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Museum 2.0

Museum 2.0 explores ways that web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design.

Lessons in Participatory Design from SFMOMA's Exhibition on (you guessed) The Art of ParticipationNovember 11

Here are two pictures. The first one is me. The second one is George. George is a stranger I met last week at SFMOMA’s new show, The Art of Participation:1950 to Now. We didn’t need a staff member or a program to meet each other. We weren’t trying to pick each other up. We engaged in an exhibit together, making "one minute sculptures" and taking photos of each other. We talked afterwards. We connected virtually later. We were strangers, and now we are not, and we have SFMOMA to thank for it.

The Art of Participation provides a retrospective on participatory art as well as presenting opportunities for visitors to engage in contemporary (“now”) works. As the museum's website puts it, "this exhibition examines how artists have engaged members of the public as essential collaborators in the art-making process." While many of the artifacts of historical art pieces are arresting, the pieces of “now” form an exciting testbed for gallery-based participatory engagement, albeit in a meta way around the topic of participation. The participatory art pieces are physical, social o

Two Years LaterNovember 2

Thank you.

This is a post to say thank you.

Today, Museum 2.0 is celebrating its second birthday. And when I think back on the last year and how it compared to year one of blogging, the shining difference is you--your interest, your comments, and most of all, your extraordinary example.

I started the Museum 2.0 blog in 2006 as a personal learning exercise about "the ways that museums do and can evolve from 1.0 (static content delivery machines) to 2.0 (dynamic content aggregation and network machines)." I had heard some influential museum leaders raise the question of what a wiki museum might look like, and I wanted to explore that and related concepts. I always assumed that this would be a semi-private endeavor and that the public nature of the blog would just be an efficient vehicle for sharing my ideas with a small group of interested folks.

Two years later, things have changed for the blog--and more importantly, for the museum field. In the last year, I have seen traditional museum attitudes about social media and community co-design go from "why should we care about this?" to "how can my institution do this sustainably and su

Scratch: An Educational, Multi-Generational Online Community that WorksOctober 30

Last week, I was reintroduced to Scratch, a graphical programming language designed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first saw Scratch a few years ago, when I had friends working at the Media Lab, and at the time it seemed like a neat way for kids who were unfamiliar with programming to jump in and start designing their own interactive stories and games. It was a serious improvement on tools like Logo Turtle and Hypercard that I grew up with... but still, a programming environment.

Then, in May 2007, the Scratch online community (called ScratchR) was released. It's a place for Scratch users to upload, share, and remix their Scratch projects. ScratchR is a true social network, connecting hundreds of thousands of people--kids and adults--in about 200 countries around the world. It's an inspiration to anyone trying to create an online community around informal learning. In this post, a look at the intentional design choices that make ScratchR work.

There are four sections to this post:

1. An overview of ScratchR user types and related statistics.

How (and Why) to Develop a Social Media HandbookOctober 27

What is the ideal role of your marketing or PR team in the creation and distribution of content on the social Web? I'd aruge that it doesn’t make sense for marketing to create and control all of the content produced in Web 2.0-land. After all, they control very little of the content produced in exhibitions, shared via programs, and expressed by public-facing staff and volunteers. If your museum has many voices in the real world, you will most powerfully and honestly convey yourself virtually if you can reflect the diversity of your institution. The trick is figuring out how to organize and track it all.

Let me give you an example. The marketing director for a mid-size science museum, Jeff, recently showed me a YouTube channel he’d discovered which was created by a camp staff member at the museum. The channel consisted of a few videos of kids making stuff at camp. Jeff said, “I don’t have a problem with this. I love that they are doing this. I have a problem with the fact that they aren’t clearly identifying themselves with the museum, aren’t linking back to the museum’s website, and just generally aren’t making it clear that this camp is a product of our museum.”

His concerns are vali

Self-Censorship for Museum ProfessionalsOctober 22

There are lots of things visitors can’t do in museums. But what about the things that museum professionals can’t (or feel they can’t) do? This week at the ASTC conference, Kathy McLean, Tom Rockwell, Eric Siegel and I presented a session called “You Can’t Do That in Museums!” in which we explored the peculiarities of self-censorship in the creation of museum exhibitions. You can view (and download) the slides and audio here, which feature our provocations and the discussion that followed. The audio starts noisy... but it gets better. Trust me.

As part of the session, Tom led live drawing (click for high-res image), and we invited the audience to add their own “can’t dos” to a large map of things that are “safe,” “iffy,” and “no way”--more on that later.

Here are a few things I learned from this session:

1. Self-censorship is different in different museum types. In science and technology centers, there are some “can’t”s that are alive and well in other museums. For example, “Nazi science” came up several times as a “can’t”—but the Holocaust Museum’s Deadly Medicine exhibition was a successful project that didn’t bring the walls down. And while narrative-base