Museum 2.0
January 18, 2011
As a young boy leaves a museum, his teacher turns and asks him one thing he learned inside. The boy thinks for a moment then responds, "Don't touch."
This joke profoundly irritates Nina Simon. For her, it's a perfect example of a cultural institution that has failed to reach its community in a meaningful way.
Simon, a design consultant for a variety of museums and author of "The Participatory Museum," is the leading evangelist for a movement to make the exhibits more interactive and open to participant collaboration. On January 8th, she addressed a packed room at the Harris School for the first Cultural Policy Center workshop of the winter quarter. She spoke energetically, citing numerous places where her spirited work has rejuvenated institutions across the country—Museum of Life & Science, Boston Children’s Museum, Oakland Museum—and brought her some high-profile critics.
Simon's governing philosophy and inspiration come from the Internet. Her lecture began with a definition of "Web 2.0"—a term she borrowed to title her blog—as software that gets better the more you use it. She then turned to the fundamental question that grounds her work: "How can a museum get better the more people participate?"
Her first step is to employ the web's democratic ethos, allowing anyone the opportunity to contribute. One exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, for example, recruited visitors online to assist in research duties. Visitors online combed through records to help archive historical data on children lost in a gruesome ghetto. Participants, Simon explained, were immersed in roles, as historians and researchers, usually reserved for professionals. And they had a new sense of ownership in the exhibit, as a result, she said.
Building a participatory museum, she explained, using another analogy, is like cooking with children. "It's not faster or more efficient," but it has other desired outcomes, ones that should fit the museum’s overall mission.
But some observers think this approach can rob a museum of its purpose. When museums move in this direction, they often look to the growing reach of social networks. In a post last month, Arianna Huffington, the liberal Web empress, and founder of the Huffington Post, bemoaned the tech-heavy turn of museums. "[If] museums forget their DNA and get their heads turned by every new tech hottie that shimmies by," she wrote, "they will undercut the point of their existence." Museums, she asserts, are places of contemplation and reverence that should be free of our pesky tech distractions.
Simon said this sort of lament misses the point.
In most of the examples Simon cited, technology was used to help make the exhibits—not to view them in the museums. Some even deployed low-tech tactics. Two years ago, the Minnesota History Museum featured an exhibit culled entirely from the thousands of responses sent in from state residents. Their first effort to solicit responses online failed. So they moved to an old-fashioned solution: passing out fliers at the state fair.
Still, Simon finds the resistance to technology staid and unnecessary. She hates the idea of a silent museum and insists that museum guests should be free to snap photos. “Cell-phone cameras are today’s sketchbooks,” she said.
To detail her views, Simon offered an analogy: She is an avid backpacker, who prefers to hike in isolation. She recalled her frustration on a recent trip to Yosemite, having to pass through park features for less ambitious visitors—wheelchair ramps and food stands. But she understands why they are there. They open the park to new participants, much the way Simon's ideal museums do.
Those pristine places, the ones that museum backpackers like Huffington cherish, will always exist, Simon argued. She believes critics are reeling back from a lurching cultural change that simply isn't happening. "It's a very small part of museums," she said of work like hers. "Ninety-nine percent of museums will stay the way they are." - Mark Bergen
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