Today is the Awesome Nina Simon’s birthday. I’m more than happy to fulfil her birthday wish of answering a question.
How could a museum get better the more people use it?
The question comes from the analogy of the web/museum 2.0 label. Wed 2.0’s “architecture of participation” has more than enough examples, what are the museum equivalents?
Two things first: The question says “How could”, so I’m allowed to be as liberally creative with my answer; the other is “better”
Better?
What does a better museum look like? One with high visitor numbers? Increasing visitor number surely means the museum is getting better as an unused museum is surely a poor thing. Maybe I should be thinking in marketing/business terms and getting better with more users is dependent upon the goals and objectives of the museum? We want 2000 local schoolchildren to do our education program. We would be better if we had 6000.
These example don’t make any reference to participation apart from passive attendance. I should include the 2.0 set of relationships between Museum and Mob. Something more than just increasing the statistics of object and observer. To be “better”, there must be problems/issues and therefore solutions. Museums have plenty of problems. Museum 2.0 is involving users in the solutions. More users, more solutions. Or at least a solution based upon an average.
So what are museum’s problems? What could be done better?
There are two starting points, I guess. One is complete transparency. Opening up, declaring all your problems, shouting “We’re doomed!” and then try to motivate your users to offer solutions. The other would be to construct the problem as a puzzle or game (a la Superstruct) and act as carefully influencing guides to your users to see where they end up.
Out of all museum problems, is one of them a lack of knowledge? I get a bit cynical when it comes to crowd-sourcing knowledge. Not because of any elite sense that I would only listen to academics, but I struggle to see what obtaining 1000 people’s thoughts on a particular object achieves. I know I say this after quite liking The Odditorium’s encouragement of creative responses, but Museum 2.0 is what happens after. Are all those labels kept? What happens when they are all put in a folder? Are they Beautiful, Emotional or Useful or are they just adding to the clutter?
Are they thrown away? If they all are, then the users are making anything better than your numbers and the exercise is redundant. If a few are kept, say the ten most interesting labels are curated, then you didn’t need 2.0 participants – you just need more interesting people in your museum.
Keep them all, keep half or none. Is this participation making the museum better or solving its problems? I guess it was published in Seb Chan’s blog, and received more blog attention from me and Nina so I guess that’s a benefit. Maybe it could spark new ideas because of it. Baby steps.
So what are the problems? Money? (Maybe a bit tacky). Collection Management? Using an increasing amount of users to find what is Beautiful, Emotional or Useful based upon participation with objects. If something is in your collection and it’s never been seen, nobody cares about it and/or its broken, maybe you could consult several thousand people as to whether or not its truly is a Museum Piece. You would have a better, more efficient, less wasteful museum.
(Okay, okay, you deaccesioning police. Take all these objects not wanted by one museum and put them on a museum-only eBay that only museums can purchase from. Store all the objects in ghost boxes.)
Would a user’s experience be enhanced by this? It could mean they wouldn’t experience the bad. It would mean that what is in the museum has been decided to be worth something by the wisdom of crowds…
Doesn’t look like a lot of fun, does it?
Problems made better with more people… Painting the building? General maintenance? Many hands make light work-type jobs? An incredible army of microvolunteers working to make the museum a better place? Well, instead of flooding the foundation, how about the flooding the top? Microtrustees, each paying a small amount of money (helping the museum no end) to get one vote in the running of the museum (making it better). More users, more income, more rounded direction etc.
I may have not given a satisfactory conclusion, then again, my hazy definition of a “better museum” would probably need more than my solitary opinion.
Happy Birthday Nina. You’re a Star.
Thanks, Pete for your thoughtful and generous post. I take issue with only one bit (besides the fact that you didn’t solve my problem or give a smashing winner-take-all example) – the idea that if you only save the ten best you just need more interesting people. In all cases of cultural production (certainly art), you need lots of content, interesting and dull, to create the landscape and help you make value assessments. The trick isn’t to get the best people, it’s to create the environment most likely to encourage people to improve. That’s what I learned from long and torturous years at good, bad, and ugly slam poetry open mics.
I know it was glib, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting that the Powerhouse Museum was going to throw anything away, but I stand by my remark, even if it was ill-constructed. If a mass-participation project’s outcomes could be whittled down to the best-ten, then that means (truthfully or otherwise) that there was a lot of clutter, and most of your participants shouldn’t have bothered. I suppose what I was meaning to say that a top-ten results shouldn’t be possible.
I feel even this action goes against a 2.0 mindset as they still boil down to a singular curator’s whims. “Curators” in web 2.0 are the ones who are shifting through to find content they like. They don’t tend to alter the source of the content.
I suppose the other point I should have outright stated is I think there’s a danger of museums (or anything) getting worse with more users, when social microcosms form and act in very strange ways, like the “human flesh search engine”. How can museums get better with more users? By more users solving problems without creating more…
I thought I did come up with an example- Microtrustees. Look at UK football team Ebbsfleet United, “run” entirely by a subscription social network. The massive increase in income, support and participation in the “ownership” or something (they suggest team lineups) meant that Ebbsfleet won their first trophy.
How was your birthday? I saw the ziplines.
“I struggle to see what obtaining 1000 people’s thoughts on a particular object achieves.” Sounds to me like you are not asking the right questions. Ask a question that you don’t know the answer to – better yet, one that no one does. And don’t just collect thoughts – get them to build on each other, a la World Without Oil, Superstruct or Ruby’s Bequest. Get some collective intelligence going, and your struggle may be over!
OBJECT. A particular OBJECT.
Did… you read this article?