| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Chapter 5, Part 2: Contributory Projects

Page history last edited by Georgina Goodlander 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.

 

Contributory Models for Participation

 

Many of the examples shared in this book thus far are contributory models for participation.  This model is frequently employed and is a "big tent" for lots of different types of participatory visitor experiences.  Visitors are invited to contribute their opinions, suggestions, and personal stories on talkback boards.  They share their wedding china, scientific toys, and photographs inexhibits, both while the exhibits are developed and after the exhibits are mounted.  They contribute data in polling stations and experimental interactive exhibits.  They create art objects, perform science experiments, and do historical research both at home and in the museum to share with other visitors on the floor. They share their text, photo, and video reflections on visits on the Web.  In some cases, the public contributes ideas and objects that are used privately to inform internal institutional processes that are typically preliminary to and hidden from public consumption.  In other cases, visitors may offer their ideas and creations in forums that allow other visitors to access and benefit from them.  While in previous chapters, we've looked at various items visitors can contribute, this section looks specifically at these different types of contributory structures and how to successfully select and design the appropriate model for your needs.

 

As is evident from the diversity of these examples, not all contributory projects are identical in the ways that they support visitor-driven content.  There's a big difference between an exhibit that allows visitors to indicate their preference in a quick poll and an exhibit which is entirely built from visitors' creations.  I struggle somewhat with this categorization, because it means that exhibits sourced entirely from visitors (such as those produced by the Denver Community Museum) fall into the contributory model, even though they appear to be co-created (or, effectively, visitor-created) to audience.   When planning contributory projects, staff need to think both about what (and how) you will solicit from visitors, and what you will do with their creations.  Your strategy with regard to the solicitation primarily affects participants, and your strategy with regard to the display affects audience members.  Of course, because contributory projects are often made open to any and all visitors, participants and audience are often one and the same--thus making these strategies intertwined.

 

What's special about contributory models for participation?  These projects are often the simplest for institutions to manage and for visitors to engage in as participants.  Unlike more intensive models, which often accommodate only a small number of deeply committed and pre-selected participants, contributory activities can be easily offered to visitors of all types without a lot of setup or vetting.  The contributory model is powerful when it invites visitors to engage as activities that are easy to understand, require low time commitment, and are accessible to visitors without prior knowledge or skills. Anyone can write on a talkback wall or make a claymation video in the course of a visit.  Contributory projects can function with minimal staff support; many are self-explanatory and self-maintaining.  When they are used to support project development, contributory projects can allow staff to narrowly focus the scope of visitors' participation to give staff exactly what they need (and no more). Contributory projects are also, in many cases, the only type of participatory experience in which visitors can seamlessly move from functioning as participants to audience and back again.  You can write your comment, post it on the wall, and immediately experience the excitement of seeing how you have contributed to the institution.

 

But contribution isn't just for quick and simple activities.  Contributory projects can also be ones that offer visitors the most creative agency, to write their own stories, make their own art, and share their own thoughts.  In the most radical contributory projects, such as the Denver Community Museum, the institution provides only the infrastructure--the rules of engagement, the solicitation for contributions--and then presents what is offered by visitors.  Contributory models are rigid structures that can be designed in thousands of ways, and it is that diversity (not flexibility!) that makes them very useful in participatory design.

 

There are three major factors that contribute to the success or failure of contributory projects: the sincerity and clarity of the ask, the appeal of the participant action, and the attractiveness of the final display.  These factors roughly correspond to the needs of institution, participant, and audience.  For contributory projects to be valuable to institutions, the institution must sincerely and genuinely desire or require the contributions sought.  For these projects to appeal to participants, the contributory action must be clear and compelling.  And for other visitors and audience members to enjoy contributory projects, the submissions must be harnessed or designed into a display that is interesting and of high quality.  This display often is used to model the act of contribution for subsequent visitors, forming a virtuous cycle in which positive contribution informs and inspires further participation.  Let's look at one example of one successful project that exhibits all of these factors superlatively: the World Beach Project.

 

Spotlight: The World Beach Project

 

The World Beach Project is managed by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with artist-in-residence Sue Lawty. It launched in October of 2007 with a very simple and understandable idea: to produce a global map of pieces of art made with stones on beaches. The World Beach Project does not exist in the V&A Museum. It doesn't involve visitors coming to the museum at all. It's a project that requires people to do four things that are both simple and complex: go to the beach (anywhere in the world), make a piece of art using stones, photograph it, and then send the photos to the museum via the Web.

 

The World Beach Project is one of very few online museum projects that has truly "gone viral," enjoying press attention and growing participation from people all over the world. In the first two years of its existence (Oct 2007 - Sept 2009), the World Beach Project received more than 700 contributions, including submissions from every continent except Antarctica, and submissions continue to come in each day. Run a quick search, and you'll find references to the project in over 1,400 blog posts, mostly from individuals around the world who love art, or beaches, and who share their discovery and delight in the project with their small networks of friends.

 

What makes the World Beach Project so successful? It's not marketing hype. The project has not had any heavy marketing campaigns or contests associated with it. The artist, Sue Lawty, maintains a blog with her reflections on the project and occasionally celebrates particular contributions, but this blog is fairly contained within the project website and is not a major source of web links. The beach artworks are not on display in the physical V&A galleries, nor will their creators receive prizes. Visitors to the website can't even comment on the photos or mark them as favorites. These are not shareable objects beyond the beachcombers who tread the same shores and the people who light upon this part of the V&A's website. The act of making art, and the recognition on a simple website, are the only rewards.

 

And yet this reward, mixed with an intelligent project design, are enough to make this project attractive to people all over the world. The ask is clear, the activity is compelling, and the display of contributions is simple and inspires greater participation. Let's look at how each of these aspects--the ask, the activity, and the display--contribute to the overall success of the project.

 

The ask is clear...

 

The World Beach Project doesn't have a flashy website or fancy animations. It features three parts: very clear instructions on how to participate, a map of all of the contributions to date, and photos of the contributions. The simple statement "I want to add my beach project to the map" is always accessible and obvious in the upper corner of the map, allowing inspired consumers to quickly transition into participants.

 

While contribution may take many steps, the website instructions are written to make contribution as simple and painless as possible, using phrases like "it is really easy to join in" to convey in everyday language welcome and support for would-be participants. The World Beach Project also uses the classic format of encouraging visitors to the site to browse the content before participating, which encourages people to view model content and further understand how they might be able to contribute. Beach art is democratic, and while Lawty, a professional artist, modeled the activity by making beach sculptures of her own, the artistic endeavor required to be successful is attainable by anyone, and participants didn't need encouragements or instructions to know how to make beach sculptures.

 

Each contributor is required to submit her name, the location of the beach, the year of the creation, a photo of the finished artwork, and a brief statement about how the work was made. Contributors can also optionally upload two additional photos: one of the beach and one of the work in process. The process is well-designed to remind participants what will be asked of them and how to meet the criteria, and the V&A provides participants with legal terms and conditions explaining that you are granting the museum a non-exclusive license to your contributed content. While the terms are written in legalese and may not be understandable to all participants, I appreciate the V&A's placement of the terms out in the open (rather than asking you to agree to something you have not read). Many museums do not provide participants with clear terms surrounding their submissions, and for savvy people (especially artists!) such statements are a must not only from a legal standpoint, but to promote mutual trust and understanding between participants and institutions.

 

The activity is compelling...

 

Contributing to the World Beach Project is not easy, and yet, the Victoria and Albert Museum has received many more submissions than other museums receive for much simpler photo- or video-based online contributory projects. I have browsed hundreds of contributions that are beautiful, thoughtful, and on-topic. What makes the World Beach Project so successful? This is a project in which participants immediately and self-evidently perceive the personal benefits of participation. You aren't trying to win anything; you're just going to make a piece of art on a beach and share it with others. Sue Lawty, the artist who initiated the project, is a textile artist, and she wrote about the World Beach Project being "a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch." Through her own personal take on the project, Lawty encouraged participants to think of themselves as part of something greater--part of a community of artists and a geologically-connected ecosystem.

 

In their personal statements, beach artists wrote about profound connections to nature. They celebrated structures that disappeared after ten minutes but were "worth it." People shared stories of coming back to visit their creations again and again, seeing how the ocean and other people had altered their designs. The World Beach Project is, in its own small way, important. It isn't about collecting photos for a marketing campaign, or making a quick-e-card to send home. It's about making art, connecting to the earth, and being part of something greater.

 

By asking people to do something that is complicated, Lawty and the V&A express their respect for participants' competence and artistic ability. Yes, many contributory projects succeed by asking people to do something quick and easy - to register an opinion or share a small personal expression. But these are only as successful as the ask is genuine. Visitors, like all people, want the opportunity to show the world (and themselves) that they are interesting, capable, and worthy. Too often, we look at dismal rates of participation in basic contributory projects and assume, "this is too complicated for visitors." But in many cases, visitors may simply choose not to submit a photo for a contest or a thought into a comment box because the request seems insincere, demeaning, or silly. No one likes to have their time wasted.

 

In her research on happiness and gaming, Jane McGonigal has stated that people need four things to be happy: satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be part of something bigger. The World Beach Project accommodates all of these goals for participants. In other words, it's a contributory project that is optimized to make participants happy. And that sets it apart.

 

The display is easy to navigate and inspires further participation...

 

As noted above, the display of the beach artwork is blended well with the ask, so visitors can easily transition from spectator to participant. That said, the World Beach folks recognize that this is a fairly hefty ask--not everyone can get to the beach--and I assume that many people come to the site, like myself, to enjoy the artwork without making their own contribution. The content does not live behind click after click; instead, you can access every submission from the world map. It is easy to move around and zoom in on the map and access contributions directly in the form of photos and text statements. These contributions don't send you to another page; instead, they pop up over the map, encouraging you to surf quickly from one to another. If you want to dig deeper into a particular submission, you can click to see other photos and longer statements from the artists on dedicated collections pages.

 

It is a bit strange that the World Beach Project is housed within the Collection subsection of the V&A website. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, it's a pain to have to find the project hidden beneath the textiles category of Collections (who would think to go there?). And the project might be more attractively displayed on its own site, outside the fairly staid templates of the V&A's overall site design. On the other hand, placing the project within Collections reinforces the idea that these beach artworks are accessioned into the museum's collection [I think this is really important. Participants are not necessarily "winning" anything, no, but the idea that their work will become a permanent part of a significant institution is certainly a reward! That's why many of the participants in Ghosts of a Chance spent a lot of time on their creations and didn't care that they would not get them back - they wanted their achievement to be on view at the Smithsonian, even if just for a day. That's the kind of thing they'll be telling their kids and grandkids. Do you think the World Beach Project would have had as much success if it were affiliated with a smaller institution? GBG], and that the project exists within a larger context of dialogue about what textile art is and can be . The World Beach Project is a gem hiding in a vast space populated by other objects and experiences. Maybe that's where all great museum experiences live.

 

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.  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 team 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.

 

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.  For example, 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 shot 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.

 

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 (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.

 

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 emphasizes 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.

 

Why Do People Contribute?  Participant Motivations

 

As noted in the profile of the World Beach Project, research shows that people feel happy when they have "satisfying work to do, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be part of something bigger."  Good contributory projects can accommodate all of these needs, and at a basic level, people participate in these projects because they make them feel fulfilled.  In particular, contributory projects give visitors satisfying work to do and invite them to join a community of practice.  In the context of a museum visit, these needs are rarely met.  Especially for adult visitors, museums rarely offer challenges that encourage participants to work hard and demonstrate their ability.  Whether creative, physical, or cognitive, contributory projects provide these challenges.  In contrast to the passive ways that many visitors experience museum exhibits, the opportunity to make your mark, share your voice, or contribute an object are distinctive and appealing.

 

Digging deeper, we see that different kinds of projects motivate people in different ways.  In the case of projects that are based solely and directly on visitors' contributions, would-be participants see the opportunity to make a significant impact.  Projects like the Denver Community Museum or the World Beach Project are clearly shaped and driven by the contributions provided, which makes participants feel a great deal of ownership over the whole experience.  People who contribute to these types of projects often experience a small jolt of fame, and they feel proud of their actions and want to share their experience with others. 

 

Not everyone wants this kind of fame; some people cringe in the spotlight.  But that doesn't mean they don't want to contribute.  Projects that have very simple activity requirements or strict constraints may be more appealing to people for whom community affinity is more appealing than individual fame.  As one observer of the Nanoscape sculptures at the Exploratorium commented that they liked the installation, "because anyone who comes could participate, and it makes people feel like they're a part of things."  No one contributor's individuality stood out in the final assemblage of balls and sticks, but the collective power of the group experience made it a powerful participatory output.

 

There are also people who put their voice out there not for fame or community spirit, but to express a deeply felt sentiment that they feel they need to contribute to the conversation at hand.  On many talkback boards, sprinkled throughout the fame-seeking "John was here!" comments, you can read the impassioned arguments of visitors who loved, hated, or just reacted strongly to exhibits on display.  These participants aren't trying to express themselves creatively or to excel at their contribution in a distinctive way; they are trying to join and shape the discussion, in dialogue with other visitors and the institution as a whole.  For example, the Pratt Museum's exhibition Darkened Waters, opened in 1989 in reaction to the Exxon Valdez oill spill, featured comment boards and books that quickly filled with debate and discussion among visitors.  Visitors often responded to each other's comments or addressed the museum directly, feeling that conversation, even asynchronous, was valuable and necessary. 

 

Note that while this typically happens in museums on comment boards, the same critical function could be provided to visitors as a partner to creative contributory projects.  For every visitor who wants to make their own stop-motion video, there may be three or four who would happily rate or comment on the videos made by others.  On the web, the desire to critique, to curate, and to comment is both more common and more valued that content creation.  Why is it more common?  There are more people who feel confident of their ability to critique than their ability to create.  Why is it more valued?  Because critique, when built into a well-designed platform, is what separates distinctive content from dribble.  When we hunt for books, movies, or restaurants online, we use ratings and reviews to guide our choices.  Similarly, platforms like YouTube use critique to organize the vastness of human expression.  While critical platforms are not always designed in line with museum values, good ones can help subsequent visitors consume more interesting content that is more likely to model quality participation.  And just as there are educational skills to be learned by those who create content, there are important new media skills learned by visitors who are invited to participate in critical or curatorial functions. 

 

Finally, going back to McGonigal's list of experiences that make people happy, there are those contributory projects that allow visitors to experiment with and improve at new skills.  Citizen science projects are often promoted to visitors in terms of "try your hand as a scientist," and while this language can be misleading, the motivation to try and do like the experts drives many people to participate in new and unfamiliar activities.  This feeling is often accentuated by projects in which visitors' contributions are on display alongside professionally produced or curated content.  If my label is on display next to the curator's label, I've gotten a chance to act like a curator.  If my portrait is on display alongside other artworks, I've been validated as an artist.  There's a fine line between pandering and genuinely supporting visitors as amateur contributors, and the best projects help visitors attain and use skills that make them feel intrinsically more successful and knowledgeable.

 

All of these are ways to positively appeal to contributory participants.  These folks have turn-offs as well which will keep them from contributing to your project.  As noted above, wasting visitors' time with stupid questions or activities is an obvious turn-off, but there are some more subtle designed elements that can reduce participation as well.  The most important of these is lack of clarity about roles and opportunities.  When it's not clear how a participant can be successful, they feel wary of the activity and may second-guess their ability to perform the requested action.  When the ask is too generic or broad, it can also raise barriers that make people unsure of what will constitute a "good" or proper contribution.  And if participants are unsure of where their contribution will be shared or used--especially if it involves personal data like contact information--they may steer clear of engagement.  If you are designing a contributory platform, don't get overly enamored with the ability to ask for more information or content from visitors.  Keep it as simple as you can, and respect the fact that not everyone wants to share their contact information with their exhibit comment.  Many museums marry together mailing list and visitor feedback forms.  While there are some people who are happy to give both, there are also people for whom an insistence on personal information is very off-putting.

 

Modeling Desired Participant Behavior

 

The easiest way to make participants' roles clear and appealing to would-be participants is through modeling.  When a visitor sees a handwritten comment on a talkback board, she understands that she too can put up her own comment.  She takes cues from the format of other comments--their length, whether they are signed or anonymous--and the models on display influence her behavior and the likeliness of her participation.  Good modeling is not as simple as displaying representative contributions.  The diversity, quality, and recency of the models, as well as the extent to which the platform appears "full" or "empty," significantly impacts whether and how newcomers participate.  Let's look at each of these briefly and how they impact the participant experience.

 

The greater the diversity of contributions, both in terms of participant demographics and contribution content, the more likely an approaching visitor will feel that the contributory platform is open to and inclusive of their experience.  One of the most unfortunate choices made by many museums with video talkback kiosks to to solely feature model content that is professionally produced using celebrities or content experts.  These models are meant to entice people in, and they may successfully attract people who want to watch videos of celebrities sharing their views.  But the level of production and the type of people displayed send a clear message to visitors that their opinions are inferior and are secondary to expert or celebrity perspectives.  If you want to encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to share their thoughts, you should deliberately reflect and celebrate contributions from a range of people, perhaps going so far as to mentally "slot in" a model contribution from a child, in another language, expressing different viewpoints, and so on.  One obvious exception is hate speech; while in some cases expressing highly contentious and provocative views may be deemed appropriate and may promote inclusion, in many situations museums will draw the line somewhere.  Going back to the essential role of clarity in contributory model design, make sure that your expectations and boundaries about appropriate content are clear and available to visitors.  Just as other constraints, such as size of post-its, types of materials, or length of video, will focus visitors' participation, so will clear statements about content that is and isn't considered appropriate. 

 

The higher the quality and topical focus of the model contributions, the more likely visitors are to "rise up" to the level of contributions on display.  This is a delicate balancing act.  As noted in the celebrity example, model content that is of a quality that is impossible for visitors to attain is not appropriate.  If celebrities or staff are included in the models, their contributions should be produced in the same way visitors' content is produced.  If visitors will write in crayon, staff should write in crayon.  This technique was very powerfully employed in the Denver Art Museum's Side Trip exhibition, which was highly participatory.  All of the instructional labels around contributory exhibit activities were written in marker on cardboard.  This design choice fit in with the overall aesthetic of the space, but it also made visitors feel that their content could be of a reasonable quality to blend attractively into the exhibit.  When done well, making design choices that bring everyone to the same production values can make for more appealingly integrated visitor content that enhances rather than distracts from the overall look and feel of the exhibition.  

 

Staff models can also bring the experience down to earth when they express their opinions and creativity in ways that regular visitors can connect with.  In the chapter on personalization, we looked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's inclusion of staff voices in a comment board about making choices to protect ocean inhabitants.  In that case, staff used the board to express how they would change their personal and family lives, conferring respect upon the tough decisions and changes the exhibit asked visitors to consider.  In some cases, staff intentionally descend below "typical visitor" behavior, modeling behavior at a novice level.  This technique has been championed by many radio producers, most famously Studs Terkel, who played up his clumsiness around recording equipment to make his interview subjects feel confident and comfortable in contrast.  One of the best examples of this kind of modeling is exhibited on the NPR show RadioLab, in which two hosts, Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, explore big science topics like "time" and "emergence" from a variety of scientific perspectives.  Commenting on their process at an event in 2008, Krulwich said,

 

"I think we both start also as virgins. We don't know really what we're talking about at the beginning--we find out along the way. And we make that very clear. So we never pretend to anybody that we're scholars cause we're not. And we do represent ourselves as novices, which is a good thing. It is a good thing in a couple of ways. First, it means we can say, 'what?!' honestly. And the second thing: 'can you explain that again?' honestly. And then the third thing is, it allows us to challenge these people as though we were ordinary, curious folks.

 

 

We have a show coming up right now about synthetic biology, where engineers are building life forms that are new to existence, new to the history of life. And they're doing it quite... aggressively. And we, we yell at them and we fight with them and we argue with them, and they give right back. But we're trying to model a kind of conversation with important people, powerful people, but particularly knowledgeable people, where we say--YOU can go up to a person with a lot of knowledge and ask him 'why?,' ask him 'how does he know that?' Tell him, 'stop!' Ask him why he keeps going. And get away with it. And that's important."

 

Effectively, Krulwich is saying that Radiolab isn't just a show where the hosts have conversations with scientists. It's a show where the hosts model a way for YOU to have conversations with scientists, a way for regular people to engage with experts rather than deferring to or ignoring them.

To do this kind of modeling, Robert and Jad actively portray themselves as novices. They make themselves look stupid so we don't have to feel that way. They articulate the basic questions and knee-jerk reactions in our own minds, carrying us deep into the content from a common starting place. By humbling themselves in this way, they create a powerful learning experience. Robert and Jad aren't content experts, but they are interpretative experts, skilled interviewers and producers. And those skills drove the cultivation of personae that are wonderfully accessible.

 

Accessibility of model content is important, but so is the showcasing of superlative visitor creations, which are exciting and attractive.  There may be some visitors who produce contributions that are breathtakingly superior to others' submissions, and modeling participation solely via these shining examples is not necessarily conducive to people feeling comfortable adding their own inferior creations.  But visitors are pretty savvy about this, and the energizing benefit of seeing other visitors' really amazing work may be more important than the fear that they can't perform comparably.  It's no shock for me to find out that other people are better at drawing than I am.  I already know that.  When I see a bunch of crappy drawings in a restaurant, I'm never motivated to pick up a placemat and some crayons and start coloring.  But when I see something really unusual, surprising, or appealing in way that clearly shows that someone spent a lot of effort on it, I'm more likely to be intrigued by the experience overall--whether I participate this time or not.  The key is not whether you can display the most amazing contributions ever.  The important thing is offering model content that conveys that participants genuinely care about their contributions and have made a serious effort to produce something that fits the requirements at hand.

 

Recency of model content matters because it reflects the values of the contributory platform and the extent to which the platform is well-tended by staff. Imagine an exhibit that invites visitors to whisper a secret into a phone and then listen to secrets left by other visitors.  If the secrets you hear are several months old, you may have less confidence that your own secret will soon be on display.  Recency of content is most important for contributions that target participants' desires to be famous and engage in active dialogue with others.  If you are inclined to participate because of a promise (explicit or implicit) that your contribution will be on display, you want immediate feedback that tells you when and where your content will be on display, and, if possible, you want it to be on display right away.  Similarly, if your goal is to contribute to collective dialogue, you don't want to drop your contribution into a queue for processing--you want to see it join the conversation immediately.  In platforms for which recency is used as a primary motivator for participation, model content is often entirely or primarily composed of the most recent content.  For example, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an exhibition called From Memory to Action that features a pledge station and display wall.  Visitors can sit at the stations and scrawl their promises of actions they will take "to meet the challenge of genocide" on special digital paper with pens. The paper is perforated with one section for the promise, which visitors keep, and another section for a signature, which visitors leave at the museum. Once signed, visitors drop the signed paper stubs into clear plexiglass cases that are beautifully lit. The paper "remembers" the location of pen marks on the pledge section, so visitors' handwritten promises are quickly and magically projected on a digital projection wall in front of the pledge kiosks. The digital projection wall displays a dynamic show of recent pledges as well as statistics on how many pledges have been made to date, and the plexi cases provide a powerful physical representation of all the names and promises that have been made. This case full of real people's handwritten signatures is reminscient of the haunting pile of Holocaust prisoners' shoes in the permanent exhibition, providing a hopeful complement to that devastating set of artifacts.  The combination of the physical accumulation of the paper stubs and the dynamic, personal digital projection reflects both the power of collective action and the importance of individual commitments.

 

This pledge wall example is a beautiful demonstration of the ways that aesthetic and functional design of contributory platforms can be mutually beneficial.  Why require visitors to hand-write their pledges rather than keying them in on a keyboard? It certainly would have been easier for the museum to digitize and project visitors' entries if they were typed in, and it wouldn't have wasted so much (expensive, digital) paper. But requiring visitors to sit and think and then hand write their response (to a very hard question!) forces them to slow down. Signing a pledge in your own handwriting ritualizes the experience. Adding your slip of paper to a physical, growing, highly visible archive makes you part of a larger community. I watched several visitors as they went through this process, which ends with your card being reproduced digitally, letter by letter, on the large projection wall in front of the kiosks. People were captivated by the slow animation of their pledges being added to the wall, and that slowness sealed a deliberate interaction.  By rewarding visitors with an immediate display of their own content, and effectively generating model content out of the real-time promises, the pledge wall captivated both participants and would-be participants.

 

One final design consideration--the extent to which the platform feels "full" or "empty"--is often overlooked by designers developing contributory platforms.  No one wants to act alone and be under the microscope, but participants also don't want to be ignored or lost in the crowd.  We all intuitively know the difference between a conversation that feels open to our opinion and one which is already too crowded with voices.  Platforms that have explicit "slots" for content on display, such as comment boards or video kiosks that display grids of videos, can often overwhelm and disincentivize continued participation if they don't clearly illustrate where the current participant's content will be integrated.  I experienced this first-hand in a small project using a tool called Voicethread that allows people to add their own audio comments to slides.  The audio comments are arranged in rows "around" the slides, and visitors to the website can click on any face to hear that person's comments.  Despite the fact that you can explore the content in discrete chunks, later visitors reported being overwhelmed by the high volume of content, and creation of new audio comments steeply dropped off after the first few.  People needed a couple of examples to get going, but once a slide had eight to ten comments associated with it, subsequent would-be commenters kept their mouths shut.

 

One easy way to ameliorate this problem is to give the current participant a clear "position of privilege" in the map of contributions to date.  In exhibits which invite visitors to add their own personal memories to post-it maps or timelines, this position of privilege is self-evident; the newest post-its layer on top of older ones, giving would-be participants confidence that their story will be read, at least for a while.  In digital environments, or ones in which staff are in control of the presentation of contributions and model content, it is useful to provide visitors with an obvious "pathway" or slot for their contribution, so they can see where their contribution will go visually and physically.  This is easy to do in schemes that prioritize recency, such as the US Holocaust Museum's pledge wall, because your promise immediately floats up in front of the digital display.  It is harder to do in systems that have a time delay between contribution and presentation.  Staff may want to include label text like, "Where does your opinion fit into the conversation?" or "Place your creation near others that you feel are connected" to help visitors feel that there is a place for their unique participation, no matter how crowded the field.  Finally, it's important for staff to tend the contributory platform, clearing space for new contributions, replenishing any needed materials, and ensuring a diversity of models on display, so that they activity always looks appealing to newcomers.  This sounds easy, but as we'll see in the next chapter, the challenges of managing participatory platforms over the long term can often lead to their demise. 

 

Curating Contributions

 

There are several contributory art projects that combine necessity with creativity, using a range of curatorial models to embue the contributory platforms with values that perpetuate high-quality submissions.  Postsecret is a well-known example; the project could not exist without the postcards, and yet Frank Warren curates the incoming postcards very tightly for public consumption.  The Postsecret project could easily devolve into a display of the most prurient, grotesque, and exaggerated fears and desires people share, and yet Frank's curatorial touch puts cards with  authentic, creative, diverse voices on display, thus encouraging people to keep their contributions honest and artistic.  There are other examples, like the Museum of Broken Relationships, which collects and displays objects and stories related to breakups, in which the invisible curatorial hand keeps the quality of audience-consumed exhibits high, even as they receive unsolicited submissions on a continual basis.

 

Curating visitors' contributions isn't good or bad, but like all decisions that impact participants, the curation policy needs to be clear to people.  If visitors create something and then drop it into a black hole for staff review, they need to understand how their submission will be evaluated, how long it might take, and whether they will be notified if their contribution is included in some audience-facing display.  This doesn't need to be exhaustive; even a sign that says, "Staff check these videos every week and select 3-5 to be shown on the monitor outside.  We are always looking for the most creative, imaginative contributions to share with visitors." can help visitors understand the overall structure and criteria of curation.  And while very few institutions get back in touch with visitors to let them know that their content is being featured, doing so makes good business sense.  It's a personal, compelling reason to contact someone who may not have visited the institution since making their contribution, and it's likely to bring them back to show off their creation to friends and family.

 

When considering what your curation policy will be for a contributory project, consider whether your goal is to give everyone a voice or to sculpt a high quality audience experience from contributions.  If your goal is to empower visitors' voices or to encourage conversation, your curatorial touch should be as light as possible, and you should spend your design time focused on how to display the contributions so they work well together rather than trying to cut down to a few models.  The Signtific game is a good example of this; instead of developing a curatorial or monitoring system, the designers focused on developing ways to explicitly require players to respond to each other and build arguments together, so that every new voice has a place in the growing conversation.

 

Even inane visitor comments are important to include when your goal is visitor empowerment.  When people write on each others' walls on Facebook or MySpace, they are often just saying hi and asserting their affinity for the other person or institution.  The same is true of the people who write, "Great museum!" in comment books in the lobby.  These statements are a form of self-identification, and while they may not make very compelling content for audiences, the act of expression in a public forum is important to those who contribute their thoughts, however banal.

 

Of course, there are many cases in which creating a high quality output for subsequent audiences is more important than serving the identity needs 

of participants.  Using phrases like, "contribute to the exhibition" as opposed to "join the conversation" can help signal to visitors that their work may be evaluated and used subject to more stringent criteria.  People will not be less motivated to participate if it is perceived as difficult to get your work featured on display.  That perception activates different motivations--the pleasure of competition and the desire to be marked as special.  These motivations can be equally powerful, but they also alter the way visitors perceive the activity and the profile of visitors likely to be drawn to participate.

 

And one quick note on the top issue that most museum staff worry about regarding curation of visitors' contributions: moderation of inappropriate content.  On the web, people who make offensive comments or terrorize other users are called "griefers," and fortunately few museums suffer from participants who use contributory platforms to actively attack other visitors.  But they may use the platforms to share content that is considered offensive from the perspective of the institutional mission.  The US Holocaust Museum is a very interesting example of this, because their highly active online comment boards frequently attract Holocaust-deniers and anti-Semitic individuals.  The Museum devotes significant staff resources to moderation, and prefers to engage directly and quickly with commenters who express views they deem inappropriate or potentially inflamatory.  But the comments are still there, on their site, and that makes some people uncomfortable.  David Klevan, Education Manager for Technology and Distance Learning Initiatives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, reflected on this issue, saying:  “No matter what disclaimer we put up about posters’ views not reflecting the views of the institution, we know that content on our site reflects upon us.  There’s the double-edged sword of wanting to make it a welcoming and safe place for free expression—without making people feel threatened.”

While acknowledging griefers’ detrimental impact to other individuals’ experiences is important, the fear about their impact often outweighs its harm.  Museums already have developed ways to deal with griefers of a different type—the ones who vandalize exhibits and disrupt other visitors’ experiences.  When it comes to people who want to vandalize the community spirit, the same techniques—proactive staff, model users, encouragement of positive and respectful behavior—can prevail. 

 

Interestingly, while staff tend to be most concerned about content that uses curse words or hate speech, these kinds of offensive contributions are usually vastly outweighed by submissions that are inappropriate in other ways: off-topic, devoid of content, or unintelligible.  The best way to tackle all of these types of inappropriate behaviors is to develop asks that are genuine, so that the contributory platform is treated with the same respect visitors confer on other exhibits.  There are also some sneaky placement decisions you can make.  At the Ontario Science Centre, there was a digital comment kiosk in a quiet area that was constantly receiving off-topic content related to body parts.  The staff moved the kiosk to be directly in front of the entrance to the women's bathroom in a very central location.  Once in the proximity of more visitors (and moms in particular!) the bad behavior disappeared.

 

 

Audience Experiences of Contributory Projects

 

Of course, participants aren't the only ones who access and consume each other's content.  There is also a wide body of audience members--other visitors, stakeholders, sometimes scientists or researchers--who enjoy and use contributed content.  What makes a compelling audience experience of a contributory project?  

 

Some contributory projects, like citizen science data collection, are intended for a very specific and non-public audience.  In these cases, there are really two audiences for the data--the scientists who will use the data as part of their research, and the participants and would-be participants who are curious about what happens to their data and what others have contributed. This is also true of any contributory projects in which visitors are contributing as part of institutional research or project development.  In the case of MN150, people submitted nominations of topics for inclusion in the exhibition over a year before the exhibition was opened, so the nominations functionally had two lives: internally for staff to consider, and then (for a subset of winners) externally once the exhibition was open.  When contributions are being worked into a private process, participants need to know where their contributions are going and how the process works.  People are often comfortable "giving up" their ideas as long as they receive basic recognition and some insider information about how the institution plans to use their content. 

 

Interestingly, there are some citizen scientists (and managers of citizen science projects) who are advocating for more access to the data they collectively share with scientists.  As noted earlier, people who only participate in data collection gain skills in a very narrow segment of the scientific process.  Many of these participants would like to be more involved.  For example, birder Eric Gyllenhall has requested that project managers "give people more tools to manipulate the data after it has been collected. Both FeederWatch and eBird allow some of that, but there should be lots more opportunities for data mining, data mash-ups, post-creation projects, or whatever you want to call them."  These are participants who would like to be able to use the data collected in more extensive ways, not necessarily in collaboration with scientists, but as data consumers in their own right. 

 

Data collectors aren't the only people who enjoy exploring and playing with participant-submitted content and data.  In the past couple of years, manipulatable data visualizations have become ubiquitous on the web, and people enjoy fiddling with everything from data on baby names to crime statistics to the frequency of different phrases in internet dating profiles.  From an audience perspective, playing with visitor-submitted data can be a fun and attractive way to explore huge numbers of contributions while learning important analytical skills.  Even the simplest visualization--such as the LED readouts above the turnstiles in the Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars exhibition--let audiences learn from, enjoy, and engage with visitor-submitted content.

 

In 2008, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam hosted Damien Hirst’s piece For the Love of Godand with it, a visitor feedback system presented contributions in a way that allowed non-contributing audiences to interact with contributions in intriguing ways. The artwork is a platinum-cast skull encrusted with over 1100 carats of diamonds: a hype machine in death’s clothing. Entering the exhibit involved standing in line in galleries full of Dutch masterpieces (mostly ignored) and then emerging into a dark room with guards and the skull terrifically lit in the center. You weren’t sure how much time you were supposed to spend with the object or what to get out of it. There was no interpretative content in the room, and you were not allowed to take pictures. I walked in, self-consciously watched myself watching other people watching the skull, then walked out.

 

At the physical museum, visitors who wished to provide feedback on the skull were instructed to leave the building and walk into a temporary structure that served as both a For the Love of God gift shop and feedback environment. The feedback stations themselves were little closed booths where you could record a video with your opinion about the skull.

 

By positioning the feedback stations outside the flow of the museum (and within a solely skull-branded structure), the resultant videos were more topical and focused than is typical. But the thing that makes this project stand out is the way these videos were shared on the Web. They were displayed on the For the Love of God website, which was created for the museum by an outside vendor, skipintro. The format is reminiscent of Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine project, allowing users to view the videos by country of origin, gender, age, and some key concepts (love it/hate it, think it’s art/think it's hype). The videos were automatically chromakeyed (i.e. masked or cropped) so that each person appears as a floating head, which creates an eerie, appealing visual consistency. The browsing experience is somewhat clunky and the filters are not always accurate, but the overall website is impressive in its display and aggregation of videos. Note that not all of the recorded videos were used on the website; videos were culled for volume, and "harsh and insulting" ones were removed.  Skipintro functionally created an interactive online experience for audiences out of the contributions offered by visitors.

 

This design was also notable for its overall integration into the exhibit experience. The visitors' videos on the website were couched in the same self-conciousness buzz that permeated the exhibit, with a welcome screen informing you that, “never before has a work of art provoked as much dialogue as Damien Hirst’s ‘For the Love of God.’” Oh really? Never?  Whether true or not, the website implies that the visitors’ videos are a justification for this claim, a demonstration of the rich dialogue supposedly surrounding this skull. In this way, the visitors’ videos are integrated into the larger art piece and are arguably as much a part of the skull experience as the posters, the lines, and the guards. The existence of controversy is part of the intentional setting of the skull, and so visitors are encouraged to talk.  Whether you experienced the visitors' videos as evidence of this controversy, or just as a beautiful data visualization, the audience experience of the feedback contributions was immersive, intriguing, and quite haunting. 

 

There are many audiences who enjoy engaging with visitor-submitted content actively.  Many people who are not motivated to create their own content are motivated to critique, edit, curate, and organize other visitors' contributions.  As noted earlier, this is a different kind of participation which can improve the overall quality of visitor contributions and contributory outputs, especially in institutions where staff do not have the time to actively manage or curate contributions. A simple "favorite" or "mark as inappropriate" button can go a long way towards helping audience members feel invested in visitor-contributed content and winnowing out the best and worst submissions.

 

But what about the visitors who are "just looking?"  How does the experience of exploring visitor-contributed content differ from consuming standard exhibits or museum content?   Just as diversity of contributions helps motivate people to participate in contributory platforms, diversity of creations can help some audience members feel more personally included in the institution as consumers of that content.  In 2006, the Art Gallery of Ontario developed In Your Face, an exhibition of 4"x6" visitor-submitted self-portraits.  Over 10,000 self-portraits were submitted, and the portraits were hung in an overwhelming and beautiful mosaic, blanketing walls from floor to ceiling of the exhibition gallery.  Toronto is a very culturally diverse city, and Gillian McIntyre, coordinator of adult programs, noted that, "the portraits noticeably reflected far more diversity of all sorts than is usually seen on AGO walls."  She also reflected that "on several occasions children in visiting school groups from West and East Indian communities enthusiastically pointed out people who looked like them on the walls, literally saying: 'That looks like me' or 'That's me with dreadlocks.'"  McIntyre further commented that these comments represent the extent to which In Your Face helped the AGO be a more socially inclusive place.  Visitors "saw themselves" in the exhibition in a way they never had before.  The exhibition was incredibly popular, attracting significant crowds and media attention.  Another visitor took the experience from personal to collective, commenting that "it's depicting the soul of a society."

 

MN150 has had a similar effect on visitors, despite being a much more conservative installation.  Unlike In Your Face, MN150 was not a direct installation of visitor contributions.  Instead, it displays the distillation of 2,700 visitor nominations into 150 fairly simply designed exhibits.  Each exhibit label includes the text contributed in the original nomination form, as well as a photo of the nominee.  But otherwise, with a few exceptions in cases where nominees provided objects, the exhibits were designed and produced by staff in a traditional process.  In summative evaluation, staff learned that... (COMPLETE IN DEC WHEN EVAL REPORT AVAILABLE)  Anecdotally, staff noted that the video talkback station in MN150 was particularly active. The kiosk invited visitors to make their case for other topics that should have been included in the exhibition.  I assume the display of visitor's voices throughout the exhibition and the transparent focus on the public nomination process motivated more audience members to feel that there was room for their own voice and topics than in a typical exhibition.  While it wasn't tested, my guess is that more people felt encouraged to add their own feedback than they would have if the exhibition had showcased only curatorial perspectives on the top 150 topics that have shaped Minnesota.  Interestingly, the Art Gallery of Ontario's In Your Face exhibition had a similar effect, with many more visitors than is typical visiting a station where they could make their own portraits inspired by the installation.  In this way, these exhibitions of visitor-created or nominated content become a giant modeling machine, encouraging visitors to participate with the exhibition in related but not identical ways.

 

How important is it to visitors to know that an exhibition was created via a participatory process?  Is the focus on the process a reflection of cultural obsession with user-created content, or is it actually useful or compelling to visitors in some way?  In the examples above, we've seen how exposing the process can help audiences feel more socially included both in the content and the participatory experience of the product.  In the introduction to the book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock offer several ways that "visitor-response elements" can enhance audience experience of exhibitions, including "validat[ing] visitors' experiences, knowledge, and emotions," "redress[ing] perceived imbalance in the content of an exhibition," and "expos[ing] visitors and museum staff to diverse perspectives."  These all point to a very simple truth: visitor-contributed content is different from traditional institutionally-produced content.  It is often more personal, more authentic, more spontaneous, and more relevant to human experience than the labels and displays that committees agonize over for months or years.  Just as people are becoming more distrustful of overly packaged marketing messages and news productions in the broader media landscape, visitors see the authoritative voice of traditional museums in a suspicious light.  There are many studies and reports about shifting brand allegiances and how savvy consumers are more likely than ever to trust the opinion of a peer and scorn the message of a traditional splashy advertisement.  In a world of aggressively marketed and abundantly available consumer experiences, people are trying to find the content that is most relevant and significant to their own lives.  I don't believe that visitor-contributed content produces intrinsically better audience experiences than institutional-designed content.  But at least so far, many museum staff members are unwilling to produce content that is as raw, personal, and direct as that which visitors create.  Hopefully, working with and seeing the positive impact of visitor-contributed content will give some institutions the permission they need to transform the way they create and display content as well.

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.