Post on 07-May-2015
description
Flickr Credit ~adforce1
CONVERSATION
STRATEGIES TO CULTIVATE MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT
& COLLABORATION
WITH CULTURAL AUDIENCES
Robert SteinDeputy Director for Research,Technology, and EngagementIndianapolis Museum of Art@rjstein - http://rjstein.com
CAN MUSEUMSDENT THE UNIVERSE?
Why is your community better off because it has a museum? The answer must necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence.
Stephen Weil, Making Museums MatterFlickr Credit ~Sweetie187
TOWARDS
ENGAGEMENT
Art museums have for decades described their role as interpreter of cultural inheritance. In our new socially networked world, interpretation is no longer a one- or two-way street. Transparency changes the museum dynamic from registrarial fortress to public square. Interactivity allows for questioning, augmentation, and dispute of official interpretations by scholars and informed observers. Art museums host conversations among experts and enthusiasts, rather than privileged glimpses into the working methods of curators. Works of art themselves ‘converse’ through loans and exhibitions. Teachers, students, and museum staff and volunteers exchange ideas about the objects in our care and the experiences to be had in our facilities and on our websites. Visitor comments and market research initiate conversations that permeate the former comfort zone of institutional remove. Blogging by museum staff and by others about museums opens up new engagement, exchange, and conversation.
Maxwell Anderson, The Art Newspaper, June 2010.
GATHER
STEWARD
CONVERSE
If museums had just one purpose, our jobs would be much easier. But museums address multiple needs, regardless of the era in which we find ourselves. For art museums, those needs include collecting and caring for examples of cultural heritage and providing the public with avenues to understanding the intentions of artists in their time and the relevance of works to the present. But the Web has altered this last-mentioned obligation, from dispensing information alone to soliciting new forms of participation. And while museum professionals will always offer the “official” interpretation of objects in our care, we also should welcome the opportunity to attract the notice and to encourage the engagement of people anywhere.
Maxwell Anderson, Dallas Museum of Art
GIVING THE
PUBLIC A VOICE
In a world shaped by immediate access to a vast sea of digital data, museums will serve as: sources, sharing information emerging from their collecting and research; aggregators, finding and integrating information from the many sources touched by their work; curators, selecting and annotating content to help people find reliable information; and educators, providing context and commentary. Technology will enable museums to scale up these core functions, which are already embedded in their work.
In the future, museums also will become mentors, recruiting and training people to contribute and interpret content; and moderators, encouraging people to engage with content, sharing views, opinions, and their own expertise. And museums will continue to be welcome havens of respite and retreat, where people can unplug, disconnect, and immerse themselves in silence, beauty, and wonder.
Elizabeth Merritt, Center for the Future of Museums
AGGREGATORS,
CURATORS, MENTORS,
AND MORE
PARTICIPATORY
CULTUREA participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another…
Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.”
The mass media, by and large, do a bad job of it, and the proliferation and success of demagogues at hijacking the public debate have made it almost impossible for people to disagree respectfully…
Making museums places that you go to in order to be an active citizen is something I’d love to see more of us attempt. That means making space available, making time available, and making our ears available to hear what matters to our constituents.
Ed RodleyMuseum of Science Boston
CULTURE HAS A
NEED FOR
DIALOG
ARE WE FAILING?
Empirical data supports the view that visitors spend little time at individual exhibit components (often a matter of a few seconds and seldom as much as one minute); seldom read labels; usually stop at less than half the components at an exhibit; are more likely to use trial-and-error methods at interactive exhibits than to read instructions; that children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than adults, and that attention to exhibits declines sharply after about half an hour.
From Learning in the Museum by George E. Hein, Routledge, 1998, p. 138.
Studies of 150 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a mean time of less than 30 seconds viewing an object to be typical, with most spending significantly less time. Douglas Worts, former interpretive planner and audience researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario and museologist, summarizes this behavior as “grazing” and theorizes that the pattern may arise from a mismatch in the goals of curators and visitors. It is relatively rare to watch a visitor spend more than a minute with any individual artwork.
Spending Time on Art” by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith in Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 19, Number 2, 2001.On the Brink of Irrelevance? Art Museums in Contemporary Society” by Douglas Worts, 2003.
Flickr Credit ~Petereck
GRAZING
Enrich Permanent Collection
Time spent looking typically averages
between 12 and 35 seconds
STUDIES AT
THE IMA
THE VALUE OF MUSEUMS IS NOT A SURE THING
The work of organizing museums has not kept pace with the times. The United States is far behind the spirit of its own people…
This can not long continue. The museum of the past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts.
Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums of the Future. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums of the Future. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
A NURSERY
OF LIVING
THOUGHTS
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
Flickr Credit ~gerlos
ON THE LOOKOUT
FOR ENGAGEMENT
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT
PRESENCE…is it real?
The Museum of Modern Art, 2010
PRESENCEWalter Benjamin, 1936
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
AURAWalter Benjamin, 1936
I LOVE THIS ROCK
I LOVE THIS ROCK
I LOVE THIS ROCK
I LOVE THIS ROCK
AUTHENTICITY IS
THE CORE STRENTH
OF MUSEUMS
Flickr Credit ~paulwatson
EPIPHANY
OPTIMIZING FOR
It probably has a million definitions. It's the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way.
Maya Angelou
EPIPHANY
“… moments that leave a mark on people’s lives”
Jean-Paul Sartre
EPIPHANIES
Flickr Credit ~measter2
WHAT’S
MODEL?
THE RIGHT
ENGAGEMENT
Flickr Credit ~shutterhacks
A REVIEW OF
THE LITERATURE
1.Pekarick and Doering2.Samis3.Csikszentmihalyi4.Falk
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
Developed by Andrew Pekarick and Zahava Doering at the Smithsonian Office for Policy and Analysis
Results from a series of surveys of exhibitions at the national museums
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
Visitors tend to favor interpretive materials that focus on one of either ideas, objects, or people
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
IdeasGaining information or insight
Enriching my understanding
ObjectsSeeing rare, valuable, or uncommon things
PeopleFinding out what its like to live in a different time or place
Getting a sense of the everyday lives of others
ReflectionReflecting on the meaning of what I see
Being moved by beauty
These predispositions tend to drive the experiences they seek out – and are highly correlated to exit-satisfaction results for those types of experiences.
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
“Visitors are happiest when they encounter experiences that are unexpectedly satisfying”
IDEAS
PEOPLE
OBJECTS
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove
“Experientially richer visits seem to be rated higher”
Flickr Credit ~da100fotos
ATTRACT, ENGAGE, FLIP
“Most of the visitors we observed and interviewed revealed a primary orientation, but—if given the right contents or presentation—could flip to unexpected discoveries of a different type.”
VISUAL VELCRO
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya
VISUAL VELCRO
To illustrate, let us imagine the humble Velcro patch. It consists of a strip of tiny loops, originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface. Now imagine a sensory impression, in this case an artwork, arriving in your perceptual field. Unless the visual impression has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific LTM “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.”It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.
Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.
quinnanya/
Photo Credit Alan Levine
The work of interpretation, then, is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception.
Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.
Flickr Credit ~samhames
Flow
Flickr Credit ~samhames
FlowThe flow state is an optimal state
of intrinsic motivation, where the
person is fully immersed in what he or
she is doing. This is a feeling everyone
has at times, characterized by a feeling
of great absorption, engagement,
fulfillment, and skill—and during which
temporal concerns (time, food, ego-
self, etc.) are typically ignored.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flickr Credit ~samhames
FlowIf a museum visit can produce this
experience, it is likely that the initial
curiosity and interest will grow into a
more extensive learning interaction.
Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why
Does One Want To Learn,
Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson
Flickr Credit ~photograham
IN THE GROOVE
Flickr Credit ~photograham
IN THE GROOVE
To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.
Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi, 1997.
Flickr Credit ~paulwatson
EPIPHANY
OPTIMIZING FOR
Flickr Credit ~phineasx
THE MUSEUM VISIT
CAN HAVE MANY
FACETS
Founder of Institute for Learning Innovation
Professor Learning and Science Education at Oregon State University
Research conducted primarily at zoos, aquaria, and science centers.
But also with art museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Denver Art Museum
JOHN FALK
FREE-CHOICE
LEARNING
FREE-CHOICE
LEARNINGAccording to tourism researcher Jan Packer, most people visit museums, parks, and other similar venues in order to “experience learning” or what she calls “learning for fun”
Falk suggests that learning and leisure are becoming one and the same experience
LEARNING AND
IDENTITYAcademic Learning
Learning is about the mastery of facts and concepts in order to orally, or in writing describe or defend an idea or proposition
Free-Choice learning
Primarily driven by intrinsic motivations. Typically for personal rather than public reasons and often strongly motivated by the needs of identity formation and reinforcement
John Falk, 2006
IDENTITY-RELATED
VISIT MOTIVATIONS
Explorers: motivated by a need to satisfy personal curiosity and interest in an
intellectually challenging environment.
Experience seekers: aspire to be exposed to the things and ideas that exemplify what
is best and intellectually most important within a culture or community.
Professional/Hobbyists: possess the desire to further specific intellectual needs in a
setting with a specific subject matter focus.
Rechargers: motivated by the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually
recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment.
Facilitators: motivated by the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with
someone whom they care about in an educationally supportive environment (parental
facilitator and social facilitator).
ENTRANCE
Flickr Credit ~aunto
NARRATIVE
WHY FALK?
Flickr Credit ~aunto
• It is simple and easy to understand.• It is fairly well documented in the literature.• It has been tested and used in many
museums.• It can be used by more than one department
in the museum.• Falk has developed and tested a simple
method to identify visitors motivations.
BASELINE
MOTIVATION SURVEY
EXPLORER
RECHARGER
FACILITATOR
PROFESSIONALS
HOBBYISTS
EXPERIENCE
SEEKERS
AFFINITY SEEKERS
Results (371 participants)
The most common visitor types were explorers (22.6%), experience seekers (22.4%), and rechargers (21.8%). Affinity seekers were the least common visitor type (2.7%).
Explo
rers
Experie
nce s
eekers
Recharg
ers
Facilita
tors
Profe
ssio
nal/Hobbyis
ts
Affinity
seeke
rs0.00%
5.00%
10.00%
15.00%
20.00%
25.00%
Parental vs. Social Facilitators
Of the 63 respondents who identified themselves as facilitators, 54% were parental facilitators (visiting with children under the age of 18) and 46% were social facilitators (not visiting with children under the age of 18). These correspond to 9.10% and 7.8% respectively of the total participants.
parental facilitators social facilitators0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
4054%
46%
ACTIVITY INVENTORY
Flickr Credit ~zomerstorm
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya
WHAT ABOUT
ONLINE VISITORS?
2011 Web Stats1M Visits (3.6M Hits) +7%56% (566K) not in Visit 6%58% (580K) not in IN +5%2011 Museum Attendance
381,026 (-11%)Mobile 8.8% (2x 2010)
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya
WHAT ABOUT
ONLINE VISITORS?A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrées, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same. Web site designers assume that the visitor already knows what to choose. That's not true. People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.
Csikszentmihalyi, WIRED, 1996.
WHAT’S THE ONLINE
Flickr Credit ~aunto
ENTRANCE NARRATIVE?
Flickr Credit ~measter2
WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
Prior Work:
1. Haley-Goldman & Schaller, 2004
2. Peacock & Brownbill, 2007
3. Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman &
Falk, 2008
Flickr Credit ~measter2
WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
In Summary:
• Using the site to plan or follow up a visit to the physical site
• Using the website to locate subject-based information
• Accessing the website as part of browsing activities on the Web
• Using the website to interact or transact with the museum
Flickr Credit ~measter2
WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
It seems (at least on the surface) that motivations for visits to physical museums are different than for museum websites:
Experiences, identity-building vs. communication/information seeking
Investment in visiting the physical and virtual museum is not the same
Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman & Falk, 2008
HOW CAN WE
FIGURE THIS OUT?
Google Analytics Is Not Enough
Initial Open-Ended Survey
0%10%20%30%40%
Coded Results from Open Ended Online Motiva-tions n=113
Follow Up Categorical Survey
A Much Better Response
0.00%
20.00%
40.00%
60.00%
5:407:09 6:19 5:56
12:00
Online Motivation by Type and Time n=4076
Percent Visits Average time
Plan a
Visi
t
Find S
pecific
Info
rmatio
n for P
rofe
ssio
nal Reaso
ns
Find S
pecific
Info
rmatio
n for P
ersonal R
easons
Casual B
rowsin
g
Make
a T
ransa
ctio
n0
102030405060
Average Time per Page by Motivation Type
time/page (sec)
Visitor Flow
Visitor Flow
Visitor Flow
IN THE MEANTIME
Flickr Credit ~nicholasjon
LOOKING
AND SEEINGFlickr Credit ~rocketjim54
Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow
Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow
EXPERIMENTS IN TRACKING GAZE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Audience Engagement
Tiffany Leason, Audience Engagement
Charlie Moad, IMA Lab
Ed Bachta, IMA Lab
MUSEUMS CANDENT THE UNIVERSE.
Flickr Credit ~Sweetie187
Thank You