IMA Chief Information Officer Rob Stein threw down a pretty good defence in response to Nina Simon’s article: Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto. It was a good defence, but I saw a very different attack.

Nina preaches a particular brand of participatory design that I only partially understand myself, but I guess this is why Nina gets paid to give talks on the subject. I understand it as a movement in museum ideology from passive to active to social. This last part is exceedingly difficult to manufacture. What Nina is aiming for is getting a dialogue going that comes so easily in that mass-social-experiment known as Web 2.0, where complete strangers form communities over common themes. The trick is getting that 2.0 goodness off the Internet and into the physical museum. There’s no point in having a dualism of high web-based participation and a passive museum space. Nina fears this becoming a widening gulf. So do I: my beloved AR can’t happen otherwise.

In most museums, technologists are still seen as service providers, not experience developers. They live in well-defined (and self-protected) silos. There are stereotypes flying in many directions—that curators won’t give up authority, that technologists don’t respect traditional museum practice, that educators are too preachy, that marketers just want to get more live bodies in the door.

This is why Nina dreams of a museum that’s also a bar. It an attempt to move museuming into a established model community structure. (Nina – if that ever gets off the ground, I’ll drop everything and come be a barman/curator)

There’s nothing I think isn’t fair in what Nina said. Rob called it “misinformed” and I disagree. It’s justifiable to base a critique upon a single visit. It may be the toughest challenge, but if you can’t grab someone on their first visit, how likely are you to get a second. It’s brutal, I know, but people have 300 other things vying for their attention. So if someone goes to your gallery and doesn’t feel the same involvement as the Internet, that could be considered a curatorial weakness.

This is why I disagree with IMA Director of Education Linda Duke’s point:

First off, I’d like to argue against lumping all sorts of museums together in this discussion. I think the relationship between virtual and in-person offerings is necessarily different when the museum is an art museum.

Standing Order 6: Don’t Fork (the Insurgency). I believe a museum is a museum. If we start finding reason to exclude art museums, then why not maritime museums or archaeological museums? Every taxonomy of museum has different issues. Hell, every institution has different issues. We’re not dealing with magic bullets or surgical scalpels here. We’re talking about the movement of museums towards the future. That movement is going to stagger and lurch. It would be a shame if the lurch made the technology side of museums merely an accessory, in an art museum or otherwise.

This is why I harp on about Augmented Reality. This is why Nina was talking about loyalty cards. (Not “interactives”, whatever that means. That words sounds so 90s, like “multimedia”). These things can be homogenised right through a museum.

When I talked with Rob Stein, the IMA’s CIO, about my frustration, he suggested that “institutional change has to start somewhere.”

Rob was clearly a bit sore about Nina visiting the IMA as a regular visitor and coming up with this very hard criticism. And it was very hard. Not harsh or snarky. Hard. That was Nina in full cultural critic mode, analytical and evaluative. There are lessons to learn, as proven by the large amount of discussion it generated.

Do I think the IMA deserved it? No. There are far worse museums committing far worse sins. I do believe it has to start somewhere and the IMA is doing great work. Looking at the list Rob made, things like Project IMA or the “Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface” have some really exciting elements in this field. I can’t think of many museums seriously trying to make this much effort to establish web-and-reality communities. As Rob states about innovation in museums:

At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at.  Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.

So, Nina went into a gallery and found it sparse compared to the online experience. Rob states the what they have done (albeit, in short term projects rather than total museum integration. Fair comment?) and then talks about the very interesting things they’re working on to get that experience. I like to think that they’ll “get around to that sparse gallery space”. It has to start somewhere.

Nina gives us a warning about a potential ghettoising of museum tech. I think it’s unfortunate that it was the IMA that inspired such a warning. Rob tells us where they are with the current museum tech movement. Where we are and what we should be concerned about. Two points along a line we can make judgements from.  There’s a lot to learn here for us well-informed museum people, especially when we need to start thinking like the uninformed public that can’t drag out important members of the museum staff. Was is it that we’ve learnt?

Shelly?

I think we can be doing better.

As we always should be. Let’s hug it out bitch.