Meeting Participants' Needs

    Most of the time, we think of visitors as the consumers of institutional products rather than their co-creators. When they become participants, visitors' needs are more complex. While other chapters provide many examples of ways to design platforms specifically to support users as participants and motivate active engagement, this section includes a few thoughts on managing projects in a way that will support growing and sustaining participation.

    The most common question people ask about attracting and sustaining participants is, "how can we get people to engage with this amazing experience we have designed for them?"  This is, as you may suspect, the wrong question. It sets up a false dichotomy between us and them: we the intelligent experience designers, they the culturally devoid masses in need of external sources of fulfillment. While I am a strong advocate for the intentional and thoughtful design of participatory experiences, I also believe that these experiences are rooted in healthy relationships among people. If you start a new relationship with a sense of entitlement or disdain for others, with the intent to deceive or to coerce them into action, you are unlikely to build strong and sustainable bonds. Yes, professionals have expertise that they should absolutely bring to bear in designing participatory experiences to best support the abilities and interests of users. But they should do so in a way that is respectful of users' time and abilities. 

Give Participants Meaningful Work

    When it comes to designing a participatory tool that will serve users as participants, the most important value to uphold is respect for your users. If you are trying to support participation with children and families, your tool should be comfortable for people to use in groups and should make clear how or if participants' privacy will be protected. If you are working with artists or makers, your tool must address concerns about intellectual property rights and content ownership. This list goes on, and while each of these aspects are to some extent appealing to all user groups, choosing what to accentuate and what to ignore will help users understand what is valued in the context of a particular project. You don't need to exhaustively offer every feature and every specification. Recall how the designers of the ScratchR community intentionally focused on some tools, like remixing other users' projects, while eschewing others, like ratings.(Worth repeating the content/point of this example. SB)

    One of the easiest ways to foster respectful two-way relationships between users and institutions is to design projects that support a real need on the part of the institution. In the best participatory projects, users' actions are intrinsically linked to institutional goals. There would have been no interactive exhibits in The Tech Virtual without the community exhibit designers, no portraits in the Art Gallery of Ontario's In Your Face exhibition without creative visitors, no gameplay in SF0 without design-minded players.(What are the institutional goals that are the catalysts here? Your paragraph starts with need for institutional links, but these are not featured in your examples. Needs more. SB)

    When you give people real work to do, you hold them accountable. We usually think of this as onerous for workers, but it is also a sign that the institution cares what they do and how well they do it. The Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project at the US Holocaust Museum featured a clear statement on its website: "Now the museum needs your help." This website clearly (tried to communicate? SB) communicated that the project was real, meaningful, and dependent on users to succeed. (The quote you have cited could be perceived as real or not. Alone, it does not make the case. SB)

    Well, sort of. As noted in the case study, the Lodz Ghetto project was actually a less efficient research project because of its participatory approach. When I mentioned to project lead David Klevan how much I liked the straightforward "Now the museum needs your help," he grimaced. As he pointed out, the museum didn't REALLY need visitors' help, and in reality, their help was resource-intensive and riddled with errors.

    How do you reconcile this issue? There are many cases where designers, quite appropriately, develop participatory experiences offer a small slice of "real" work--possibly too small to really be useful. Or, in cases like the Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project, the work is real but simplified, and more resources are required to support participation than would be to do the work in-house. (But what did actually happen here? Were all frustrated? Staff and visitors? What was visitor perception of the experience? What was the pattern of their contributions? You make a good point that framing the context for and approach to participation is critical.  SB)

    Georgina Goodlander of the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum reflected on this irony with regard the "Fill the Gap," in which visitors selected and advocated for objects to fill vacant spots in the museum's study storage. This proved a popular activity, but not one that saved staff any time or effort. Goodlander said, "To do this staff had to first select a pool of objects for people to choose from. We posted a printed image of the gap, and people could play around with the different artwork choices (on laminated bits of paper) and select their choice. We also asked them to explain or justify their choice. The object with the most votes was then installed in the gap. This was hugely successful, with many people participating and commented on how much fun it was to 'be a curator.'  BUT it was no longer a real project and actually required quite a bit of work from us to set up - more work that it would be for us to just choose the artwork ourselves."

    This last sentence reveals two faulty assumptions that underly this question of the value of participation. First, Goodlander comments that it was not a "real" project because the experience was constrained by staff and visitors weren't truly doing the "real" work of selecting objects for display. Of course, visitors aren't curators. They don't have the expertise or the time to hunt through the entire collection for the items that will physically fit into a study storage location. I would argue that Goodlander's approach--offering visitors a small set of objects from which to choose, and then focusing the activity on picking one and arguing for its inclusion--represents good design, not a fake experience. She appropriately identified the valuable experience as arbitrating among objects and making an argument for a preferred one, and she designed a platform that supported those experiences. (Again, it would be useful to have input from visitor participants on this experiment, as well as input from staff. Is it necessary to quote particular staff person here? It might be too pointed in scapegoating particular individual? SB) (I don't personally find it to be scapegoating, because Nina is giving the person *more* credit for success than the person herself does, not more [or any] blame.  MK)

    In most participatory activities, staff should give away the fun part of their jobs, offering experiences that are exciting, enjoyable, educational, and skirt the dullness that often surrounds the creative moments. After all, participants aren't paid employees, and they deserve work that is likely to bring them pleasure. Just as we use other interactive techniques to spark visitors' interest in content, participatory activities should be enjoyable to perform and should lead naturally to deeper experiences with the content. I'd rather see visitors arguing for their favorite artifact than sorting through catalogs reading measurements any day.

    The second question here is whether a participatory project's value is diminished if it takes more work to set up the user experience than to just get the work done by staff.  In most cases, the point of participatory projects is not just to produce an output; the goal is to change the relationships among staff and visitors, and to engage visitors with the institution in new ways. These outcomes are not possible to produce if staff do the work instead. The "true value" of a participatory project is not equivalent to the amount of time and money it would take staff to do the project work; it also includes the value of building community relationships and supporting skill-building experiences for participants. (In this case, there are other potential values, such as: engaging people who do not normally do anything in a museum and might now become museum-goers; word of mouth about the fun of this will spread to community outside the institution and positively influence perceptions; more online engagement with the collection by people who want to go deeper; people talking/interacting with each other inside the institution that influences inclination to visit in the future,etc. Important to further articulate the benefits, including intended and unintended consequences/observations. SB)

    Consider, for example, the experience of cooking with a child. Under no circumstances is it easier or faster to bake a cake with an eight year-old than to do it yourself as an adult. But doing so is an activity that builds your relationship with that child, empowers him as a maker, and supports mutual enjoyment of the co-created product. (This is true and a metaphor to give people a taste of what you are talking about, but it is still described in the 'feel good' category, more than as substantive outcomes. SB) (I think the substantive outcome is that the child moves down the path of becoming a competent cook--I think part of the challenge in this book is that since participatory projects are relatively new, simply making visitors feel empowered is a sufficiently ambitious goal to start off with, but it is not really an ultimate goal. The same with building relationships--museums want to build relationships with X in order to Y. I think it is important for an institution to specify that Y (or Ys): to develop individual critical thinking skills? to construct a more unified community identity? what?  MK)

    The other element to consider when designing participatory tools is how the platform will support diverse types of users and levels of engagement. Participants need not engage with the same project in a uniform way. Recall the Wing Luke Museum's structure, in which a focused group of community advisors work as highly active exhibit team members whereas other community members provide occasional contributions or support. Participants don’t require the same overhead as employees or even volunteers. There is no need for institutions to create one set of expectations for what constitutes adequate engagement. You may not want your staff coming in whenever they feel like it, but flexibility is an asset when it comes to participants--you want them to be able to engage when and how they are most able. 

Reward Participants Appropriately

    The final participant need that must be addressed is the need to value visitors' contributions and work in a meaningful way. This doesn't require giving every visitor a gold star for participating. In many cases, if the promise is compelling and the tool is clear, then participation can be its own reward. But in most situations, reward-based feedback loops energizes and sustains participation by featuring highly visible, shareable outputs.

    If you contribute something to the museum, you want to see it integrated in a timely, attractive, respectful way. Too many participatory exhibits have broken feedback loops, where the ability to see the results of your participation are stalled by opaque and slow-moving staff activities like content moderation or editing. In some cases, it is completely acceptable to have a lag between participatory action and output for intermediate processing, but if that delay is required, it should be communicated clearly to participants. This can even be turned to the institution's advantage; for example, the museum may send an email to a visitor days or weeks after the visit to inform her that her sculpture is now on display or her story integrated into an audio tour.

    Regardless of the timeline, rewarding participants involves three steps that should remain consistent. First, you should clearly explain how and when visitors will be rewarded for participating. (I am questioning the issue of reward, which can have a tone of condescension. What is needed is feedback, a sign of respect. Maintaining the loop cultivates the ongoing two-way process of communication. SB) Second, you should thank visitors immediately upon participating, even if their content will now go into a holding pattern. And third, you should develop some workable process to display, integrate, or distribute the participatory content--and ideally, you should inform participants when you do so. And fourth, continue the conversation after the results/decisions are made public, exhibited, rewarded, etc. For example, when the Tate Liverpool published this year the 36 selected Flickr photos for the Colour Chart out of more than 3.500, there were many who had submitted photos that were deceived for not having been selected or people who found that there were better pictures than some of the chosen ones. The Tate was still there to answer and comment.(CR)

    Here's how these three steps play out in two examples: one simple, one complex.  At the simplest level, these three steps are immediate, automatic, and obvious to visitors.  Consider  the XX children's museum, which includes an area where visitors can build sculptures or toys out of found objects. Visitors can place their creations on a conveyor belt that moves throughout the museum for all to see. In this case, there are no labels necessary. Visitors see what will happen to their sculptures when they put them on the belt, and they have some personal understanding of how that might fulfill their interest in sharing their work with the immediate community of fellow-visitors. 

    For a more complicated example, recall the crowd-curated Click! exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Click! offered two basic ways to participate--by submitting photos in the open call, and by judging the photos via an online curation system. In both cases, the Click! team was very specific about both the responsibilities and potential rewards for participants. Participants were not in total control of their content; photographers couldn't dictate the size or printing process for their images, and citizen curators couldn't choose which photos to judge and which to skip. The museum team carefully explained the reason for each restriction and engaged in frequent dialogue with confused or concerned participants. The online system was highly responsive to visitors' actions, storing each entry and thanking participants for their actions, but participants understood that their work would only be released in a particular format on a well-articulated schedule. Managing this complex balance of participants' expectations required consistency and open communication, and in the end, most participants felt appreciated, rewarded, and respected as co-creators of the final exhibition.  

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