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Chapter 5, Part 3: Collaboration Projects

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.  

 

Collaborative Projects

 

If contributory projects are a one-night stand, collaborative projects are a controlled relationship.  Collaborative projects are institutionally driven, with staff soliciting outside participatory partners who represent particular communities of interest.   These partners may be chosen for specific knowledge or skills, association with cultural groups of interest, age, or they may just be representative of the intended audience for the outputs of the project.  In some cases, museum staff and participants work hand in hand; in other cases, staff guide a process that is largely participant-determined.

 

Investigating Where We Live is a classic collaborative museum project.  Investigating Where We Live is an annual 4-week program at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., in which thirty local teens work with museum staff to create a temporary exhibition of photographs and creative writing about a neighborhood of D.C.  The program is coordinated and directed by staff, who select the neighborhood for the season, provide photography and writing instruction, and generally shepherd the project to completion.  Teens join the group via an application process, and they are expected to participate in all twelve sessions of the program over four weeks.

 

In format, Investigating Where We Live functions like many standard museum camp programs.  What distinguishes it as a collaboration is the fact that the teens are creating a partly self-directed exhibit for public consumption.  The institution provides the framework--the space, the sessions, the instruction--but the content, design, and implementation of the exhibition are up to the teens.  Investigating Where We Live has been offered at the National Building Museum since 1996, and many graduates of the program come back in subsequent years to serve volunteers, interns, or program staff.  The blending of participants of different ages and levels of expertise and authority helps blur the line between staff and student, and the result is a program that feels truly collaborative.  For example, in 2007, James Brown first participated in IWWL as a student.  In 2008 and 2009, he returned as a "teen assistant" to staff member Andrew Costanzo.  On the 2009 IWWL blog, Andrew reflected, "Of course, I have to mention my fantastic Teen Assistant, James Brown. This is the second time I have had the honor of working with James in this capacity. He dubbed us 'Batman and Batman', because 'there was no sidekick this time.'"  Andrew and James appear to regard each other as true partners in the program.

 

This is not to say that the teens completely control the program or can take it in a different direction.  As James Brown noted on the 2009 blog in the first week of the program in a post entitled Groundhog Day, "I must admit the training and first day the students arrived seemed like the rewind of a bad 80s movie. It was all the same as the year before and the year before that. Every exercise and activity mirrored those I had already done up until the point when people started to participate."  James didn't see this as a bad thing; he went on to describe all of the design skills he'd honed over his time in the program.  Unlike contributory projects, which tend to focus on the product supplied by participants, collaborative projects often have an explicit educational component for participants.  As a part of the "reasonable bargain" between institutions and participants in collaborative projects, participants often make long-term commitments to the project in exchange for institutionally-provided skill-building and content education.

 

As is evident from the example of Investigating Where We Live, collaborative projects often require much more staff time, planning, and coordination than contributory projects.  They also ask more of the participants, both in terms of time and output.  For this reason, collaborative projects typically involve small groups of participants working with dedicated staff.  Because collaborative projects require more resources than contributory projects, they tend to be tightly tied to institutional goals or core programs.  While institutional needs may still be broad and diverse, the institution typically has a good sense of what they are trying to accomplish throughout the program and what might motivate participants to take part.  There are some institutions, most significantly non-museum experience design companies, for which collaborative user-design processes are an essential part of design practice.  There is rarely a "put it out there and see what happens" attitude towards collaborative projects.  This is positive, because institutions are often more thoughtful in planning collaborative projects and expect more from them at the output.  But it's also a problem, because it makes collaborative projects seem too complicated or resource-intensive to be usable in many situations.  Later in this section, we'll look at some alternative formats for collaborative projects that allows them to be more distributed, informal, and flexible than the traditional approach allows.

 

Because collaborative projects are partnerships between institutions and participants, the roles and needs of each are somewhat blended.  Basic institutional needs that can be fulfilled by collaborative projects include:

  • the need to bring in experts or community representatives to ensure the accuracy and authenticity of an exhibit, publication, or program
  • the need to test and develop new products in partnership with intended users to improve the likelihood that they will be successful
  • the desire to provide educational experiences in which partners design, create, and produce their own content or research
  • the desire to offer in-museum experiences in which visitors can contribute, take ownership over some content creation, or work with the museum in a sustained way

 

As in contributory projects, the motivation for participation in collaborative projects mostly comes from the clarity of roles and the appeal of the participatory activity.  However, in collaborations, institutions also often provide several additional layers of motivation, as well as amplifying these basic incentives with more information.  Participants may be paid or receive school credit for participating in a collaboration.  Because collaborations often involve more formal and prolonged relationships between institutions and participants, institutions are more likely to explicitly and exhaustively explain what roles the participants will be given, what expectations the institution has for the collaboration and its outcomes, and what benefits (education, publicity, renumeration) participants should expect to receive.  Many collaborations involve an application process, which serves as a kind of vetting both for would-be participants' motivation and their ability to perform adequately in the collaboration.  At the beginning of a collaboration, ideally, both participants and staff feel confident of each other's ability to fulfill the roles and functions assigned to them.

 

Because of the tight relationships between institutions and participants, the audience experience of the outcomes of collaborations often takes a backseat.  This is problematic; sometimes a project that only served ten or twenty non-staff participants in its creation will produce an outcome that is only appealing to that small group of people and their friends and family!  Making matters worse, many collaborative projects are evaluated solely based on the experience of the collaboration for staff and participants, and not based on the audience experience of the outputs.  The most common way this problem is ameliorated is by staff developing a collaborative process that will confidently produce an outcome that is considered of a high enough quality to be appealing to wide audiences (such as the process used at the National Building Museum to develop the Investigating Where We Live exhibition).  There is another interesting approach to this problem.  Some institutions will use collaborations as an opportunity to test new modalities for audience engagement or display.  These projects often involve participant-generated content that is treated with different rules and values than institutionally-held content, and so staff are willing to take risks they might not take with artifacts or content in the permanent collection. 

 

In the rest of this section, we will look at collaborative projects from several angles.  First, we'll look at collaboration as a formal design process and how it serves both institutions and participants in the co-creation of exhibitions, programs, and research.  We'll dig into the story of one particularly messy formal collaboration I worked on, and how honesty and open communication held together a world of shifting promises, tools, and bargains.  Then, we'll turn to the lesser-known (and to me, more interesting) world of experiments in collaboration: institutions that use collaboration to test new ideas in museum practice and design.  Finally, we'll look at some collaborative structures that are more informal than these design process, structures that allow visitors to collaborate more flexibly with institutions at commitment levels comparable to those exhibited by contributory projects. 

 

The Collaborative Design Process

 

Collaborative design processes have been documented for use in everything from community planning to software development for at least forty years.  Whether going by the name participatory design, cooperative design, collaborative design, user-centered design, or other terms, the concept is the same. Someone initiates a project or an organization, and then, instead of developing that project on their own, they bring in collaborative partners to work with them.  In recent years, product design firms like IDEO have greatly enhanced the public profile of user-centered design and have argued that integrating intended end-users into the design process results in products that are more likely to succeed in the market and introduces new product ideas that may also be successful down the road.  IDEO isn't engaging end-users to give participants beneficial educaitonal experiences; these product designers are banking that their "audience" will respond better to products designed with collaborative processes.   In addition to helping the bottom line, user-centered design has emerged as a particularly useful technique when moving into new markets.  As companies "go global," designers are being asked to design products for intended users from countries and backgrounds they may have never encountered.  In these foreign environments, partnering with intended end-users is often the most effective way to understand how your product will work in the new market.

 

User-centered design of this type goes beyond prototyping or offering focus groups with intended end-users.  In 2009, IDEO published a free e-book on human-centered design written specifically for non-profits and NGOs working in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In this guide, they offer specific design techniques for how to partner with intended users to do field research, develop project ideas, evaluate prototypes, assess program viability, and deliver pilot projects.  While your goal may not be to improve drinking water quality in Zambia, many of the techniques described in the IDEO book apply to cultural project development processes as well.

 

Early in their book, the IDEO authors state, "The foundation of HCD is a concise Design Challenge. This challenge will guide the questions you will ask in the field resesarch and the opportunities and solution you develop later in the process."  Collaborative museum design processes must also start with a clear and well-understood design challenge or goal.  These challenges are the basis for how you will recruit participants, what you will ask of them, and what you will create in partnership.  Sample challenges might include, "How can we tell the story of the Inuit experience in a way that is authentic, respectful, and compelling to non-native audiences?" or "Can we give teenagers with AIDS the tools to document their own daily experience in a way that supports their creative development, is sensitive to their privacy, and accessible to other audiences?" or "Can amateurs develop interactive exhibits for our music and technology exhibition?"  Each of these questions implies different target collaborators and design processes.  In the lightest collaborations, collaborators may serve as "advisory boards" or consultants with whom staff have occasional design meetings throughout the project development.  At their most intensive, collaborators and staff may work side by side to develop and implement the project.

 

The development of the traveling exhibition Yuungnaqpiallerput/The Way We Genuinely Live: Masterworks of Yup'ik Science and Survival at the Anchorage Museum is a good example of a successful partnership in which the non-staff participants... advisory...

 

When the collaborators are youth (and they often are), institutional goals related to providing participants with educational experiences often become more explicit and essential to the project.  In both the case of IWWL and projects I've worked on, the overall design process typically breaks down into about one-third instructional time, two-thirds teen-driven production time.  Weaving instruction into a collaboration is not easy; you have to develop and maintain equitable partnership relationships at the same time as you reinforce old standards about who is the authoritative instructor and who are the students.  For this reason, it's a mistake to front-load all of the instruction to the first days or weeks of the program; that sets an expectation that the whole program will be "business as usual" with teachers as authoritative leaders and students as followers.  Front-loading can also cause exhaustion in later weeks, especially in intensive programs where participants spend several hours each day working on the project.  Like most people, youth participants can get fatigued if they are constantly "working on the project," and later in the program, instructional sessions can often be fun breaks that help teens shift focus and gather additional skills useful for their projects.  In the best cases, much of the instruction can be dictated by the needs of the youth participants themselves.  For example, when I work with participants (of any age) on projects where they are designing exhibits, objects, or activites that draw on their own creative interests, I try to use the early time period to introduce them to as many unique examples as possible rather than prescriptively showing them a small set of tools or paths to take.  Then, I ask participants to write proposals for the projects they would like to do, and I try to find instructors or advisors who can come in specifically to help those participants with the tools they want to use, working from their particular levels of expertise.  Especially when working with young people and technology, it's ridiculous to assume that everyone is starting from the same base or has the same knowledge and interest in different tools.  Students can improve their skills more significantly when they can receive specific instruction at their level with tools they consider essential to their work.  Guest instructors and flexible instruction schedules also help reinforce the collaboration between institution and participants.  Participants see this kind of instruction as supportive to their needs rather than imposed from outside.  From a relationship perspective, it's useful to bring in guest instructors and experts, as well as using past graduates or other youth as instructors because this allows students to receive instruction while still perceiving the program directors as partners, not teachers. 

  

In 2008, I worked with the Chabot Space Science Center in Berkeley, CA, to develop a new program like IWWL in which teens would design media components for a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics exhibition on black holes.  The teens spent three weeks together in the Black Hole Institute, Monday through Friday during the summer, and were paid a small stipend for their participation.  The Black Hole Institute was a collaboration nestled within a collaboration; the Center for Astrophysics partnered with Chabot to provide the teens, and Chabot partnered with the teens to produce the exhibit content.  As noted in the first chapter of this book, despite what we thought was a crystal-clear design question, teens felt frustrated in the early stages of the development process by a lack of clear criteria for what would constitute successful media products.  The Center for Astrophysics had a very simple design challenge in mind: "Can teens create media products related to black holes that we could integrate into our exhibit?" but that wasn't enough for the teen collaborators.  They wanted specific feedback so that they could fulfill their own needs to produce an excellent product worthy of inclusion in the final exhibition.  While this desire to produce something of high quality was partially fueled by participants' general desire to perform well, it also may have reflected a suspicion that the institution would not hold up to its side of the bargain if the outcome was poor.  The exhibition to which the teens were contributing was at a very early stage of development, and no one was able to satisfactorily explain to either the teens or the Chabot staff where and how the teen media products would be integrated into the final exhibition.  Would they be in the exhibition itself or only on the exhibition's website?  Would they be in a special "teen" area or woven into the general content?  The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics team promised that the media would be included on the exhibition website, but that website is several months from being initiated. There was no initial design, no graphics, and no idea of where the teens' work would fit into an overall structure.  It's not surprising that the teens felt insecure about where their work might be going, and that they responded to that insecurity by asking for as many criteria as possible to ensure that their products would be desirable to include in the final, mysterious result.

 

When developing collaborative projects in which participants and staff work together to produce an exhibition, event, or educational program, it is important to balance the equitable partner relationship with participants' need for structure, clarity, and criteria.  Just as contributors to simpler projects like to know how their work will be evaluated and used, collaborators also want to understand the specific reasons and outcomes of their work.  No one likes to work on a team or committee without a clear goal in mind, and volunteer participants are no different from staff in this regard.  Respect the fact that your collaborators have made a significant committment to join your project, submitting themselves to an application process and dedicating time and effort to the project.  They want to be real contributors, not just screw around.  Of course, you can make their work a more fun version of staff duties (and give them the most fun parts of real work to do), but it's important to maintain the overall stance that their activities are in pursuit of a goal that is valued and needed by the institution. 

 

One of the most effective ways to clarify the structure and goals of a collaborative project is to give participants a client to serve.  At Chabot, we were lucky to have a representative from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics come twice during the Black Hole Summer Institute to review the teen projects and offer her feedback. Having a client to embody the goals can help participants get on the right track, even when those goals are fuzzy. The client need not even be real. The most extreme example of this is the writing programs at the 826 tutoring centers.  At 826, student groups come in for short programs in which they work together to write a book, which must be completed by the end of the program.  The staff present themselves as assistants to a tyrannical publisher, a monster who eats books. The publisher is never seen, but is portrayed by a staff member hidden beyond a door who angrily pounds on the door and shouts out orders and demands.  The staff ask the students to help them write a book to satisfy the publisher.  This sets up an emotional bond between students and staff, an artificial collaborative device that helps the students get motivated and feel connected to the staff.  The invisible publisher is an entirely fictitious device used to create criteria, add drama, and help focus the kids on what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly open creative project. 

 

A Messy Collaboration: The Tech Virtual Test Zone

 

These lessons may sound obvious, but I learned them through a series of projects that were poorly structured with unclear goals and shifting criteria.  I want to share with you the story of The Tech Virtual Test Zone, the collaborative project that taught me about the essential role of clear structure and criteria to co-created projects.

 

The Tech Virtual Test Zone was a project of The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.  In the fall of 2007, I joined the staff of the Tech Museum to help lead an initiative called The Tech Virtual, of which the Test Zone was the pilot project.  The goals of The Tech Virtual were clear.  As a hands-on science museum focusing on technology, the director deemed it inappropriate for us to use traditional multi-year processes to develop new exhibits.  If it takes you two years to develop a new exhibit about technology, the thinking goes, the exhibit is already obsolete by the time it hits the floor.  The Tech Virtual was a project designed to solve this problem in an innovative way: by crowd-sourcing exhibit development to participants all over the world via web-based and virtual world-based collaborative platforms.  We used a virtual world platform called Second Life to invite participants not only to share their ideas in words but to prototype three-dimensional, digital versions of their proposed exhibits.  The idea was for the community to develop many exhibits in parallel virtually, and then for the Tech Museum to select the best of these for fabrication in real life.  In addition to speeding up the process, we hoped that we would attract participants who were content experts or at least passionate amateurs about the content, whose experience and ideas would broaden the limited exhibit development abilities of the staff (the exhibition development and education departments had recently been cut).  On October 31, 2007, I joined the staff as curator/exhibit developer/community manager.  We opened the collaborative digital platforms in December, offering would-be participants training in exhibit development as well as a cash prize for the best exhibit ideas.  Over the next six months, I worked closely with about 200 participants worldwide to develop their ideas, and on June 4, 2008, we opened a real-world 2,000 square foot gallery presenting seven interactive exhibits on the topic of "art, film, music, and technology," all of which originated in collaboration with twelve external partners, ranging from a Toronto bartender to a Manchester accountant to a local music teacher.  While the museum did not do any formal evaluation of the exhibition, the exhibits have been generally well-received by visitors.  Because The Test Zone was a pilot of a collaborative process, we focused less on the audience outcomes of the products than on the participatory process.

 

From an institutional perspective, the desired outcome was clear, but the the collaborative process with participants that took us from December to June was anything but.  The Test Zone was an experimental pilot, and rather than setting fixed goals, participant criteria, and outcomes at the outset, they evolved over the experiment.  In some cases, we changed course based on community feedback, but in many instances, museum leadership dictated changes in schedule, budget, and desired outcomes, and I scrambled to adjust the project accordingly, not always to the benefit of participants. While it's easy to say, "this is an experiment," it's hard to build trusting relationships with people who might be affected adversely by the various changes that every experimental project undergoes.  When we changed something, we were changing it on people.  Fortunately, by maintaining honesty and open communication with participants, the majority were willing to weather the changes and stick with the project.  Much as the 826 tutoring staff use an imaginary authoritative publisher to establish repoire between staff and students, I shared my own challenges and frustrations with the Test Zone participants, honestly sharing the ways that I, like them, felt tugged around by the chaotic process.

 

The Tech Virtual Test Zone was an experiment in crowd-sourced exhibit development.  From the outset, I tried to balance offering participants an open slate for their creativity in terms of exhibit ideas with a highly structured and staff-supported process for turning those ideas into viable exhibits.  We offered participants many resources to support their exhibit development.  On the web, we set up templates for participants to flesh out the big idea, content, look and feel, interaction, and key objects/technology associated with each exhibit concept.  In Second Life, I produced three-dimensional interactive walk-through tutorials on how to design interactive exhibits that are engaging, accessible, easy to use, etc.--a virtual exhibit on exhibit-making.  I worked with contractors and volunteers to design a few simple open source Second Life exhibits on the theme of technology in art, film, and music, which served as working models for participants, many of whom had not spent much time in interactive science centers.  And most importantly, we provided participants with a sandbox, where anyone could build anything at any time, and dedicated workshop space, where individuals could house their projects-in-progress.  The virtual workshop became the homebase for exhibit development and at its high point, was a thriving, active room filled with people working on diverse projects. 

 

Because Second Life is a social environment, users can talk to and work with each other in real time, and we quickly discovered that interpersonal interaction, not tutorials or templates, was the key to motivating participants and encouraging them to develop their skills.  We offered Second Life-based exhibit design classes twice a week, which blended basic Second Life building skills with exhibit thinking.  These classes were a kind of marketing outreach.  They helped promote the project to new people, who may have been enticed by the chance to learn how to create a color-changing sculpture and then found themselves interested in designing whole exhibits.  For the invested participants, we hosted a weekly exhibit designers' meeting in Second Life in which community members sat at a large virtual table to discuss the challenges in their projects, new developments in the Test Zone project overall, and whatever else was on their minds.  These meetings only attracted a small percentage of the community (about 10-15 people per week, compared to about 100 at work in the workshop at any time), but these participants tended to be the most motivated folks who often informally volunteered their time to greet new workshop denizens and help out wherever they could.  Because things kept changing both in their own projects and at The Tech Museum, these meetings became an essential way to keep lines of communication open and address any problems in the system.  Because many participants who attended the meetings were highly networked within the larger Tech Virtual community, they were able both to bring in problems from the community and share information back to less-engaged participants.  There were several times that participants solved their own problems at these meetings; for example, when we needed a better way to delineate the "frame" of each exhibit in the workshop, participants rapid-prototyped sample virtual frames and voted on the best one to distribute to everybody for use.  In their research on public participation in science research, Rick Bonney and others discovered that this model of "core" community members who work cloely with staff, combined with secondary level community members who contribute at a more basic level, is successful for collaborative and co-creative projects. In the case of The Tech Virtual, as in some science research projects, the core group was self-defined, which made them more effective than a group pre-selected by staff may have been.

 

While some participants showed extraordinary community spirit, going so far as to offer their own classes and pitch in with "office hours" in the workshop, the overall collaborative goals were greatly compromised by the inclusion of a contest with cash prizes.  We awarded $5000 to each exhibit design that was translated to real life. Doing so meant we could raise awareness very quickly, which was useful given the short time frame. It also focused the experience. People weren't coming to The Tech Virtual to muse about exhibits; they came to build exhibits on a deadline for submission to the contest. However, the contest also prevented us from legitimately fostering collaboration and community. People were unsure whether they should go it alone (and try to win the whole prize) or team up with others. We had several community discussions about the competition disincentivizing collaboration, and I fielded bizarre but understandable questions about whether participants should try to get involved with as many exhibits as possible to optimize chances of winning, or do only solo projects to maximize potential reward.  The money sent a contradictory signal to all our talk about sharing. 

 

This problem was most acutely felt in our experimental and limited work with teens in the Teen Grid of Second Life.  We focused our efforts in the "adult grid" of Second Life and primarily worked with participants who ranged from their 20s to their 50s (with the majority trending older).  I also created a scaled-down version of the walk-through tutorial and workshop in the Teen Grid of Second Life, but we spent less time working with teens than with adults.  This was partly due to the restricted role of adults in Teen Second Life (most programs need to be teen-led to be successful) and to a late entry into the space.  But we also found that teens were less self- and community-motivated and desired more staff attention than we were able to give.  Unlike the adults, who appreciated connecting with staff on a regular basis but were happy to work on long-term projects on their own, the teens wanted short-term goals, lots of staff feedback, and were generally more competitive (and less collaborative) with each other.  They were obsessed with the contest and the cash.  They also several times expressed that it was not fair that their work was being evaluated in the same pool with adult work; we were surprised by the extent to which they felt themselves inferior to the (often bumbling) participants in the adult grid.  In response to these concerns, we added a special "teen prize" to ensure that at least one teen entry would be honored in the final exhibit design contest.

 

The contest not only caused problems for collaboration among participants in the Test Zone--it also complicated the collaboration between staff and participants.  Staff and participants could not be true partners when one was in a position to judge the other.  As the community manager, I had to maintain positive, encouraging relationships with all of our virtual exhibit designers.  To do so, I had to mask the reality that I was also the primary arbitrator of which exhibits would be selected for inclusion in the physical exhibition.  I couldn't be both the person who cheered someone on and helped them consider how their idea might become an apealing interactive exhibit and the person who told them their exhibit wasn't good enough to win.  So I hid behind an imaginary panel of judges, invoking them to tell participants that "the judges didn't understand this part of your project," or, "the judges don't believe this would be feasible in the real world to fabricate."  Using this device, I was able to keep working with the participants and encouraging them throughout the process as their partner, not their evaluator.  But obviously this is not ideal from a trust or honesty perspective. 

 

The contest caused one final problem that relates to honesty: we could not easily align a clear, fair contest structure with the goal of developing seven interactive exhibits in five months.  As museum professionals know, not every exhibit that sounds like a great idea can actually be built successfully, and conversely, some great exhibits emerge from hazy and unpromising beginnings.  In some cases, such as an exhibit called "musical chairs," our internal team of engineers were able to quickly identify the concept as a winner from a simple one-paragraph description of the concept.  While the participant, Leanne Garvie, who contributed that concept did build a working (and quite fun) virtual prototype in Second Life, it bore little similarity to the real-world version we designed in parallel at The Tech.  Leanne's idea was definitely a winner, but the criteria that made it a winner were different from those that governed other virtual exhibits that only emerged as winners based on progressive work on the virtual prototypes that eventually led us to see how they could be successful real-life installations.  In the end, we gave the $5,000 award to each exhibit that was built in real life, but we also gave lesser prizes ($500 and $1000) for outstanding virtual-only projects.  Our criteria for awarding the $5,000 prize remained consistent throughout the project--top prizes would be given to those people whose exhibits were developed in real life--but once we really started working with participants, it became clear that the underlying criteria used to determine winners was not easily quantifiable to contestants' satisfacation. 

 

In the beginning of the project, the museum director would speak about "copying" exhibits from Second Life to real life. The theory was that we would hold a contest with staged judging, and at each judging point, we would select fully completed virtual exhibits to "copy" to the real museum.  Our fabrication team quickly realized that this was unrealistic, both technically and conceptually. Once we realized that virtual exhibits would not translate directly to the real world, we transitioned to a model where the real exhibits were "inspired by" the virtual. In all cases we chose superlative virtual exhibits in which the core idea was powerful enough to transcend platforms. We maintained that core idea in the real version of the virtual design, and tried as much as possible to retain other aspects of the virtual designers' goals in recreation. 

 

We didn't leave our virtual designers out of the ensuing real-world process, though at that point the Tech Museum staff definitely asserted the upper hand in the collaborative relationship.  The real-world fabrication and design teams were as open as possible with participants.  In many ways, the collaboration became easier for museum staff when we moved to fabrication, because we knew how the process would work and where we could and couldn't integrate input from the participants themselves.  In cases where participants were local, they often came in to check on our progress and even help  put their exhibit together.  For those who were hundreds or thousands of miles away, I shared our real-world progress in virtual meetings, photos, calls, and emails.  Wherever possible, we asked participants to provide their own or preferred content for exhibit artwork, audio, and video.  All final exhibits featured a didactic label about the core art/film/music/technology content as well as a second label about the virtual designer and the collaborative process.  Three exhibits feature original art and music by the virtual designers, and (overlapping) three relied heavily on the technical expertise of the virtual designers. They enabled our engineering and fabrication team to push beyond our in-house capabilities to tackle some exhibit components and or content elements that we could not have produced in this timeframe. We also branched out of the virtual-to-real process to solicit amateur content. One of the exhibits features video of original paintings being created. To produce that content, I put an ad on craigslist and invited artists down to The Tech to be videotaped while creating art. One of these artists, a graffiti artist named Dan, had such a good time that he came back to the shop with friends several times to do more graffiti for us on his own dime.  Dan had lived in the San Jose area all his life, and hadn't visited the museum since he was a child.  He arrived at the exhibit opening with family in tow and was pretty overwhelmed with excitement to see his piece in the museum.

 

Overall, the Test Zone experience was an exciting and frustrating one, for staff and participants alike.  In some ways, this made us great collaborators because everyone was dependent on each other to complete the project in such a short time frame.  But the openendedness and chaotic nature of the project did not make for the foundation for a sustaining community of amateur exhibit developers.  There was no way for participants to rely on each other; they had to rely on me as the conveyor of changing information and criteria for success.  We formed an unhealthy community that revolved around me as the community manager, exhibit design mentor, and institutional representative.  As Richard Milewski, one of the virtual participants commented, "I think we would have welcomed a slightly heavier authority influence on the part of The Tech. As an amateur I was often bewildered as to what the requirements were, and it was only boundless encouragement from Avi (Nina's Second Life avatar) that prevented me from giving up more than once."  When the Test Zone opened in real life, I ended my time with The Tech Museum and The Tech Virtual.  The community did not survive after I left.  We'll explore this issue further in the next chapter on managing and sustaining participatory projects, but clearly, communities that are dependent on one central figure are not sustainable.

 

Finally, The Tech Virtual Test Zone demonstrated some of the barriers that "regular" people feel to collaborating with institutions.  Despite all of our efforts to be as friendly and open as possible to would-be collaborators (and our desperate desire for their participation), many found the idea of working with a big museum overwhelming.  When the Smithsonian American Art Museum ran a game called Ghosts of a Chance that relied on participant-contributed art, staff member Georgina Goodlander was comparably surprised that some people reported being unsure of their ability to "live up" to the standards of the Smithsonian.  In the case of The Tech Virtual, the use of Second Life as an exhibit development platform helped ameliorate some of this threshold fear.  This may seem paradoxical, since Second Life is itself a very high-barrier to entry, hard-to-use software platform.  But many of The Tech Virtual participants were much more proficient in the Second Life environment than I was, and that virtual space was a place where they felt confident in their skills as designers and builders.  Not only was Second Life a comfortable, familiar place for them to engage, it was a place where my authority as the museum exhibit designer came down a notch and we became individuals bringing different skills to the table.  As Richard Milewski, commented, "Second Life is an abstract enough environment that the somewhat intimidating prospect of attempting to collaborate with an institution such as The Tech was made to appear possible. "After all, it's not real! It's just a cartoon on my computer screen and I could always just turn it off." (Not really... but I told myself that more than once). "  Later, when several of the virtual participants came to the opening of the real world exhibition, we offered them a tour of the fabrication shop where their exhibits were made.  While a few people were enthused, several were strikingly overwhelmed or uncomfortable in the shop space.  It became immediately apparent to me that these were not people who would have ever engaged with us as exhibit developers had it required them coming to the actual museum or the staff design area.  By meeting them on "their own territory" in Second Life, we tipped the scales in favor of a positive collaboration.  

 

Collaborating on Research Projects

 

So far, we've looked at collaborative museum projects in which the outcome was an exhibition or educational program.  But what about museum research and co-creation of knowledge?  There are ways to invite visitors and students to collaborate with institutions on research and data analysis projects.  Let's look at two collaborative research projects in which museum users are invited to ... WIkipedia Loves Art and the Children of the Lodz Ghetto.  Both of these projects use web-based tools, but they involve a range of relationships and engagements among participants and institutions.

 

Wikipedia Loves Art was a month-long event in February, 2009, in which fifteen museums (mostly art institutions) partnered with the Wikipedia community to invite people to take photographs of art pieces that could be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles.  While to its many users, Wikipedia is a resource, it is also a thriving user-driven community of people who are passionate about making the world's knowledge freely available to all internet users.  While the user activity in Wikipedia Loves Art was a simple contributory action (taking photographs of objects and uploading them to Flickr), the process was collaborative because the outcome images were for use by the Wikipedia community, not the institutions.  This was in many ways an uncomfortable collaboration.  The Wikipedia community (or Wikimedians, as they often call themselves) are passionate about "liberating" cultural content to be digitized and published online using as open a licensing structure as possible.  Museums, on the other hand, are often concerned about losing control of images of their collections, even those that are in the public domain, for fear that the images will reflect poorly on the objects themselves or be taken out of context.  To make the Wikipedia Loves Art collaboration work, the museums developed careful rules about what could and couldn't be shot, and how participants should upload their images for use by the project. 

 

To avoid a conflict of interest in which museums would "pump" Wikipedia with content of the museums' choosing, the museums asked representatives of the Wikipedia community to provide them with lists of thematic topics that required illustration.  Museums used these thematic lists to develop scavenger hunt lists to distribute to participants so that they might find art objects to illustrate Wikipedia topics like "Roman architecture" or "mask."  The museums encouraged Wikimedians to form teams and created online game infrastructure to support competition among teams participating at different institutions around the world.  In this case, unlike in the case of The Tech Virtual, the competition was a positive motivator that encouraged individual teams to see themselves as part of a worldwide project. 

 

Wikipedia Loves Art was an incredibly decentralized effort, and that led to some confusion about how to participate.  From the institutional perspective, the best way to deliver good participant experiences was to constrain contributions to very specific collaborative platforms and structures (the scavenger hunts and Flickr).  But there were many participants who were confused or frustrated by what they perceived as arbitrary institutional constraints, and some folks found their own rogue ways to upload museum images outside of the project framework, much to the consternation of museum representatives, who saw these actions as causing more confusion, not more opportunities to participate.  Worse, as in The Tech Virtual, the institutions managing Wikipedia Loves Art had to make some changes throughout the process to the scavenger hunt lists and scoring mechanisms, which caused additional confusion and prolonged discussion among participants and institutional representatives on Flickr.  In a blog post reflecting on the experience, Shelley Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum commented that they should have "frozen" all the lists, noting that "changes are enough to drive participants off the deep end."

 

The participatory experience was confusing and frustrating for some Wikimedians, but that wasn't the end of the project.  The work for institutions once contributions were received was massive.  Over 13,000 photographs were submitted by 74 participating teams at the fifteen different institutions, documenting about 6,200 pieces of art.  While these 102 photographers had done the hard work of capturing the images, it was up to the institutions to validate, tag, caption, and prepare them for Wikipedia's use.  This was a herculean effort, and some institutions found themselves unable to deal with the data received in a timeframe that also accommodated the participants' desire to see the fruits of their labor.  As Brooklyn Museum data processor Erin Sweeney explained, she had a ten-step process for determining whether an image was a valid contribution.  After determining validity, Sweeney added tags to the images to identify the objects with which they were associated, the number of points the team received for the images, and more.  Eventually, all of the work was completed, but when the dust settled, the overall effort for institutions involved in Wikipedia Loves Art was so great that many saw it as a collaboration that could not continue as it was originally produced.

 

Wikipedia Loves Art is a good example of a collaboration that has all the right elements: a scalable, distributed data collection model, a goal that is appealing to institutions and participants alike, interesting work for participants to do, and an institutionally-managed platform to keep the project on track.  But ultimately, the project was overambitious, and the institutions involved found themselves overwhelmed by the amount of work required to manage what had seemed at the outset like a simple partnership.  The short time frame helped institutions see Wikipedia Loves Art as an experiment and quickly learn from the challenges of the colalboration.  The one-month campaign model allowed this experiment to succeed without causing too many headaches and allowed institutions and participants alike to reflect on what worked and didn't.

 

In contrast, around the same time, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum launched a small pilot of a collaborative research project that was tightly controlled and was being rolled out slowly on an institutionally-driven schedule.  The Children of the Lodz Ghetto, like Wikipedia Loves Art, is an artifact-based project... but the similarity ends there.  For many years, the Holocaust Museum has provided research tools and services that are somewhat accessible for non-academics who would like to access survivors' registries or find out more information about various incidents related to the Holocaust.  Researchers have made specific requests for survivors to offer information or stories related to their experiences, but the majority of the Holocaust's audience are not survivors.  One of the Museum's top priorities is educating schoolchildren about the Holocaust, and the institution has been a leader in the use of educational technologies to connect students to the lessons of the Holocaust.  The Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project is an educational program in which students investigate the paths taken by over 13,000 children who signed a school album in the Lodz Ghetto in 1941.  Using a subset of the online research databases used by professional Holocaust researchers, the students try to find out what happened to individuals in the album by running a variety of searches on different spellings of names of children across many geographic locations and concentration camps.

 

To participate, users must register, and for the first several months of the project, registration was primarily advertised to small groups of university students and teachers, and by April of 2009, there were 145 active user accounts.  Once registered, users could select a name from the album to research or continue on research started by other users.  The database queries are sorted into timeframes (ghetto, labor camps, concentration camps, liberation) so that users can progressively add information about individuals' location and status throughout the 1940s.  Eventually, the goal is to have a record of each child's story, starting from those signatures in 1941.

 

For the institution, the Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project provides valuable information about the children in the album. As the project website says, "Now the museum needs your help."  However, this help comes at an incredible (but acceptable) cost.  Staff vet every entry in the research project, and in the first few months of 2009, only 26% of user-contributed submissions were validated as accurate.  The rest were incorrect or possible, but inconclusive.  However, despite the fact that staff researchers could have done this research more accurately (and more quickly) on their own, the value of researchers engaging in discussion with participants and helping them learn how to be researchers was deemed high enough to make this project worth the low quality of data submitted.  Participants noted in particular how much they enjoyed and learned from commenting on each other's research and receiving feedback from staff and other participants alike.  In an evaluation, one participant commented that, "Having their help made this project less stressful and made it feel like we were working as a team.  Much of the time, our peers allowed our research to continue without any dead ends.  When we were stuck, it was comforting to know that the United States Holocaust Museum and our peers had our backs." 

 

The educational experience for participants in the Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project in terms of research skill-building and content learning has been very high.  Additionally, performing research increased participants' emotional engagement and perspective on the Holocaust, as many commented that they now had tangible, specific people and incidents to connect to the horror of the time. 

 

Museum staff are continuing to tweak the project as time goes on, in particular, to encourage a community of self-motivated researchers to sustain the project on their own.  David Klevan, XXX, believes that the research can improve in quality and the community can effectively self-police entries if they can grow to a sustainable level (which he defines as about 1000 registered users).  Because the project is built to support and integrate peer review and active collaboration on individual research efforts, it is certainly possible that the Children of the Lodz Ghetto research project will grow into one that is self-sustaining and can provide real value to institutional and research audiences as well as to the participants themselves.

 

 

Collaborations for Experimental Audience Experiences

 

So far, we've looked at collaborations that have mostly focused on the experience and needs of institutions and participants, but not audiences.  There are some cases when institutions use collaboratory platforms to push the boundaries not of the participant experience but of the audience experience.  Just as some contributory models give museums license to include more personal voices in institutional content, collaborative models may be used by institutions that want to take a less precious view on museum artifacts and collections.  This section explores two projects from art institutions on opposite sides of the US.

 

The city of Bellevue, Washington, has hosted a bi-annual sculpture exhibition in civic sites since 1992.  Each exhibition is accompanied by a teen project, in which local teens work with art educators to produce their own sculptures on the same theme as the professional exhibition.  In 2008, exhibit developer Seth! Leary worked with the Bellevue arts coordinator and the teens to take their work in a unique direction, using the collaboration as an opportunity to explore what it means to engage with "public" art.  Rather than displaying the teen sculptures at the exhibition site, the teens' creation went on the road, traveling throughout the Seattle area at the whims of regular people who found the sculptures, took them to new sites, and tracked their movement.  Each sculpture had a goal written on a tag, explaining that it wanted to go to the Seattle Aquarium (a whale sculpture), a cathedral (a sculpture of "death in a box"), and other landmarks in the Seattle area.  The tags also stated that the sculptures hoped to return back to Bellevue City Hall by the end of the summer for a final exhibition. 

 

The sculptures traveled and were tracked through the geocaching network.  Geocaching is an activity like going on a treasure hunt; geocachers use GPS devices to track down the location of "caches" which are filled with neat stuff like coins, logbooks, and yes, sculptures made by teenagers.  There is a centralized website at geocaching.com that geocachers use to track the things they have found and planted in the world, and the Bellevue teen sculptures were each tracked on individual pages on geocaching.com.  Hundreds of people handled, moved, and hung out with the sculptures, sharing photos and stories on the web.  Some people even documented time they spent fixing parts of the sculptures that had been damaged in travel.  Taking this approach connected the sculpture program to a new and very different audience (geocachers) and sent art out into the community rather than closing it inside City Hall.  The people who found and traveled with the sculptures engaged with them emotionally and personally, and these were not necessarily people who would have ever visited the sculptures on exhibition.

 

Of course, the reason that the Bellevue arts commission felt comfortable exposing the sculptures to potential damage, harm, and even loss was the fact that they were produced by teens in a city program instead of commissioned by professional artists.  The city staff felt (very reasonably) that they had to protect the professional art in certain ways that made travel impossible, but they didn't feel that way about the art created by the teens.  Fortunately, the teens were aware of the project plan from the outset, so no one was tricked into sending out a sculpture that he or she wanted to preserve, though there were likely teens who were not thrilled when sculptures returned worse for the wear or not at all.  Hopefully, the 2008 teen sculpture experiment helped the Bellevue arts team think more expansively about other ways that they could share art with the public in innovative, flexible ways. (GET QUOTES FROM TAMAR TO IMPROVE)

 

Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition was a collaborative project at the Brooklyn Museum of Art with the ambitious goal of creating an exhibition that was about a data process rather than a collection of objects.  The Wisdom of Crowds, a book by social scientist James Surowiecki, argued that large groups of non-experts could be collectively "wise" if individuals in the group were able to make decisions without overly influencing each other's choices.  Click! was a project meant to test how Surowiecki's theory might bear out in the subjective experience of judging art.  Click! was an open call photography exhibition, in which people submitted photographs on the topic of "the changing face of Brooklyn."  These photographs were judged in terms of quality and adherence to the theme on a sliding scale by citizen-curators using an online platform which was optimized to reduce the influence users could have on each other (no cumulative scores, no comments, a forced random path through the photos, etc.).  In the end, the photos were displayed, both virtually and physically, sized relative to their rank in the judging scheme.  In the physical exhibition, the sizes of the prints were fixed, but on the web, audience members were able to resize the photos contextually by changing data criteria, looking at the photos resized based on geographic location or self-reported art knowledge of judges.  Interestingly, the top ten photos selected by judges of all levels of self-reported art knowledge included eight of the same images, suggesting that "crowds" of people with little art knowledge are likely to make comparable choices to those made by experts.

 

Click! was a collaboration between an institution, crowd theory researchers, local photographers, and museum website visitors/curators.  Its goal was not to find the best photos submitted by photographers; there were no prizes awarded nor preferential treatment granted to top winners beyond the size of their prints.  Instead, the goal was to perform a public research project about crowd-based decision-making.  As Shelley Bernstein, organizer of the show, put it, “it’s a conceptual idea put on the wall.”

 

Conceptual ideas don't necessarily make pretty exhibits in a traditional sense. The Museum's contemporary art curator Eugenie Tsai commented that, “[Click!]’s about data, and making the data visual. It’s not really a photography show in the way I would curate a photography show.” Shelley and Eugenie were both explicit about the fact that Brooklyn made decisions in favor of the research and against the most beautiful exposition of the art. All the photos were printed with the same process, and their sizes were determined by the judging process, not aesthetic preferences. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post commented that the resulting show was not that visually impressive, but they were comparing Click! to photo exhibitions, which Shelley and Eugenie would deem inappropriate. It would be more correct to compare it to data visualizations like tag clouds or spark charts.

 

Click! wasn’t just a research project; it was a deliberate attempt by the museum to test something and present the results, saying, “don’t judge this as art.” Not everybody believes or wants to hear that. Some of the photographers who submitted their work to Click! were not thrilled to learn that they would not be able to control the way their photos would be printed, and some were skeptical about the validity of the public curation platform.  The collaboration was a forcefit to the institutional goals.  Fortunately, according to Shelley, her team's open and clear communication with the artists about the project helped keep the participants feeling positively. And some participants didn't care if their work was being exhibited as data; as one photographer commented, for her, the thrill was about having her photo in the museum.  The various collaborators--staff, photographers, and citizen curators--all got different things out of the exhibition process.  For visitors, the experience in the Click! gallery was appreciably more social than in other parts of the museum, due both to the publicity around the exhibition and the fact that so many people came to see the photos they had helped judge or create.  Click! may have generated dynamic tension between what the museum wanted to present and what participants, visitors, and reporters wanted to experience, but the institutional team stood by their initial goals as a valuable experiment.  Ultimately, experimenting with the questions of how collaborators can be engaged in curatorial process and whether crowds of visitors can be "wise" evaluators of art were the most important parts of the Click! experience from the institutional perspective.

 

 

Collaboration on the Floor

 

We've looked at several examples of collaborative projects in which participants work with institutions in the context of innovative exhibition, research, and design processes.  But all of these are process-based, which lead to a couple of undesirable outcomes.  First, the focus on process often leads to diminished attention to the product.  We worry more about the participant experience than the audience experience, because the active collaboration is where all the "work" happens.  Second, processes are time-limited by design; they progress through time towards an eventual product.  This means that participants can only be engaged for a limited amount of time, and some kinds of participation (for example, judging photographs for Click!) are confined to a short, fixed time period.  In Click!, the Brooklyn Museum found that citizen curators spent an average of 22 seconds evaluating each image, compared to a span of 3 seconds spent examining artworks in the physical museum.  Despite the fact that the participatory function may have enhanced visitors' engagement with the artwork, the participatory process had a well-defined beginning and end, which prevented subsequent visitors from experiencing Museum artwork in the same engaged way.

 

But what if the museum integrated this participatory activity--judging artworks--into the regular visitor experience?   What if regular visitors could, in the course of their visit, collaborate with the institution to co-create new knowledge about the artifacts on display?  Integrating collaboration into public-facing museum experiences ameliorates both of the process challenges explored above.  It makes collaboration available to anyone, anytime.   And because floor experiences are explicitly and directly audience-facing, it forces the institution to design collaborative platforms that are more appealing to spectators.  Just as the contributory platforms described in the last section often promote a virtuous cycle by which participants are enticed out of passive spectating into action and then model that experience for others, on-the-floor collaborative platforms can have the same effect.  I believe that these kinds of collaborative projects are the most fruitful for visitors and institutions alike, as long as they can be sustainably managed as they evolve over time.

 

On the web, Wikipedia is a good example of this kind of evolving, "live" collaborative platform.  At any time, non-contributing users can access and use the content for research purposes, while behind-the-scenes, authors and editors collaborate to improve the content on display. The collaborative workspace is a click away from the audience-facing content--close enough to observe and join in on the process, but distanced enough to keep the spectator experience coherent and attractive.  The ideal collaborative floor experience is comparable: appealing to visitors, with a thin and permeable division between collaborating and spectating. 

 

Sometimes putting collabortion on the floor is as easy as bringing your process out into the open.  When the Ontario Science Centre was developing the Weston Family Innovation Centre, they went through an extensive and prolonged prototyping phase.  They developed a technique called Rapid Idea Generation (RIG) in which teams of staff would physically build ideas for exhibits, programs, mission statements, and more out of junk in a matter of hours.  While the RIG started as an internal process, the team started to show off the final prototypes on the floor, integrate visitors into their building teams, and ultimately, to hold entire RIGs on the museum floor in public space.  The RIGs were highly collaborative, often bringing together executives, designers, floor staff, shop staff, and visitors to design things in an open-ended, team-based format.  By bringing the process onto the floor, the staff became more comfortable with some of the core ideas behind the Innovation Centre (in which visitors would be encouraged to make crazy things all the time) and shared their work with visitors in a format that was structured, creative, and highly enjoyable.   

 

In other cases, collaboration can be baked into the visitor-facing product, the exhibition or program itself.  In 2009, I worked with a group of graduate students at the University of Washington to design an exhibition that would be entirely collaborative as a visitor-facing experience.  The exhibition, called Advice: Give it, Get it, Flip it, Fuck it, was developed using a highly protracted but standard exhibit design process that did not include participants outside the class.  But the product was a platform in which visitors could give each other advice in a variety of collaborative formats, including both facilitated and open experiences.  Advice was only open for one weekend, but during that time, we observed (and measured) the ways that visitors to the University of Washington student center in which it was housed co-created a large volume of interpersonal content.

 

The Advice exhibition offered four main experiences--two that were facilitated, and two that were unfacilitated. The facilitated experiences were an advice booth, at which you could receive real-time advice from children, money managers, tattoo artists, and more, and a button-making station, where a gallery attendant would help you play a simple game to make a custom button featuring your own advice "madlib" composed of your own nouns and verbs rolled into classic advice phrases. The unfacilitated experiences (discussed in more detail below) involved visitors writing their own pieces of advice on post-its and walls and answering each other's questions asynchronously.

 

At any time, there were two facilitators in the exhibit--one for the advice booth, and the other for the buttons. This might make Advice sound more like an educational program than an exhibit, or like a failure on the unfacilitated front. But the exhibit team did something novel. First, they replaced staff with volunteers--some entirely spontaneous--at the advice booth. Like the Living Library project, the advice booth was a platform that connected strangers with strangers--not just staff with strangers. One eight year-old enjoyed the advice-giving experience so much that he came back the following day for another shift in the booth!  These facilitators were collaborators with visitors, talking with them, listening to them, and playing with them.  Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it. And in Advice, the activities for staff were interesting and specific enough that a really eclectic mix of volunteers could perform them successfully.

 

While the facilitated experiences pulled many spectators out of their solitude and into participation, the unfacilitated post-it walls were the place where visitor-to-visitor collaboration thrived.  In Advice, the setup was simple: the exhibit team came up with a few seed questions, like "How do you heal a broken heart?," and put them up on signs behind glass. Then, they offered different shapes and colors of post-its, as well as pens and markers, for people to write responses.  While this is a basic contributory activity, I consider Advice to be collaborative because the contributions steered and redirected the content of the entire exhibition.

 

Post-it Interaction

The engagement with the post-it walls was very high. Random passers-by got hooked and spent twenty minutes carefully reading each post-it, writing responses, creating chains of conversation and spin-off questions and pieces of advice. It's worth noting that the exhibit space was not optimal--it was a hallway separating the lobby of the student center from a dining hall. The previous exhibit in this space was a very provocative art exhibit about sexual violence, and yet in our brief preliminary site survey we saw almost no one stop to look at the art. Not so for the post-its. The Advice exhibit hooked maintenance staff, students, athletes, men, women--it really seemed to span the range of people passing through.

 

There were 230 responses to the nine staff-created seed questions, and in a more free-form area, visitors submitted 28 of their own questions which yielded 147 responses. Some of the advice was incredibly specific; for example, one person wrote a post-it that asked, "Should a 17 year old who is going to college in the fall have a curfew this summer?" That post-it received 9 follow-up post-its, including a response from another parent in the same situation. Others stood and copied pieces of advice (especially classes to take and books to read) carefully into personal notebooks.

 

It might seem surprising that people would take the time to write up questions on post-its when there is no guarantee that someone will respond, and very low likeliness that someone will respond while you are still in the gallery. Collaboration is not guaranteed, especially in a low traffic hallway in an odd area of the UW student center. But the impulse to participate was high and the threshold for doing so was very, very low. The post-its and pens were right there. The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.

 

People felt very comfortable not only adding their own advice but also critiquing others'. We saw many instances when someone would write "lol" or "love this" directly onto a previously posted post-it. People also asked follow-up questions. For example, one person recommended "grappa and Bessie Smith records" as a cure for a broken heart, to which another responded, "Who's Bessie Smith?" The query was answered by yet a third person, who wrote, "Uh, only the greatest singer of the 20's 'I need a little sugar in my bowl.'"  The evolving collaborative content stream created a growing story that became progressively more valuable over time.

 

Finally, it's worth noting that offering a range of contributory activities can be useful in motivating collaborative participation overall.  In Advice, there were many forms of talk-back: the post-its, the bathroom wall, the book, the phone, the website. Each of these took pressure off the others as a visitor participation outlet, and the overall result was a coherent, diverse mix of on-topic visitor contributions.  My favorite example of this was the "bathroom wall" component, in which visitors could scrawl with marker on what appeared to be a bathroom stall door. At first, I didn't understand why this was necessary. If visitors could write on post-its anywhere in the exhibit, why did they also need a bathroom wall?Advice Exhibit Bathroom Wall

 

But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was "anything goes" by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls. They were totally focused on the questions and answers at hand. I think the bathroom wall made this possible by being an alternative for those who wanted to be a little less focused and just have fun with sharpies.

 

The Advice team also offered a guest comment book (sparsely used) for people to offer comments about the whole exhibit. There were also multiple ways to follow up or submit content online or by phone. All of these ways together constructed a landscape of visitor participation that supported a large number of people participating in ways that felt most appropriate for them.

 

By baking a collaborative platform into the exhibition, the Advice staff were able to reduce their ongoing management role to organizing the post-its in appealing ways and highlighting visitor content they perceived as particularly compelling.  While this was a small experimental project, I believe it is a model for the potential for museums to pursue collaborative floor experiences that can be highly distributed, available and appealing to visitors, and low impact from a resources perspective.

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