Make Museums Like…

I’ve been pouring over all the stuff that came out of the MW2009 conference. There’s far too much for me to talk about individually, yet I don’t really want to just post a load of links. So I’m going to talk about the one that caught my attention the most.

It is pure chance it came from Nina Simon’s workshop.

Shelley Mannion’s blog post about the session spoke about question of what you could transform a museum into something else. I think a liberal use of metaphor was involved, but hey, I’m game.

Shelley group chose Nature, as in.

• Engages all the senses
• Diversity of environment, terrain, landscape
• Place of surprise and discovery
• Dynamic and changing
• Vast and awe-inspiring

One group chose Fantasy Baseball (which is like Fantasy Football over here, right? Pick a team, players get point over the season, most points win?). The idea seemed to generate a couple of laughs, but when I say it and call it the Death of the Curator, it causes all kinds of reaction. I mean, thousands of people picking their favourites and pretending they are the manager?

Anyway, I’m going to play now, and I don’t have a group.

Make museums like: Magazines

Or, more accurately for my tastes, make museums like Monocle Magazine.

• A magazine structure with similar responsibilities. An Editor-in-Chief like Tyler Brûlé, section editors, correspondents, freelancers etc. Every gets their name on what they create.
• Lots of different content, structured. Okay, Monocle has five general topics, but there are about fifty different things in each topic of various sizes, from features to small columns. I pick up the copy I have here and under BUSINESS is a report of Arbil in Iraq, a two-page spread on the brands involved in airport security, ten short articles on ten businesses not suffering from economic collapse and three slightly longer columns on three business as examples of the future of retail in Japan. Its amazing.
• Top level design and “format”. Monocle magazine looks good. It always does. Their design team has a lot to do and they do it well. I imagine they’re paid handsomely. Every edition looks good and within the desired format. This has got me thinking in a different tangent about the production of an exhibition being the same as publishing. May explore further in another post, but you get the idea of inserting content into a structure like a magazine, right? The better magazines have very strict style-sheets to give a coherence to everything inside, especially with lots of different subjects. Bad magazines don’t have two pages that look the same nor have two editions have anything in common with umpteen different fonts, hundreds of different column layouts, random splashes of colour with as many badly taken photoshopped images crammed into every space. There’s also the side of formatting which is the physical: the size, the shape, the quality of the paper, the number of pages. all of which slight changes can make a huge difference. Like when The Guardian changed from a broadsheet format to a thinner Berliner format. They’re sales shot up because of the easier to handle paper for reading on planes/trains as well as aligning themselves to be more like European papers as per they general pro-European/international stance. “Format” is one of the most important priorities. Lets the writers/journalists/(curators) get on with being creative and filling that format.
• Twelve Monthly Issues. This is where I give people an aneurysm. Monocle does an edition once a month. How often does a museum do a complete turnaround? A temporary exhibition once every couple of months? I’m saying museums need to do massive changes, whole New Editions, once a month to keep a readership interested.  I’ll let you work out how to pay for it.
• Something Worth Collecting. Now, I admit most magazine are cheap trash to be read once and recycled. Monocle differs because it looks great, has high production values, it’s as thick as a book and it shows me the world. First edition copies of issues one of Wallpaper* Magazine (Tyler Brûlé’s previous job before Monocle) are extremely collectible because they are worth something. In museum terms, the product on offer is an experience. Make people want to collect the experience. Make them something tangible to say This is Mine. Not merchandising, but an intended object. I go out and buy Monocle Magazine because it’s worth something. In 40 years time, I’ll be able to say that whilst there monetary value may have increased and they’re becoming increasingly rare, it was the excellent level of magazine journalism and quality of design during an era of insipid media cultures. Museum experiences shouldn’t be memorable, they should be collectible.

That’s five things, “which require little or no modification of visitors’ existing behaviors”. I’m damned sure that most visitors buy magazines. I’m sure I could think of many other points, like magazine racks in shops covering a wide variety of topics and demographics other than “family” or the priority of reporting first and offending second, but this would turn into a thesis.