Participants Thrive on Constraints

    If your goal is to invite visitors to share their experiences in a way that celebrates and respects their unique contributions to the institution, you need to design more constraints, not fewer, on visitor self-expression. Consider a mural. Given the chance, a very small percentage of people would opt to paint a mural on their own. The materials are not the barrier—the ideas and the confidence are. You have to have an idea of what you want to paint and how to do it.

    But now imagine being invited to participate in the creation of a mural. You are handed a pre-mixed color and a brush and a set of instructions. It’s easy. You get to contribute to a collaborative project that produces something beautiful. You see the overall value of the project. You can point out your work in the final product with pride. You have been elevated by the opportunity to contribute to the project.

    This experience is shared by the thousands of people who contribute data to Citizen Science projects or nominated concepts for the Minnesota History Center’s visitor-driven MN150 exhibition. In these successful participatory projects, visitors didn’t build exhibits from scratch or design their own science experiments. Instead, they participated in larger projects, joining the team, doing their part. Constrained projects often provide opportunities for partial self-expression—a flourishing brush stroke here, a witty Facebook status update there—but the overall expressive element is tightly constrained by the participatory platform at hand.

    One of the best small-scale examples of a constrained participatory museum experience I’ve seen was at the Denver Art Museum in their Side Trip gallery, on display in the spring of 2009. Side Trip was an interactive space that accompanied an exhibition of psychedelic rock posters called The Psychedelic Experience. As one of several activities in Side Trip, museum educators wanted to invite visitors to make their own rock posters. Rather than giving people blank sheets of paper and markers (and reaching a narrow audience of creators), the DAM educators devised a remixing activity that engaged people in a low-barrier activity that blended collecting, critiquing, and creating. Visitors were offered clipboards with transparencies attached. There were stacks of graphics, cut-out reproductions from the real rock posters on display next door, which visitors could place under the transparencies to arrange and remix into poster designs of their own choosing. Visitors then used dry erase markers to trace over the graphics, augment them, and add their own flair. When someone was satisfied with her recombined poster, she handed it to a staff member, who put it in a color copier. Each visitor was given a copy of her poster and the museum kept a copy as well.

    The results of this physical “remix” activity were beautiful, intricate posters. You couldn’t easily tell where the remixed artifacts end and the visitors’ additions begin. In Side Trip, I saw teens and adults who sat and did this activity for 45 minutes and wasn’t surprised to hear that some people spend over an hour on it. The activity is successful because you don’t have to start with a blank slate. You’re given a starting point via the graphics that also tied the activity tightly to the artifacts in the show. Brilliant.

    This rock poster-making activity elevated the participatory museum experience in several ways.  It encouraged visitors not only to share their own personal expression but to contextualize it in response to museum-provided content. It invited visitors who did not think they could make art to engage confidently with a positive result. And it created a beautiful, high quality body of visitor-generated content for spectators to enjoy.

    Why aren’t more museums designing highly constrained participatory platforms in which visitors contribute to collaborative projects? The misguided answer is that we think it’s more respectful to allow visitors to do their own thing, that the ultimate learning experiences will emerge from unfettered self-expression. But that idea is ill-conceived, and is mostly born from design laziness and a misunderstanding of what motivates participation. [it's also sometimes comes from well-meaning aim to be more democratic, and from ideas particularly from the adult learning world about the power of self-directed, open learning. Too much direction is seen as a bad thing in both of these camps, even though ironically, the resulting 'blank slate' approach is perceived as a ten foot barrier by lots of people, and when they turn away, the only democratic or self-directed action is a walk out of the door! LG] It’s easy for museums to assign a corner and a kiosk to visitors and say, “we’ll put their stories over there.” [this is a slightly different issue, containing and marginalising visitor content... ]It’s harder to design an experience that leverages many visitors’ expression and puts their contributions to meaningful use [throughout the main space of the museum? LG] .

    It’s like cooking. If you have a bunch of novice friends, it can be maddening to find appropriate “sous chef” roles for them to fill. Many cooks prefer just to get those clumsy hands out of the kitchen. It takes a special kind of cook, artist, or scientist to want to support the contributions of novices. It takes people who want to be educators, not just executors.

    Museum staff should be those special kind of people. We should respect visitors enough to engage them in work that we actually value, to find in-roads that support their participation. We should care enough about their potential usefulness to find the right job for them to do. This is not easy, and to make it worthwhile, we also need to make sure that the project is of value to the staff members who conduct it and the institutions they represent.

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