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.
Visitor participation is a key topic on this blog - why it’s important for museums, when it’s the right approach, and how it’s best implemented. But what about examples of engaging, dynamic projects that have successfully incorporated visitor contributed art?
"Generation Curator." It’s a great term for thinking about What’s Next in the future of museums. I came across it in the Museum Marketing Blog’s excellent posting on how Web 2.0 is radically changing what visitors expect from their museum experience. Among the post’s key insights - museums are perfectly positioned to appeal to this generation:
"Art is for everyone. Art is in everyone."
This quote, from a participant in the In Your Face- The People’s Portrait Project, truly sums up the spirit of this innovative exhibition. The project began with an open call from the Art Gallery of Ontario for Canadians to submit their 4"x6" self-portraits - nearly 17,000 submissions later, curators realized they had a hit on their hands. It’s also the topic for what’s cookin’s new "Spotlight" feature, which will showcase visitor-contributed museum projects and websites.
For museums seeking the contributions of their visitors, participation is king. We’ve already covered some key steps for getting visitors on board with visitor-contributed programs, but if participation is king, it deserves even more thought. Here’s today’s:
It is worth pointing out that not all museums or exhibits are deemed appropriate or appealing to visitors as an opportunity to contribute. Or may immediately seem that way. In our recent paper Art of Storytelling, we point to this quote from Matthew MacArthur of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History:
A Marcel Duchamp quote kicks off our recent paper, Art of Storytelling:
– Duchamp, as quoted in Dalia Judovitz’s Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit.
In researching our latest paper, Art of Storytelling, we discovered a lot about encouraging visitor participation and avoiding the inadvertent ways we might discourage participation. We also learned about the important factor of motivation.
Our latest paper, Art of Storytelling, points to the Speed Art Museum’s ispyspeed.com contest as an example of a participatory program stymied by a complex login process. As of January 2008, this very creative project had only one visitor-contributed design and just two votes.
Since then, the project garnered 19 submissions and over 800 votes in its final weeks, a tremendous improvement since our paper went to print. Congratulations to the Speed Art Museum on this creative and ambitious project.
For more on getting visitors on board, see our posts on encouraging participation, avoiding participation barriers, and creating motivation.
Danielle Rice, executive director of the Delaware Art Museum, wrote an excellent piece for The News Journal about the Art of Storytelling project.
“The art in the museum is an invitation to engage in the lost arts of conversation and free association, and as such to let imagination roam wild,” writes Rice.
Read the article — then create and illustrate your own story at the just-launched artofstorytelling.org.
We recently posted comments from participants in the Delaware Art Museum’s Art of Storytelling project. But it isn’t just visitors who reap rewards from participatory programs. In our Art of Storytelling paper, we explore how museums benefit, but here it is in a nutshell:
