THIS IS THE NEW FIRST CHAPTER.  THE END IS STILL ROUGH (ME-TO -WE) BUT THE REST IS READY FOR REVIEW. 

 

I'm visiting a museum. It's the end of the experience. I'm flipping through videos that visitors have made about freedom, and they are really, really bad. The videos fall into two categories:

1. Person stares at camera and mumbles an inane, marginally decipherable sentence. Static.
2. Group of teens, overflowing with enthusiasm, "express themselves" via shout-outs and walk-ons.  

 

This is not the participatory museum experience of my dreams.  But I don’t blame the participants.  I blame the design.

 

When we talk about visitor participation in museum experiences, design is not one of the first words that come up.  The motivation behind creating opportunities for participation are typically about fulfilling visitors’ desires for self-expression and transforming the museum from a one-way content distribution system to something more conversational.  Our participatory aspirations are often more conceptual than practical.  We think about our goals to reflect visitors' meaning making.  We think about the potential to bring people together in dialogue around tough issues.  We dream of the "town square," the "third place," the idealized civic community institution.

 

But town squares are not born of comment books and talk back walls.  To fulfill these civic aspirations, we need to design participatory frameworks that support complex visitor engagement.  Just as museum experience designers have integrated a wide range of learning styles into the ways that we present visitors with content, we need to consider the diversity of participatory styles embodied by those who create, remix, share, critique, and consume user-generated content.  Just as we establish content goals for didactic exhibits, we need to develop concrete participatory goals for what we are trying to accomplish beyond "giving visitors an opportunity to share their thoughts."  Even the most classic participatory exhibit elements deserve a deeper look.  When designing talkback walls, we should be asking questions like: How would you design a station to encourage people to interact with each other's comments?  How would you design one that is optimized for long, thoughtful comments?  How would you design one that would attract teens in particular?

 

We have answered these types of questions for many kinds of design in museums.  We know how to write labels for different audiences.  We know what kinds of physical interactions promote competitive play and which promote contemplative exploration.  And while we may not always get it right, we are guided by the expectation that there are design decisions we can make to be successful.

 

Where do we start in developing rigorous design frameworks for participatory museum experiences?  First, we need a working definition of "participatory museum experiences."  In many ways, the museum experience is inherently participatory; visitors participate by exploring the exhibits, enaging deeply with experiences that are most appealing, and make decisions about how to use their time and attention in the museum.  You could comparably say that the museum experience is inherently interactive, since visitors choose which content to explore and may react to the exhibits as they choose.  And yet when we talk about designing "interactive museum experiences" we understand that to mean a particular type of exhibit or educational program that deliberately and explicitly affords a two-way interaction.  Visitors can "talk back" to exhibits anywhere in the museum, but only interactive exhibits are designed to receive and respond to visitors' actions. 

 

Participatory museum experiences, like interactive experiences, are distinct because of the visitor experiences they are designed to support.  They are particular types of exhibits and programs that deliberately and explicitly invite a social experience with the content.  Participatory experiences are those in which visitors can create content, share content with others, and connect with each other socially around the content experience.  Whereas interactive exhibits are designed for a two-way engagement between the object and the visitor, participatory exhibits are designed for multi-directional social experiences.  The participatory object serves as a "platform" that connects different users who act as creators, distributors, consumers, critics, and collaborators on content. 

 

In many cases, museums develop participatory practices that invite visitors to co-create future exhibitions or programs.  Institutions like the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow have extensive and well-documented community design processes that allow staff to work closely with community members to develop exhibitions and museum experiences that are highly relevant to the community's interests and needs.  Other museums informally test new exhibit ideas with visitors or focus groups drawn from intended audiences.  This work is in the long tradition of participatory design, a product design technique in which intended users are engaged as partners in the design process.  Intended users' involvement may be extensive or slight, formal or informal.  But the goal in participatory design is to co-create a more appealing, valuable product. 

 

While there are several examples in this book drawn from innovative museum participatory design projects, my primary interest is in the ways we can design new products--new kinds of exhibits and programs--that invite ongoing participation by users.  Community members who are involved in intensive participatory design projects often have transformative experiences as partners in the process, but the ultimate visitor experience of these exhibits isn't necessarily altered by the innovative processes that created them. For some museum professionals and projects, this is a good thing--it "proves" that participatory design can yield products that meet institutional standards. But if the goal is to change as many peoples' perception of the institutional relationship to community members as possible, then limiting yourself to a hidden participatory process is problematic.

 

Instead, the majority of this book is focused on designing experiences that invite audiences to socially participate with the content on the gallery floor.  While In some examples, museums do use participatory processes to create these experiences, and in many cases, engaging with intended users as partners in the development process improves the likeliness of success on the part of the participatory product.  But the focus is on offering every drop-in visitor a legitimate way to contribute to the museum, share things of interest, connect with other people, and feel like an engaged and respected participant with the institution.

 

This leads to an obvious question: does every visitor really want to participate in this manner in museums?  No.  Just as there are visitors who will never pull the lever on an interactive and those who prefer to ignore the labels, there are many visitors who will choose not to share their story, talk with a stranger, or consume visitor-generated content.  Many museum professionals argue that people don't visit museums for a social experience and that there are some visitors for whom exhibit experiences that prompt dialogue might be entirely off-putting.  This is true, but the converse is also true.  There are many people out there who engage heavily with social media and are incredibly comfortable using devices and participatory platforms to connect them with roommates, volleyball buddies, and dates.  There are people who prefer social recreational activities and avoid museums because they perceive them as non-social, non-dynamic, non-participatory places.  Just as interactives were introduced in museums to accommodate the presumed educational needs and active desires of young audiences, participatory elements may draw in audiences for whom appropriation, social connection, and redistribution of content are preconditions for cultural engagement.  In XX (YEAR), Elaine Gurian wrote an essay entitled The Importance of 'And' to address the necessity in museum practice to accommodate many different goals, including scholarship, education, inclusion, conservation, etc.  She commented that we too often think of different institutional goals as oppositional rather than additive (GET QUOTE).  And while the addition of new pursuits to an institutional plan does force some either/or decisions around policy and resources, it need not inhibit the ability to deliver on multiple promises to multiple audiences.

 

Participatory museum experiences are another "and" for the museum professional's toolbox.  They are tools that can be used to address particular institutional aspirations to be socially relevant, dynamic, responsive, community spaces.  While the ardor with which museum directors speak of these aspirations may have grown, the goals themselves are not new.  The design of successful participatory visitor experiences helps museums more completely fulfill their missions.  Again, I come back to the analogy to interactive exhibits.  Interactive design techniques are additive methods that supplement traditional didactic content presentation.  Interactive exhibits, when successfully executed, promote learning experiences that are unique and specific to the two-way nature of their design.  And while there are some institutions, notably children's and science museums, that have become primarily associated with interactive exhibits, there are other types of museums, notably art and history museums, in which interactives play a small role.  There are some institutions that can be called "interactive" museums.  But the introduction of interactive exhibits does not require an entire institutional shift, and in the majority of instances, interactive exhibits are just one of many interpretative educational techniques employed.  Similarly, the majority of museums are and will integrate participatory experiences as one of many types of experiences available to visitors.  There may be a few institutions that become wholly "participatory" and see their entire institutional culture and perception transformed by this adoption.  But in most cases, this is just one design technique among many, one with a particular ability to enhance the social experience of the museum.

 

But poorly designed participatory experiences such as the video talkback station at the beginning of this chapter do little to enhance anyone's experience.  Before we dig deeply into some specific frameworks for designing participatory experiences, we need to address their two core audiences: visitors and staff.[MAYBE YOU ADDRESSED THIS SOMEWHERE ELSE, NINA, BUT ARE THERE REALLY ONLY TWO AUDIENCES? ISN'T THE GOVERNING BODY OF THE INSTITUTION ALSO AN AUDIENCE? ChrisCastle]  To improve the ways that we design for participation, we need to both understand the participatory audience landscape and articulate clear institutional goals for participation.  If participatory engagement is intended to be a multi-vocal conversation, it must involve multiple parties—staff and visitors.  And for it to be a great conversation, each party has to feel supported, acknowledged, and that they are getting something positive from the experience.

 

Let’s start with the audience side of the conversation.

 

While it's true that not everyone wants to participate, the diversity of ways that visitors might participate with museums is much more extensive than many people think.  There's more to participation than self-expression.  In 2008, along with the release of their book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Forrester Research released a “social technographics” profile tool to help businesses understand the way different audiences engage with social media online. 

 

The researchers grouped audiences into six categories by activity:

1. creators (people who produce content, upload videos, write blogs)
2. critics (people who submit reviews, rate content, and comment on social media sites)
3. collectors (people who collect links and aggregate content for personal or social consumption)
4. joiners (people who join social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn)
5. spectators (people who read blogs, watch Youtube videos, and visit social sites)
6. inactives (people who don't visit social sites)

 

 

 

These categorizations are fluid and many people fall into several categories at once; for example, I fall into all of the first five categories, expressing myself as a creator when I blog, a critic when I make comments on others' sites, a collector when I assemble "favorites," a joiner on many social networks, and a spectator when I consume social media.  The percentages keep changing (and are different for every country, gender, and age group), but one thing holds constant: creators are a small part of the landscape. You are far more likely to join a social network, watch a video on YouTube, send a link to a friend, make a collection of things you’d like on Amazon, or review a book than you are to produce a movie, write a blog, or post photos online.

 

And while about 20% of people who engage in the social web are creators in some capacity, on any given participatory site, the representation of creators is much smaller.   Only 0.16% of visitors to YouTube will ever upload a video.  Only 0.2% of visitors to Flickr will ever post a photo (source).  In 2006, researcher Jakob Nielsen wrote a lauded paper on participation inequality, arguing that there is a 90-9-1 rule in which “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” 

 

YouTube is an extraordinary example of a participatory platform that carefully and deliberately caters to all kinds of social media participants.  At first glance, YouTube looks like it is made primarily for two audiences: creators, who make and upload videos, and spectators who watch them.  YouTube's tagline--"Broadcast Yourself"--is crafted for the creator audience.  Even though only 0.16% of visitors to the site will ever upload a video, YouTube's designers know that the participation of these creators drives the content and the experience of everyone else who visits the site.  That's why, despite the fact that the vast majority of their audience are spectators, YouTube's tagline is not "watch funny videos of cats."  A deeper look at the homepage reveals the ways that other kinds of participation is encouraged as well.  Critiquing is a major activity on YouTube, and critics can comment on videos, rate them, and post follow-up video responses if desired.  These ratings are shown on the homepage, which means that critics and their opinions get top billing alongside the video creators themselves.  You can also join YouTube (and significant space on the homepage is dedicated to convincing you that joining will provide you with value) and collect favorite videos across the site.  Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, YouTube displays the number of times every video has been viewed.  This is not a secondary or private statistic; it is the main statistic of YouTube and drives a number of algorithms that elevate videos to featured status.  If you think about it, this is incredibly strange.  Who cares how many times a video has been viewed? [ISN'T COUNTING SPECTATORS PRETTY MUCH THE WAY ALL CULTURAL ACTIVITIES ARE SCORED? THE OLD "BUMS ON SEATS" COUNT? EG THE POPULARITY OF A CONCERT IS DEMONSTRATED BY HOW MANY PEOPLE CAME TO SEE IT.] The point is that spectators, just by showing up, are counted.  Your participation as a viewer affects the status of each video in the system.  Just by watching, you are important. 

 

Interestingly, YouTube and other participatory platforms spend more time trying to shift spectators to become joiners, collectors, and critics than they do trying to encourage more people to become creators (PETE WILSON - check).  Why do they focus their energy on these "intermediate" participatory behaviors?  One reason is that they have much lower barriers to attainment; it's much easier to rate a video than it is to make one.  But the other reason is that YouTube doesn't necessarily need 10% or even 2% of their audience to make and upload videos.  Maybe the overall YouTube experience would be worse for all those spectators if the service was glutted with millions more crappy videos.  The more people critique and comment on videos, the more they improve the experience for everyone by altering the ecosystem of what is considered popular or high-quality.  This isn't true of making videos.  The more content there is, the more content there is.  The more interpretation and discussion there is around the content, the more people can get the content (and the conversations) that are most valuable to them.

 

Despite the paucity of creators and the diversity of popular and valuable alternatives, many museums are fixated on creators. I show colleagues Forrester’s statistics and then they say, “yeah, but we really want people to share their own stories about fly-swatters,” or, “we think our visitors can make amazing videos about justice.” Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. Allowing visitors to select their favorite exhibits in a gallery or comment on the content of the labels isn’t seen as valuable a participatory learning experience as producing their own content.

 

This is a problem for two reasons. First, exhibits that invite self-expression appeal to a tiny percentage of museum audiences. Less than 1% of the users of most social Web platform create original content. Would you design an interactive exhibit that only 1% of visitors would want to use? Maybe—but only if it was complemented by other exhibits with wider appeal.  When I encounter a video talkback kiosk in a museum as a visitor, I never want to make my own video.  I’m not a creator, and my only other option is to be a spectator.  But I would love to rate the videos on display (critic) or group them (collector).  Unfortunately, those potentially rich participatory experiences—ones which would develop my ability to detect patterns, compare and contrast items, and express my opinion—are not available to me.    

 

The second problem with focusing on creators is that open-ended self-expression requires self-directed creativity. You have to have an idea of what you’d like to say, and then you have to say it in a way that satisfies your expectations of quality. In other words, it’s hard, and it’s especially hard on the spot in the context of a casual museum visit. What if I assigned you to make a video about your ideas of justice? Does that sound like a fun and rewarding casual activity to you?

 

If your goal is to invite visitors to share their own experience in a way that celebrates and respects their unique contribution to the institution, you need to design more constraints, not fewer, on visitor self-expression.  Consider a mural. If given the chance, a very small percentage of people would opt to paint a mural on their own. The materials are not the barrier—the ideas and the confidence are. You have to have an idea of what you want to paint and how to do it. But now imagine being invited to participate in the creation of a mural. You are handed a pre-mixed color and a brush and a set of instructions. It’s easy. You get to contribute to a collaborative project that produces something beautiful. You see the overall value of the project. You can point to your part in its making with pride. You have been elevated by the opportunity to contribute to the project.

 

This experience is shared by the visitors who contribute data to Citizen Science projects or nominated concepts for the Minnesota History Center’s visitor-driven MN150 exhibition. In these successful participatory projects, visitors don’t build exhibits from scratch or design their own science experiments. Instead, they participate in larger projects, joining the team, doing their part. There are often opportunities for partial self-expression—a flourishing brush stroke here, a witty Facebook status update there—but the overall expressive element is tightly constrained by the participatory platform at hand.

 

One of the best small-scale examples of this type of participatory exhibit experiences I’ve seen is the rock poster-making activity at the Denver Art Museum in their temporary Side Trip installation, on display in the spring of 2009. Side Trip is an interactive space that accompanies an exhibition of psychedelic rock posters, and the educators wanted to invite visitors to make their own posters.  Rather than giving people blank sheets of paper and markers (and reaching a narrow audience of creators), the DAM educators devised a remixing activity that engages people in a low-barrier activity that blends collecting, critiquing, and creating. Visitors are offered clipboards with transparencies attached. There are stacks of graphics, cut-out reproductions from the real rock posters on display next door, which visitors can place under the transparencies to arrange and remix into poster designs of their own choosing. Visitors can then use dry erase markers to trace over the graphics, augment them, and add their own flair. When someone is satisfied with her recombined poster, she hands it to a staff member, who puts it in a color copier. The visitor is given a copy of her poster and the museum keeps a copy as well. The results of this physical “remix” activity are beautiful, intricate posters. You can’t easily tell where the remixed artifacts end and the visitors’ additions begin. I saw teens and adults who sat and did this activity for 45 minutes and wasn’t surprised to hear that some people spend over an hour on it. But you don’t have to start with a blank slate – you’re given a starting point via the graphics that also tied the activity tightly to the artifacts in the show. Brilliant.

 

This rock poster activity elevates the participatory museum experience in several ways.  It encourages visitors not only to share their own personal expression but to contextualize it in response to museum-provided content.  It invites visitors who did not think they could make art to engage confidently with a positive result.  And it creates a body of visitor-generated content for spectators to enjoy that is beautiful and of high quality.

Why aren’t more museums designing highly constrained participatory platforms in which visitors contribute to collaborative projects? The misguided answer is that we think it’s more respectful to allow visitors to do their own thing, that their ultimate learning experience will come from unfettered self-expression. But that’s mostly born from design laziness and a misunderstanding of what motivates participation. It’s easy for museums to assign a corner and a kiosk to visitors and say, “we’ll put their stories over there.” It’s harder to design an experience that leverages many visitors’ expression and puts their contributions to meaningful use.

 

It’s like cooking. If you have a bunch of novice friends, it can be maddening to find appropriate “sous chef” roles for them to fill. Many cooks prefer just to get those clumsy hands out of the kitchen. It takes a special kind of cook, artist, or scientist to want to support the contributions of novices. It takes people who want to be educators, not just executors.[I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE GETTING AT BUT NOT SURE THIS IS THE RIGHT WORD - SOUNDS TOO MUCH LIKE EXECUTIONER ;-) ChrisCastle]

 

Museum staff should be those special kind of people. We should respect visitors enough to engage them in work that we actually value, to find in-roads that support their participation. We should care enough about their potential usefulness to find the right job for them to do. [SOMEHOW THIS SOUNDS PATRONIZING ChrisCastle]

 

And this brings us to the other party to the participatory conversation: the staff and institutional expectations. If participation is truly a two-way experience in which visitors are contributing to the institution, museums should actively seek contributions that are useful.  In audience-centered design, we often talk about designing “for” audiences instead of designing content and expecting them to take it on our terms.  In participatory design situations, museum staff need to also think about what will be valuable “for” the institution.  The experience isn’t solely about providing value to the participants.  It’s also about providing value to their critics and spectators, [I'M CONFUSED HERE - WHOSE CRITICS & SPECTATORS? THE PARTICIPANTS'?ChrisCastle] which include museum staff.

 

This is easier said than done.  We’re so used to asking open-ended talkback questions like, “What do you think?” or prescriptive ones like, “how do you define nanotechnology?” that we often forget to consider whether we actually care to hear the answer.  When I design visitor contribution components to exhibitions, I’m always asking myself: how can we use this?  What can visitors provide that I can’t?  How can they do some meaningful work that supports the museum overall?

 

One of my favorite examples of a simple participatory element comes from Bibliotheek Haarlem Oost, a library in the Netherlands. Jan David Hanrath, an architect and former library information technologist, designed a tagging system into this branch library. Tagging is a term that refers to a collecting activity in which people assign keywords (“tags”) to things. These things can be websites, videos, objects—whatever. If visitors can assign their own tags to artifacts, exhibits, or books, then staff can generate visitor-generated folksonomies alongside traditional taxonomies—and visitors who are searching for content can find artifacts of interest via either path. Why are folksonomies useful? Traditional taxonomies may only cover a certain set of metadata about an object. You may want to see “red paintings” but the museum may not have a formal code for the color of pieces in the collection. Tags can allow people to search for artifacts via the real words they’d use to describe those things.

 

Tagging has huge theoretical value to museums and libraries as a way to allow users to create folksonomies around institutionally-held collections, and there’s a clear mission connection for institutions whose goal is to engage visitors with collections and learning. While many museums are ably exploring the world of tagging on-line, no one has figured out how to make it work in the onsite visitor experience. Tagging could be very useful onsite if there were a way to access the tags and use them to discover artifacts of interest. Ideally, there would be a complete feedback loop where you would then be able to assign tags to objects as you view them in the galleries, thus creating more data for new visitors walking in the door.

 

What I’m describing maps to a complicated set of inputs and outputs. At the input (performing the tagging), visitors while onsite would need a way to mark individual exhibits or items with keywords. Then, on the output (using tags to access content of interest), visitors would need a way to scan the keywords at any exhibit, see linked related exhibits, and receive directional information to find the other exhibits. I can think of several ways to do this, and they all have long, painful lists of behavior changes associated with them.

 

The library at Haarlem Oost wanted to do this same thing – to allow patrons to tag the books they’d finished so they could be displayed on shelves and in the collection database for others to find books they might enjoy. But Hanrath's team didn’t come up with a clunky technology with lots of required behavior changes and instruction sets. They did something very, very clever. They installed more book drops.

 

The library created a book drop for a set of predefined tags (boring, didn’t read it, great, funny, exciting, good for kids, etc.). They also created shelves for the individual tags. When patrons return books, they place them on the shelves that appropriately describe the books.  Because the majority of books in the Dutch library system have RFID tags, the shelves were enabled with RFID readers that scan the books and add the tags to the books’ digital entries in the library database. The only behavior change required is for the patron to shelve his or her books in categories, and the benefit on the output side (the tags appearing in the library on-line catalogue) is immediate.

 

No patron would call the activity of putting their books in book drops ‘tagging,’ and that’s a good thing.  Participation is easy and its rewards for the next set of visitors searching for a good book are immediate.  There’s little concern here about barriers to use, educating the visitor on how or why to participate, or even significant infrastructure or support costs.  The feedback loop is there, and it works because it’s a clever, simple distillation of the core idea of tagging.  That's what I call good design.

 

Doing a sorting activity is a constrained form of participation, but that doesn’t diminish its ability to be useful.  Many museum exhibition designers are wary of the idea of giving visitors useful work; it sounds like we are ignoring the personal expressive goals they might have for which we designed the participatory experience in the first place.  But constraints, whether on a small scale as in Haarlem Oost or on a large scale in a co-created exhibition project, help visitors feel confident that their participation matters.

 

In August of 2008, I worked with the Chabot Space & Science Center on a participatory design institute in which eleven teens designed media pieces for an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition on black holes. When we did the final evaluation for the project, one comment from the teens surprised us: they complained that it felt like we were "hiding" the goals of the project from them in the first of three weeks. At first, we didn't understand what they were talking about. Hiding?! We gave them all the information we had, and on the first day they had a 90-minute conference call with the exhibit designers.

 

But we were not entirely specific about where their media pieces would fit into the completed exhibition. The answer was: we don't know. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics folks knew that the media would be included on the exhibition website, but that website is several months from being initiated. There was no initial design, no graphics, and no idea of where the teens' work would fit into an overall structure.

The adults thought (as many would) that this was an opportunity, not a setback. The teens were free to be as creative as they wanted, without limitation of pre-existing requirements or criteria. But what staff thought of as "being open," the teens saw as "hiding" the real needs.   They wanted to know where their media projects would be featured in the exhibition and what the specific criteria were for success. The client kept saying, “do whatever you want,” which they thought meant, “we support your unique self-expression.” But the teens heard, “Do whatever you want—we don’t really care what it is.” The teens wanted the constraints, both so they could be good contributors and to put some limits on the vast openness of “whatever.”

 

Exhibit designers (and almost all creative professionals) work within constraints all the time.  We want to know that we are designing things that will work, be valued, and achieve our personal and institutional goals.  When the goals are hazy or we don’t receive feedback on our work, we are discouraged and confused.  We stop being our best creative selves, and eventually, we may opt out of participating altogether.

Visitors are no different from exhibit designers in their desire for structure.  If anything, they need more support and guidance as they operate in the unfamiliar territory of museums.  Visitors need meaningful, responsive, clearly defined frameworks for participation and contribution.  And it’s time for us to start designing them.

 

 

Me to We Design

 

My technique for developing successful participatory museum experiences and moving towards more socially-contextualized museum venues as a whole relies heavily on a core principle called "me to we" design.  The basic idea is this: to participate in a social environment, people need to start by expressing themselves personally and receiving positive and useful response to their own individual identities, needs, and interests.  By self-identifying relative to things--artifacts, objects, experiences--visitors create personal profiles that can be cross-referenced with the profiles of other visitors.  That cross-referencing can create new value for users as the networked contributions of different users can inform each person's individual experience.  Visitors are thus connected to each other via things, which are also called social objects.  These social objects can broker formal and informal relationships that invite visitors to connect with each other in a way that is safe, comfortable, personally-contextualized, and adds value.  Once visitors feel sufficiently confident, connected, and well-served in this object-mediated social environment, they are able to engage directly in communal activities.

 

In other words, you don't start from the top down and design a participatory space.  Developing the museum as a social town square requires starting from individual users and supporting connections among them.  This design strategy is based on the fundamental lessons of the social Web, which is built on an "architecture of participation with network effects" - one in which the overall service or venue is built by harnessing the collective intelligence and actions of users.  In 2007, I developed a hierarchy of participation that explores five stages of interaction between museum and visitor. The first two stages are focused on the individual, personalized experience.  In stage one, it would start by offering quality content in a neutral/safe environment.  In stage two, it would create ways for visitors to interact with exhibit elements individually.  The third and fourth levels transition to networked, social experiences. In stage three, it would network individuals’ experiences to enable data sharing and flexible use for a better individual experiences.   In stage four, it would offer social tools that encourage users to interact with one another. And the fifth stage (which I perceive as an aspirational outcome, not a designable technique) is a social community venue--the participatory museum.  It is a place that can dynamically support communal activities among socially networked users. I do not think of this as a one-way race to the top.  Visitors can have wonderfully compelling museum experiences at any stage, and many visitors are only interested in limited levels of sociality in their visit experience. But the stages are progressive with respect to their participatory outcomes. If fostering a participatory social venue is an institutional goal, you have to work through the different stages of interaction to attain it. 

 

NOTE: I INTEND TO RECAST THIS AS A GRAPHIC THAT IS NOT A PYRAMID. MAY ALSO CHANGE THE LANGUAGE FROM "LEVELS" TO "STAGES" OR  "PHASES."  THE GOAL IS TO SHOW AN EVOLUTION, NOT A HIERARCHY. [GOOD IDEA - ALTHOUGH YOU STATE ABOVE THAT ONE LEVEL IS NOT NECESSARILY BETTER THAN ANOTHER - THE PYRAMID SEEMS TO SUGGEST OTHERWISE ChrisCastle]

 

 

 

Level 1: Individual Receives Content (Museum to Me)

In this model, the content provider or museum delivers content for the user to passively receive. You look at an artifact. Watch a video. Listen to a news clip. Read a label. The level of user engagement is self-determined by your interest in the content and your motivation to reflect on it, either singly or with your companions. A successful level 1 experience features content that is meaningful and interesting to viewers.

 

Level 2: Individual Interaction with Content (Museum with Me)

Most interactive content in museums falls into this category. The exhibit provides a opportunity for the user to play with the content. You press the button. You drop the balloon. The content may be responsive to you, but the interactive experience is non-networked; that is, your interactions with the content are not affected by, nor do they affect, other people’s interactions with the content. Again, the level of social engagement is self-determined. A successful level 2 experience builds on killer content (level 1), not interaction for its own sake. The interaction provided enhances the visitor’s engagement with the content.

 

Level 3: Individual, Networked, Interaction with Content (Me & Me & Me & Museum)

These are experiences in which your individual interaction with the content is networked so that each individual’s interaction is available, in a limited capacity, to the entire group of users. Voting, whether for American Idol, national elections, or museum kiosk surveys, falls in this category. Your action is not influenced nor influences others, but you are aware of how others have acted in the same context. This is where many museum programs lie that allow user-generated content. You can register your own opinion about X at the video kiosk, and others can view your video. A successful level 3 experience makes you feel connected to others who have used the same content; visitors start to wonder why others voted/expressed themselves as they did.

 

Level 4: Individual, Networked, Social Interaction with Content (Me to We with Museum)

This is the level where web 2.0 sits. Individuals still do their interacting with the content singly, but their interactions are available for comment and connection by other users. And the architecture promotes these connections automatically. For example, on Netflix, when you rate a movie highly, you don’t just see how others have rated it; Netflix recommends other movies to you based on what like-minded viewers also rated highly. By networking the ratings, tags, or comments individuals place on content, individuals are linked to each other and form relationships around the content. A successful level 4 experience uses social interaction to enhance the individual experience; it gets better the more people use it. The social component is a natural extension of the individual actions.

 

Level 5: Collective Social Interaction with Content (We in Museum)

This is the holy grail of social discourse, where people interact directly with each other around content. I have come to see this level as an outcome rather than a design strategy, something that is attained in fleeting moments in institutions with well-designed level 4 experiences.  Personal discussions, healthy web bulletin boards and co-created exhibitions fall in this category. Healthy level 5 experiences promote respect among users, encourage community development, and support interaction beyond the scope of the content.

 

Many of the examples of level four experiences available are online.  It's easy to look at a service like Flickr, which connects people socially through photographs, and say, "that's digital.  Museums can't do that."  But one of my favorite examples of a successful participatory experience which incorporates all me-to-we design levels is physical.  It's based on a frequently-disliked, voluntary activity that takes place all over the world.  No, I'm not talking about visiting museums.  I'm talking about Nike Plus.  Nike+ is a combined iPod and shoe sensor product that allows users to track every step of their runs. This means you receive real-time audio data while running about your progress (updates each mile), and later, can review your run stats online. You can create goals for yourself (against which your progress is automatically tracked) and challenge others (anonymous or known) to run at your pace, complete a number of miles, etc. You can also create song lists for runs that give you a "power-up" when you most need it based on your run thus far.

 

Nike+ provides a brilliant trifecta of sticky experiences, combining tracking, game mechanics, and me-to-we design to support a product, an activity, a community, and ultimately, healthy lifestyles. Let's take a closer look at how this all comes together.

 

First, Nike+ offers tracking. This is the most obvious feature of the product, and one that offers value on its own. As with the mileage displays inside hybrid vehicles, Nike+ users report that the experience of being tracked actually improves their performance. It's no coincidence that Nike+ provides both real-time and post-run statistics--you need both to adjust behavior real-time, and to motivate future improvement.

 

Second, Nike+ gives you a game. You get rewarded for running. As one enthusiast put it:

"The second best part about the Nike+ running — the cool, video-game like part — is that you not only run, but you also get points for running. Your score ever-increases. Better still, if you set goals for yourself, you even get awesome virtual trophies and ribbons, resplendent in their vector beauty. Just like Pac-Man got to eat the occasional delicious (albeit high-sodium) pretzel treat in-between hundreds of dots, the Nike+ runner gets the occasional trophy treat in between the miles. As I understand it, a lot of people run for so-called "exercise", but let me tell you: points are way cooler."

 

These first two mechanics, tracking and gaming, make for an intoxicating individual experience. However, these two are most valuable while you are actually using the Nike+. When you stop running or looking at your stats on the web, the memories of trophies and goals slip away. Why run? It's not even a human encouraging you--just a stupid machine.

 

And this is where the third mechanic, the me-to-we design, comes in. Consider how the Nike+ performs via the hierarchy of participation. 

 

On the first level, we're talking shoes and iPod only. You get music, you get covering for your feet. Nice provisions.

 

On level two, you get the sensor, the tracking, the points. Now, you can interact with the content, set the individual goals, see your progress, etc. This is where tracking and points take you.

 

On level three, you can see the goals and runs set by other people, and use that for inspiration, but you can't do anything meaningful with it.

 

On level four, you can join in collective challenges. Here's where the power of "we" comes in. Now, you aren't just thinking about your running goals while running or checking out your own stats. Now, you have external goals for which you have to answer to others. You've got to leave work so you can run and meet the challenge. Right. Now. Here's how that same enthusiastic blogger put it:

"And the coolest part about Nike+ running? Like any good online game, you can challenge your friends. First to 100 miles? Fastest 5-mile time? Your call. These challenges wind up being incredibly inspiring — running against good friend and athletic powerhouse J. John Afryl kept me on my toes (maybe a bit too much as you'll read later) — and they're also incredibly fun. Logging in after a long run, uploading your data, and seeing where you are in the standings, is a pretty awesome way to wrap up your exercise. And more importantly, sitting around the house, wondering what to do, thinking about jogging, and then realizing that if you don't go jogging tonight you're going to lose points and slip in the standings — now that's true, videogame motivation."

In this way, the architecture of participation is the most powerful of these three mechanics, encouraging customers to think about the Nike+ product even when they are not using it. The gaming and tracking make it fun and addicting, but the architecture of participation makes it pervasive.

 

And what about level five? One of Nike's core goals--and a major component of their web presence--is to encourage people to run together.  They sponsor races and running groups all over the world.  But Nike understands that these mass social events are only as successful as the motivation of the people participating--and thus they move people "up the participation ladder" with Mike+.  There are many Nike+-based forums and opportunities for meeting up with real people in your real neighborhood to go running.  The social experience of Nike+ is so powerful that people are even clamoring for virtual ways to "run together."  Users have argued that running is often a social activity, and that they want to have that same social experience via Nike+. It's not crazy to imagine a future cellphone bluetooth Nike+ that allows you to talk real-time to a running partner half a world away as you both navigate the streets. Without the pyramid of me-to-we supporting it, no one would want such a feature. But now, through the networked challenges, Nike+ users are starting to know, appreciate, and want more ways to interact with each other.

 

Think about what a strange feat Nike has pulled off with this product. It has taken a non-screen-based, often anti-social, occasionally loathed or feared activity--running--and turned it into a social game. It has transformed the motivation to run from exercise to winning. Nike+ took an uncontrolled venue--the streets and trails used by runners all over the world--and created a compelling experience around it. In museums, we're often challenged by the question of how to track and provide a networked social experience without bringing more computers and screens into the galleries. We need to think more like Nike+, more modular, more visitor-centered, with devices that are simpler than handhelds.

 

Yes, the iPod nano (required for Nike+ use) is functionally a handheld, but it is smaller and more versatile than the devices many museums use for personalized experiences. And you don't have to give it back at the end of the run/tour. I think the most powerful lesson to learn from Nike+ is NOT how the tracking and gaming improve the running experience. It's the way that networked social activities encourage people to stay engaged long after and before they run.  Nike+ transforms running into a pervasive, fun, socially-driven experience. And if Nike can do it for something as feared and despised as running often is, surely we can do it for museums.

 

 

In the following chapters, we will dive deeply into each of the levels of participation and explore how museum-going, like running, can evolve into a more exciting, dynamic, social experience.  The second chapter focuses on designing personalized entrypoints to museum experiences (levels 1 and 2).  The third chapter focuses on network effects and the social experiences made possible via networked content (levels 3 and 4).  The fourth chapter digs more deeply into social objects and how museum objects and experiences can serve in this function (level 4).  And the fifth chapter takes a closer look at a variety of specific visitor contribution and participation techniques that contribute to an overall social experience (level 5).  

 

Continue to Chapter 2: Participation Begins with Me (FULL)