MCN2015 – museum geek

The MCN conference is only a couple of weeks away now, and I’m finally starting to relax and enjoy the run up to the event. The program is off to the printers, the timetable is locked down, and we’re putting on the finishing touches. This is the second year that I’ve been a Program Co-Chair, and it’s the last that I’ll have this level of involvement. Last year we implemented a two-year cycle for Program Co-Chairs that includes recruitment, training, and handing over the reins for the conference, so although I’ve loved working on the Program, it’s almost time for me to let it go. My current Co-Chairs––Jennifer Foley and Trish Oxford––will now take it over and shape its next iteration.

The conference team has achieved a lot over the last couple of years, and I wanted to share a few of the things I’m most proud of. In 2015, we affirmed our commitment to ensuring a positive and constructive experience for all participants with the introduction of our Friendly Space Policy. We also worked to better integrate networking throughout the program so that people had plenty of informal time as well as session-based learning opportunities. That conference was our biggest MCN, and it was a great pleasure to work with my then Co-Chairs Ed Rodley and Morgan Holzer making it come to life.

This year, we wanted to increase transparency about how the conference is put together, and improve communication with speakers–both of which I think we’ve achieved. We’ve asked all speakers to help us improve the accessibility of the conference by being mindful of accessibility when creating presentations. We’re also trying to be more thoughtful about scaffolding the experience for for first time attendees. In any given year, up to 50% of the people at MCN are new to the conference, so we’re offering a first timer’s orientation to help newbies have a great experience. If this is your first MCN, make sure you join Elissa Frankle for her wonderful, creative introduction to MCN. She’s taking your questions now to tailor her content to your needs. Our scholars now have a voice at the conference, too, with all 15 presenting lightning talks on their work.

I think our theme this year, which is focussed on the human-centered museum, has prompted some really interesting sessions this year (props to the Program Committee for that). Some that I’m most excited about are: The Intersections of Social Media, Race, and Social Justice for Programming; Museums & Incubators / Accelerators; True Stories: Learning from Storytellers Inside and Outside the Museum Field; Sleep Stories at Wellcome Collection: manifesting digitally submitted stories through an embroidered quilt and translating that back online; Creating Anti-Oppressive Spaces On-line ; and, of course, our keynote with Catherine Bracy, a pioneer in civic technology and digital democracy who has led organizations such as Code for America and the TechEquity Collaborative. Check out our big ideas playlist to get excited.

Finally, I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to partner with the Cultural Heritage and Social Change Summit, which will be held in NOLA immediately after MCN. The aim of the Summit is to promote movement building across the cultural heritage sector. Our hope is that it continues the work and conversations we start at MCN. It will definitely be worth sticking around for.

We’ve had an amazing group of people working on the conference over the past couple of years, so if you see or meet any of them, please make sure you thank them for their hard work. Something as complicated as MCN doesn’t come together overnight, and it’s taken a lot of people many, many hours to pull it off. I am so grateful to all the people who’ve worked and volunteered to make it real. Y’all rock.

PS: Ed and I are running an informal book club at MCN. You’ve still got time to join us, so pick up a copy of Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum, dip into its goodness, and meet us at there to discuss. We’d love to see you there!

Well, the MCN2015 theme has been posted, and I could not be more excited to share it with you:

MCN 2015: The Invisible Architectures of Connected Museums: Making Meaning with People, Collections, and Information
The world continues to move past the simple physical/digital dialectic towards a more nuanced matrix of architectures uniting digital and material culture. For this year’s MCN conference, we seek submissions that expand the museum experience through the marrying of the physical and the digital, the back office and the visitor, the screen and the vitrine. How will we utilize embodied, digitally responsive, and inclusive methods and approaches to build 21st-century literacies with our audiences?

One thing I love about this theme is that it asks us to think critically about the systems, structures, and rules that impact museum work. What are the existing implicit and explicit architectures and systems that dictate how we do our jobs, and impact how people experience the museum on- and offline? And (how) can increased awareness of those architectures enable us to build upon them differently?

Some of the architectures that immediately come to my mind include: our buildings (physical architectures), our organisational charts (procedural or institutional architectures), the systems created by others (funding and political systems; digital networks and social sites like Facebook that have their own rules), and broad cultural architectures. Then there are the less obvious ones, like language. Jean-Francois Noubel, for instance, explores how:

ontology (our language structures that define our relationship to the world) builds our collective self, and how these invisible architectures often maintain the collective entrapped in predictable social structures that self perpetuate via language.

He continues:

One of these (many) old ontological structures can be seen in our habit to use substantive words that express a function, a social status or state, rather than essence… [An example of this is] a user in the software world, rather than a person (shall we say some day a person interface rather than a user interface?).

How does the language we use to address visitors/users/the public change the way we think about them, or our objects? What is the essence, rather than the function of people who visit? I know many people in this sector have had conversations in recent years about what to call the people who come to the museum. Does changing what we call someone who attends the museum also change the way we think about and address them? And does that have any impact on inclusiveness and designing better experiences? We know that museum taxonomies significantly impact how we think about objects; does the same apply to other aspects of museum work?

In 2011, there was an Invisible Architectures festival in the UK, which sought to expose “layers of the city that would otherwise remain imperceptible.” What I’m hoping is that through this theme, MCN2015 will help us expose layers of the museum and museum work that would otherwise remain imperceptible, too.

There is much more in this theme that I love, and I might write a little more about it in coming weeks. The Call for Proposals will come out in early April, but until then, I’d love to talk more about these ideas, the thoughts that surfaced for me at least in the discussions that led to this theme, and how these might shape a super interesting conference.

Let me know what you think. What are some of the architectures (visible or otherwise) that impact your work? Have you made changes to the language you use to describe [users? visitors? other?], and what impact did that have?