On the paradoxes of empathy

Recently empathy has become a topic hot for discussion in museum circles. Whether in Gretchen Jenning’s expressed frustration that many museums struggle to respond empathetically to traumatic community events as they happen, Regan Forrest’s discussion about the role of empathy in interpretation or Dana Mitroff Silver’s work on design thinking in museums, empathy is having a moment. The thing is, I’m not sure I fully understand empathy or the role it can play in institutional processes, so I’ve decided to explore the subject in a little more depth.

The word empathy is derived from the German Einfühlung, and was first understood to mean ‘feeling into’, and related to ideas of sympathy and understanding. (An aside – Magdalena Nowak describes how the term Einfühlung also has particular connection in its use to the interpretation of art and history from 1873, when Richard Vischer used the term to describe ‘the viewer’s active participation in a work of art or other visual forms. It was a mutual experience of exchange between the body and the perceived object.’)

If empathy is ‘feeling into’ another person or an object, does that mean it’s a concept primarily related to emotions? Maybe not. In a 2012 article on Sherlock Holmes and empathy, author Maria Konnikova argued that Holmes’ cold reason, his detachment from emotion, actually enables Holmes to be empathetic. She proposes that being too emotionally involved actually stifles our capacity for empathy, for thinking ourselves into another position and necessarily out of our own, because it is impossible for us to leave our personal feelings out of the equation.

Usually, when we think of empathy, it evokes feelings of warmth and comfort, of being intrinsically an emotional phenomenon. But perhaps our very idea of empathy is flawed. The worth of empathy might lie as much in the ‘value of imagination’ that Holmes employs as it does in the mere feeling of vicarious emotion.

If Konnikova is right and empathy isn’t intrinsically emotional, what is it? Psychologist Paul Ekman recently described to Daniel Goleman three different kinds of empathy, being cognitive, emotional and compassionate empathy. Cognitive empathy enables perspective-taking, and is useful in negotiations or motivating people (this seems to be the type Konnikova is referring to). Emotional empathy leads to a kind of emotional contagion, in which it becomes possible to feel what another person feels. Finally, compassionate empathy is empathy that firstly enables us to understand someone else’s position, but also motivates us to act upon those feelings.

Empathy, then, is not straightfoward. What kind of empathy should museums employ? With such inherent compexity, does empathy necessarily enable better planning or decision making? Almost all discussion I’ve read in regards to empathy and museums has taken as given that empathy is good. Regan writes persuasively about the importance of treating visitors as people, as individuals rather than numbers, and Gretchen paints a picture of empathetic museums as museums that are understanding and aware. But does an inclusion of empathy in design or interpretation always create positive outcomes for the institution and its visitors?

In a provocative piece against the broad movement towards empathy, Paul Bloom writes that empathy is ‘parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate.’ He suggests this because we find it easier to empathise with a specific individual whose name and face we know, than to do the same with an identity-less ‘other’. This aligns with Nowak’s piece, in which she expresses that Einfühlung emphasised the specificity of particular examples. She writes, ‘Empathy denies the possibility of a comprehensive and general description of feeling and perception, and rather stresses subjective, individual experience.’ (p323) Or, as philosopher Jesse Prinz puts it, ‘We cannot empathize with a group, except by considering each member.’ (p17)

My impression of the move towards empathy within museums – and design thinking – is indeed to position these subjective, individual experiences at the heart of the design process. As Susan Spero writes:

Over and over, one of the big lessons in design thinking seems to be don’t assume—discover directly. The insights gained from talking directly to users informs our understanding of their needs, which in turn makes all the difference between spinning one’s wheels and developing solutions that people can actually use. And prototyping and iterating along the way provide constant check-ins and mechanisms for adjustments.

The connection to visitors that Regan mentions in her post on interpretive empathy also comes directly from talking to visitors; from having a personal relationship with them, from considering them as individuals. So, does planning better specific experiences based on particular visitors necessarily lead to a better outcome for all visitors? Bloom’s piece argues that sometimes the ‘politics of empathy’ can actually lead to poor decision making, such as when sensible policies of greater benefit for vast numbers fail to persuade as convincingly as the stories of individuals who will be affected. Individual experiences seem more meaningful than abstract ones, but might not benefit as many.

It might also be worth noting that empathy is highly selective. As Prinz describes, we all carry empathetic biases, the sort that might make us more likely to empathise with the cute over the ugly, or the person more like us than the one who isn’t. Empathy increases for those who have a close cultural or geographic proximity to our own. Even as it has the power to move us from our own position towards an understanding of others, empathy is not necessarily applied equally. It therefore cannot always offer a solution that will be appropriate for the many and faceless, rather than for the identified few.

Bloom argues that, ‘A reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.’ He continues,

it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.

Empathy is paradoxical. We cannot think ourselves into the mind or emotions of everyone and still maintain our sense of self. But if we never attempt to move from our own position, which necessarily privileges those concerns and people that have personal meaning, can we ever create institutions that are appropriately inclusive and sensitive to others?

It is in this gap between the particular and the universal that I find myself uncertain about the role of empathy in museums. Although I definitely think empathy is an important personal trait, I don’t know where it fits institutionally. Would an ’empathetic museum’ be one that is ‘truly visitor-centered, dedicated to inclusion, and committed to its community’ per Jennings’ idea? I’m not sure, since empathy is necessarily particular rather than general. Maybe it would instead look something akin to the ideas Orhan Pamuk puts forward in his modest manifesto for museums, which honour the ‘the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals’?

This is a new line of inquiry for me, so I’d love to hear more from others who’ve done more thinking or work in this area than I. How do you think about or define empathy, and does it play a role in your work? And what relationship do you think empathy and rationality should or do play in the decision making process for museums?

Museopunks episode 3 – The Shape of Punk to Come – is online

This year, I’ve been super lucky to embark on a few different collaborative projects. One of the major ones was the paper that Danny Birchall and I co-wrote for MW2013, which kicked off a whole new line of investigation for me in research, and the other is the museopunks podcast that Jeffrey Inscho and I launched in April.

Both projects have been super rewarding, and I think it’s because they’ve eached pulled me out of my own headspace and the set of assumptions I port around, and forced me to push my work in new directions. Danny summed up similar feelings when he wrote about the experience of collaboration earlier this year:

When you’re working with someone towards a definition of a shared project, there are many modes in which you can operate. Sometimes you try to write down what you think they’re already thinking (and sometimes fail); sometimes you get to try your ideas out before they’re fully formed; you can take it in turns to lead the process. Most importantly, your paper or presentation goes beyond just trying to fill your audience’s cup with the knowledge you have, and moves towards making and thinking new things.

With that in mind, I’m super pleased to announce that the third episode of museopunks is online. In this episode, Jeffrey and I chatted to Bridget McKenzie from Flow Associates about future scanning and museums. It was a subject I was super keen to dig into a little further after being part of a session on Shaping the Future of Museums at Museums Australia 2013, and when I noticed all the Tweets from Bridget’s talk on a similar subject at MuseumNext, I knew we had to talk about the shape of punk museums to come.

This episode is actually the first of two with a focus on museum futures. Next month, we’ll be talking to Elizabeth Merritt from the Center of the Future of Museums, so if you have any particular questions you’re keen for us to investigate, feel free to send them through.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to Museopunks via iTunes, or check out our first two episodes. In Episode 1, we spoke to Michael Edson and Paul Rowe about museums in the Age of Scale, and Episode 2 focussed on museums, design and design thinking, with Dana Mitroff Silvers and Scott Gillam. If you have any ideas for topics you think we should dig into, or potential guests you’d love to hear from in future, please drop me or Jeffrey a line. We’re always eager to have our own ideas pushed a little further too.

Engagement analytics and lifelong engagement in museums

Does a repeat visitor to your museum have more value than a unique visitor? How often does someone have to visit your museum to be considered loyal or ‘repeat’? How do you know whether people are engaged with your museum? These are questions I’ve been thinking about since visiting Dallas back in April (this year is flying), and learning more about DMA Friends, the Dallas Museum of Art’s newly-launched free membership program. The program – which everyone who comes to the museum is invited to join – launched in January, coinciding with the DMA’s move to free entry.

Once signed up to the program, Friends start accruing points and badges in the museum by logging their activities – which galleries they visit, which programming they participate in – via SMS or at dedicated logging stations. Once acquired, the points can be redeemed for rewards like free parking, discounts in the shop or even (at the higher levels) qualifying to spend a night in the museum. In Nina Simon’s 2008 post on modelling repeat visitation, she talks about the importance of rewarding repeat business and letting people know you appreciate them, which is precisely what DMA Friends does. You can learn a bit more about it in the video below.

In exchange for giving away membership, the DMA gets something super valuable… information. The Friends program offers the DMA the capacity to learn more about existing visitors, identify potential new audiences, and make stronger connections with niche and micro-communities (like those who always come for particular types of events). As more and more people opt into the program, the DMA will have opportunities for understanding their visitors and the ways in which they engage with the museum at a scale that seems unprecedented for museum visitor research (please correct me if I’m wrong on that last point). And knowing this kind of detailed information about visitors and their visiting habits opens new windows for thinking about destination loyalty and the sustainability of the museum’s offerings.

What we’re ultimately talking about is engagement analytics
Consider the bank of information that the DMA will have on its visitors over the course of several years. How closely does repeat visitation tie to demographic proximity to the museum? How do you define a repeat visitor? Is someone who visits every year – but only once a year – a repeat visitor? What is the value of their engagement with the museum? How might you get them to increase their visits to twice a year? These visitors who are regular-but-not-frequent visitors might be an interesting place to start when thinking about trying to increase visitation, even though it will take some time to gather the initial data and establish those visitation patterns.

DMA Friends also makes it possible for the DMA to think about individual visitor behaviour and lifetime visitor behaviour. What happens when we start judging success as being about lifetime engagement rather than just numbers in the door? The scale and possible granularity of that measurement is staggering. In DMA Director Maxwell Anderson’s important 2004 paper on The Metrics of Success in Art Museums (PDF), Anderson writes that the first metric of success that museums should be pursuing is measuring the quality of the visitor’s experience.

A museum’s responsibilities to its public are many, and its success in fulfilling them is notoriously hard to quantify. The correspondence of visitor demographics with the demographics of the local population would be useful in pursuing a more representative result. One could continue not with the number of members but with the average number of visits by its members. As opposed to attendance, it would be useful to know the number of visitors who paid full or discounted admission to the permanent collection or special exhibitions. If the museum has no admission charge, then the number of visitors to the galleries (as opposed to the lobby, restaurant, gift shop, or party spaces) would be revelatory. The average length of a museum Website visit and the number of hours that galleries are open to the public are also indicators of success in the quality of the experience offered.

Running through this criteria, it strikes me that DMA Friends offers precisely the opportunities that Anderson was looking for when proposing these metrics almost a decade ago. The program will enable the Museum to see the correspondence between visitor and population demographics; to understand average visitation rather than just total visitation; to see how many visitors go into the galleries and which galleries they visit; and maybe even indications of how long a visitor spends on campus.

In addition, having this kind of information about visitors will allow the Museum to tailor specific experiences for Friends. In the paper Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman wrote on DMA Friends for Museums and the Web, the authors discuss ways that this might play out:

As visitors engage, new patterns quickly emerge showing how visitors use the museum and what sorts of programs are most valued. Ultimately, this pattern of data collection will allow more spontaneous types of programming, almost akin to a game of pick-up basketball: for example, a spur-of-the-moment docent tour around a critical mass of self-identified enthusiasts appearing in the same place at the same time.

Awesome right?!

But we’re not quite there, yet…
For all this potential awesomeness, there are a few things in the current execution of DMA Friends that prevent it from realising some of these longer term ambitions just yet. The first is that, as an international visitor with only limited phone use whilst in the States, I was never going to use the SMS codes to log my Friends points. That’s not a problem in and of itself. I could (and did) use the logging stations. But I only did this at the end of my visit. This meant a couple of things. The first was that I had to record the SMS codes as I passed them to ensure I remembered them all. Not a major pain, but a little one. It also meant that all the numbers I was plugging into the station came at once, so the Museum doesn’t really have a sense of my movements through the museum, like when I moved into each space and how long I took. It also means that, if other visitors are like me, then the idea of running a spontaneous tour for DMA Friends could actually be more irritating than awesome, if I was contacted minutes after I’d left the DMA, rather than in the minutes after I’d arrived. None of these are critical issues. They are just opportunities for further developing the concept in future iterations.

The badging system, which Elizabeth Merritt has touched on, also offers a lot of potential that isn’t being fully realised yet. Because the badges aren’t tied to earning particular rewards (although they do garner the visitor additional points) and there is no social component or way to share and show how many badges someone has earned – or compete against others for rare badges – I don’t think the badges are all that compelling right now. I do see opportunities with the badging program along the social dimension once they are sharable on social media, particularly if there is a competitive element – can someone be the Mayor of the European Art Gallery if they attend it more than anyone else? Would there be those who might compete for the honour of being at the Museum the most?

What I do love about the badges in their current state is the way Maxwell Anderson ties them to self-identification by visitors, in this interview. He says:

The one feature that I’m equally interested in is that people change. Their motivations change in the course of their lives or even their visit. So I think that it’s important to be flexible in presuming why somebody showed up and what they’re expecting to happen when they get here. That’s why [DMA Deputy Director] Rob Stein’s premise of badges has you self-identifying in as many ways as you want: a “sleuth,” you know, a “creative cat,” all these phrases that are tongue-in-cheek. And they’re meant to give people license to self-identify in a constellation of ways. And it’s playful, but it’s also, it gives us some clarity about why people are here.

The idea that visitors change over their visit, and particularly over their lifetime – and that it might be possible to track and tailor experiences to those visitors over that long period – fascinates me. Moves like this one by the DMA should prompt museums to think further about how they can measure and understand those changes, and use those measurements to provide more meaningful experiences for participants throughout their lives. What happens when we start thinking about the engagement visitors could have with our institutions as being (measurably) lifelong engagement?

What do you think about this kind of approach to membership and engagement? How might understanding the way your visitors engage with your museum over the course of their lifetime change the way you think about your work?

A participatory museum sector? On discussion, debate and transparency.

All right, fair warning. This is a long post.

The annual Museums Australia conference was held in Canberra in mid-May, and covered a range of topics under the broad banner How museums work: people, industry and nation. I had an interesting conference, in part because I was invited to be a speaker in a plenary session on Shaping the Future of Museums. In it, Dr Patrick Greene, David Arnold (NMA), and I all responded to a presentation from Dr Stefan Hajkowicz, Director CSIRO Futures, in which he spelled out six megatrends expected to change the way we live. The session framed much of the conference for me and opened up many conversations about the future of the sector.

For the remainder of the conference, I purposely sat in on sessions outside my usual comfort zone to get the broadest possible insight. There was lots of useful content (the sessions on the public value of museums, and the business of money were unmissable), with many of the discussions pivoting around common themes; about the importance of collaboration; about how we identify and solve the problems that actually matter; about how we enable career development and training right across the sector; and about the benefits that co-creation engenders for all participants.

As the conference went along, it became apparent to me just how much the questions facing the sector mimic those being played out in our institutions themselves, particularly around questions of participation and collaboration. How does the museum sector become more participatory and allow people right across the sector – regardless of their formal position – contribute to the solving of the problems facing the sector? How to come to terms with the tension between allowing new voices in, whilst simultaneously speaking with a singular voice in order to ensure clarity of communication and vision? How to transition from closed conversations to open ones?

Many of these tensions were readily apparent in an article on the price of climate control and environmental sustainability in Australian museums in The Australian, in which Michaela Boland notes that:

…the structure of the three-day conference — which featured keynote addresses from AGNSW director Michael Brand, West Kowloon Cultural District chief executive Michael Lynch and new Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson — did not lend itself to much actual debate. The overall impression was that Australia’s museum industry seems blithely unaware of its own significance and potential.

Not scheduled for discussion… were many issues concerning the industry, among them Australian museums acquiring items from dealers of questionable reputation, the propriety of museum curators writing catalogue notes for art auction houses and complaints by the auction houses that cultural-heritage rules are stymieing sales of Aboriginal art.

In the days before the conference got under way, meetings were held by the Council of Australasian Museum Directors, Museums Australia and the National Cultural Heritage Committee, where these topics were discussed behind closed doors.

One senior figure tells The Australian museum directors think it is unwise to discuss sensitive issues publicly; another says the institutions are scared to air their dirty laundry lest they fall foul of government funders.

Here a journalist writing for national paper picks apart the conference for being closed and failing to have space for debate, concluding that the sector was “blithely unaware of its own significance and potential” as a result. This rankled me a little, because I disagree that a lack of debate indicates a lack of awareness. Instead, I think it’s indicative of real tensions around the problems of if and how a sector can open up to become more participatory and inclusive, whilst still maintaining the capacity to speak to really important issues with a single voice – tensions I see replicated in discussions about institutional voice in an age of social media.

Social media has made it theoretically possible for everyone to have a public voice in any conversation, whether they have relevant knowledge or not. It makes publishing easy, which means that it is very much an “opt-in” activity. But does the reality that every voice can be heard mean that they all should be, or  are some voices and opinions worth more than others? Does every topic need to be open to debate, or are there some we should just trust to the experts?

Late last year, Matt Popke wrote an excellent comment about institutional voice that is valuable here:

It could be that we need to dramatically alter our institutional voice altogether. Instead of focusing on The Museum we could shift more attention to the individual members of the museum team. As more start blogging and otherwise directly engaging people through social media they’re going to become more visible within the organization anyway. As we pull back the curtain more on our internal processes, we’re going to expose more of those people who are individually making our organizational choices. As these people become more visible, their personalities and individual values will start to take the fore more and more in relation to our institutional identity.

When that transition happens there won’t need to be an institutional position on political issues anymore, just the positions of the various individuals within the institution. It will be their choice how visible they want their opinions to be (to a point, it’s becoming less certain how much anybody gets to choose their degree of publicness anymore). The organization simply won’t have the same kind of monolithic “voice” anymore.

I think the more we allow this process to take hold and be visible within our organizations, the easier it will be to draw the public into the discussion and convince them that they actually have some influence over what we do (and the more they actually will have some influence over what we do). We talk a lot about participatory engagement these days, but we have to change internally a lot before that participation will reach any kind of critical mass.

These ideas are picked up by Mairin Kerr in a discussion on digital protectionism in museums. In considering “Why are there gatekeepers?”, Kerr asks:

…do we really need an institutional voice? Or is this us holding onto the past – the single authoritative voice and idea that an institution must stand united for something. Why not show that there are divisions? Why do we need a strong message? Why can’t the message be diversity? Aren’t we supposed to be encouraging multiple voices and perspectives in the new age of museums?

These are important questions. But it’s also important to think about why the unidirectional and opaque “institutional voice” was dominant for so long. I don’t think it was just because that was what the technology enabled. There is real power in having a singular message that is communicated clearly. Consistency of message is critical in showing people what you stand for and enabling them to understand it. While experts can get into hugely nuanced discussions about a topic, based on a shared vocabulary and deep knowledge, most people won’t have the prior learning to engage with the ideas at such a level, and in those cases, clarity is important.

So how do we resolve this paradox? As an insider, I want more opportunities for discussion and debate. I want to be able to take ownership of these issues and make them my own; to feel like I can play a role in shaping the sector. But I also value the power that comes from clarity of vision. Is is possible to have both nuance and simplicity? What happens if the museum directors quoted above are right, and talking about these issues openly makes us vulnerable to political attack? Is that a price worth paying?

Maybe what we’re really looking for – both within our institutions and within the sector – is a kind of “cohesive multivocality” (thanks Ed Rodley!), which allows for multiple perspectives, but all with a shared mission and ultimate goals. And if that’s the case, what are the steps we need to take to enable such a thing to exist?

What do you think?

Floor staff and the guest experience @ the Dallas Museum of Art

If you’re anything like me, you probably keep a mental notebook of museums that seem to do consistently interesting work; it’s pages filled with the names of people you’d want to work with or museums you’d like to be at if the opportunity arose. My list has quite a few names on it, but one that has been near the top for a while is the Dallas Museum of Art, so it was enormously cool to spend a week at the DMA following Museums and the Web this year.

The DMA has been of interest to me for a number of reasons, but primarily because its mission and approach seems to align with much that I value in museums. It has an emphasis on transparency, dialogue and participation, ethical practice, scholarship, and even taking informed risks (yes! Risk is built into the mission). Under the leadership of Director Maxwell Anderson and Deputy Director Rob Stein, the museum appears progressive, innovative and interesting, and consistently looking to new ways of thinking about museum practice like opening up museum membership to anyone who wants to join it, for free – so it ticks all of my boxes.

So what did I learn from a week there? In short, a lot. As well as spending a significant amount of time with Rob, I had meetings with a number of high-level staff, sat in on general staff meetings, and lingered long in the museum observing visitors and thinking about the dynamics of the space. The takeaways are too many for a single post, so I’m going to run a short series of reflections from my week as museumgeek-in-residence at the DMA. This is the first.

DMA Reflection One: Confident, comfortable staff make for confident, comfortable visitors
While the DMA’s simultaneous introduction of free museum entry and DMA Friends were perhaps the most noteworthy moves it has made towards visitor engagement in recent times, they have not happened in isolation. A less-documented but equally interesting shift in the museum has been in the role of visitor services staff, who are no longer expected to simply guard the museum space, but to take a far more proactively open approach to guest engagement. A member of staff greets visitors upon entry to the museum; another waits near the sign-up stations for the Friends program to assist anyone who needs help. Floor staff through out the museum make eye contact and nod or say hello when guests approach. It’s an approach that reminds me of Disney’s concept of being “assertively friendly” to provide exemplary guest service.

This change in the manner of the floor staff to visitors dovetails nicely with the broader emphasis on relationships found in the DMA Friends program, but is also indicative of a more general cultural change in the institution. For staff who have worked on the museum floor for a decade or longer, the difference in attitude and expected actions is significant. Even the uniforms of floor staff are now different, with a move away from formal jackets and towards more comfortable polo shirts (something which has left some feeling a bit vulnerable without the authority of their prior uniform, but also more open). This change might seem superficial, but comfortable staff make for comfortable visitors.

Cultural change does not happen overnight. One of the most important elements for bringing in change is equipping staff with skills and strategies for coping with the new expectations of their new role; something the DMA and its Director of Visitor Services, and Visitor Services Staff Barbee Barber seems to be approaching proactively. Visitor services staff are given a 15 minute briefing before every shift, as well as attending weekly training. During the training session I sat in on, two members of visitor services staff – David Caldwell and Joe Delinski – had each gone out of their way to research a topic they were personally interested in that was also related to the DMA Friends program to teach other members of the team (itself a great idea for encouraging internal staff development).

Joe’s talk was on gamification and gameplay as they relate to DMA Friends, a subject he was passionate about because Joe is himself a gamer. David spoke on the datafication of concepts, and the idea of “quantifiable social opportunities” and the “cumulative quantity of positive impressions [on visitors]” that the DMA floor staff could make. His talk emphasised the importance of the visitor services staff in generating positive impressions to protect, generate and promote the image of the DMA. What was particularly lovely was the emphasis placed on respect and self-esteem of visitor services staff as well as others, in order that the floor staff could take pride in their work whilst impressing other people. David put forward the idea that while curators, educators and registrars etc have particular knowledge and training that makes them experts at their job, those who work consistently on the floor are the museum’s experts at making “positive impressions.” It’s an attitude and idea I’d like to see at all museums.

In an old post on Museum 2.0, Nina Simon wrote:

Floor staff may also be the most efficient vehicle for transforming museums into social spaces. Web 2.0 succeeds by focusing on the personal interests of users and connecting users to each other via their interests. If we truly want museums to become places for social engagement among visitors, why not re-envision floor staff, who are trained to interpret the collection, as community organizers, trained to encourage and support interactions among visitors?

My impression is that the DMA is on the way to doing just this. They aren’t absolutely there yet; cultural change takes time. But this approach to visitor services, which puts emphasis both on providing welcoming experiences for visitors, and upon ensuring that staff feel respected and gain self-worth from the role played in that experience, seems valuable and aligned with the museum’s approach more generally.

What role are floor staff expected to play in the visitor experience of your museum? And how are they supported in this role?

Rethinking why immersive theatre is compelling. It might not be the immersion after all.

On Wednesday night, I went to Sleep No More again. It was the second time I had been to the immersive theatre piece which has inspired so much conversation within the sector, and revisiting it prompted a shift in my thinking. Much like Ed Rodley, I’m pretty sure I’ve been focussing on the wrong aspects of immersive theatre this whole time. I’ve been thinking about the immersion, but I’m not sure that’s the bit that is most interesting.

Every time I meet someone who has been to SNM, I talk to them about it. I want to know if they had a one-on-one experience with an actor (a transformative, intimate experience in which an audience member is pulled into a secret room and participates in a scene alone with one of the SNM characters); I want to know which rooms they saw that I didn’t. I want to hear about which characters they connected with; whether they tasted the lollies in the candy store; what moments they saw and experienced and how they compared to my own moments. What was shared? What wasn’t?

These conversations serve as cultural touchpoints; moments of connection. “Were you there? What was your experience like? Was it like mine?” And with this discussion – which I’ve been having for six months now – I’m beginning to suspect that the reason SNM is so successful may be less that the experience is immersive but the fact that it is complex, compelling, and difficult to understand or complete alone. With 17 hours of content, of which only three can be experienced in a single performance, and more than 90 different rooms in which the action takes place, SNM is a social experience because it needs to be; because the performance cannot make sense without the offered experiences of other people. The story is necessarily incomplete without the pieces that other people can share. And it matters that the story is incomplete.

You see, not only does the play have a plot and a story, but everyone who attends it does too. Everyone who goes to SNM leaves with a narrative of their own experience, whether good or bad. They leave with a story to tell; a reason for a conversation and connection; a piece of cultural currency. And so when I’ve been trying to make sense of the story, I’m simultaneously trying to make sense of my own.

With this, Sleep No More manages to be at once very personal, and highly social. My experiences, my one-on-ones (…of which I have now had four), they felt unique to me. But I can go online and read about how others have been through the same things, and look for small differences or similarities. I can seek out more knowledge about different characters or the set. I can offer up my experiences and find out about yours, and we both gain from the experience of doing so. The disorientation of the play is shared and it is set up to encourage reactions – both reasons why people may feel confident interrogating it further after they leave. I have never had an experience like that in a museum.

When we discussed museums and immersive theatre at Museums and the Web 2013, Seb Chan asked Diane Borger (plenary speaker and producer of the show) about the show’s superfans and how it became possible for the show to remain mysterious and interesting once people were posting every detail of every encounter online. But I’m starting to wonder if those obsessive superfans and their online and offline discussions aren’t kind of the whole point.

In a piece on Sleep No More as an Internet-based augmented reality game, Drew Grant writes:

Yes, this play is an ARG, although it doesn’t have to be; it can start and end with your experience during a performance. But the show does have bonus material that will lead you to real-life encounters with the characters outside of McKittrick Hotel, provided you can figure out how to unlock Punchdrunk’s coded website. There have been location-based clues at Grand Central and IRL meet-ups for those who are as obsessed with solving the seemingly endless mysteries of “Sleep No More.”

The discussion around SNM grows as its NYC season extends; its world extends far beyond the walls of the McKittrick Hotel as stories of the performance and its secrets are shared and dissected by those who have attended it. And yet it hasn’t stopped being interesting. So can museums create this same sense of urgency to know more, to figure out or ‘solve’ a show or a story within the museum? Do we need to create disorienting experiences, experiences full of gaps to do so? Would that even be desirable in a museum context? And if so, can we make the story the visitor tells of their experience as compelling as the stories within the exhibit itself.

What do you think?

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…

One of my favourite moments at Museums and the Web 2013 was the closing plenary. Being invited to talk about museums and immersive theatre (well, really about Sleep No More) with Seb Chan, Ed Rodley and Diane Borger, producer of Sleep No More was kind of incredible. As a group, Seb, Ed and I had been trying to have a conversation about that topic for months (we had squeezed in a Google hangout previously), so to get the opportunity to delve more deeply into the issues was golden. It was also a fairly significant moment to be a part of; when a closing plenary of a museum conference that is ostensibly about the web has very little to do with technology or the Internet at all.

I’ve long been more interested in the implications of technology – in what it actually allows you to do, or how it allows you to rethink and solve problems in new ways – than in the technology itself. It’s one reason why I really interested in the DMA Friends program that Rob Stein and Bruce Wyman gave a paper on whilst at MW2013. DMA Friends is a new kind of membership program for the Dallas Museum of Art that let’s anyone sign on to become a member or Friend of the museum for free. It’s inception coincided with a move towards making admission to the Museum free as well, and has been accompanied by other changes at the Museum, like ensuring that floor staff act more like guides than guards (more on this in coming posts).

As Friends sign up or move around the Museum, they have the opportunity to collect and log codes for places they’ve been, activities they’ve done, or events they’ve attended, earning points that grant them access to specific rewards. So the visitors get a gift back from the museum for their visit (like free parking or a discount in the museum shop). It also means that the DMA is collecting quite granular information about specific guests; about what they are interested in, where they come from, and how often they attend the museum. This offers great potential for understanding your museum’s audience profile, particularly when you start to link it to programs and interests.

But it’s also interesting in terms of the possibilities for personalising communications and even programs to particular individuals who are regular – or irregular – guests of the museum. As Rob and Bruce note in their paper (emphasis added):

visitors can claim a variety of rewards created by the DMA to say “thank you” for participating with the museum. These rewards include traditional membership benefits, such as free parking and special exhibition tickets, as well as special and boutique rewards like behind-the-scenes access to staff and areas of the museum not generally seen by the public. One of the underlying goals of the program is to create long-term relationships with visitors while offering them value and benefits tailored to their experience and engagement with the museum. This long-term connection and repeat participation is seen as key to establishing the hoped-for relevance of the museum in the lives of visitors.

So what does this have to do with Sleep No More and immersive theatre? Well, I’m in New York for a few days this week, and so  I’m going back to see/experience SNM for the second time. Two days ago, the day after I booked my ticket, I received this email communicae:

DEAREST-
AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT, I AM HOSTING A DINNER PARTY ON THE NIGHT 
OF YOUR STAY AT THE MCKITTRICK HOTEL, AND I WOULD BE HONOURED TO HAVE THE 
PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY. WE ARE CELEBRATING THE ARRIVAL OF A VERY 
SPECIAL GUEST WHOM I WOULD LIKE YOU TO MEET.

THIS WILL BE AN INTIMATE AFFAIR - VERY FEW GUESTS WILL BE GUARANTEED A 
SEAT AT THE TABLE.

Now I don’t know whether every guest who had registered to see Sleep No More tonight received this email, or whether a little flag went up in the SNM database next to my name/email address that noted that I had been to the performance before and therefore would be a likely candidate for this kind of upselling experience. But either way, it suckered me in (let’s call my attendance “research”), and I don’t think it would have had I not already engaged with the performance. I don’t think it would have mattered to me that I would get to go to an “intimate gathering in an undisclosed area of the hotel that a majority of guests will not have the opportunity to experience” if I had not already explored the hotel; if I didn’t already have stories of the event to share that I would enjoy adding to.

And this is one of the things that I think is hugely interesting about DMA Friends, and this approach to membership. Information is power. Getting to know your guests, to learn their attendance patterns and what they like, and then being able to offer them something special based on those preferences, offers some unique possibilities about how you can engage with your most engaged. About turning fans into superfans.

I spent last week at the DMA, so I have much more to write on this topic. But when we think about what museums can learn from immersive theatre, one simple thing might be that theatrical performances generally require bookings, and that gives you a little opportunity to learn something about your audience, and that creates opportunities of its own. It’s interesting to think of ways in which museums can do the same.

What do you think?

MW2013 reflections on emerging and collapsing museum roles

Well I’ve been hanging out in America for the last week with a mind full of thoughts in the aftermath of Museums and the Web 2013… and computer problems. It’s been frustrating, but it also provided the perfect excuse to upgrade my laptop after years of slow technology. Hooray! Truly, a new computer is a pleasure.

Now that I’m back online, I thought I’d start a series of quick posts on the issues that really caught my attention during the conference (a kind of belated version of what Koven Smith was doing in his live-blogging from Portland). In the meantime, if you’re feeling less patient and just want an overall summary of the themes and discussions that came out of the conference, check out the great reads by Danny Birchall, Susan Edwards and Ed Rodley.

So, theme no. 1: the fluctuation of museum jobs, and the impact that has upon the sector
On Day 2 of the conference, Rob Stein and Rich Cherry presented a plenary session that asked what is a museum technologist anyway? During the questions that followed, Liz Neely asked how many people in the room had made up their own job at some point in their career. I was surprised to see  the number of hands waved in response. It was probably close to half the room, all of whom had created a job for themselves.

As someone who has never known where I would fit within existing career paths in this sector, I was pretty excited by this. But then I started thinking further on the implications. When a job is created for someone, rather than created to fill a particular pre-identified need or purpose, then that job will be necessarily built around their individual strengths and weaknesses, maybe even more than the institution’s actual needs. So what happens when that person leaves the organisation? Does the museum then look to fill that position, or to craft another one in concert with the person who comes next into the role? I know I’ve created at least one job for myself in this sector, and it’s now something my museum will always need to have someone doing… but the opportunity came up because I identified the gap, not because they did. How often does this happen?

Sitting next to Michael Parry in one session, I had a discussion about the frequency with which museums should revisit their digital structure and strategy. Given how quickly the technological and work context change, should a museum rewrite its digital strategy and organisational chart regularly? And what are the benefits of doing so very regularly (maybe every three years) versus waiting longer; of making foundational instead incremental change? Two critical issues here become the value of adaptability vs stability, and the potential loss of corporate knowledge (not to mention staff morale… do people want to work in an environment where they position is always up to be questioned?). But it is something worth considering in the frequent discussions we have about writing a digital strategy; getting beyond the how and looking at the when.

These were just some of a series of questions that started to come up about the fluctuation of museum roles. In the session on digital curation that Danny Birchall and I were a part of, Danny looked at different curators who have influenced the sector to show just how diverse the notion of a “curator” is, even in the museum sector in order to demonstrate what museums could teach those who now seek to curate the digital world (one of these being Iris Barry, founder of the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, who herself created her own job based on her own skills and interests), while I looked at what museums could learn from some different types of curators of the digital world. In response to this session, Koven got to the heart of the matter and asked whether the discussion was indicative of the need for a new kind of role within the museum; that of the curator of the digital. Are we witnessing the birth of a new museum profession in these discussions? Do we now need someone who curates the digital world for stories and information as they relate to the collection and/or mission of the museum, in addition to more established curatorial roles?

In the unconference session that followed, Seb Chan pointed out that many museum, archive and library roles were beginning to collapse onto themselves as the differences that defined one from the next became less distinct in the digital realm. All of which makes me start to wonder just which roles within the museum will stand up as they currently are, and which other roles (like digital conservators) will begin to emerge as more and more critical in the coming years? Just how fluid is the museum’s institutional and organisational structure, anyway?

And, finally, what happens if you design yourself out of a job? There is a tension between wanting to create efficiencies and do things better, and wanting to maintain your job and an organisation’s need to employ you. Given that the positions needed in and by this sector appear to fluctuate more than I had previously imagined, I’m interested in how this tension plays out in career paths, and whether institutions can or do support those whose once-essential skills are now only peripherally useful.

This is where my relative newness to the sector starts to really get in the way, because I cannot look back at institutions and their history to know how these kinds of questions play out. But I am sure some of you can.

I’d love to hear more about your experiences and what you’ve seen in your own careers. Do the roles that museums need filled fluctuate significantly over the course of years? And what impact does that have on the museum? How often should a museum actively revisit its structure and strategy to ensure a fit for purpose?

Finding God in Texas

This was supposed to be the first of my post-MW2013 posts, wrapping up the conference and starting to pull together the underlying themes and ideas that emerged for me during the week in Portland. And then I arrived in Texas, and Google brought me God in the form of a thousand search results; an unexpected kind of creeping normalcy that painted the world a different colour to the way I usually see it. So I thought I’d detour from plan and spend a couple of minutes thinking about some of the immediate questions that this raised for me.

When I search on almost any issue back in Australia, I don’t get a lot of religion in my results. I don’t know whether it’s because we are a largely secular country, or because the profile of people whom otherwise “look” like me to Google (ie, using a Mac, female) in Australia aren’t very religious. Therefore, to look into the Google mirror and find the results reflected back at me so distorted from their usual bent, and from my sense of self, was somewhat jarring. In The Filter Bubble Eli Pariser comments that “from within the bubble, it’s nearly impossible to see how biased it is.” (10) What I think I’ve experienced here in Texas is my first real opportunity to look at the search results presented to me from beyond my normal cocooned perspective. The sensation grates.

It also raises interesting questions for me about the idea of a canon of knowledge, because these kinds of personalised results surely make it much harder to form an agreed-upon body of ideas or frame of reference for history, much less the present. (This is something that Danny Birchall and I touched lightly on in our Museums and the Web paper about curating the digital world.)

I am not even close to making sense of what these kinds of distorting lenses mean for us in museums, but here are some first thoughts. We are all now at the mercy of these kinds of algorithms, because they are in some ways a necessary strategy for coping with the scale of non-hierarchical online information; whether we work in museums or not. The information we have access to, then, is rarely going to be everything we might need or want. This is ok, I think. It’s surely always been the case that with so much information in the world only some has been esteemed over others.

But the perniciousness of algorithmic invisibility, that it is next to impossible to understand how and where those non-neutral search engine biases comes from, seems to present museums with both a challenge and an opportunity. By declaring where our own knowledge is drawn from as it relates to the collection or otherwise, or acknowledging when it is missing or known to be incomplete, we gain the opportunity to act as a different voice within the digital space, with different interests and values. In addition, utilising such an approach could enable those who use our resources to both provide other perspectives by knowing where our conclusions were drawn from.

What do you think? Is this an issue that museums need to tackle, and if so, how should it affect their approach to knowledge sharing and gathering?

Announcing Museopunks – a new podcasting project

One of the themes that emerged in day one of Museums and the Web was a question of how museums can work at web scale; how their practice has to shift in order to curate the digital world or to deal with the rare becoming commonplace. It’s a super interesting question, and one that I’ve been lucky enough to delve into a little deeper in recent weeks in some conversations with Mike Edson (Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution) and Paul Rowe (CEO of Vernon Systems).

The cool thing is that these conversations were actually recorded as the very first episode of a new podcasting project that Jeffrey Inscho (Web and Digital Media Manager, Carnegie Museum of Art) and I are kicking off, launching today.

Museopunks is a podcast for the progressive museum. Each month, we’ll invite passionate practitioners to tackle prominent issues and big ideas facing museums in the modern age. With innovation, experimentation and creativity as focus points, Museopunks features forward-thinking people and projects that push the sector into new territories.

In the inaugural episode of the Museopunks podcast, we chat to Mike and Paul about museums in the Age of Scale. How can museums rethink their practices to work at web scale, from the smallest institutions up to the biggest?

This is a project that Jeffrey and I are super excited about. We’re both keen to hear from different voices and get into subjects that maybe deserve a little more focussed investigation. So we’d love to hear what you think about the podcast, or ideas for future shows or guests that we should dig into. It would also be great if you wanted to get involved with the discussion about scale that we’ll have over at the Museopunks website.  How do you think museums should tackle the complexities – and opportunities – that come from trying to scale up digital (and even non-digital) operations?

You can subscribe to Museopunks via iTunes.