Collaboration on the Floor

     We've looked at several examples of collaborative projects in which participants work with institutions in the context of innovative exhibition, research, and design processes. But all of these are process-based, which lead to a couple of undesirable outcomes. ( Suggest that it is different outcomes. It depends onthe aim or intention to pick the tool for the job. One is not necessarily better than the other. It depends on what the desired outcome is and how to best deliver.SB) First, the focus on process often leads to diminished attention to the product. We worry more about the participant experience than the audience experience, because the active collaboration is where all the "work" happens. Second, processes are time-limited by design; they progress through time towards an eventual product. This means that participants can only be engaged for a limited amount of time (yet you have given previous examples of iterative engagement SB), and some kinds of participation (for example, judging photographs for Click!) are confined to a short, fixed time period. If the collaborative experience is where the real value lies for visitors (has this actually been demonstrated? SB) then we need to find ways to open up who can collaborate, when, and how.(Not sure that this is the right "if...then..." expression for this section. Is it more about exploring different ways to collaborate? Different ways to learn about the participation/collaboration tools to see what they do well and what they do not do well? SB)

     What if regular visitors could, in the course of their visit, collaborate with the institution to co-create new knowledge about the artifacts on display? Integrating collaboration into public-facing museum experiences ameliorates both of the process challenges explored above. It makes collaboration available to anyone, anytime. And because floor experiences are explicitly and directly audience-facing, it forces the institution to design collaborative platforms that are more appealing to spectators. Just as contributory platforms often promote a virtuous cycle by which participants are enticed out of passive spectating into action and then model that experience for others, on-the-floor collaborative platforms can have the same effect. I believe that these kinds of collaborative projects are the most fruitful for visitors and institutions alike, as long as they can be sustainably managed as they evolve over time.

     On the web, Wikipedia is a good example of this kind of evolving, "live" collaborative platform. At any time, non-contributing users can access and use the content for research purposes, while behind-the-scenes, authors and editors labor to improve the content on display. The collaborative workspace is a click away from the audience-facing content--close enough to observe and join in on the process, but distanced enough to keep the spectator experience coherent and attractive. The ideal collaborative floor experience is comparable: appealing to visitors, with a thin and permeable division between collaborating and spectating.

Transparent development - Ontario Science Center (suggested subhead, SB)

     Sometimes putting collabortion on the floor is as easy as bringing your process out into the open. When the Ontario Science Centre was developing the Weston Family Innovation Centre, they went through an extensive and prolonged prototyping phase. They developed a technique called Rapid Idea Generation (RIG) in which teams of staff would physically build ideas for exhibits, programs, mission statements, and more out of junk in a matter of hours. While the RIG started as an internal process, the team would occasionally show off the final prototypes on the floor, integrate visitors into their building teams, and eventually, hold entire RIGs on the museum floor in public space. The RIGs were highly collaborative, often bringing together executives, designers, floor staff, shop staff, and visitors to design things in an open-ended, team-based format. By bringing the process onto the floor, the staff became more comfortable with some of the core ideas behind the Innovation Centre (in which visitors would be encouraged to make crazy things all the time) and shared their work with visitors in a format that was structured, creative, and highly enjoyable.  

Participant content generation - Advice (subhead suggestion, SB)

     In other cases, collaboration can be baked into the visitor-facing product, the exhibition or program itself. In 2009, I worked with a group of graduate students at the University of Washington to design an exhibition that would be entirely collaborative as a visitor-facing experience. The exhibition, called Advice: Give it, Get it, Flip it, Fuck it, was developed using a highly condensed but standard exhibit design process that did not include participants outside the class. But the product was a platform in which visitors could give each other advice in a variety of collaborative formats, via both facilitated and open experiences. Advice was only open for one weekend, but during that time, we observed and measured many ways that visitors to the University of Washington student center in which it was housed co-created a large volume of interpersonal content.

     Advice offered four main experiences--two that were facilitated, and two that were unfacilitated. The facilitated experiences were an advice booth, at which visitors could receive real-time advice from children, money managers, tattoo artists, and others, and a button-making station, where a gallery attendant helped visitors play a simple Madlibs-style game to create buttons featuring personalized adages. The unfacilitated experiences (discussed in more detail below) involved visitors writing their own pieces of advice on post-its and walls and answering each other's questions asynchronously.

     At any time, there were two facilitators in the exhibit--one for the advice booth, and the other for the buttons. This might make Advice sound more like an educational program than an exhibit. But the exhibit team did something novel. First, they replaced staff with volunteers--some entirely spontaneous--at the advice booth. Like the Living Library project, the advice booth was a platform that connected strangers with strangers--not just staff with strangers. One eight year-old enjoyed the advice-giving experience so much that he came back the following day for another shift in the booth! These facilitators were collaborators with visitors, talking with them, listening to them, and playing with them. Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it. And in Advice, the facilitator activities were interesting and specific enough that an eclectic mix of untrained volunteers could perform them successfully.

     While the facilitated experiences pulled many spectators out of their solitude and into participation, the unfacilitated post-it walls were the place where visitor-to-visitor collaboration thrived. The setup was simple: the exhibit team came up with a few seed questions, like "How do you heal a broken heart?," and put them up on signs behind glass. Then, they offered different shapes and colors of post-its, as well as pens and markers, for people to write responses. While this is a basic contributory activity, I consider Advice to be collaborative because the contributions steered the content of the entire exhibition.

     The engagement with the post-it walls was very high. Random passers-by got hooked and spent twenty minutes carefully reading each post-it, writing responses, creating chains of conversation and spin-off questions and pieces of advice. It's worth noting that the exhibit space was not optimal--it was a hallway separating the lobby of the student center from a dining hall. The previous exhibit in this space was a very provocative art exhibit about sexual violence, and yet in our brief preliminary site survey we saw almost no one stop to look at the art. Not so for the post-its. The Advice exhibit hooked maintenance staff, students, athletes, men, women--it really seemed to span the range of people passing through.

     There were 230 responses to the nine staff-created seed questions, and in a more free-form area, visitors submitted 28 of their own questions which yielded 147 responses. Some of the advice was incredibly specific; for example, one person wrote a post-it that asked, "Should a 17 year old who is going to college in the fall have a curfew this summer?" That post-it received 9 follow-up post-its, including a response from another parent in the same situation. Others stood and copied pieces of advice (especially classes to take and books to read) carefully into personal notebooks.

It might seem surprising that people would take the time to write up questions on post-its when there was no guarantee that someone would respond and very low likeliness that a response would come in real-time. Collaboration was not guaranteed, especially in a low traffic hallway in an odd area of the UW student center. But the impulse to participate was high and the threshold for doing so was very, very low. The post-its and pens were right there. The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add new ideas to the wall.

     People felt very comfortable not only adding their own advice but also critiquing others'. We saw many instances when someone would write "lol" or "love this" directly onto a previously posted post-it. People also asked follow-up questions. For example, one person recommended "grappa and Bessie Smith records" as a cure for a broken heart, to which another responded, "Who's Bessie Smith?" The query was answered by yet a third person, who wrote, "Uh, only the greatest singer of the 20's 'I need a little sugar in my bowl.'"

(Agree that above could be cut. SB) The evolving collaborative content stream created a growing story that became progressively more valuable over time.

     Finally, it's worth noting that offering a range of contributory activities can be useful in motivating collaborative participation overall. In Advice, there were many forms of talk-back: the post-its, a bathroom wall, a comment book, a call-in voicemail box, and various online interfaces. Each of these took pressure off the others as a visitor participation outlet, and the overall result was a coherent, diverse mix of on-topic visitor contributions. My favorite example of this was the "bathroom wall" component, in which visitors could scrawl with marker on what appeared to be a bathroom stall door. At first, I didn't understand why this was necessary. If visitors could write on post-its anywhere in the exhibit, why did they also need a bathroom wall?

     But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was "anything goes" by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, (

(I would vote to keep above gray section. SB) it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls. They were totally focused on the questions and answers at hand. I think the bathroom wall made this possible by being an alternative for those who wanted to be a little less focused and just have fun with sharpies.(This is another example of the placement or location and circulation variable for participatory exhibits. Suggest that you consider the key underlying variables and shape the examples/case studies to address. Examples of variables: process, product, duration, repetition, staff role, visitor role, investment level in time/dollars/education, location, intended and unintended outcomes. A more parallel construction would help people to get the particular messages of each example, as well as the overall pattern of what is being considered. SB)

     By baking a collaborative platform into the exhibition, the Advice staff were able to reduce their ongoing management role to organizing the post-its in appealing ways and highlighting visitor content they perceived as particularly compelling. While this was a small experimental project, I believe it is a model for institutions that wish to pursue collaborative floor experiences that are highly distributed, available and appealing to visitors, and low impact from a resources perspective.

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