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Chapter 5, Part 1: Participatory Models

Page history last edited by Nina Simon 14 years, 6 months ago

THIS IS A SECTION OF Chapter 5: Contribution, Collaboration, and Co-Design.  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO EDIT THIS PAGE WITH YOUR COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS.

 

The previous three chapters focused on setting up frameworks that allow museum experiences to be networked, social experiences.  This chapter shifts to visitors and the ways that they can engage in museums as active participants.  So far, we've seen how personalizing the experience, networking individual visitors' actions, and designing objects as locuses of conversation can connect visitors to museums and to each other in a social way.  But those are all institutional actions and designed experiences.  What about the objects, ideas, and creative work that visitors contribute to the museum experience?  How are their interests and abilities supported and valued?  How do we design entrypoints for them to act not as networked consumers but as partners and participants?

 

The first problem here is to simply define the ways that visitors can become active participants in the museum experience. A participant who writes her reaction to an exhibit on an index card is very different from one who donates her own personal effects to be part of an exhibit, and both of these visitors are different from one who helps develop a new museum program from scratch.  I separate the different kinds of visitor participation into four broad (and occasionally overlapping) categories: contribution, collaboration, co-creation, and co-option.  In the contributory model, visitors are solicited to provide limited and specified objects, actions, or ideas to an institutionally-controlled process.  In the collaborative model, visitors are invited to serve as active partners in the creation of a museum project which is originated and ultimately controlled by the institution.  In the co-creation model, visitors and the institution work together from the beginning to define the project's goals and to generate the program or exhibit based on community interests.  And in the co-option model, the institution turns over a portion of its facilities and resources to support programs developed and implemented by external public groups. 

 

These terms come partially from the world of citizen science, where the scientific process provides a framework for clear delineations among different roles and actions.  Rick Bonney of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been working for years on expanding the roles of public citizens in scientific research, and  The scientific process has several steps.  Scientists state a problem, make a hypothesis, develop a test regimen to test the hypothesis, gather data, analyze the results, and make conclusions, which may include stating new problems or hypotheses.  In citizen science projects, the public is invited to participate in "real science" by working with scientists on projects that benefit from mass participation around the world.  But most citizen science projects only invite the public to engage in limited components of the overall scientific process.  Most citizen science projects are contributory; participants collect data based on specifications determined by scientists, to help answer questions posed by scientists.  The scientists control the process, steer the data collection, and analyze the results.  Unsurprisingly, studies have shown that these kinds of citizen science projects are enormously successful at engaging the public with science but are not successful at exposing participants to the entire scientific process. 

 

For this reason, some citizen science projects are now moving towards collaborative and co-creative models.  As in the contributory model, In the collaborative model of citizen science, the scientists still determine the research question and the overall data collection and analysis methodology. However, the public is actively involved in multiple steps of the research process, including collecting data, analyzing results, and drawing conclusions.  The scientists and the public participants become partners in the implementation and dissemination of the scientific research, though the research is still led by the scientists.

 

In the co-creative model for citizen science, the public comes up with a question or issue and then works with scientists to answer the question and suggest solutions.  These projects include equal partnership between scientists and participants in all stages of the scientific process, including developing new research questions and regimens for data collection and analysis.  In many cases, these projects are initiated based on some community concern, such as issues around local sources of pollution, invasive species, or unsafe consumer products.  The community-stated need drives the development, implementation, and dissemination of research activities.

 

I've added a fourth model to this citizen science typology, one may be more appropriate to facilities like museums than to scientific organizations: co-option.  In this model, the public uses institutional facilities or resources to develop and manage projects of their own devising.  In some cases, the use of institutional content or facilities is known to the instituion; for example, when a museum allows a community group to hold meetings on the premises or develop their own exhibits.  But in other cases, people may use institutional resources without the institution's knowledge.  For example, programmers may use museum collection database information as the basis for their own software, or game enthusiasts may use the grounds of an institution as a giant playing board for imaginative play.  Visitors co-opt institutional facilities every day for their own agendas, whether to impress a date, bond with family, or work on their photography skills.  In the context of this chapter, I'm limiting my discussion of co-option to situations in which the institution and the visitor or public group enter an explicit relationship in which the museum makes content, facilities, or resources available for the outside group's use.

 

Contribution, collaboration, co-creation, and co-option.  None of these models is better than the others; they cannot even be seen as progressive towards a model of "maximal participation."  Consider, for example, the difference between a project in which a museum sources exhibit material from visitors (contributory) and one in which the museum works with a small group of outsiders to develop an exhibit (collaborative).  If the first project results in an exhibit made entirely of visitors' creations and voices, and the second results in an exhibit that looks more like a "typical" exhibit, which project is more participatory?  What's more participatory, making art or doing research?  Developing exhibits or using them to make new media products?  There is no "best" level of participation for museums and cultural institutions overall.  Instead, I'm interested in the question of how to understand the diversity of options and determine which models and levels of engagement will be most valuable for different projects, at different institutions, at different times.

 

The differences among participatory project types are highly correlated with with the amount of ownership and control of process and creative output given to institutions and visitors, and not every project benefits from the same power structure.  Some of the best participatory projects severely constrain the ways visitors can contribute, and others successfully integrate visitors in all aspects of planning and implementation.  You can have disasters on either side of the spectrum.  Some contributory projects provide too few engaging experiences to attract any participation, and some co-created projects go way, way beyond what institutions desire or value in the outcomes they produce.  In many of the examples we'll explore here, the participatory structure is set up so that visitors can participate with or on behalf of the instituion, but it is equally important to consider participatory models in which visitors are contributing, collaboration, and co-creating for themselves and for each other.  It's also essential to bear in mind the impact of participatory models on non-participating visitors who consume the results of the participation.  We often get overly focused on the experience of the participating visitors, but these people often represent a tiny minority of the people whom participatory projects impact.  If you work with a community group to co-create an exhibit, that exhibit will be experienced by all of your visitors, not just those who were part of the co-design process.  It is not enough to design robust structures to support participants; you must also ensure that the outcome of participation is enjoyable and useful for your greater community as well.

 

Institution, Participants, Audience

 

In this chapter, we'll look at each of the participatory models outlined above from three perspectives.  First, we'll look at institutional goals, considering how the participatory model might benefit the institution and defining situations in which it would be of value.  Second, we'll look at participants' goals, and ways to structure the experience for participants so that roles are clear, activities are attractive, and participants successfully accomplish both personal and institutional goals.  And finally, we'll look at how participatory outcomes can be displayed and shared in ways that are valuable and interesting to the broader museum audience, including both visitors and external stakeholders.  The design process always starts with two simple questions: what will visitors and the institution gain from this participatory activity?  How will the contributions be useful and valuable to both of these constituencies, and what other constituencies or communities might benefit from it? 

 

Some elements of these perspectives are common across all participatory models.  On the institutional side, the key is to identify an activity or resource that is most usefully provided by someone external to the institution.  For example, if you want to "crowdsource" a problem related to the visitor experience and get a wide variety of recommendations and opinions, a contributory model would allow you to receive diverse ideas from your audience.  Or, if you are trying to produce an exhibit that reflects the authentic experience of a local group, a collaborative model would allow you to work closely with members of the constituent group to collect and display their objects and experiences.  You should be able to define the specific way that the participatory project has value for your institution, and be ready to clearly draw a line between that value and your institution's mission statement and bottom line.  It may be valuable for one museum to receive lots of snail shells collected from visitors, whereas another institution may find value is providing a forum where visitors share their opinions on a difficult topic with each other. These values may be as diverse as the goals of the institution overall: to attract new audiences, to collect and preserve unique content, to provide educational experiences for visitors, to produce appealing marketing campaigns, to display locally-relevant exhibitions, to become a townsquare for conversation... the list of potential values of participation is endless. 

 

And yet unfortunately, many museum staff settle for an unambitious value of participation that is not compelling to institutional directors and stakeholders: visitors will like it.  This is not a robust value, and it turns participatory projects into trivialities instead of opportunities to satisfy core institutional goals.  I certainly hope visitors will enjoy participating with your institution, but if you focus solely on participation as a "fun activity," you will do a disservice both to yourself as a professional and to visitors as participants.  Yes, it is fun to help paint a mural or construct a giant model of a molecule.  But these activities also promote particular learning skills, create outcomes that are usable by others, and so on, and the more you think about which of these other mission-relevant goals you want to support, the more likely you are to design a project that satisfies more than visitors' desire to be entertained.  As Geoff Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University, commented: "To be most satisfying,  leisure should resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills and important relationships."  Participatory projects can accommodate these interests and are often better suited to providing visitors with meaningful interpersonal work than typical museum experiences.  

 

Of course, some participatory activities, like designing shoes or making stop-motion videos, are rewarding on their own, and visitors may not care what the institution does with the outcomes.  But even these activities are most successful when the institution makes a designed effort to display or share visitors' creations, which helps visitors understand their actions contextualized to the overall institution.  The extent to which museums care for and respect visitors' creations is a reflection of the extent to which museums care for visitors themselves.  While the desire to provide participatory experiences generally is admirable and understandable, it can lead to problematic situations in which visitors perceive that staff are pandering to them or wasting their time with trivialities.  Even if the effort is minor, participatory activities should never be a "dumping ground" for interactivity or visitor dialogue.  And in cases where visitors are actually asked to "do work," that work should be useful to someone.  It's fine to design participatory projects in which visitors produce work that could more quickly or accurately be completed by internal staff (see the Children of the Lodz Ghetto story in the section on collaboration); however, the work should still be of value to the institution ultimately.  If the museum doesn't care about the outcomes of visitors' participation, why should visitors participate? 

 

For potential participants, the key motivator for participation is not perceived value of the activity or outcome but clarity of roles.  Unlike institutions, which have explicit and narrow mission-related goals that presumably dictate what activities are valuable to pursue, individuals have a wide range of personal goals and interests that dictate behavior.  In the chapter on personalization, we talked about John Falk's research into visitors and identity-fulfillment, and the concept that visitors select and enjoy experiences based on their perceived ability to reflect and enhance particular self-concepts. For one visitor, the opportunity to enroll her daughter in summer camp confirms her identity as a good parent and facilitator of others' experiences.  For another, the opportunity to share his own opinions or contribute a piece of an exhibit confirms his identity as a creative agent and community member.  When designing opportunities for visitors to participate, especially when these opportunities are foreign to the standard museum experinece, it is essential for staff to clearly define the participatory roles and opportunities so that visitors can evaluate whether those activities are compelling and in-line with their own identity goals.  Many studies have shown that visitors are already confused about what their roles are in museums and that confusion increases anytime the museum offers an opportunity that is aberrant, or even directly contradictory, to typical museum behavior.  While this may describe the plight of particularly uninformed museum visitors, clear role definition may be even more important for savvy participants.  Visitors who are familiar with creating and sharing content in other venues (especially the Web) are highly attuned to issues of privacy and intellectual property.  What happens to the video I record in your gallery?  Who owns the idea I share with the museum?  Being clear, specific, and honest about participants' roles in participatory projects helps visitors of all kinds know what to expect and evaluate whether an opportunity is right for them.

 

Whether you are asking for a long commitment or a brief encounter, a contribution to research or exhibit development or marketing, clarity and honesty are the key to supporting positive engagement by participants.  In some cases, especially when working with the more flexible participatory models like collaboration and co-creation, roles and activities change over time, and both participants and staff members can break promises, let each other down, and get frustrated.  I've worked in several "fast and loose" collaborations with visitors which are sustained almost exclusively by relationships built on open communication.  As long as visitors feel that they understand what they are being asked to do and can trust that you will use their work respectfully and appropriately, they will engage wholeheartedly.  You can change your mind, make mistakes, and evolve with each other if you are clear and honest every step of the way.  And the more you can express to participants--in actions as well as words--how their work helps the institution or other visitors, the more they will see themselves as partners and co-owners of the museum experience.

 

In the book Here Comes Everybody, technologist Clay Shirky argues that there are three required components for a participatory mechanism to be successful: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the [participants]."  These components define the relationship between institution and participants.  The institution must offer an experience that is perceived as valuable and appealing.  It must be easy and clear how to participate successfully.  And the rules governing participation must be reasonable to participants.  Even if your promise, tools, or bargains have to change over the course of a project, you should always be able to articulate what you are offering and expecting clearly and openly.     

 

But participatory projects are not solely for institutions and participants.  There is another populus constituency, the audience of non-participating visitors.  How will your participatory project produce outcomes for the rest of the museum community that are valuable and interesting?  I'm most interested in participatory environments that are continually open and evolving, so that any visitor could electively become a participant and the outcome and process are intertwined, but very few projects are designed this way.  It is much simpler to say, "you can submit your idea until the end of the year" or "we will work with twenty teenagers from a local high school to develop this project," and for many institutions, constraining the scope of participation is the appropriate way to go.  If only a few people participate, then their experience, no matter how superlative, must be weighed against the experience that others will have with the outcome of their work.  A mural on the wall isn't just for those who painted it; it must bring pleasure to others as an art object as well.  Likewise, the exhibits, research, marketing materials, programs, and experiences produced in collaboration with visitors must be compelling outcomes in their own right.  That is not to say they can't be different from standard museum-created programs; ideally, projects developed using participatory models will have unique value that cannot be achieved by traditional processes.

 

There is no single concept like "mission-relevant value" or "clear roles for participation" that defines what makes a successful participatory project in the eyes of the audience.  This is true for two reasons.  First, audience goals, unlike institutional goals, are diverse and broad.  What's valuable to one visitor is a waste of time for another, and no process is going to change the reality that different museum experiences appeal to different visitors.  But secondly, from the institutional perspective, goals with regard to audiences for participatory projects are also wide-ranging.  In projects in which visitors' contributions are targeted to a very specific and narrow outcome, for example, a research project or exhibition development, the participatory element may be hidden from view of the final intended audience.  In situations in which participation is open to all visitors, such as via talkback boards in exhibitions, the institution may desire for the participatory element to spark conversation or to model active behavior that might encourage reluctant visitors to add their own opinion to the wall.  When we design visitor experiences via traditional techniques, there is little opportunity for visitors to peek behind the curtain or to add their own mark to the content on display.  Participatory projects open up that potential, and so institutional goals may shift from focusing on delivering content experiences to modeling and inciting visitor action in new ways.

 

Whatever your goal with regard to ultimate audience, it is essential to keep these folks in mind throughout your participatory process.  If your goal is to encourage all visitors to see themselves as participants, you will have to design in mechanisms by which participation (even by a small percentage of visitors) is celebrated, encouraged, modeled, and valued in the eyes of the audience.  If your goal is to create a high-quality product that is acceptable to an audience accustomed to a certain level of rigor, design, and content, you have to make sure your process delivers that output.  One of the most interesting things about citizen science programs is the fact that the ultimate audience for user-supplied data is professional scientists, a constituency that demands an incredibly high level of confidence and rigor in the content they will use and consume.  The awareness of this demanding audience forces the people who direct citizen science projects to ensure that their participatory processes will accommodate those end-user needs.  While your average museum visitor may be less demanding than a university biologist, her needs are no less important to bear in mind as you design and implement projects whose results she will consume.

Comments (4)

Georgina Goodlander said

at 7:30 am on Oct 2, 2009

This is fascinating. We've been exploring a small scale 'citizen curator' project and have met with mixed success. First, we started the project on-line by posting a photo of a "gap" in an exhibit and asking the public to use our on-line collection to select an artwork to fill the gap. We gave them the dimensions of the gap and details of the artworks around it. We did not provide them with any more help than this, although a staff member monitored the page to answer questions if needed. I really wanted it to be a real project (i.e. not just a cool project that we did for the sake of being cool), a project that truly benefited museum staff without creating the need for extra work. We had small participation on-line and did successfully fill 5 gaps. The conversations were interesting and I think the contributors really enjoyed the chance to have a say in what artwork was hung, and to be credited in the label text.

After your "Going Analog" presentation at MW, I thought we would have a go at taking the project off line and into the physical museum. I thought we might benefit from the fact that the Luce staff could encourage visitors to participate, and that visitors to the space "get" the concept of visible storage in a way that on-line visitors seem to be unable to. To do this, however, 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."

Georgina Goodlander said

at 7:30 am on Oct 2, 2009

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.I guess what I'm trying to say with all of this rambling, is that it's difficult to implement a "real" contribution project and have it still be engaging to more than just a handful of people. Real museum projects are generally not easy and take quite a bit of effort and time. Most visitors (on-line and on site) want to participate and they definitely appreciate the opportunity to contribute something, but they prefer it when it has been tailored for them and is fun and easy.

I guess what I'm trying to say with all of this rambling, is that it's difficult to implement a "real" contribution project and have it still be engaging to more than just a handful of people. Real museum projects are generally not easy and take quite a bit of effort and time. Most visitors (on-line and on site) want to participate and they definitely appreciate the opportunity to contribute something, but they prefer it when it has been tailored for them and is fun and easy.

I'm going to start thinking about how we might modify the next phase of the project to fit in with your other three categories though...

Georgina Goodlander said

at 7:37 am on Oct 2, 2009

Ooo, another thing to note is that both versions of the project also revealed some of the problems within our institution. It was clear to all that participated in or followed the project that it took a ridiculously long time to approve/ship/install the object once it had been selected. If this project had been done on a larger scale (i.e. not just in Luce), this may have resulted in criticism, as people expect/demand immediate feedback to their contribution. Institutions often carefully guard their behind-the-scenes processes, so may need to think about that when considering whether to make the visitor a part of them...

Nina Simon said

at 2:23 pm on Oct 2, 2009

Georgina,
Thanks for the great comments. Good point about Fill the Gap and you are right - I hope this comes through in the Lodz data example (collaborative, next section) where the Holocaust Museum could have collected the data much more easily, accurately, and quickly on their own.

Can you explain more about how "Fill the Gap" revealed challenges? I'm working on the final chapter about managing participatory projects and matching them to institutional capacity and it would be helpful to have that information.

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