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.
Here are a few comments from participants in the Art of Storytelling project at the Delaware Art Museum. We think these comments are the final word on why visitor-contributed programs have a place in museums:
In researching our latest paper, The Art of Storytelling, we learned how museums can help get visitors to participate. And, on the flipside, we also learned that museums can inadvertently create barriers that discourage participation.
Visitor participation can be a transformative experience for both the museum goer and the museum itself. But as more museums invest these programs they also confront a nagging concern: What if no one actually participates?
Museums looking for the Next Big Thing are finding it by rethinking the visitor experience. In addition to engaging visitors through traditional viewing, these museums are inviting visitors to creatively participate and contribute to the museum experience. Using Web 2.0 tools such as Flickr and WordPress visitors can respond to a collection or exhibit by blogging, writing creatively, or remixing objects into new themes and contexts.
Hilde Hein’s 2006 book, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently inspires a lot of the work here at Night Kitchen Interactive. Hein essentially proposes a new future for museums of all kinds and is worth checking out.
For more insight into some of her theories and how they apply to methods of engaging visitors both online and off, you can our papers The Art of Storytelling and Remixing Exhibits.
We just completed our paper for the 2008 Museums and the Web conference: The Art of Storytelling: Enriching Art Museum Exhibits and Education Through Visitor Narratives (PDF). It has lots of great details about visitor-contributed programs and their impact on the museum experience. Here’s an excerpt:
Working with museums of all types on creating participatory visitor experiences, you can count on one issue to keep coming up: Curatorial Control. For many, the long-standing belief that a museum should be the single, authoritative voice on its collections is not up for debate. It is what visitors expect and it is the mission of a museum to provide it.
Night Kitchen’s vision for an immersive, participatory museum experience is inspired by many sources – from theorists Philip Yenawine and Hilde Hein to the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Maurice Sendak. But our inspiration also comes from personal experience. Take a look at Matthew Fisher’s opening to our 2007 paper, Remixing Exhibits:
Visitor Participation can take many forms – one of our favorites here at Night Kitchen “the remix”: using technology to rearrange and recontexualize an exhibit in order to create their own original narrative. Night Kitchen’s Franklin Remixed project is an excellent example. Here, students used blogging, podcasting, and image sharing to remix exhibit components to create their own online exhibit.
We recently discussed what makes a story instructional and educational, as opposed to mere “edutainment”. Another great strategy for making your story (and its characters) as instructional as possible? Identify the optimal “teachable moments” found in your story. With apologies to Quentin Tarantino, these moments are best found in the traditional story structure of beginning, middle, and end.
