We’d like to share our thoughts on the latest trends impacting our clients. In this section, we give you access to the theory behind our work on visitor participation and interactive storytelling.
"Museum exhibits that integrate personal and creative responses into exhibits and collections and encourage visitors to participate in the dialog."
Therein is the crux of Matthew’s presentation last week at the annual Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Entitled "Museums and the Social Web: Integrating Visitor Voices into Museum Exhibits" Matthew emphasized the importance of two-way communication between cultural institutions and their public. Today’s museum visitors are looking for experience that takes them beyond static information, shifting from a traditional museum model wherein the institution presents a single, authoritative voice to a model with which they can engage institutions in a dialog, fostering a democratization of voice and encouraging the creation and contribution of original content.
We are proud to say that the Art of Storytelling interactive that we developed with the Delaware Art Museum back in 2008 continues to inspire visitors around the world to share their stories around artworks in the museum’s collection.
The verdict is in - Matthew’s Crowdsourcing Culture panel at this year’s Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit was a huge success! As the voice of the multitudes shifts from a passive to active role in the fields of business, design and even politics, this presentation, which you can now check out on slideshare, was significant in bringing this newfound relevance of the crowd to the forefront.
Social media tools are being used not just for outreach, but for sharing resources and furthering scholarly work – this is the hope of Bruce A. Falk of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. As a guest blogger on the Center for the Future of Museums site, Falk discusses the value of expanding the ways in which the intellectual community thinks about and makes use of Web 2.0 tools.
We hear more and more about Web 2.0’s myriad tools and innovations in business, media and increasingly, education. However, with technologies changing on nearly a daily basis, it can be intimidating to approach, let alone adopt, many of the advances that are revolutionizing how we communicate, interact, work, play, and live.
I recently had the pleasure of presenting for the board of the nascent Envision Peace Museum regarding my ideas on how they might utilize the web to support their mission. It got me thinking about social media, online community-building and envisioning the future of museums, both online and off, and I am posting my thoughts here for those who are interested:
When considering museum missions these days, I am struck by an emerging movement. Many missions go something like "We collection and preserve X to educate and inform for the betterment of all". But others are more along the lines of "bringing objects and people together to produce dynamic experiences" or "inspiring curiosity and creativity by engaging the public". This is more than a shifting of emphasis from being collections-centric to becoming visitor-centric. No longer are museums simply collecting and preserving, or simply informing and educating. Instead, museums are sources of inspiration and transformation. While they have always embodied these principles at their core, they did so through the prism of collecting and preserving, educating and informing. But a museum is not its collection, nor is it simply its people.
A fantastic session from Classroom 2.0 on May 26th discussed "The Future of Education" and featured a talk with Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Dr. Wesch is an intriguing figure- awarded the 2008 CASE/Carnegie US Professor of the year for Doctoral and Research studies and hailed as "the explainer" by Wired Magazine, his compelling research took him from exploring Papua New Guinea to studying of the impact of social media and emerging technologies on global culture.
His much-watched YouTube videos, many developed alongside students in his undergraduate courses, are thought-provoking yet approachable explorations of key issues surrounding Web 2.0 and are worth checking out.
We here at Night Kitchen love to share our thoughts on the value of collaborative storytelling and the impact it can have on museum visitors of all ages. Whether adding a humorous example of Abraham Lincoln in contemporary culture to 21st Century Abe’s growing collection, or sharing your thoughts on what photography means to you through the click! photography changes everything site, we’re passionate about creating and fostering opportunities to contribute to a communal dialog. It’s therefore always fantastic to learn about people who’ve contributed to and been inspired by one of our projects, and have since hit the ground running with their own storytelling pursuits!
Last week, we posted our responses to the questions raised during Matthew’s presentation at the AAM conference. We invite you to review the presentation here and share your own successes/challenges in encouraging visitors to contribute meaningful responses to online exhibits at your museum.
I was recently asked to speak to a class of soon-to-be graduating students in their Temple University Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab by Christopher Harper, Associate Professor and Co-director of the lab. I am not a journalist, nor did I study journalism, but I have been in the business of multimedia storytelling for a long time, so I guess I had a thing or two to say. Here’s what I told them:
Not only traditional journalistic entities, but also traditional industries across the board are hitting rock bottom right now, so it’s important that everyone resets their framework accordingly. Newspapers are disappearing, television and radio are hurting, yet American’s thirst for information is growing- however, when the economy recovers it will do so in a very different landscape than even our current one. Journalism is and will continue to become more relevant than ever, but not necessarily in the traditional sense.
We are proud to say that the 
