The big picture

March 3rd, 2010

“I have a particular beef with the notion of authorship,” says Bob Baxter, one of the founding directors of London-based design consultancy At Large.

It is a preoccupation that seems to underpin the consultancy’s approach to exhibition design work, perhaps with good reason: for people who are wary of designers – those who fear a creative prima donna figure, intent on stamping a singular vision over a project – Baxter’s is an allaying reassurance.

“Authorship doesn’t come into it because you’re dealing with all sorts of creative inputs,” he says. “It’s not even art directing because we’re not necessarily focusing people on what we want; it’s a collaborative endeavour. If you’re working together as a group of people the excitement is when you find something, not when you create something, but when you find it – it just jumps out.”

Having already worked together in various configurations over the years, the group’s three founders – Baxter, plus architects Ned Phillips and Helen Abadie – came together on projects for the Millennium Dome in London in the 1990s. While few involved with the Dome recall the experience fondly, for Abadie, Baxter and Phillips it forged a unit and working method that seemed too fruitful to relinquish.

“We put together [the Dome’s Money Zone] with a very tight but incredibly talented team. For me, it was not wanting to let go of this really good working practice that had established itself, this natural combination of skills,” recalls Baxter.

This working practice has served them well so far, helping the consultancy build a portfolio that includes the Holocaust Gallery at the Imperial War Museum in London, giant educational plants and insects at the Climbers & Creepers play area in Kew Gardens in London, and the British Museum’s Lost Tomb-chapel of Nebamun gallery.

On the eve of the group’s 10th anniversary, At Large has just finished what is arguably its most high-profile project to date, the Natural History Museum’s (NHM) Darwin Centre exhibition, which opened in September last year. As with many major museum projects, the Darwin Centre is the outward manifestation of cultural and institutional change; in this case, it is NHM’s desire to illuminate its role as an important scientific hothouse, as well as every kid’s favourite dinosaur haunt. To this end, the contents of the Darwin Centre’s beguiling “cocoon” structure provide a publicly visible union of exhibitions and scientific study.

What stands out in the Darwin Centre exhibition is precisely what “jumped out” in At Large’s consultation with the museum’s staff – namely, that the best people to talk about the work of NHM’s scientists are the scientists themselves. As a result, visitors are guided through the linear, spiralling exhibition by four NHM scientists, liberated from their labs via a series of video presentations.

“When we started they spoke only of scientists and their expertise and their collections. But they also wanted it to be personal – they wanted people to get involved with the work of the museum as a scientific institution,” says Baxter. “So we said ‘let’s stop talking about them as scientists for a moment, let’s talk about us all being curious about the world’. And we built the exhibition around this notion of curiosity. It became clear that the scientists’ excitement about the research and their advocacy of the scientific method, which is what the Darwin Centre is really all about, could perhaps be communicated directly to the public. The design challenge then lay in making the link between the scientists and the public as direct as possible.”

A similar search for the voice of the exhibition informed a much smaller project, the Household Cavalry Museum in Whitehall, London. Better known as the Horse Guards, the Household Cavalry has guarded the main entrance to the royal residences and provided protection for queens and kings for more than 300 years. Along the way, it has collected an array of objects, treasures, achievements and stories. But unlike most museum collections, these objects were never the subject of academic inquiry. Rather than being studied and interpreted by curators, the cavalry’s collection was merely “kept” in Windsor by volunteer soldiers and ex-soldiers. Inevitably, this raised questions of how to exhibit and interpret the material for the public.

“This is the oldest British regiment and it has an extraordinary quality in the relationship between the officers and men that’s really so strong – they all feel it. Squaddies and officers are all talking about the same thing. They talk about ‘our’ regiment. So it was fascinating to try and tap in to that,” says Baxter.

To present this sense of belonging, the exhibition’s text – its narrative – is written in the first person as a series of stories and observations told, or retold, by the same soldiers who are working in the stables behind a wall of glass. This approach to the text, along with the fact that the building is the cavalry’s home, helps to personalise the otherwise rather disparate exhibits.

“If you took those objects and put them in a temporary show in the V&A [Victoria & Albert Museum, London] or somewhere else, it would be different again,” says Phillips. “That’s their home, and one of the ‘exhibits’ is looking through the window and in to the horses. It’s a real place, it’s happening there, just like the scientists in the Darwin Centre labs. The people who are telling you this story, you’ve just seen them outside.”

Unlocking the stories in museum collections – and finding a perspective for an exhibition – requires an open, collaborative approach, Baxter says. In this way, At Large is more facilitator or producer than creative auteur. “If we’re talking about what sits behind our work, the key driver is probably in working with people to find the purpose of what they’re trying to do, the vision for their project,” says Baxter. “And once you’ve got it, you have to test it in all kinds of ways. Then it’s really important that everyone hears the same thing together so you’re building something consistent, because as the project changes – and these things are three or four years [long], with huge changes – what is it you’re going to hang on to? What is your measure of success at the end of it? Our job is to reflect that back all the time, to say ‘remember three years ago when we were talking about this, this is what we came up with and this is what we’ve still got’.”

In developing an exhibition space, it’s important to plan to scale and “in physical proximity and association, see the real material scaled in relation to each other,” adds Baxter.

More broadly, the group approaches exhibition design and development by taking a view of the “entire visit”, starting before a potential visitor has even contemplated walking through the door and continuing after they have returned home. This demands a very clear idea of what the museum is all about. Partly, a “design” process helps clarify that role for individual institutions, but it’s also a question that all museums are repeatedly asking. Are museum exhibitions about entertainment, learning, stories, collecting, or, increasingly, social interaction?

“I sense that museums are more certain about their role and purpose these days. Going back 15 or 20 years museums lost their direction and started to look to other models like entertainment. Everyone used to go off to the States and look at other things from a visitor management point of view and experience point of view – Disney and all kinds of things were used as models,” says Baxter. “It’s a long time since I’ve heard the remark that people get up on a Saturday morning and decide whether to go to Thorpe Park [theme park] or the British Museum. That was said a lot 20 years ago and you never hear it anymore, which implies that museums are more confident in their offer and how they are perceived.”

This renewed confidence seems to have come largely from a conviction that museums are places for learning. “Everyone seems to be much more relaxed now about going to a museum because it’s a learning experience. And there’s been a broadening of what learning might mean,” says Baxter. “It’s something that we’re trying to work through, the expectation people bring with them to museums, the reason that you decide to go in the first place. You go to learn something. Even the notion of it being a fun learning experience has started to mature in a lot of museums. People are less anxious about it being seen as fun. There’s less emphasis on things like immersive environments; we’re not asked for those very often now.”

For the the permanent London, Sugar & Slavery gallery at the Museum of London Docklands, confidence in the museum as a place of serious learning and discussion was crucial in reaching out to new audiences and giving treatment to a sensitive and emotive subject. Working with At Large “way beyond the confines of a curatorial department”, the Museum of London Docklands used community advisers to talk to black and ethnic minority groups to create an “authoritative support for exploring really difficult things, way beyond entertainment”. The space itself is developed as part gallery, part workshop and part multimedia presentation, with a simple son et lumière show taking over the environment every 20 minutes.

Increasingly, At Large considers the adaptability of an exhibition space for ongoing activities and interactions. In all the projects mentioned here, there are some points in the galleries that are specifically designed to allow interpreters to move in quickly and easily, as well as areas for equipment to be added and removed. “We’re increasingly finding aspirations to allow semi-formal events to happen and chance encounters to take place,” says Phillips. “It’s interesting that real physical spaces, with real things in them, encounters with objects, are still immensely powerful in a world where you can now have all kinds of encounters with perhaps much larger groups of people with much wider ranges of opinion. But that real place with other people is still incredibly potent as an experience.”

This article was written for Museum Practice, Spring 2010 (Issue 49)

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Shaping the future of design networks

December 18th, 2009

Shaping the future of design networks

– report from a Design Council event, 11 December 2009

Within the last ten years, regional design networks have emerged over much of the UK, adopting a wide range of shapes and sizes. Some are county-wide, such as Design Leicestershire, while others are more locally focused, like Creative Sheffield. Of these two examples, Design Leicestershire focuses on design specifically, whilst Creative Sheffield takes on a wider city development remit. Larger networks span multiple counties and act as umbrella bodies for smaller groupings: the South West Design Forum (SWDF) is a good example of this approach. There are also networks representing Wales (Design Wales) and Ireland (Design Business Ireland).

A quick review of the Design Council’s map and list of regions and their associated forums shows that some areas are well served by design networks and others have less activity. Add to this list the four main national design industry bodies – British Design Innovation, the Chartered Society of Designers, D&AD and the Design Business Association – as well as the Design Council itself, and it’s clear that there is a complex and sometimes confusing landscape of bodies, offering a range of services which sometimes overlap.

To review this landscape and to ask why we need networks, what we have already and how they can be made stronger, the Design Council last week hosted a day-long conference featuring an unprecedented gathering of people from the national bodies, regional networks, regional development agencies (RDAs), universities and county and district councils. Different perspectives and experiences were raised, along with questions about the future for collaboration, funding and the purpose of regional networks and national membership bodies.

What do design networks provide?

Representatives from both national bodies and regional networks outlined the activities and services that they provide, which include:

·         Training

·         Education

·         Seminars and conferences

·         Links and matchmaking between design, business, universities and the public sector

·         Knowledge transfer partnerships

·         Advice, support and good practice guides and documentation

·         Professional networking opportunities

These are the typical services offered by both national and regional bodies, so why have both? Many regional networks have grown from a perceived need to unify and promote design in those regions in a way that the national organisations have not been able to. Fuelled in many cases by economic development funding from the RDAs, such networks offer a way of maintaining local contact and relevance whilst allowing their design members to punch with greater weight.

Despite their disparate nature, all the networks share a common belief in the economic value of design and its power to innovate, improve and solve business and social challenges. Promoting this value to industry and government is the focus of many of the activities of both the national and regional design networks.

Why do we need design networks?

As well as providing links and matchmaking to businesses, design-led economic forums can also hook up with manufacturers and university research departments to create mutually supporting innovation programmes.

Networks can help designers share experience and resources and promote their services more effectively to businesses both inside and outside the region. With more designers working independently (the number of freelancers has grown by nearly 40 per cent in the last five years, according to Design Council research), networks fit with changing work patterns too, acting as social and professional hubs. ‘We’re already seeing different ways of working and we may see a greater concentration of remote, regional workforces who are connected by forums,’ said Barry Jenkins, deputy chair of the South Coast Design Forum.

According to Stuart McFarlane, sector manager for digital and new media industries at RDA Yorkshire Forward, networks are a vital resource for creative businesses. ‘Designers are businesses whether they like it or not and must start being creative entrepreneurs. Networks are an absolutely key business support tool.’

Should the national and regional networks collaborate?

It was felt that a combination of national weight and local reach could be harnessed to better promote design across the country, with potential efficiencies and cost-savings along the way. While the national organisations have more clout and greater membership revenues, the regional networks offer local relevance to their members and could provide a ‘grassroots’ voice directly to a national body such as the Design Council, suggested Design Leicestershire project manager Kate Beresford.

DBA chief executive Deborah Dawton is keen on collaboration, saying: ‘I think there’s been a shift out there and there needs to be a generosity of spirit; we need to work together, to adapt things for the locality of where you’re working.’

Greater collaboration between regional and national bodies could give a more unified voice for lobbying government, on areas such as procurement policy, for example. ‘I think there needs to be some sewing up between the national and regional bodies so that you get a real lobbying membership and you might then be able to decide whose is the lobbying voice,’ suggested Emma Cheshire, head of industry development for Screen Yorkshire. SWDF chair Roger Proctor agreed: ‘We really have to work together. We have to make it really simple for government so we can lead them toward what we want to do.’

Neil Tinson, chair of the Cornwall Design Forum, asked if we even need four national bodies –  should they merge to reduce duplication? They say not. There are too many different sectors in design and one huge organisation would be unwieldy, leading to further breakaways, according to BDI chief executive Maxine Horn. Frank Peters, chief executive of the CSD, agreed, saying: ‘We have 30,000 members, 39 areas of practice, in 34 different countries – every one with different ideas of what you should do. It would be an incredibly difficult thing to combine all the organisations. We have to gain professional recognition, it doesn’t really matter who you belong to – it’s about professional status.’ Peters also clarified that the CSD is not a membership body ‘seeking to compete with other groups based on services offered’, but a professional body to study, promote and support the practice of design.

What are the major issues facing design networks?

Uncertainty of funding streams is a cause of concern for many regional networks. Money typically comes in small amounts from different stakeholders and ‘pots’ and managing this can be time-consuming and inefficient, suggested Roger Proctor at SWDF. ‘We do this because we are passionate about the benefits of design, the economic benefits, the social benefits. But there are a hell of a lot of people between us and the source of the money we receive, so most of my time is not about value to the industry but spent [working with funding].’

With a change of government seeming likely and the future of the RDAs looking uncertain, must networks become self-financing and sustainable, as suggested by Vanessa Brady, president of the Society of British Interior Design, and Roger Proctor at SWDF? Events-based organisation Designer Breakfasts is already self-financing. Co-founder Amanda Tatham said that because Designer Breakfasts has no funding support, they must think entrepreneurially, developing revenue through partnerships and sponsorships.

Other issues facing design networks include a lack of shared vision, apathy toward engagement and, according to DBA chief executive Deborah Dawton, ‘not thinking big enough’ when it comes to ideas to promote the industry. There’s also the affect of policy on funding streams: ‘There’s a central government policy document which dictates how the RDAs can work. If you want to be heard you will have to work to that policy,’ noted Stuart McFarlane at Yorkshire Forward.

The future of design networks

The Design Council event was regarded as a positive and inclusive step in bringing together regional forums and national bodies. Further similar meetings were desired, particularly by regional representatives. But objectives need to be clear, said Gavin Cawood, operations director at Design Wales. ‘If this group wanted to carry on and get together again it would have to find reasons to do so, to go beyond the show and tell type thing of today.’

SDWF member Kathryn Hughes suggested that future events could include ‘facilitated working sessions’ where the national bodies discuss ‘what collaboration actually means and what it offers to working design practitioners’. Amanda Tatham of Designer Breakfasts proposed a centralised point of communication. ‘We’re doing all sorts of things in isolation, but I think it would be really good to bring all these things together in one place, where the people here could all contribute, and see what comes out of it.’

Design Council chief executive David Kester summed up with a series of questions pointing to the future. ‘There are all sorts of extraordinary networks across the UK doing a wide range of work – a whole ecosystem to promote design. But is there a missing piece? And if so, what can we do? What can the Design Council do? What can all of us here do? As Gavin Cawood said, if you bring people together once it is quite interesting; twice you get a bit more out of it and then the third time you ask why you’re doing it. Is there something more that we can do in the UK, not just for designers, but for Britain as a whole, that comes from us working together in a collaborative way. If there is, if it’s feasible, what shape should it take?’

What next? – Thoughts from the delegates

‘I think there should be a meeting between all of us, including the national organisations, to work out what we really mean by collaboration. It’s the role of the strategic body – the Design Council – to get us round a table and facilitate discussions about what collaboration could mean. In terms of funding, I don’t think there is going to be very much, so we are planning to build up revenue from our own assets, such as our high-profile directors, events, our newsletter and website and so on. I’m working on a model to do this and I am happy to share this with others. The national bodies can probably help as they are already self-supporting; the regions need the same financial stability, independence and sustainability.’ – Peter Spence, director, South Coast Design Forum

‘Regional design networks would benefit from opportunities to communicate with each other and share experiences. I believe that the Design Council is in an excellent position to facilitate such an exchange of information. The regional networks could also provide a route to grassroots opinion through their membership. This is not to suggest that the Design Council would become a representative voice of design practices – I know that is not its role – but it could enable the Design Council to develop strategies and initiatives that are better informed by the design sector.’ – Kate Beresford, project manager, Design Leicestershire

‘I thought that the biggest potential benefit that came out of the day – and also the biggest potential headache – was the idea of ‘open-sourcing’. We’re duplicating things all over the country. How much time and effort could we save collectively by sharing best practice and learning, by telling people what has worked well and what has failed? Can we adopt a more open source approach, not just to back-end technology, but also as a more general ethos? It would make us look better to our funders because we’re working with different parts of the country and it would be better value too.’ – Morag McClaren, chief executive, a:design association

‘Whilst the [regional] trade bodies can organise their members by networking and promotion, they do not have the resources or expertise to promote design to UK business. This is the remit of the government, in the guise of the Design Council. I understand that the Design Council was called upon to provide some funding for a hub of regional groups and it would be difficult to argue against this proposal. A contribution of £50,000 to each of the 9 UK regions, to be split or awarded on a tendering basis, would only cost the Design Council £450,000 and the rewards would be immense for the regions and the Design Council’s image. If the Design Council wished to see accountability, as they must, they could channel the funding, or part of it, through the key national bodies: DBA, BDI etc representing the trade and CSD, Institution of Engineering Designers etc. representing the profession.’ – Frank Peters, chief executive, Chartered Society of Designers

‘[As networks] we have to go way beyond just getting people together. We have to develop what people want first and then get them to pay for it. The South West Design Forum business plan is very focused around delivering strategic initiatives which can be taken up by the sub-local forums, ultimately encouraging paid membership. I also think we need a national organisation to present a coherent and single-minded message, otherwise government will get confused. I would like to see another meeting set up really soon and I think we should agree on a common strategy and business plan, then take it and partner with the Design Council, which is a good body to distribute resources throughout the country. We need to start doing things, not just keeping talking.’ – Roger Proctor, chair, South West Design Forum

‘Differentiation is very important. Why not carve membership bodies into specific sector remits such as graphics, digital, retail and so on, so there’s no competition? The regional groups should pay to join these to receive funding for local events, not use RDA funding to give services away for free without a sustainable business model. People were also concerned about duplication and reinventing the wheel across the country. BDI has already invested in a structure with a national centre and portals in every region. We are absolutely willing to find a way for people to use our structure and design directories technology in the most efficient way, so don’t reinvent the wheel – it’s already here. But all these things should be built around the needs of the external world – from the point of view of clients, students and business, not self-interest and self-promotion. We also need the voice of in-house designers. This group is now larger than consultancy-based designers and must be incorporated into the discussion.

Finally, we really should be supporting the CSD, not tearing it down, as it is the only professional body for design and should hold the remit for education and professional development. If we lose the CSD and its royal charter it will take years to get anything like that again. The CSD should be as strong for design as RIBA is for architecture.’ – Maxine Horn, chief executive, BDI

‘I wonder if the national bodies are necessarily offering regional businesses value for money in the way that the local bodies are or could, especially [if the local bodies] had access to bigger chunks of direct funding. The national networks however provide a critical broader function within the UK design ecosystem, and our local North East networks benefit from valued strategic support from DBA in particular. This relationship works both ways and enables the national organisations to get immersed in the detail of regional operations without duplicating activity. Fundamentally it comes down to co-ordinating appropriate roles, resposibilities and levels of collaboration across the networks to maximise wider benefit for the sector. But there is likely to be less and less public sector funding for design, so how are we going to collectively plan for this? There needs to be collective agreement when it comes to dissemination of best practice – the whole industry should promote generic guideline documents. There should also be a means for talking with one voice when the industry needs to. It was absolutely clear that this co-ordination of voices and lobbying is one of the functions the Design Council should be fulfilling. The Design Council needs to develop a framework for converging regional needs and voices towards common industry goals and objectives, government facing or otherwise.’ – Ben Strutt, design senior specialist, One North East

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Platform cues

September 11th, 2009

As the seams at Apple’s App Store threaten to burst, the volume of iPhone mobile phone applications continues to soar. Stacks of apps, from both independent developers and big commercial clients, from trivial little games to a major music platform, are lined up and waiting for the green light from Apple so they can enter the store. The apps micro-payment market is booming. For digital designers, this is a coming of age in mobile apps possibilities. The iPhone’s 480×320-pixel screen ‘real estate’ and button-less operation have opened up graphic possibilities and a new level of intuition in interaction design. And with brands starting to see the value of mobile apps to their marketing mix, the opportunities for professional designers are ripe.

The iPhone is certainly not the only touch-screen mobile around (handsets using Google’s Android platform are emerging, and others run on the Symbian platform) and it’s easy to forget just how small the iPhone market really is: O2 says it has sold ‘more than a million’ handsets, but that’s in a mobile market, says Ofcom, of more than 75 million connections. Yet the iPhone is clearly the designer’s favourite. ‘It is ahead of the competition and although at first sight it’s similar to a Google[-powered] phone, it’s quite different to use,’ says Alasdair Scott, director at mobile group The Bright Place, which has developed a series of i-Trump apps based on the original Top Trumps card game.

Of course, mobile apps did not appear with the advent of the iPhone; there are many available for older handsets, mostly using the Java language, but their visual and interaction capabilities are far more constrained. The arrival of larger screens and touchbased interaction means that visual elements are becoming as vital as coding, opening the door for developers to work in collaboration with graphic designers.

‘There’s a real talent to designing with very few pixels - originally we had 32×32-pixel, black-and-white icons. Now things are a little bit easier. The iPhone gives you proper screen real estate and 57×57-pixel icons, so the experience compared to a Java app is very different. And because of the mechanics of how an iPhone app is constructed, you’re looking at the space as one element, in which you can hang different bits. In the old days of the Internet, you had separate elements like pictures, text and headers and they all looked a certain way,’ adds Scott.

As graphic possibilities increase, so does the importance of visual impact. Advertising agency Fallon’s visual identity work for the BBC’s national radio stations was conceived in 2007 with mobile platforms in mind, and has come into its own in BBC Worldwide’s new Radio Times iPhone app, itself a great bit of information design by US group TV Compass.

But ensuring stand out from the crowd is harder than ever. The ‘open’ distribution platform of the App Store has attracted a swathe of independent developers - some hobbyist, and others seeking to making a living - but often without any real training in visual or interaction design. Independent developer Ed Lea acknowledges that without higher quality design, apps are now less likely to be seen. ‘I’ve noticed a huge shift in the Apple Store since it launched last year. Getting applications noticed is now very, very difficult. Working with a designer to create an application that’s both aesthetically pleasing and well thought out certainly wouldn’t harm [its chances of success].’

Having held number one spots in the App Store charts with his MMS and TV Plus apps, Lea brought in illustrator Emma Anderton to create a character for his latest offer, the ‘novelty app’ BoomBot, which reads out text entered into the phone.

But perhaps the biggest shift for professional designers will arrive when corporate clients start to explore the marketing possibilities of mobile apps. ‘They are very much part of the marketing language, converging around websites, widgets and phones,’ says Jon Carney, chief executive of digital and mobile consultancy Marvellous. ‘And there is a branding impact in using apps too - it’s part of a whole move from being a message holder to becoming an enabler. In this way, everyone has a chance to do something interesting.’

This article was written for Design Week’s Interaction Design Supplement, autumn 2009. 

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Second life

September 9th, 2009

Online social media are where it’s at. Brands know this, corporations know this and of course, so do many museums.

Bundled under the rather opaque term “web 2.0″, a host of online sites and services - coupled with wider access to faster internet connections - has profoundly influenced the way that many people communicate.
Previously unrelated individuals can speak to one another, while larger numbers of people come together to form “web communities”.

At its best, this activity spawns new networks of knowledge - sharing, thinking and inspiration; at worst, it serves up a white noise of banalities. And like all organisations that deal with the public, museums have to navigate a way through this terrain, harnessing its strengths and watching for its pitfalls.

With each new social media phenomenon there is a bubble of hype: first it was Facebook and now it is Twitter. Among the hype it is not always easy to ascertain whether these things are genuinely useful; in the case of Twitter in particular, first appearances are generally discouraging, although further exploration yields riches.

The benefits of such services to museums, and how they might approach using them, are even less clear and a lot of head-scratching and question-posing is currently underway.

This Working Knowledge discusses some of the opportunities and challenges presented by online social media, looking at projects from leading institutions around the world. But before heading into the thick of it, it is worth trying to pin down what web 2.0 actually means.

Really, it is a catch-all term relating to a “generation” of online services that are built around interaction, social networking, sharing and interoperability.

Another, simpler way of looking at it is offered by consultants Lord Cultural Resources, which describes social media sites - such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter - as an extension of “the sharing of experiences once the sole purview of word-of-mouth communication”.

SPREAD THE WORD, VIRTUALLY

As a virtual word of mouth, it is the sharing of ideas, knowledge and experience that underpins web 2.0 services and user behaviour. This behaviour is typically predicated on relaxed openness, dialogue and a collegiate style of collaboration.

While many museum workers may share these attributes, very often the institutions themselves operate more like corporations, as Bridget McKenzie, director of cultural consultancy Flow Associates, explains.

“In the UK, we’ve followed the US model of shifting to museums as corporations and we’ve learned the rules of PR from the business world,” she says.

“I think this PR mode sits uncomfortably with the collegiate style of critical and independent thinking that characterises most cultural sector workers and increasingly grates against the conversational and open modes of social media.”

As a rule, the US is leading the way in working through these questions, with the Brooklyn Museum and Indianapolis Museum of Art both notably advanced. On the whole, museums and galleries that have really embraced web 2.0 are still few and far between, yet many say they want in.

“Over the last six months, one of the biggest things I’ve found is that people say they want to do web 2.0, but when it comes to matching the digital output that’s necessary with the shape of the museum institution inside, there is a mismatch,” says UK-based consultant Jon Pratty.

And we are right at the peak of the hype, says Mike Ellis, former head of web for the National Museum of Science and Industry and now a solutions architect at IT group Eduserv.

“Once upon a time the development of social tools had our fellow institutions looking on with horror. After a while it became entirely de rigueur. Round about now, it has become unfashionable to launch anything without some kind of social element. [This] is more about doing technology for the hell of it rather than looking at how users might really want to interact with our content.”

With this as a word of warning, the following articles discuss the practical, as well as strategic, challenges thrown down by museums’ use of social media. The apparent simplicity of many services and projects is appealing, but it masks a number of complex issues within.

The structure and culture of most museums, for example, is rarely prepared to handle a multiplicity of voices, both incoming and outgoing. Managing web 2.0 content throws up many implications for branding, content generation and authorship, tone of voice, timeliness, marketing, interpretation and more.

The Brooklyn Museum, considered by many to be exemplary in its online community work, is still something of an exception, says Pratty (see link below).

“Everyone wants to be like the Brooklyn Museum, but most UK museums aren’t like that. They don’t allow open voices or allow people to speak and author [content]. We have a hierarchical structure and the exemplars [in web 2.0] are not shaped like this, so museums have to change. This is a big thing to be tackled and it is less to do with technology and more to do with who and what the organisation is.”

MULTIPLE VOICES

One key aspect is the erosion of a centralised, single voice of authority, as traditionally presented and policed by a museum’s press and marketing department. Museums need to adjust to the idea of having multiple voices, says Mia Ridge, head of web development for the Science Museum, London.

“The monolithic museum voice is challenged by social media. It has always been the way that a museum has many voices: curators would do seminars, education teams would do something in school, and marketing people would be sending messages out to lots of different places,” Ridge says.

“But technology makes it much more obvious because you can just search through it all on the web. So if I’m semi-officially writing about work at the Science Museum on my own blog, what does that mean? My [technical] writing doesn’t really clash with the museum [voice], but what if explainers or curators are blogging? That might clash with the official lines. We’re exploring this at the moment.”

In fact, even the most progressive institutions are still exploring these issues, so hard-and-fast answers are scarce. But there are already some great examples of innovative projects out there, including the use of Flickr in competition events, both on- and off-site; blogs that offer staff the chance to share their experiences and knowledge; and exhibitions and online collections that are “co-curated” by the public.

As ever, different museums will need different responses to these challenges, based on their own particular objectives. “[Practical responses] have to be crafted for each situation, using the right channels and communities of interest,” says Bridget McKenzie.

“With social media, I think those generic rules you see everywhere are problematic. Organisations need to accept they need to invest in advice and training staff in these new PR skills.”

Jon Pratty echoes this: “Museums are seeking or searching for digital publishing skills, and they really need to. Publishing and content skills are absolutely needed.”

Or, as US-based museum and web 2.0 consultant Nina Simon puts it: “Do we have to be on Facebook and Twitter and every other damn social site? No - you have to determine what fits your goals and resources. And then just do that.”

This Working Knowledge is loosely organised around the types of activity that museums already do before the emergence of web 2.0 communications.

Some argue that the distinction between departmental functions is eroded by these new communications channels and that a full structural and cultural reappraisal is needed to embrace changes in visitor relationships, curatorship and interpretation.

This may be the case, but in the end much outward activity will fall into familiar categories: projecting what the museum does; building audiences; developing and marketing exhibitions and events; and researching and interpreting the history of objects.

The web can now play a role in all of these areas, even if it is just one channel among many. Web 2.0, for want of a better term, is more than a fad - and it is here to stay.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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New voices

September 9th, 2009

Blogging and podcasting are two relatively easy ways to embrace web 2.0. But museums need to be prepared to allow for different views and voices

Web 2.0 technologies enable people to contribute all sorts of ideas and material to museums’ online activities, yet it is the museum’s own content and expertise that remain the main appeal and focus of an institution.

So before considering how actual visitors, and potential ones, might contribute their own material, it is worth asking how the museum’s activities might be usefully translated, or perhaps expanded, into the online world.

What content do you have that is already suited to the web? How might new content be developed that would bring in new audiences, both online and to the museum itself? And how might your processes have to change to manage these new channels?

Perhaps a more apposite question is why publish online at all. When asked whether blogs, podcasts, videos and so on are produced for marketing, interpretation, education or a form of exhibiting, most museums say it is a combination of the lot.

“It is for all of these in a sense,” says Mark Hook, a web content manager at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), in London. “They are communicating the creative work that goes on in the museum to inform and enlighten the site’s users.”

RAISE YOUR PROFILE

In the first instance, a blog or podcast may function primarily to raise the museum’s profile and allow it to communicate farther and wider to interested parties. It is also a way of forming a record of activities for people inside, as well as outside, the museum, and it can allow staff who may not otherwise write about their roles to do so - itself an empowering opportunity.

Once established, a blog might instigate a dialogue with readers, much as the Tate Modern’s Great Tate Mod Blog was used to garner ideas for the interior design of its proposed extension.

A blog may be written for the general visitor, or, as in the case of some of the V&A’s blogs, it might offer a more specialist and focused view than would be appropriate for the main website.

Glenn Adamson and Tristan Webber’s V&A blog, From Sketch to Product, for example, is a detailed examination of the processes of creation in craft and design. Ultimately, blogs will be more successful if they are more about interpretation than marketing.

If you are considering starting a blog, an internal “evangelist” will help convince other, possibly sceptical, members of staff of the benefits. Fiona Romeo, the head of digital media at the National Maritime Museum (NMM), London, says that blogging is still seen by some people as an exercise in the banal.

“It takes a while for some people to realise that [it] is not about what you had for breakfast, but something where you can talk about serious museum things. The blog of Jonathan Betts [the senior specialist in horology at NMM] offers a very personal account of fixing the Harrison H1 clock, for example,” she says.

MAKE IT PERSONAL

The “personal” is at the heart of the idea of blogging and sometimes this can clash with a museum’s traditional authoritative voice.

Museums embracing web 2.0 channels need to make a cultural change in how they approach communications. Distributive content with a more individually authored tone is to be encouraged, even if this does mean relinquishing some “control”.

Viewing content creation and publishing in this way also necessitates certain practical and operational changes. Staff who previously did not produce any written material may need to be briefed on the suitability of different kinds of content.

Guidelines may be useful, but remember that blogs are individually authored: even if the press office did have time to sign everything off, it would run counter to the ethos of blogging.

“We’re looking at more blogs for the [Science Museum’s] centenary celebrations, but how can we bring them into the institution without making them un-blog-like? Previously, some early blogs had ridiculous sign-off processes,” says Mia Ridge, the head of web development at the Science Museum in London.

On the other hand, there will be instances when press and marketing need control of communication over and above a staff member who is publishing a blog, as Fiona Romeo says: “Once, someone made a blog post before the press office had issued information on what was a fairly formal and slightly sensitive issue.

But to issue a press release or draft a formal letter can take days, so which is the better way? People have different views on this, but we have realised there’s a need to build better planning and coordination into our processes, especially with press and marketing.”

Such cultural and operational adjustments are probably more challenging than any practical obstacles when it comes to publishing blogs. According to Mark Hook, the V&A’s blogs seldom need editing and the web team receives them and uploads them in a short time - most of the onus is on the writers.

Mia Ridge at the Science Museum estimates that it takes about an hour to write a post, if the author has thought about the topic in advance.

Another way of disseminating museum content is through a podcast. This may seem technologically daunting, but can be simple and effective. The NMM’s On The Line podcast is an example of how to harness the participatory nature of the web, while creating a museum-authored production.

As well as featuring museum staff talking about their activities and telling various maritime and astronomical stories, the programme also answers the public’s questions.

“We were keen to have real voices asking these questions so that it was authentic,” says Natasha Waterson, the digital project manager at NMM. To achieve this, people call an On The Line answering machine, which records their questions as MP3 files. A presenter then scripts and records the answers on a handheld device and the two are edited together.

“The voicemail system costs about £2 a month, and we send the file for transcription to Castingwords.com, so the whole thing is really cheap. The transcription helps with search engine optimisation and provides better accessibility to the [online] content. All in, it takes about half a day to do,” says Waterson.

Blogs and podcasts extend museum content beyond a physical visit and in a manner that can be more detailed than is appropriate for an exhibition or conventional website. They can also can be instructive and entertaining while at the same time performing a marketing function, albeit not a conventional one.

Just be prepared to rethink the way the museum authors and publishes its “voice”.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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Fan mail

September 9th, 2009

Online communities offer many opportunities to market a museum, event or exhibition. But their interactive nature means you must tread carefully

MARKETING

The temptation to use the internet’s many channels and communities for marketing is great. Thousands of people can be reached at once, often in well-targeted groups.

And if a museum starts a Facebook group or Twitter feed, its “fans” and “followers” are just waiting for marketing messages to tell them what’s going on at the museum - right? Well, not quite, because marketing, in the conventional sense, sits rather uncomfortably in the world of social media.

In many ways, social media are a great way of spreading the word about what a museum is up to, especially if people are involved in those activities. The problem is, the net answers back. Or rather, individuals do - and that is where it gets tricky, at least from a branding and marketing perspective.

A recent scuffle centred on the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York illustrates this. In May, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz used Facebook to comment on the galleries at Moma, which he felt significantly under-represented the work of female artists.

The museum’s chief communications officer, Kim Mitchell, responded to the Facebook group, but in a press release-style statement, using a regal-sounding “we” that irked many online readers who seemingly felt shut off from a proper dialogue by Moma’s corporate communications department.

Without scrutinising the precise language, it is sufficient to say that the museum thought it was engaging with people through social media, while others found Mitchell’s tone to be impersonal and inappropriate for a web 2.0 community that expects discourse.

Saltz was also criticised for using Facebook rather than a more open forum to air his opinions, as only Facebook “friends” could respond directly.

NEW MEDIA, NEW RULES

This episode demonstrates how marketing, public relations and branding do not work in the same way online as they do in traditional advertising, posters, leaflets or direct marketing.

Commenting on Moma’s response to the growing online conversation instigated by Saltz, ArtsJournal.com editor Douglas McLennan wrote, “Traditional PR notices are not only ineffective in this new era of many-to-many communication, but can make things worse. And what might have been a real opportunity to meaningfully engage this community has been lost.”

This is a sticky subject that, for most institutions, is still in formation and flux. If you are thinking of reaching out online for marketing purposes, first think carefully about how you will respond to conversations - favourable or critical - when they develop.

Where does the museum’s voice reside? Is it with the press office, the marketing team, curatorial staff, the director, or all of these? How do you want your brand to be projected and how closely do you want to police it? Do you care about negative comments and will you engage their authors?

Almost certainly, the view on these types of question - and the structures and processes that support it - will have to change as you engage online, as Fiona Romeo, head of digital media at the National Maritime Museum, London, explains.

“Typically [at NMM], every piece of communication would be controlled with style guidelines, editing and so on. Interviews would be run through the press office and everything was centrally controlled. But over the past couple of years we’ve been moving towards more distributive content.”

The web will serve up a multitude of views about a museum and given that these cannot be controlled, it is better to learn how to respond. Traditionally, bad press is often ignored in the hope that the story will soon blow over. But online comments usually hang around indefinitely, and they are searchable.

Nina Simon, a consultant on museums and web 2.0, advises organisations taking their first steps towards social media to start by searching review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Qype to see what people are saying about the institution.

“If reviews include incorrect information, add your own comment giving helpful information. If there are negative comments you want to address, commiserate, be friendly, and help them know that you care,” she says.

You can do the same for blogs, again commenting where appropriate. This is a good and simple starting point to familiarise yourself with the web 2.0 environment and is also a type of “soft” marketing.

TWITTER YE NOT?

The biggest social networking story of the day, Twitter, is perhaps the hardest to pin down from a marketing point of view. Some museums are using Twitter to post regular updates on exhibitions and events, as well as converse with the public. Its 140-character “tweet” limit is ideal for quick updates and short question-and-answer conversations.

However, it is informal by nature and the “voice” of a museum’s Twitter contact is typically individual, not corporate. This is a good thing perhaps, but it does have brand and public relations implications.

“Twitter could be the hardest social media platform to take your brand into because it is a person-to-person platform,” says Jim Richardson, managing director of branding consultancy Sumo.

“You need to have an individual [twittering for your organisation] who understands what your organisation is about and understands the medium. They need to be perceived as ‘that cool person who Twitters from the museum’, rather than the institution itself.

“But the content that this individual tweets can be based on your brand. If I’m tweeting for an art gallery wishing to inspire people to engage with art, this forms the basis of all my activity on the site, not just about my own exhibitions, but about other inspiring things.”

Richardson does not recommend Twitter as a public relations vehicle per se, but rather as a way to engage audiences “with interesting conversations”.

Having said that, Twitter is a great mechanism for quick updates, along the lines of “still seats left for tonight’s screening” or “6-9pm tonight, free bar (while stocks last)”, which were recent tweets by the Museum of Childhood in London to promote its First Thursdays events: direct marketing in anybody’s book.

Facebook is perhaps easier to approach in a straightforward marketing sense because it has a section for event details - and, unlike Twitter information, it is not limited to 140-character updates.

Facebook users can become “fans” of their favourite institutions and they do - in droves. The Design Museum, London, boasts of its 46,000 fans, the Tate has almost 12,000, and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), London, more than 10,000.

MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS

So what does everyone get from this “relationship”? “We keep them updated with news, information about exhibitions and events, and we run competitions and special offers,” says Mark Hook, the web content manager at the V&A.

“The benefit to the online audience is that they always know what is going on at the museum and they are able to enter discussions with us about areas of particular interest. The benefit to the museum is that it is a chance to get feedback from people who are engaged with what we do and it is also an opportunity to reach new audiences,” he says.

Social media are great at getting the message out and reaching new audiences but the feedback is trickier to handle. So marketing in web 2.0 is marketing, but not quite as we know it.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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Shared aims

September 9th, 2009

Sites and services such as YouTube, Flickr, iTunes and Wordpress can provide useful platforms for sharing your work and events

THIRD-PARTY SITES

One of the most significant aspects of the move to web 2.0 technologies and social media is just how much online content is now delivered to the reader not directly from the source, but through third-party websites or software.

Photos are viewed on Flickr, videos on YouTube, blogs on hosting sites such as Wordpress and Blogger. Designed to get people using their systems, these services are simple, largely free and robustly developed.

As well as hosting content, these services are specifically designed so users can share and comment on this material. In many ways, they are an ideal option for museums, few of which can afford to build complex and media-rich websites to host and manage their own content.

When used cleverly, such services can support museum activities extremely effectively. Used poorly, they could become a dumping ground for largely irrelevant media. There are other issues to consider too: media on a third-party site sits within that site’s branding, not your own. And if the site becomes unpopular - or worse, goes bust - it may be difficult to migrate your content to a different system.

These are two main reasons why, given sufficient resources, it may be worth developing a proprietary content management and publishing system for multimedia content to use alongside third party sites.

Of course, the appeal of third-party systems is that all this expensive and time-consuming back-end development is already taken care of; all you really need is good content and a reason to publish it - the rest is easy.

POST HASTE

Posting images to Flickr should take less than an hour if you are already generating photographic content.

“You can post images from museum events on Flickr or upload event videos to YouTube easily,” says Nina Simon, a web 2.0 consultant.

“The time required is highly correlated to whether you are currently generating this kind of content. But if you are already snapping shots, putting them up on the web - with a handy link back to the museum website - is a cinch, and it’s totally acceptable to do it sporadically.”

It is debatable just how interesting pictures of people mingling at an event are to the wider public, but it is an easy way to kick off an online presence. National Museums Liverpool is using this snapshot approach through Flickr to chronicle construction of the new Museum of Liverpool on the city’s waterfront, for example.

The Tate, London Transport Museum and National Maritime Museum (NMM) have all used Flickr to run competitions, with user-contributed photos feeding into content for accompanying exhibitions and books.

In July 2008 the London Transport Museum’s Flickr Scavenger Hunt sent five teams of visitors on a trail of “cryptic clues” to locate and photograph nearby transport-related features in the Covent Garden area, in central London. All the photos were uploaded to Flickr - and ultimately to social networking site Webjam - where the winners were chosen by public vote.

“You need to be well organised to run a Flickr scavenger hunt and think creatively to come up with clues, but events are fairly low-cost and the more you do the easier it becomes,” says Jane Findlay, a community curator at the London Transport Museum.

“Running a public vote is also a great way of prolonging the life of the event. As well as the competition on the day we had a week-long vote for the best photograph.

“It’s been a good way of developing a new web 2.0 community audience and building a media relationship with bloggers. It’s also changed museum interpretation practices by inspiring the use of user-generated content in all future exhibitions.”

The Tate joined forces with Flickr and book-publishing site Blurb as part of its Street & Studio photography exhibition, to add a public element to the show, which was held in 2008. Participants could add two of their own street- or studio-based photographic portraits to a Flickr site, for example (see link below).

“We use Flickr to run audience-participation projects,” says John Stack, the head of Tate Online. “Our approach has always been to ask people to contribute but then to offer something back: displays in the gallery, or a book of selected photographs [for example].”

USING YOUTUBE AND ITUNES

Flickr is the easiest and most used of the third-party media-hosting sites, but some museums are also making use of YouTube and iTunes. If you are already producing video and audio material in-house, these services are especially useful for broadcasting that content.

Tate publishes its video podcast series TateShots on YouTube, and iTunes and is now producing a small amount of content specifically for YouTube. Audio and film recordings of Tate public events are available through iTunes, as are some exhibition audio and multimedia tours, which can be downloaded to iPhones or iPods prior to a visit to the gallery.

Even if you are already producing multimedia material in-house, deploying it to third-party sites will take some additional resources, especially when you plan to update it at least once a month, as the Tate does.

“Mostly we are reusing content from elsewhere or redeploying it,” says Jane Burton, the head of content and creative director of Tate Media.

“Generally it needs to be recontextualised for the medium, and that’s time-consuming. There is a change in what people do as part of their jobs and inevitably working with social media is additional, rather than replacing existing channels, such as email communications, press releases and Tate Online. There is some staff time involved in uploading and maintaining play lists and responding to comments, for example.”

Given the extra time needed to “populate” third-party sites with content, it is reasonable to assess what the benefits might be. According to Burton, Tate measures the number of referrals from these sites back to the main Tate Online website and has found the results encouraging enough to adopt this approach in all of the gallery’s activities.

“In general, we have found that reaching out to communities on other sites is very successful and we are working on a cross-departmental strategy to embed this within the organisation including Tate Online, marketing, press and communications, visitor services, director’s office, membership, and beyond,” she says.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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Crowd as curator

September 9th, 2009

Web 2.0 services, such as social networking sites, allow museums to become truly collaborative and democratic

PUBLIC INTERACTION

Web 2.0 is all about interconnections. It can develop the connections between museums and their users, as well as those between the users themselves, but there are also connections between objects - and not necessarily objects held in the same museum.

And it is this last set of connections that can really be harnessed by the interoperability of web 2.0 services and collaboration with the public.

The digitisation of objects and information to create online collections is not new, even though for many institutions it is a slow and ongoing process. But the way that people, including other organisations, might make use of these collections is now changing.

Web 2.0 services such as Flickr and Facebook allow content to be added and manipulated from other pieces of software through what is known as an application programming interface (API).

It is here that some of the most interesting developments will take place, says Mike Ellis, the former head of web for the National Museum of Science and Industry and now a solutions architect at IT group Eduserv.

“[While we focus] heavily on the social aspects of web 2.0 from a user perspective, it is the stuff going on under the hood which really pushes the social web into new and exciting territory. It is the data sharing, the mashing, the APIs and the feeds which are at the heart of this new generation of web tools,” he says.

OPEN SOURCE

A number of museums are building APIs to allow access to their online collections: the Brooklyn Museum in the US and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, are two leading examples. But what does it mean to have an API?

Shelley Bernstein, the chief of technology at Brooklyn Museum, describes it like this: “It’s basically a way outside programmers can query our collections data and create their own applications using it.” In other words, the data in the digital collections becomes open and can be mined and presented in new ways by other web-based applications.

This means that museums can effectively share their digital collections and the public can potentially “collect” information on objects they are interested in, irrespective of which museum holds the real items.

This prompted Beth Harris, the director of digital learning at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York to ask: “Why would a person want a ‘personal collection’ at seven museum websites? Can we really think about our users instead of ourselves?”

This is exactly what the Powerhouse Museum has done with the creation of “D*Hub”, a resource that uses APIs to search a number of design collections held in institutions around the world.

Developing APIs for digital collections obviously requires a dedicated web team, with time to do the coding, even assuming that at least some of the collection has been digitised. But once created, it could lead to a new form of open access that ultimately saves time.

Shelley Bernstein says: “People [in museums] have been working to create various pan-institution collection databases. By releasing our API, Brooklyn Museum data can now be included in these endeavours without requiring more staff time from us - something that would have been impossible prior to the API.”

As well as staff time, there are other considerations, such as material copyright and terms of use, both of which have to be considered under the ethos of sharing and collaboration that such web services promote.

But as museum collections become more readily accessible in different places and formats, opportunities for the public to contribute to the collection increase. One way they can do this is through “tagging”, where brief descriptions are attached to objects online, allowing people to assign their own attributes or knowledge to an item.

Often, the vocabulary of tagging is neither academic nor curatorial, but instead brings a “lay” interpretation to a collection. But increasingly there are instances where the online availability of collections has brought a direct research benefit.

PHOTO LIBRARY

In January 2008, the US Library of Congress launched Flickr Commons as a way to post photographs held in various public collections online. More than a dozen museums, public libraries and other cultural heritage institutions from around the world have now joined, releasing over 12,000 images to be “perused, tagged and researched by the public”.

In many instances, public users of Flickr have provided, or sometimes corrected, information relating to the images in the Commons collection. The Library of Congress itself has already updated almost 200 of its own records based on information provided in this way.

Similarly, unknown scenes in historic photographs posted by the Swedish National Heritage Board were identified by Flickr users within a day.

Both tagging and Flickr Commons lead to the idea of “the crowd as curator”, where members of the public contribute to museum collections and exhibitions alongside curators and historians.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Tag! You’re It game encourages members of its online “posse”community to tag items for the collection, with the aim that their contributions will make the collection easier for others to search.

The Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) put the crowd-as-curator idea into practice two years ago, before social media had really hit the big time. In the build up to Minnesota’s 150 Years of Statehood celebrations in 2008, the historical society invited public submissions of the key people, places or things that have shaped the state’s history (see link below).

This public engagement was partly conducted online, but the bulk of submissions came from community outreach. “This online technique brought us about 300 responses,” says Kate Roberts, senior exhibit developer at MHS.

“We were pleased with the response, but did feel that we were preaching to the converted, since we reached mostly MHS members. Of course, were we to do this process today, we could take advantage of Facebook, Twitter and so on and have a huge reach.”

The MHS programme has been successful partly because of the collaborative development process, says Roberts. “Had we not used this technique, I feel quite sure that the rich blend of stories and objects presented by real people passionate about their nominations could not have been matched.”

Should the public contribute more and more to the process? “We learned many years ago that our visitors understand there is no single way to interpret the past, and they appreciate exhibits and programmes that invite speculation and debate. Public contribution supports this preference in a real and meaningful way.”

So is this the way museum exhibitions are going? Most definitely,” says Roberts. She is not alone in her views.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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On message

September 9th, 2009

Social networking sites present great opportunities for dialogue with visitors. But you have to accept that along with praise will come criticism

BUILDING DIALOGUE

Social media are about interaction. When it works well, this interaction can lead to proper dialogue and the formation of a “relationship” between those involved.

It is this simple underlying appeal that accounts for the huge success of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the many interconnections of the “blogosphere”. But this apparent simplicity belies a thorny complexity when it comes to museums and heritage organisations interacting online.

Most museums say they want to interact with visitors to build relationships and encourage dialogue, but are they really prepared for the web 2.0 world? Too often they don’t really know why they want to have these conversations or how to handle them when they arise.

“[Museums] don’t have the resources or policies to support real dialogue with the public, even if they are present in social media-land. They may be in Rome, but they’re not ready to do like the locals,” says Nina Simon, a museums and web 2.0 consultant.

EMBRACE THE FUTURE

A handful of museums around the world seem to have changed their culture and philosophy to embrace online social media. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, the Tate and the National Maritime Museum in the UK, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum in the US are all pretty advanced in this area.

If you are thinking of using social media sites or museum blogs to interact with the public, a good starting point is to look closely at what these organisations are doing.

At Brooklyn Museum, Shelley Bernstein, the chief of technology, claims that dialogue and interaction are now intrinsic to their work. But have they had to change to achieve this? “The easiest way for me to answer this question is to say we live with technology and these tools differently now,” says Bernstein.

“It’s more about ambient awareness - it’s a fifth of what my job entails here, but it’s always on in the background: nights, weekends and even on vacation. That’s not a bad thing; I encourage institutions to find the people in their organisation who live these platforms much like our audience do. They are going to be the most natural at managing the presence in a way that is very fluid.”

Much of the challenge lies in how a single institution with limited staff and time can effectively communicate with many individuals, some of whom are not complimentary.

Take an example on the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) Facebook page made after a recent event held at the museum. A visitor wrote: “I was so disappointed. What an over-priced, uninspiring exhibition and such half-hearted late-night ‘events’. Do not pay £11 to see the Baroque exhibition, it’s a total rip-off!”

This may be an isolated opinion, but you really have to respond, which the V&A did, albeit in a fairly cursory fashion, by saying it welcomes feedback. Spurred by this, the visitor then offered more specific criticism of the design of the Baroque exhibition, which the museum then failed to respond to, at least publicly.

The V&A has almost 10,000 “fans” on Facebook, so these interactions are significant. As Simon notes, a Facebook group is one of the most time-consuming of the “cheap” options for developing web 2.0 activity, but it can reach a lot of people in a targeted manner.

“If you have staff members who are already using these social networks, you can quickly broadcast out to a large group of people at infrequent points and provide a place for that group to meet and interact with each other,” she says.

Another option for starting interaction and discussion is to host a message board on the museum’s site. The site of the UK Science Museum’s Dana Centre, for example, features a Discuss area where people can talk about science, technology and the environment by setting up their own topic threads. In this sense it is simple and easily maintained.

But according to Maya Mendiratta, programmes developer at the Dana Centre, without regular plugging and content changes on the site’s homepage, participation is pretty low.

“We have discussed ways to increase participation, but they all require web editing and we are really lucky if we get one hour of the [Science Museum] web team’s time a week. So I would advise that if you are setting up a forum, you get as much web-editing experience as possible and set it up so you can do it yourself.”

FAN BASE

One of the most developed programmes of social networking is the Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans (see link below). As an internet-enabled version of a traditional member scheme, 1stfans links an online community directly to museum events.

Information about exclusive member events is delivered via Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to encourage people to visit and mix in person with museum staff, artists and other 1stfans members.

In fact, the Brooklyn Museum has a Community section on its website, dedicated to all its online interactions. Here, users can leave comments about their visit, join a “posse” and contribute to the museum’s online collection, as well as read blogs and watch videos. By all accounts, the Brooklyn Museum presents one of the most holistic approaches to web 2.0 interaction in the museum sector.

“Brooklyn has a community-driven mission, so for us, reaching out in these types of forums is very natural and makes sense overall,” says Shelley Bernstein.

“It’s less about PR and more about community and outreach, and our participation online in this way is very similar to what our visitor services staff do when people come inside the building or what our community manager does when she reaches out to the local communities.”

Whatever your reasons for engaging in social media, remember that some form of dialogue will follow, and the way this is handled will affect a visitor’s relationship with the museum.

Perhaps the most important thing is to have an awareness of potential stumbling blocks before heading online “socially”. Be clear at the outset what kind of dialogue or relationships you want and focus on that dynamic, not the technologies or platforms.

This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Autumn 2009.

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Participatory design for museums

August 10th, 2009

A young woman is strolling down the street in a medium-sized British town. Rounding a corner she is confronted with an altercation between a white man and an Asian store-owner. It is not clear what has caused the confrontation, but the aggression has a palpable racial element. As the shouting and gesticulating heightens, the observer takes out her phone and grabs a couple of photographs, as well as a short, ten-second video, all the while making sure she is out of sight.

Later, as she comes into the city centre, the woman decides to pop in to the local museum to see what’s on and to pass half an hour before a meeting. As it turns out, the museum has just opened a temporary exhibition looking at the history of race relations in the city, offering oral histories, photographs and cultural objects imported to the town by its Asian immigrants. She notices that one section of the exhibition is soliciting visitor input, encouraging people to share their own stories, experiences and images. These contributions will be collected on a special microsite, built to accompany the exhibition, elements of which form part of a constantly updated digital display inside the museum.

Recalling the incident she witnessed in the street, the woman decides to upload the pictures to the museum’s Flickr group, set up especially for the exhibition, where she is able to geotag the exact location of the event using Google maps, as well as the time and date it took place. One of the pictures – a decisive photographic moment – captured the white man’s grimacing face, his first finger rigidly poking towards the anxious looking Asian shopkeeper. Shorn of context, the image could of course have any number of meanings; but the photographer is able to provide a firsthand account of the racist abuse she overheard and which she duly records in the image’s caption.

With this contribution the exhibition has become live and dynamic. The museum has taken a difficult subject, with historical and social dimensions, examined it and opened it to the public for further and ongoing discussion and interpretation. Although focused around the physical exhibition itself, much of this public participation is made possible using online services which are constructed along the social media principles of interconnection, sharing and collaboration – an approach to web-based services encapsulated in the term web 2.0.

But more than this, in planning for the exhibition the museum staff decided to engage people outside the organisation to work through the design process itself. This participatory design sought input from a small number of community groups, local businesses and residents. One of the outcomes of this ‘outside’ contribution was the decision that the microsite, while hosted and branded by the museum, would be maintained and moderated by two volunteers. One of these volunteers works for a community outreach programme which organises events promoting integration and positive interaction between different sections of the community. The experiences and learning derived from these events continues to be fed into the microsite in the form of a blog.

And so on. This fictional scenario, presenting a museum operating on the tricky frontiers of social debate, begins to illustrate some of the possibilities of incorporating participation – by design – into the processes of creating exhibitions, as well as the way those exhibitions engage the public. Of course, engagement and collaboration may well form the backbone of many existing museum programmes without the term participatory design (or indeed design for participation) ever being mentioned. But a conscious decision to build participation into the design process itself and/or into the way users will interact with exhibitions once they are installed is an approach which may yield benefits for the institution and visitors alike.

Nina Simon of US consultancy Museum 2.0 explains: ‘Participatory design can help museums deliver on the oft-repeated but rarely demonstrated desire for museums to become essential civic spaces, social environments that encourage the democratic process.’

Participation can be as complicated or as simple as deemed necessary, depending on resources, experience and objectives. Engaging and organising people (the public, experts from areas outside the museum, community groups and so on) to take part in a truly collaborative design process is certainly an undertaking, as is inviting visitor contributions and dialogue with the exhibitions themselves. But at its simplest level, participation might be encouraged by asking visitors to caption or comment on objects by sticking Post-It notes around exhibition displays. An example cited by Simon is The Post-It Project, conducted at Sweden’s Västernorrlands Läns Museum a few years ago, ‘in which visitors were solicited to write down comments – about anything in the museum – and post them wherever they wanted.’ As she suggests, the value and goal here are perhaps too vague to be genuinely useful, but the ‘open-endedness also makes this kind of project a great starting point for a museum to explore the inclusion of visitor content. Start-up costs and development time are minimal, and the project can be aborted at any time.’

But for many museums, the catalyst for building visitor contributions into their activities has been the proliferation and mass uptake of online social media services – sites such as Flickr, Facebook and, more recently, Twitter. Flickr in particular is well known, easy to use and allows museums to garner relevant photographic material from the public, not just locally, but anywhere in the world. An event-based extension of this might be to organise a scavenger hunt, as the London Transport Museum has done, sending teams of people into the city to locate and photograph various London Transport related objects. All the pictures were uploaded to Flickr, allowing a vote for the best image to be thrown open to the public and in turn utilising Flickr’s social network aspects to build awareness of the museum’s brand amongst online ‘communities’.

Similarly, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s World Beach Project, devised by artist Sue Lawty, asks people worldwide to create sculptures and images on beaches using gathered stones, recording the process and finished art in up to three photographs. Rather than using Flickr, the images are uploaded to the museum’s dedicated web page and embedded Google world map. Again, the project is conceived specifically to create participation, engaging visitors and non-visitors alike in content generation, while marketing the V&A online at the same time.

These last two examples are competition and art project respectively, so arguably outside a museum’s core public-facing activities, which are delivered via exhibitions, collections and interpretation. But participation can seed exhibitions too. The Minnesota History Society’s MN150 exhibition and book invited public submissions of the key people, places or things that have shaped the state’s history. This engagement was partly conducted online, but the bulk of submissions came from community outreach, demonstrating that participatory design need not be technology-led – it is mostly about approach and intent. The result was an exhibition populated with content gathered directly through public input, albeit curated by the museum.

A nice example of design for participation is the National Maritime Museum’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, set up this year so that entries are submitted via Flickr, where they are held in the public domain, while a partnership with Astrometry.net allows each image is ‘astrotagged’ so that they can all be combined and compared in a growing photographic chart of the night sky. The collaborative nature of this project – along with the content created by the public – is its strength. And again, it builds awareness of the museum’s activities farther and wider than could have been achieved otherwise. It is competition, exhibition, research and marketing all in one, but would not be possible without public input, professional collaboration and web-based services.

Yet another example is Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, an investigation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ in which artists’ photographic responses to the theme of the ‘changing faces of Brooklyn’ were assessed by the public online. At the final exhibition, held in the museum last summer, the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from this public jury process.

Participatory design, then, can take many flavours. Naturally, not everything will be appropriate for every institution, exhibition or subject theme.

Traditionally, museums have delivered knowledge and learning in one direction: from institution to the public. Although it adds another dimension, participation need not supplant this model. Of course, it is valid to ask whether participation – and by extension participatory design – is actually necessary or beneficial at all. Perhaps one way to answer that is to consider changing expectations. As cultural sector consultant and Flow Associates director Bridget McKenzie notes, a recent flurry of events centred on participatory culture seem to indicate that ‘the public expects to participate’.

This article was written for the MuseumNext conference, taking place 22-23 October 2009.

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