Visitor-Generated Social Objects

    You don't have to develop exhibits that are social objects to promote social object experiences in the museum. While it takes careful planning, inviting visitors to share their own personally-relevant objects can often be the most powerful way to encourage people to experience content socially. In some cases, this means opening up exhibitions to the inclusion of visitors' objects. The London Science Museum did this in a very simple way for their temporary exhibition of science-related toys called Playing with Science (2006-2007). 

    Playing with Science displayed the history and importance of toys in scientific learning. As part of the exhibition, visitors were invited to bring in their own toys to add to a few vitrines at the end of the display. Each contributor was photographed with their favorite toy and wrote a short statement about the value of that toy. The photographs were cataloged, and on the exhibition’s website you can flip through dozens of funny, evocative images with accompanying statements like: "Bunny was made for me by my sister when I was born and has been well loved over the years,” and "I like making girls do boy parts because I am a tomboy." These visitor contributions personalized the exhibition and may have helped non-contributing visitors connect their own lived experience to the objects on display by triggering their own memories of playing with science-related toys. It also introduced a dynamic element to an otherwise static historical display, thus creating a context for a light and evolving conversation among visitors, the institution, and the objects themselves. This simple and delightful addition to Playing with Science didn’t require computers or elaborate design, just a willingness to support visitor contributions.

    In some cases, visitors' contributions aren't just given a small slot but are the basis for entire exhibitions. In 2009, the Dutch ceramics museum, Princessehof, hosted a visitor co-created exhibition of wedding china, in which people from throughout the Netherlands lent their wedding china, wedding photos, and stories to the museum. As in Playing with Science, these personal stories prompted heightened levels of dialogue among visitors about their own family stories and the stories on display, and the Princessehof engaged in extensive onsite and online programming to promote community conversations and sharing of wedding and wedding china-related experiences.

    Are these visitor-contributed toys and ceramics intrinsically more social than museum-held collections? No--but they do have some advantages. Both personal and museum-owned objects can be powerful or dull, but the platforms constructed around them are often optimized for different kinds of visitor experiences. Consider the difference between the toys in Playing with Science contributed by the museum and by visitors. The museum objects were well-mounted with proper curatorial labels written in the third person. The visitors' toys, however, were displayed alongside photos of their owners and personal first-person statements about the objects' relevance to the owners' lives. These labels were more personal and active than the institutional ones. The photos, the handwriting, and the first-person stories allowed visitors to connect directly with individuals who had used and loved the toys on display. By unapologetically offering up their personal stories, these contributors modeled a different kind of engagement with the objects than the institution could. The museum modeled descriptive, informational content about objects.  The visitor-written labels modeled personal meaning-making and relationships between people and objects. In this way, the visitors' objects reflected a more dialogic experience than the museum collection could.

    There are many ways to design platforms that amplify visitors' objects as social objects. In the case of the examples above, the platform was based on visitors contributing personal objects along with first-person stories and photographs. In 2008, the Brooklyn Museum developed an extensive online and onsite platform for a temporary exhibition with clearly defined opportunities for and limitations on the capacity for objects to be social. Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition coupled visitor-contributed objects (photos) with a public curation platform that allowed anyone to judge and select the photos for inclusion in the exhibition. Click! started with an open call for photographs that represent the "changing face of Brooklyn." Once the submission deadline was reached, the Museum opened an online tool where visitors could judge the photographs both on their artistic quality and their relevance to the exhibition theme.

    The staff team, led by director of technology Shelley Bernstein, made many design decisions about the online judging platform that intentionally limited its sociability among users. Judges could not skip to their friends' photographs or send favorite photos to their own social networks. They could not see the ratings and comments of others during the judging phase. These restrictions were intentional choices meant to limit a particular kind of social engagement that promotes expressing preferences based on social influence rather than object value. By forcing people to focus on the objects, with no access to social outlets and forums, the platform encouraged people to enter a personal dialogue with the photographs about their value. Users spent an average of 22 seconds looking at each photograph and deliberating on its value, as opposed to the "six seconds" the Museum's photography curator, Eugenie Tsai, claimed is typical for visitors exploring art in the physical institution. Tsai also commented that visitors spent much longer than she herself spends examining each image, suggesting that visitors were engaging in a deliberative process that was more prolonged than that employed by curators. 

    Click! also spurred conversation among participants not just about the photographs' value, but also about the ways that institutions might appropriately engage the public as participants. While users were prevented from seeing each others' ratings and comments during the judging stage, there were several energized discussions on the Museum's blog and other sites about how the photographs were being presented, how it felt to be a photographer in this project, and how it felt to be a crowd curator. Once mounted, the exhibition was a highly social space. The community of people who had been involved in making it--photographers and judges alike--came to share the experience with each other and with their own networks. The Museum made digital images of all of the photos accessible on the Web along with the related ratings and comments. Users continued to make new comments, energized by the seeded content from the judging phase.

    Online, the photos were sortable by the self-designated art knowledge and geographic location of the judges. Visitors could also surf the images that were "most discussed," which promoted ongoing dialogue around the photographs. Finally, the online platform allowed visitors to compare the relative ratings of different photographs--a flexible opportunity for visitors to practice juxtaposition on their own. Visitors could even view photographs that enjoyed the greatest "divergence of opinion" among the different self-defined geographic and art expertise groups. This prompted yet another discussion about the relative abilities and prejudices of different groups of people in determining the aesthetic value and relevance of images to a broad public.

    The next chapter focuses exclusively on ways to invite visitors to contribute to, collaborate on, and co-create museum experiences.  Not all forms of participation result in social object experiences.  But when you invite visitors to participate as contributors, consider how their objects might be presented in ways that offer entrypoints to social experiences that are otherwise challenging for your institution to support.

Wow! You made it to the end of Chapter 4! Here's an Icelandic pony thank you gif...

Continue to the next chapter, or return to the outline.