The Institutional and Staff Experience [don't think this title really describes what comes... maybe something more on the lines of 'Useful work: institutions asking for contributions they need and will value'? - LG]

    If participation is truly a two-way experience in which visitors are contributing to the institution, museums should actively seek contributions that are useful. Audience-centered designers often talk about designing “for” audiences instead of designing content and expecting visitors to consume it on institutional terms. In participatory design situations, museum staff need to also think about what will be valuable “for” the institution. The experience isn’t solely about providing value to the participants. It’s also about providing value to their critics and spectators, which include museum staff.

    This is easier said than done. We’re so used to asking open-ended talkback questions like, “What do you think?” or prescriptive ones like, “how do you define nanotechnology?” that we often forget to consider whether we actually care to hear the answer. When I design visitor contribution components to exhibitions, I’m always asking myself: how can we use this? What can visitors provide that I can’t? How can they do some meaningful work that supports the institution overall?[I think this is a really good point - it's about seeking and expecting something of genuine value from our audiences, not just 'being inclusive' in that way that can be patronising and may assume that museums are still the ones with all the value to give - LG]

    One of my favorite examples of a simple participatory element that provides value to an institution comes from Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost, a branch library in the Netherlands. Jan David Hanrath, an architect and former library information technologist, designed a tagging system into this library. Tagging is a term that refers to a collecting activity in which people assign keywords (“tags”) to things. These things can be websites, videos, objects—whatever. If visitors can assign their own tags to artifacts, exhibits, or books, then staff can generate visitor-generated folksonomies alongside traditional taxonomies—and visitors who are searching for content can find artifacts of interest via either path. Why are folksonomies useful? Traditional taxonomies may only cover a certain set of metadata about an object. You may want to see “red paintings” but the museum may not have a formal code for the color of pieces in the collection. Tags can allow people to search for artifacts via the real words they’d use to describe those things.

    Tagging has huge theoretical value to museums and libraries as a way to allow users to create folksonomies around institutionally-held collections, and there’s a clear mission connection for institutions whose goal is to engage visitors with collections and learning. While many museums are ably exploring the world of tagging on-line, few have figured out how to make it work in the onsite visitor experience. Tagging could be very useful onsite if there were a way to access the tags and use them to discover artifacts of interest in the course of a visit. Ideally, there would be a complete feedback loop where you would be able to assign tags to objects as you view them in the galleries, thus creating more data for new visitors walking in the door.

    This theoretical activity involves a complicated map of inputs and outputs. At the input (performing the tagging), visitors onsite would need a way to mark individual exhibits or items with keywords. Then, at the output (using tags to access content of interest), visitors would need a way to scan the keywords at any exhibit, see linked related exhibits, and receive directional information to find the other exhibits. I can think of several ways to do this, and they all have painful technology interfaces and unfamiliar user behaviors associated with them.

    The library at Haarlem Oost wanted to do this same thing—to allow patrons to tag the books they’d finished so they could be displayed on shelves and in the collection database for others to find books they might enjoy. But Hanrath's team didn’t come up with a clunky technology with lots of required behavior changes and instruction sets. They did something very, very clever. They installed more book drops.

    The library created a book drop for a set of predefined tags (boring, didn’t read it, great, funny, exciting, good for kids, etc.). They also created shelves for the individual tags. When patrons return books, they place them on the shelves that appropriately describe the books. Because books in the Dutch library system have RFID tags, the shelves were enabled with RFID readers that scan the books and add the tags to the books’ digital entries in the library database. The only behavior change required is for the patron to shelve his or her books in categories, and the benefit on the output side (the tags appearing in the library online catalogue) is immediate.

    No patron would call the activity of putting their books in book drops ‘tagging,’ and that’s a good thing. Participation at Haarlem Oost is easy and its rewards for the next set of visitors searching for a good book are immediate. There are few barriers to adoption nor significant infrastructure or support costs.  TheCh1_pt1 feedback loop is there, and it works because it’s a clever, simple distillation of Ch1_pt1the core idea of tagging. That's what I call good design.

    Doing a sorting activity is a constrained form of participation, but that doesn’t diminish its ability to be useful. Just as constraints help individual participants feel confident about their ability to succeed at the proscribed activity, constraints can also allow institutions to promote the activities that are most likely to produce useful work. Many museum exhibition designers are wary of the idea of giving visitors useful work; it sounds like we are ignoring the personal expressive goals they might have for which we designed the participatory experience in the first place. But constraints, whether on a small scale as in Haarlem Oost or on a large scale in a co-created exhibition project, help visitors feel confident that their participation matters.

    In August of 2008, I worked with the Chabot Space & Science Center on a participatory design institute in which eleven teens designed media pieces for an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition on black holes. When we did the final evaluation for the project, one comment from the teens surprised us: they complained that it felt like we were "hiding" the goals of the project from them in the first of three weeks. At first, we didn't understand what they were talking about. Hiding?! We gave them all the information we had, and on the first day they had a 90-minute conference call with the exhibit designers.

    But we were not entirely specific about where their media pieces would fit into the completed exhibition, because we simply didn't know. Chabot’s client, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, knew that the media would be included on the exhibition website, but that website was several months from being initiated. There was no initial design, no graphics, and no idea of where the teens' work would fit into the overall web structure.

    The adults thought (as many would) that this was an opportunity, not a setback. The teens were free to be as creative as they wanted, without limitation of pre-existing requirements or criteria. But what staff thought of as "being open," the teens saw as "hiding" the real needs. They wanted to know where their media projects would be featured in the exhibition and what the specific criteria were for success. The client kept saying, “do whatever you want,” which they thought meant, “we support your unique self-expression.” But the teens heard, “Do whatever you want—we don’t really care what it is.” The teens wanted the constraints, both so they could be good contributors and to put some limits on the vast openness of “whatever.”

    We shouldn’t have been so surprised by these teens’ feedback; it reflects what many of us know about scaffolding educational experiences with instructional support. The cognitive psychology theory of scaffolding focuses on learners’ needs for sufficient skills, materials, and social support to successfully attempt new tasks. Throughout museums, exhibit designers and educators are sensitive to these needs and design experiences that bridge visitors’ perceived cognitive levels with their potential attainment of new information or abilities. But when it comes to participatory activities, we often fall back on a simplistic notion that people need complete freedom to creatively and authentically express themselves.

    Exhibit designers (and almost all creative professionals) work within constraints all the time. We want to know that we are designing things that will work, be valued, and achieve our personal and institutional goals. When the goals are hazy or we don’t receive feedback on our work, we are discouraged and confused. We stop being our best creative selves, and eventually, we may opt out of participating altogether.

    Visitors are no different from exhibit designers in their desire for structure. If anything, they need more support and guidance as they operate in the unfamiliar territory of museums. Visitors need meaningful, responsive, clearly defined frameworks for participation and contribution. And it’s time for us to start designing them.

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