Upcoming This Week

Just a quick post to say that I'll be busy as a bee this upcoming week, with lots on my plate at the American Association for State and Local History annual conference in Salt Lake City.   My last round (for now, perhaps) of working with a great group of field service providers and others on the StEPs curricula will be on Wednesday.  Over the last three years,  I've really enjoyed getting to know colleagues from states big (Alaska) and small (Connecticut) and hope all those connections continue.

On Thursday,  I hope you'll come find Rainey Tisdale and I from 12:00-1:30 in the South Foyer of the convention center.  At the meet-up--open to all--we'll be sharing what we've learned so far in our work on museums and creativity and then together, we'll work on a brainstorming an activity designed to help all of us find new ways to approach one of the core functions of history museums and historic sites.   Also on Thursday, I'm looking forward to learning about Conner Prairie's transformation and the many ways that history museums can use Historypin (I'm a huge fan already!).

Wake up early on Friday morning to make my session called Banish the Boring at 8:30.  It's pretty nervy to title a session that,  but I'm planning that, all of us working together,  can come up with some pretty great ways to make conference sessions--or any other kind of presentations--not boring,  but rather,  turn them into what my colleague Stuart Chase  calls the Three Bs:  brisk, bodacious and bold!   Need an inspiration?  Try Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.    Later that day, Rainey's chairing a session with Trevor Jones of the Kentucky Historical Society and me where we hope to engage all of you in a lively conversation about whether museums need objects?  What does the 21st century hold for those things in our collections storage?  Or for those things in our community and not yet in our museums?

And finally,  another morning session on Friday,  an expansion from last year's webinar for StEPS--in an informal workshop format, we'll work on telling a good stories--and how those good stories can transform our institutions and our visitors.

As always,  I love to meet colleagues and bounce ideas around.  If you'll be at AASLH and want to meet for coffee or a quick meal,  just let me know!

Zoo-ming Into Labels in San Diego

Last weekend, I had the chance to visit the San Diego Zoo and was really struck by the variety of interpretive labeling strategies and designs in play.  Competing with lions and tigers and bears is tough stuff,  but I did see audiences of all ages engaging with some of the labels (in between doing things like making faces at baby hippos).  Although many of the labels were pretty traditional, the range of approaches and willingness to experiment a bit were worth observing--and provided lots of ideas that can be scaled for different kinds (and budgets) of exhibits.

So here's a bit of what I saw.  Above, the lesson that interactives are not just for kids, or even just for families as a woman poses in the fake iceberg in the polar bear section.  Below, part of an interactive showing how much meat polar bears eat daily,  using the easy to understand metaphor of a refrigerator.

The zoo had a number of fairly complicated messages about species conservation, climate change and other ecological issues to convey, and they did so in a number of ways ranging from the very simple to the complex.

This is a section of what, in a museum, we might refer to as a tombstone label, with the basic information about each species, but with the bar showing the range of endangerment of each animal.  The label below (really a large almost sculptural installation) talked about CO2 levels.

The zoo seemed to use, and appreciate the impact of sculptural installations.  Some of them were realistic animals to pose by,  but others just generated a sense of play or wonder.  Below,  metal monkey cut-outs along a walkway;  a snake skeleton, and a detail of paving.

Different areas of the zoo had distinctly different feels and incorporated designs and textures along with text and images to make those distinctions clear.  And in the popular panda area, a marker board like those found in restaurants keep visitors up to date and encouraged them to check out the panda-cam from home.

 

The zoo is a place where memories are made, and plenty of places were available for families to pose for photos:  on sculptures, behind big cutouts or playing with a big pull-out interactive.

And finally, two things that made me laugh.  First, a zookeeper, looking surprised as he's caught in the wild and second, a label with a caution I'd never seen before.  Clever and useful!

I'm California bound--and you can join in!

Next week, I'm very pleased to be headed to San Diego's Balboa Park to be a member of a session on employee engagement at the 2012 Smith Leadership Symposium, Organizational Innovation and the Engagement Equation,  of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership on Friday, September 6.  A tremendous line-up of speakers, headed by Chip Conley, frequent Ted Talk speaker and hotelier;  Marianna Adams of Audience Focus, Inc; Richard Evans, who directs EmcArts' programs and strategic partnerships;  and Lori Fogarty, director and CEO of the Oakland Museum,  (and me!) will work with participants to  consider questions such as:

• How do we leverage the creativity we focus on into the way we work?
• What does engagement really mean?
• How can our workspaces encourage creative work?
• What can thoughtful metrics tell us about the synergy we seek to create?   And what do those metrics say about your organizational culture?
• How are different generations approaching workplace culture and how can a culture accommodate those differences.

There will also be case studies on organizational change,  and I know there will be lots of thoughtful conversation along the way.  But if you can't make it to San Diego--you can still participate online.  In fact,  online participants get a special session, facilitated by The Center for the Future of Museum's Elizabeth Merritt,  to bring ideas  home from the morning sessions.    I'll be blogging after the fact, and trying to squeeze in a few tweets on Friday as well.

I've watched the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership from afar for a while, and it'll be great to get a chance to see their museums and other cultural organizations close up,  and enjoy the work of a thoughtful, passionate collaborative.

To register for the symposium,  online or in person,  or for more information, visit their website here. 
And as always,  if you want to join me for a cup of coffee or a drink, in either San Diego or Los Angeles,  be in touch!

What I Learned in Newfoundland #2: We Think Our Visitors are Us

Who do we think our visitors are?  Many, if not most museums may have only anecdotal ideas about the answer to this question.  Based on my experience with a specific workshop activity, I think many museum people are missing the point when we think about audiences.  

My Newfoundland learning #2 is a lesson reinforced from facilitating the same audience collage activity in five different locations in Newfoundland, preceded over the last several years, by the same activity (with many thanks to Susie Wilkening who developed it for AASLH's StEPs curricula) in Connecticut, Kentucky, Oklahoma City and Ukraine. Workshop participants (usually museum staff and volunteers) are assigned a character--say, a woman,  age 65-75,  and asked to create a collage that answers questions about her, such as: 

• What is my name?
• How old am I?
• Do I have children?
• If so, how old are they? 
• Am I married?
• Am I employed?  If so, what do I do?  Or, what did I do?
• What are my hobbies?
• What are my obligations?
• What do I enjoy?
• What stresses me out?
• What drains my time?
• Where do I shop?
• What is my race or ethnicity?
• Do I visit museums & historic sites?  If yes, which ones?

With some notable exceptions, these collages do actually reflect the demographics of museum visitors,  but not museum audiences.  When groups complete the collage,  the majority of them represent audiences that are white, college-educated and relatively well-off.  And of course, they love visiting museums!  If it's an older person depicted, it's someone who's active, who travels,  who eats interesting food, and who doesn't worry much about money or a debilitating illness. We tend to think about people like us--I think because that's what we're comfortable with.  So that often means those are the people we dedicate our museum resources to,  we develop programs for, we market to--so of course, those are the people that come.  Everyone else may be left out of the circle.

This was true in Newfoundland as well but a couple groups went deeper and their collages helped groups reach a deeper understanding of their potential audiences.  Four of my five workshops in Newfoundland were in rural locations,  with declining populations and I asked groups to develop profiles of older residents in their communities. In several profiles, older men had only an 8th grade education, as they had left school to help support their family by fishing, a common occurence for that generation ("no wonder they don't want those long labels!"  said one participant).  Because many Newfoundland men of working age now work away, in Alberta or on oil rigs (as they once went away to fish);  older generations are particularly busy with childcare and family responsibilities.  

At one workshop a participant gained a great understanding from this--it was a park,  and they had offered a special seniors day last year, with little impact.  But now it will be a grandparents day, with grandparents encouraged to bring grandchildren to learn about natural history.   What do older Newfoundlanders worry about?  their health;  who will take care of them;  their children and grandchildren;  the economy; and much more.  

For me (and I hope for workshop participants) the learning really started when we probed deeper about the assumptions embedded in the collages.  Why does he like to do that?  Where does she get her information?  Is that really her only worry?  

One goal of these workshops was to make the shift from what can older citizens do for heritage organizations to what can heritage organizations do for older community members.  And our evaluations showed that shift beginning to happen.  Participants commented:

• It reminded me that seniors come from all walks of life.
• Made me question assumptions I have about audiences.  Need to think about ways of broadening my perspective and being more inclusive.
• See in the eyes of seniors, not just your own!

What other lesson did I take away from this?  I think we're often too lazy in thinking about the communities we live in.  There's a tendency to think of "the other" in terms of developing exhibits and services rather than really working to gain an understanding of peoples' interests and needs. We engage in that lazy behavior at our institution's peril, risking disinterest and irrelevance.  

Try out the profiling exercise with your staff and volunteers.  What do you learn? (and if you've been one of my workshop participants,  I'd love to hear your thoughts as well).  

Special thanks to Susie Wilkening and Jane Severs for their ongoing conversations with me on these issues.

What I Learned in Newfoundland #1: Stories Matter

I spent almost two full weeks in July traveling around Newfoundland,  facilitating workshops on the ways in which heritage organizations can engage older community residents in their work.  I had a tremendous time, traveling all over the province from Cape Spear to Gros Morne;  from St. Alban's to Cape Anguille and Twillingate (check out a map--I went all over!).  I met great people everywhere, saw incredible scenery,  ate some of  Newfoundland's distinctive cuisine and most of all, learned some terrific stories.   I know stories matter and I care deeply about how we use them in museums--but these workshops reminded me again of their importance.

I was looking for a way to open up a workshop that was different from the usual introductions and came up with the idea of asking participants to bring an object or image that represented an older generation.  And in each of my five workshops,  I learned bits of Newfoundland history from those objects--my very own version of the British Museum's history of the world in 100 objects.   From a bone pair of snow glasses to a miniature wheelbarrow carved by a grandfather;  from a set of sail mending needles to a coin from the company store in Corner Brook;  from a tea cozy to a photo of Nan in the garden;  from a milk pan to a hooked rug;  each object had a story--and each object would have been far, far less meaningful without the story.

I didn't ask each person to share their own object's stories, rather I asked pairs to take a minute each and learn as much as they could about the object, not telling them about any next step.  After those brief two minutes, I asked each one to share with the full group about what they had learned about the other person's object.  It was amazing how much you can learn in a minute;  and how important good listening is.  Imagine, local history museums, if you always took just one minute to learn about the meaning of each object a donor brought in.

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of the, to me, most memorable object and story.  In St. Alban's, the workshop was at the Canadian Legion hall,  where there was a small museum dedicated to local residents who had served in the armed forces.  One of the participants had forgotten to bring an object, and she went in the museum and came back with a framed photograph of a veteran, probably in his '80s at the time of the photo.  It was her uncle, Alistair, I think, and she remembered the day he and all the other men came back from World War II.  "Oh, I can still see them sailing up to the dock,"  she said, "what a party there was that night...I was young, but it went on all night."    In that one minute,  I gained a little  understanding of the isolation and independence of Newfoundlanders,  the importance of family and community, and the ways in which a single memory can generate many more for others.   Thanks, Newfoundlanders, for sharing your stories with me.

Can We Get 45 Minutes of Fame?

Last week, I wrote about AAM's work in crowd-sourcing sessions for the 2013 conference.  This week, Rainey Tisdale and I, who are are working on a book about museums and creative practice (more news on that very soon) jumped into another association's crowd-sourcing idea. The New England Museum Association is running a 45 Minutes of Fame Contest for a speaking slot at their annual conference coming up this fall in Burlington,Vermont. Our entry is above, sharing some of the places and things that inspire us to think about museums in different ways. So please, watch the video, feel inspired, and like us on YouTube. If you've got a great creative inspiration to share--please comment away!

Make Sessions Better!

For next year's American Association of Museums Annual Meeting in Baltimore, AAM has embarked on an innovative process of session development.  If you haven't taken a look yet,  head on over and do so.  Until August 24,  session proposals are open for comment by colleagues.  Some sessions seem fully developed, others are looking for presenters, and still others seem very much in t the idea stage.  This gives you a great chance to comment on how proposals could be stronger,  on approaches you find useful (or not so much), and if you're thinking of attending the conference, a chance to share your own expertise.

I'm involved in several proposals and we'd love your feedback on all of them.   Rainey Tisdale and I, as part of our Museums & Creative practice project have two on the docket.  First, we're proposing a session in which we share our own learning in this process. As our proposal, Building a Creative Culture at Your Museum says,  "We’ve sought input from colleagues across the field at every step of this project, so it seems appropriate to spend some time at the AAM conference sharing the final results with you.  During this session, we’ll start by outlining the most critical things we’ve learned about museums and creativity. Then we’ll run through the most important first steps participants can take as soon as they return home to start building a creative culture at their museum."

But we also want to take our creative ideas a bit further.  In You’ve Just Won a Museum Workspace Makeover! we're going to take ideas about creative spaces and put them to work redoing those museum offices.  You'll be able to submit your own office space for the participants to rethink,  and everyone will gain tips on how to make your workplace (in the basement, the historic house kitchen, or a cubicle) into a place where good ideas flourish.

My colleagues Tricia Edwards of the Lemelson Center for Innovation and Invention at the National Museum of American History and Eugene Chervony,  this year a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University and I have developed a session that looks at the ways in which ideas and museum practice can be adapted cross-culturally, based on our very different experiences in Ukraine.

And finally,  Greg Steven and I hope to return, joined by Anne Ackerson of Leading by Design,  for a fast-paced session, Strategize Me,  on assessing and developing your own career path.  Last year's session was standing room only with great audience participation--we promise fun and fast-paced.

So head on over to the AAM website (whether or not you plan on attending the conference) and share your feedback.  How can we make our sessions more meaningful and useful to you?  I'm intrigued by a wide range of sessions--Unintentional Lessons from Visitor Surveys; Grow or Die:  Is Expansion the Best (or only) Strategy;  Making the Case for Bricks and Mortar Museums in a Digital Age; and Cats and Dogs Living Together.  Got a session idea yourself?  It's not too late!