restoration theory of psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who suggest that museums can help solve “directed attention fatigue.” Museums can also provide objects for focus, as one might focus on the breath in some forms of meditation, and they can cultivate compassion, by linking the self to others.
In this 2007 article (also published in Museum News), Adam Gopnik saysthat today the mindful museum is one that is “aware of itself, conscious of its own functions and living in this moment.” To Gopnik, this means a museum that:
- Focuses on objects (potential parallels with breath meditation)
- Puts the “good stuff” out front (acknowledges the limits of our attention)
- Does not explain the unexplainable (lives in the present, recognizing but not dwelling on difficult thoughts)
- Encourages conversation (emphasizes personal experiences over a prescribed right or wrong)
From theon-the-ground perspective of a museum professional, mindfulness may find an even more practical place in museums through:
Public Programs. Given that museums can be places that cultivate health, introspection, and transcendence, as Silverman suggests, they may be a natural place for to practice mindfulness. This could take the form of a regular program, such as the weekly Mindfulness Meditations at the Frye Art Museum, or one that occurs less frequently, such asthe Slow Art Day coming up on April 27. What if mindfulness simply took the form of a handout: “mindful ways to engage with objects”?
Human Resources. By HR, I really mean all internal museum operations, including administration. What if meetings began with one minute of silence? What if job descriptions and work plans were more realistic about the time people actually need for full attention and reflection? What if museum professionals had time to think?
Education. Instead of focusing on meeting the curriculum requirements of public schools, informal museum education could focus on what is lacking in current formal educational practices, including mindfulness. What if instead of more-better-faster, we focused on less-present-slower? How could museum education teach kids to better stay inthe moment and attune their attention? I am reminded of the “TakeThis Fish and Look at It” story and of Visual Thinking Strategies, which asks, “What more can we find?”
Curation & Interpretation.What if object interpretation strategies focused more on the present and less on the past? What do the people of today think about this object’s meaning? This has been explored, for example, by Fred Wilson Mining the Museum for contemporary meaning of historic artifacts, or Barbara Bloom envisioning how Judaic objects might converse with each other today. How might this approach be expanded to encompass other voices, as well?
There are undoubtedly numerous other ways mindfulness could find a meaningful place in museums. And maybe your museum is already giving mindfulness a home. If so, please share what you’re doing. The best way to begin exploring these ideas may be through conversation. Are we, as a field, mindful? Do we want to be more mindful? How are we doing that—or how might we—in our particular jobs, at our particular institutions?
Personally, as someone about to enter the museum field, Ihope my first full-time museum job offers opportunities for mindfulness. Will I have time to think creatively and deeply? When I leave work, how “on” will I have to be through email and my phone? And once I am inthat first position, how will I be able to influence my immediate sphere to be more mindful? I believe this approach to mindfulness will prepare me to be the person I want tobe, living in the public world. I would love to hear from readers about their experiences withmindfulness in the workplace.
Categories: Museum [Tech] Blogs + Stuff