Sharing Objects

    When describing how successful online platforms promote social object experiences, Jyri Engstrom commented that it is essential that users be able to share the objects of interest. People have always shared social objects, whether via newspaper clippings, mixtapes, or chain letters, but the internet has made sharing personal and cultural media products easier and cheaper. In the case of online social networks like Flickr and YouTube, every object has several automatically generated ways to share it. The objects can be emailed, embedded, linked, and blogged. In some cases, online sharing of objects is forbidden, and users illegally force non-social objects to become social by finding ways around the walls, but increasingly, content producers want users to share their content far and wide. In 2008, a team led by MIT media researcher Henry Jenkins published a white paper entitled, "If it Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," which argues that media artifacts have greatest impact when consumers are able to pass on, reuse, adapt, and remix them. The authors argued that spreadability isn't just a way for marketers to expand their reach; it also supports users' "processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them."

    What can museums do to make their artifacts shareable? There are two levels of “shareability” at work here: the extent to which institutions share their objects with visitors, and the extent to which visitors can share their object experiences with each other. 

    There are many designed ways, from exhibits to interactives to programs to performances, that museums share their objects with visitors. These sharing techniques are largely governed by two goals: offering high-quality object experiences to visitors, and preserving collections safely. Museums must be able to ensure that objects will not be unreasonably damaged or endangered by sharing them. Typically, this involves housing artifacts in cases, designing mediating technologies for visitor consumption, and storing and caring for the objects off public view when necessary. In some cases, museums create “learning kits” of artifacts or replicas that are considered safe for visitors to paw through, but museums are famous for taking objects that were not previously rigorously protected (for example, farm equipment) and restricting visitors’ physical access to them.

    Are there other options that might enable institutions to share objects a bit more freely? Clearly libraries make the strategic decision that the value of lending out the majority of collection items (books) is more important than conserving them. Many university museums lend art for hanging in professors’ offices and student dorm rooms, taking the stance that activating the collection across the institution and the university community is more important than maintaining perfect climate control and lighting conditions. 

    One of my favorite examples of an institution making its objects more shareable was the Sculptural Travel Bugs project at the Bellevue Art Center. In 2008, as part of their bi-annual teen sculpture show, the Bellevue Art Center decided to take a new spin on the concept of "public art" and send the sculptures out into the public rather than displaying them at their home institution. 200 sculptures were tagged with physical tags called Travel Bugs, which are equipped with unique codes that connected them to pages on a geocaching online social network. Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting activity in which people (“geocachers”) use GPS devices to track down and locate "caches," which are typically obscure locations marked with a hidden object or store of objects. As Sculptural Travel Bugs project lead Seth! Leary put it, Geocaching.com is "MySpace for inanimate objects"--a place to track the discovery and placement of new items and caches. 

    In the case of the Sculptural Travel Bugs project, all of the teen sculptures were "released" in a cache near the Art Center. Geocachers in the Seattle area could retrieve the sculptures and move them to other caches, with the goal of sending the sculptures on a public tour of the region before (hopefully) returning to Bellevue at the end of the project. The Travel Bugs were unique identifiers to help people log the places the sculptures went. Geocachers took the sculptures hundreds of miles, to other cultural sites, to obscure wooded locations, and even to their homes. While the sculptures mostly traveled through a small community of geocachers, this project was one simple way to push the boundaries of what it means to make art public and to share it with others.

    Other museums may not send out the actual collections but share information or activities with visitors that are usually available only to staff. For example, in 2009, the University College of London Museum and Collections hosted a temporary interactive exhibition called Disposal in which staff invited visitors to vote and comment on which of ten artifacts should be deaccessioned from the museum. The exhibition allowed staff to “share” decision-making regarding objects with visitors, thus engaging visitors in the intriguing work of determining the value of collecting and collections. 

    At a conceptual level, the extent to which an institution shares its objects is a reflection of how clearly people will see the institution as a publicly-owned utility rather than a private collection. What museum staff see as protecting and conserving, some visitors may see as hoarding. Museum mission statements often talk about the collections being in the public trust, but from the public perspective, the objects are owned by the building that houses them. Visitors can’t visit objects whenever they like. They can’t take them home or sit with them in the evening.  Museums share their objects parsimoniously, at strict and rule-bound visiting hours, for a fee. 

    Given that not all museums can be open 24 hours or allow visitors unrestricted access to objects, how else might institutions share objects with visitors? Some institutions have aggressively pursued digitization projects so that digital reproductions and recordings of objects, if not the objects themselves, can be made available for use by people around the world. In the best cases, these digitized items are situated within platforms that have many social tools which make sharing easy and automatic. In some cases, this means housing museum content on third party social networks like Flickr. In other cases, museums build their own online platforms with custom functions and design that (hopefully) allow sharing while promoting additional institutional values and digital experiences around the objects. And in some particularly radical cases, museums share their digital collection content and software coding openly with external programmers, who can then develop their own platforms and experiences around the digital media.

    And this leads to the other side of shareability, the side that Jyri Engestrom was after: users should be able to share objects with each other. While in some cases institutions can actively support and encourage this kind of sharing, it frequently happens without institutional input or intervention.

    The most basic way that visitors share museum objects with each other is through their photographs. Taking photographs is a way for visitors to memorialize their experiences, add their own personal imprint on the cultural artifacts, and share their memories with friends and families. The social web has ushered in an era of highly active cultural self-documentation, and there are many people taking photos and videos of their pets, meals, and daily experiences to share with friends and social networks. In 2009, the Current TV program "Viral Video Film School" documented the extremely popular phenomena of YouTube-based self-documentation of objects, in which people produced videos of themselves showing off their  purchases, tattoos, boats, and dorm rooms.

    When visitors take photos in museums, they aren't (for the most part) trying to capture the essential essence of an object or to create its most stunning likeness. Most people are taking photos of each other with artifacts, making social commentary on the experience, and generally marking their path. When people share these photos and videos with each other, either personally via email or in a more distributed fashion via social networks, it's a way to express themselves, their affinity for certain institutions or objects, and simply to say, "I was here." When museums prevent visitors from taking photos, the institutional message is, “you can’t share your experience with your own tools here.”

    Photos aren’t the only way visitors can share their experience with each other. Many of the network effect activities described in Chapter 3 can serve as the basis for social sharing experiences. For example, if you develop a recommendation system, you enable visitors to share their favorite objects with each other. The same is true for talkback walls, which are ways for visitors to share comments and reflections with each other.

    Some museums are experimenting with high-tech social platforms that invite visitors to send in photos and text messages to a central institutional account, which then shares visitors' messages and images both onsite on screens and on the museum website. For example, as of 2010, visitors to the Mattress Factory can send a text message to a single number from anywhere in the museum (or in the rest of the world). Those text messages are then shown in real-time on a screen in the museum lobby. The goal of platforms like this is to network the personal acts of text messaging or sending photos so that they can be shared with a larger audience.

    But there's a problem with this approach. Many of these digital platforms experience low participation, even in insitutions where visitors are text messaging and snapping photos all over the place. One significant reason these platforms struggle is that visitors are not effectively networked to the institution via their own personal entrypoints. When a visitor sends a message to her own friends or social network, the "me-to-we" principle is at work. She is motivated to send out a message, because she is sending it to her own personal network. If museums want to become platforms for social sharing across their objects, they need to first establish personal relationships with visitors, so that visitors feel that the museum is part of their own personal network. Once visitors see the museum as part of their personal networks, they perceive the larger museum community as one with which they want to share their content.

Gifting

    Gifting is a closely related social object activity to sharing.  In his examination of how to design good social object platforms, Jyri Engestrom notes that "invitations should be posed as gifts." On the web, this principle has been applied ad nauseum, and most of us cringe when we receive another "gift" of an invitation to join a new social network. Many people are more confused than pleased to receive the gift of a virtual taco on Facebook. But the core principle of gifting is strong. Like sharing, gifting is a powerful participatory mechanic that brings people together socially. 

    Most gifting is personal, both in real life and on the web. I give my friend a cookie. My dad sends me a NYTimes article. Personal gifting makes for powerful participation because you are directly interacting with another individual. But it's small-scale and typically occurs between people with a pre-existing relationship. We aren't culturally comfortable giving gifts directly to perfect strangers.

    Objects in social networks can mediate gifting experiences between stangers by taking the pressure off of the direct person-to-person contact. For example, consider my friend Leo, who once had a thrilling experience in which a perfect stranger ahead of him in line at a tollbooth paid Leo's toll in addition to her own. It would be extremely strange to walk up to someone's car window and offer them $2.50 for the toll. They might be offended. They might be suspicious. But by giving this gift through the toll booth operator, you shuttle the unsafe personal transaction through a safe transaction venue. It's semi-anonymous: the receiver can perceive the giver and her little blue Honda, but neither party is threatened by the requirement to actually engage with the other.

    The tollbooth enables personal giving between strangers and brings a third person (the tollbooth operator) into the experience. Arguably, three people who would never have met now get to share a nice experience and memory of generosity. And while the money is the gift, the object that mediates the social experience is the tollbooth itself.

    The problem with the tollbooth is that it is not situated in a platform that accentuates its potential as a social object. It is only by force of personal initiative that people pay tolls for the strangers behind them. But imagine if the Toll Authority decided that promoting social gifting was a goal they wanted to focus on. How would you redesign tollbooths to promote gifting? Maybe you'd add a sign that tracks the number of gift tolls paid each day. Maybe there would be a discount or a special perk for people who pay for each others' tolls. There might even be a special high-risk lane for gifting, where each driver takes a gamble that she might either be a gifter or giftee depending on the lineup.

    This sounds silly, but think about the potential benefits to the Toll Authority. Cars would move through lines more quickly because some would be paying for two. Rather than seeing toll operators as collection agents, drivers might see them as transmitters and facilitators of good will.  And the whole experience of going through the tolls would be generally more exciting.

    Could museum admission comparably be transformed into a gift (where the social object is the museum experience)? I once worked at a museum where student visits were free and largely subsidized by memberships and paid admissions. At one point, the director suggested that we change the general admission policy so that paid visitors would purchase "free tickets" for students rather than paying for their own visits. This would not have been a change in price, but it might have changed the way visitors perceive their contribution to the institution.

    The Bronx Zoo implemented a version of this idea with their Congo Gorilla Forest, which cost $3 to enter. At the end of the visit experience, visitors approached computer kiosks at which they could explore different Congo-related conservation projects and select a project to receive their admission fee.  In this way, the Zoo transformed admission into a gift. This made visitors feel generous and changed their understanding of how their money was used by the zoo. But it also introduced a diverse range of visitors to the idea that they could be donors and activists in support of worldwide conservation, an important message that would be challenging for the Zoo to convey as effectively with a sign and a donation box.

    What other museum objects could be turned into gifts or invitations into a social experience? Many museums have interactive exhibits in which visitors can produce simple media pieces (photos, audio, video) to email home or to a friend. In most cases, these products are thought of as mementos of the onsite experience, and visitors are rarely prompted to think of a recipient for their actions before they start producing their bit. But it would certainly be possible to encourage visitors to actively think of a friend or family member who would enjoy a given exhibit or object. The institution could provide standardized ways for visitors to share object experiences with others, either through low-tech devices like postcards or digital interfaces.

    In the mid-1990s, many bars and restaurants began to feature racks of free postcards promoting advertising messages. Imagine if, instead of a free catalog sheet, each exhibition offered free postcards of objects in the galleries within, pre-printed with messages about the show? Visitors could pick their favorite postcards and mail off invitations to friends to visit the object on display right from the exhibition hall. Or, similarly, visitors could visit a computer kiosk to personalize an e-card to friends that features the objects or experiences they perceive as the greatest potential "gifts" to their associates.  

    Once you support a gifting mechanism, there are some compelling designed objects you can create to amplify and socialize its value. A few neighborhood pubs and ice cream shops employ an innovative and instructive gifting strategy via a “gift board” next to the menu board. At these venues, you can purchase a gift item for someone else, and the purchase is an (opt-in) public act: the staff member writes on the gift board, “Nina gives Julia a hot fudge sundae” or “Ben gives Theo a double martini.” When you come in to use a gift certificate and claim your gift, the message comes off the wall.

    Readers familiar with Facebook and MySpace will spot the relationship between these gift boards and the interpersonal exchange-based interactions on social networking sites. Social networking sites have turned gifting into a public act by enabling people to send gifts (virtual tacos, messages on walls, snowballs) and broadcast their gift-giving on public profiles. In this way, a traditionally private interpersonal exchange becomes a collective experience by which the generosity of the gift-giver and the worthiness of the receiver can be witnessed and acknowledged by others.

    When these cafes decided to offer a gift board program, they capitalized on the same design strategy that social networks use in making gifts public. There are benefits for gift-givers, who look generous, and gift-getters, who are publicly adored. It also introduces a casual storyline to the store. Will Julia redeem her sundae? Why did Theo deserve that double martini? The cafes position themselves as part of the emotional life of their patrons in a public way. Stores always tell you that gift certificates are a great way to show people you care. The gift board venues display the value of gift certificates, and they likely receive benefits in the form of higher certificate sales. Perhaps there's a way for visitors to publicly memorialize the "gift" of artifacts to friends and family in a similar way.

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