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Page history last edited by Sarah Barton 14 years, 4 months ago

Different Contributory Projects, Different Institutional Needs

 

    There are a range of institutional needs that can be fulfilled by contributory projects. One of the most basic is the project in which visitors' contributions are necessary for the project to function, those in which the project simply cannot exist without contributions.  The World Beach Project is an obvious example of this type--no contributions, no beach artwork, no map, no project. In cases like the World Beach Project, the need is for creative contribution, and the quality and volume of visitors' creations are directly correlated to the value of the overall project from the audience perspective.  In some creative projects, like the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Ghosts of a Chance game, the audience platform requires only a few successful submissions to function, and the institution can breathe easy with only ten or twenty contributions. In non-creative projects, such as contributory research projects, the converse is often true; visitors' creativity is limited, but their volume matters. For example, many citizen science projects succeed in collecting vast quantities of data from participants across broad geographic areas. This data would be incredibly expensive to collect without participant support, and yet it is the diversity and consistency of the data, not its creativity, that makes it useful to the project.

    These types of projects can be very high-risk from the institutional perspective. If participants don't act as requested, the project can quite publicly fail, and there have been cases of video contests with just a couple of entries, or comment boards with one or two lonely notes. But the fear of failure often also incentivizes institutions to put more thought and commitment into the contributory project overall. For example, consider the experience of the exhibit developers at the Minnesota History Center Museum who worked on the MN150 project. MN150 is a permanent exhibition of 150 topics that "transformed Minnesota," opened in 2007 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the state's founding.

 

Crowdsourcing (suggested subheader, SB)

    The MN150 team decided to crowdsource the topics, reasoning that "it didn't make sense" for internal developers and curators to decide which were the most important things to the residents of their large and diverse state. The staff put out an open call for nominations on a website, and, more successfully, at the Minnesota State Fair, a huge yearly event that draws Minnesotans of all types from all over the state. As they were soliciting nominations, one exhibit developer also pursued a "shadow" concept development process in parallel, just in case the community process didn't yield fruit. Fortunately, the public call succeeded, and the museum team sifted through 2,700 nominations from Minnesotans of all ages and walks of life.

    But the MN150 team didn't just cross their fingers and wait for the nominations to rain in. Once they committed to this process, the team actively sought nominations from diverse residents by reaching out to community leaders on reservations, in small towns, and in immigrant populations. When the online call only brought in a trickle of nominations, the staff jumped at the opportunity to solicit folks at the state fair, and they energetically staffed their booth and hawked nomination forms cleverly designed as fans to encourage fair-goers to get out of the heat and make a contribution to the museum. The MN150 team iterated the nomination form to make the ask as clear as possible, and they also published their rules for how the final topics would be selected, so that participants really understood what was being asked of them. In the end, the team had such success developing an exhibition based on the public nomination process that they reconnected with individual nominees for suggestions and donations of objects to support the exhibits themselves. Because the MN150 team worked contribution into the serious work of making a "real" and long-lasting exhibition, they created a contributory process that was respectful to participants, made sense to everyone, and was ultimately successful. (Good demonstration of iterative process. SB)

 

Crowd Additions (need another subheader here. SB) 

   Of course, not every contributory project relies entirely on the participation of visitors. In many cases, the institution feels that visitors' contributions, while not necessary, will add a unique and desirable flavor to a project. The London Science Museum didn't need to invite visitors to share their own toys during the run of the Playing with Science exhibition, but visitors' voices added a personal touch to the story of how people have engaged with scientific toys throughout history. Nor did the Powerhouse Museum's Odditoreum have to allow visitors to make their own labels for the strange objects, but their inclusion promoted the sense of fun and object exploration that permeated the gallery. In a marketing example, the Metropolitan Museum ran a photography contest in 2009 called "It's Time We Met" in which the institution encouraged people to share photos on the photo-sharing site Flickr of themselves exploring the Metropolitan Museum. While several people submitted typical museum shots, a few contributed shots of themselves engaging with the art in humorous, touching, and surprising ways. The poster image for the contest was one of a middle-aged couple, locked in a passionate kiss next to a sculpture of figures in a similarly amorous position. This photo was not necessary to advertise the museum, but its spontaneity and joy conveyed a unique message that would have been hard for the marketing department to manufacture. These kinds of projects, in which visitors' contributions are seen as a way to personalize and energize more traditional projects, tend to accentuate visitors' creativity. Unlike projects of necessity, in which institutions often introduce constraints to ensure consistency of contributions, these projects thrive when visitors are given license--and models--to do something a little out of the ordinary.

 

Skill-building, active exploration (suggested subhead, SB)

    Finally, there are some contributory projects initiated by institutions which perceive the act of contribution as a valuable educational activity for visitors. I expect these types of projects to continue to increase as more institutions place emphasis on participatory learning skills and new media literacies. Most of these projects aim to teach skill-building rather than content, though citizen science projects that teach participants data collection skills have also been shown to expose people to new content around the overall science topics and specific specimens with which they interact (source: PPSR report).

    Considering their emphasis on hands-on learning and skills attainment, it is not surprising that science centers and museums are most aggressively pursuing these kinds of projects. The Weston Family Innovation Centre at the Ontario Science Centre is full of participatory activities in which visitors can make their own objects to display and share with others, from low-tech constructions like shoes and found object sculptures to media products like stop-motion videos. Julie Bowen, the director of the project to create the Innovation Centre, was very clear in stating that the purpose of the WFIC is to help visitors cultivate practices of innovation--creativity, collaboration, experimentation--and not to teach science content.

    And yet, many institutions are still stuck, because of their own and funders' goals, on teaching content. In the summer of 2006, 2,400 visitors to the Exploratorium in San Francisco built Nanoscape, an immersive ball-and-stick sculpture meant to represent atoms and molecules at the nanoscale. Visitors enthusiastically volunteered and learned a great deal about how to collaborate on a big project and put tiny pieces together. But they didn't necessarily learn about the science beyond the project--visitors were just as likely to describe what they were making as a "building" as they were to reference the atoms and tiny particles represented, and evaluators were dismayed at the lack of overall science learning that happened during the project. Hopefully, as national education systems move in the direction of "21st century skills" and new media literacies, as described by researchers like Henry Jenkins and others, museums and informal learning institutions will be leaders in charting the ways that we can use contributory projects as an opportunity to teach people important skills that go beyond basic facts.

    For example, The Magnes Museum, a small Jewish art and history museum in Berkeley, CA, initiated a Memory Lab project in 2008 to invite visitors to contribute their own artifacts and stories to a digital archive of Jewish heritage.  While the emphasis is on "making memories," director of research and collections Francesco Spagnolo emphasized the concept that participants learn how to use digital tools to preserve, organize, and care for their own heritage.  In this way, this contributory project, which is cast as a personal experience, supports skill-building and appreciation for the ongoing work at the institution.

 

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