Opening up the museum | Nina Simon | TEDxSantaCruz

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Nina comments on opening up museums to participatory culture to change organizations and the community. She said that giving people special tools to participate will encourage people to feel valued. She sees artifacts as social objects in museums.

Nina Simon is Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), which has gone through a radical transformation over the past year to become a thriving central gathering place. Opening up the MAH to the community has more than doubled attendance and introduced new levels of collaboration, dynamism, and relevance to the museum. Simon teaches radical exhibition design in the University of Washington Museology graduate program and writes the popular blog Museum 2.0. Her 2010 book, The Participatory Museum, was named "a future classic of museology" and is used as a text in cultural organizations and graduate programs internationally. Previously, Simon worked as an independent consultant to over 100 museums and cultural centers around the world, focusing on participatory community engagement. She served as curator at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, Calif., and was the Experience Development Specialist at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Thank you.

I want to be real up-front about the fact
that I am an activist about this stuff.

I want to share with you today
the passion of my professional work

which is about opening up museums,

turning them into places that are not
just places where people come to visit

but where you can actively participate,
where you can connect with culture,

and hopefully, through these experiences
connect more deeply with each other.

The problem is that for most people,
museums are not seen as open spaces.

Museums are seen as elite institutions.

New York.

(Laughter)

They're seen as elite institutions

that serve an increasingly small
and limited subset of our population.

So when most people go
looking for a cultural experience,

they don't go to a museum.

We live in an incredibly
fertile creative time.

Look at what Luke's doing, and Ally,

all of the wonderful artists
and cultural enthusiasts in our community.

You don't have to be a professional
to be excited about culture today.

People are getting together
in bars to knit.

People are renting space
and starting businesses

so they can do
science experiments together.

The research on this is very clear:

throughout our country, people
are more culturally engaged than ever,

but they are choosing to have
those experiences

outside of traditional
cultural institutions.

That means you're way more likely
today to pick up a paint brush

than you're to go to an art museum.

Instead of going to a history museum,

people are doing
their own genealogical research.

As a museum director,
I look at this, and I say,

"We have to get in on this game!
These are people who care about culture.

They're passionate about
the things that we protect,

and yet, weren't staying at arm's length."

What is that about?

When I talk with
museum professionals about this,

I hear some interest,
but I also hear some real concern.

This is a quote from a friend of mine
who works for the Smithsonian.

She said, "I know a lot of people
who work in art museums

who would recoil in horror at the idea
of being inundated by Sunday painters."

I'm sorry, but if people
who paint on Sundays

aren't the core audience
for an art museum, I don't know who is.

(Applause)

Here in Santa Cruz at our museum, the
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History,

we've decided we're going to open up
to participatory culture.

We are going to embrace it.

So, yes, we invite people
to paint with us on Sundays.

We encourage them to share
their own creative skills with each other,

and you know what?

Sometimes, that involves tools that are
a lot more extreme than paint brushes.

(Laughter)

What I want to share with you today
are just two of the ways

that we are opening up our museum,

and how it's changing

both our organization
and hopefully, our community.

The first side of this is
about active participation.

We don't just invite you in to come visit.

We expect every person
who walks in our museum

to contribute something
to make our museum better.

That means from the instant
you walk in the door,

you will be asked to give us a suggestion
of how we can improve the museum.

We've invited visitors to write poems
about objects in our history gallery.

And now, if you come in
on the first floor,

you can even bottle up a memory

and put it on display
for other visitors to see.

Over the last year, thousands of visitors
have contributed content to our museum

and it's beautiful, it's powerful,
and it's meaningful

to other people who walk in the door.

But I think we all know

that we've had experiences
with participatory public comment

that were not so meaningful.

In museums, you can see
comment books like this

full of repetitive boring information.

"Sam was here," "Jasmin was here."

Thank you very much.

I think we're all really familiar
with this kind of experience online.

I don't think any of the people

who made these YouTube comments
are dumb people.

What I see here is a lack
of a designed opportunity

to really invite them to give
something meaningful to this situation.

I believe that everyone of us in this room

has something really powerful
and creative to add.

I believe that everyone of us
has a story to share,

that frankly, everyone of you probably

has something amazing to share
from this stage today.

But I also know
that everyone of us can be banal.

We can all be idiots sometimes.

And to me, as somebody who works on
inviting participation,

the difference is in how we design
the invitation to participate.

Good design can elevate us
to share our the best selves

in a way that lousy design cannot.

Let me give you an example.

This is from an exhibition I worked on
in Seattle a few years ago.

This exhibition was about advice.

These were just two ways in the exhibition

that you could give and get advice.

On the left, people could put up
a question with a post-it,

and then, you could give suggestions.

People were very well-meaning
and trying to help each other out here.

On the right, they had constructed
a fake bathroom door.

You can see that mostly,
what people did was scribble nonsense

or write, "For a good time, call Johnny."

It's not like when you came
in the door to this exhibit,

we sent the well-meaning people
to the post-its and the fools to the door.

The same people did
both of these activities.

And the reason they interacted differently

was because of the design
and the tools that were given to them.

Here is an even geekier example.

This is from
the L.A. County Museum of Art.

They did this project a couple years ago

where they asked people
a question about art.

They gave some visitors
white cards and golf pencils

and gave some visitors these hexagonal,
blue cards and big pencils.

And what they found was that people
wrote better answers on the blue cards

than they did on the white.

Does this mean that blue
is a magical color for participation?

No.

What it means
is if you give somebody a special tool,

you make them feel valued,

you show them that you actually
care about what they going to do

and it transforms with they do in return.

And so in our museum, we think really hard

about how to design
those invitations to participate

in ways that encourage
people to feel valued

and to feel like they better give
something good back.

So when we asked people for their stories
of relationship breakups,

we had them post them
on this kind of wall.

When we invited them to share
their favorite memories of coffee,

we gave them coffee beans to vote with

so that they could smell and feel
that experience of coffee.

And again, when we wanted to ask
people to share love letters,

we gave them a typewriter to work with,

an unfamiliar tool that caused them

to slow down
and to share something different.

And right now, we're doing
this memory jar installation

where we're giving people
mason jars and craft materials,

and we're saying, "Think of a memory
that's important to you,

use some craft materials
to create a representation of it

and bottle it up
for somebody else to see."

We've had over 300 people
contribute jars in the last month.

And here is just one
that I took a picture of last week.

It says, "I remember when you were alive,

before Iraq and open pit burns
which gave you cancer.

I remember when we learned
that you died in Iraq in our arms at home,

I miss you, I miss you."

I don't think this visitor, Mark,
walked into the museum

expecting that he was going to
share this story.

But this activity and the designed
experience brought it out of him

and made him able to contribute
something really powerful to our museum

and to the other visitors
who walk in the door.

This kind of participation isn't
just changing the content of the museum,

it's changing the way that visitors
see themselves as creative agents.

We've had a lot of positive response to
what we've been doing over the last year,

but one of my favorite quotes
came from a teenager who said,

"We've been to famous art museums
all over Europe,

but this is the first exhibit
that makes me want to do art."

I looked at that, and I'm thrilled

not just because we turn somebody
onto culture in a different way

but because this is somebody
for whom the museum has become relevant.

This is somebody who is going
to get more involved.

And over the last year, we've seen this
happen again and again.

Just with one year of participation,

we've totally changed
what's happening in our museum.

So, from last year to this year,
our attendance has more than doubled,

our busiest day has more than tripped,

and we went from tenuous,
financial position,

one so bad that you can't even see
how much cash we had

at the bottom of that chart

(Laughter)

to a stable place that we can grow on.

By doing this kind of participatory stuff,

we are not just making
the museum exciting,

we are making it
sustainable for the future.

You might look at all this and wonder,
"But what about the objects?"

Aren't museums
fundamentally about artifacts?

And yes, we still have
stuff at our museum.

The next side of this I want to talk about
is how we are transforming our artifacts,

starting to look at them as opportunities

to mediate conversations
between strangers.

To you an example,
let's go outside the museum.

How many people here own a dog? OK. Great.

So you've all had this experience:

you're out walking your dog in public
and a stranger comes up and talks to you.

They're not really
talking directly to you;

they're talking through the dog to you.

The dog has become this safe social object

that mediates an encounter
that otherwise wouldn't happen.

As a museum designer,
I am really curious about this:

how could we make
museum artifacts more like dogs?

(Laughter)

I'm serious.

How could we make them
opportunities for conversations

that otherwise wouldn't happen?

Because the kinds of social experiences
that people can have around museum objects

are bigger than the ones
we have around our dogs.

When you're walking down the street,

you don't start having
a conversation with a stranger

about what it's like to be in the military

like these people are
as they're looking at art work.

When you're in the mall, you don't have
a conversation about racial inequity

as these teenagers are
as they look at stacks of money

representing income disparity
between whites and blacks in the U.S.

Museum artifacts have the power
to expose the big conversations

we have to be having
about where we have been,

where we are now,
and where we going to go.

So again, at our museum,
we think really carefully

about how to bring to life
the conversations

that can happen around these objects;

whether that's through a craft activity

that gets people deeply
involved with the work

or an activity that invites them to select
which objects belong in the museum

and which ones aren't
relevant to our community.

Some museums don't even give you
a comfortable opportunity

to sit down and talk about
the objects on display.

We're really serious about this,
so we even do things like design games

that invite people
to engage more with the work.

And yes, all of these activities help
people connect with the artifacts

and learn more about them.

But more importantly, to me,
they help them connect with people

who are not like them
and learn more about each other

because we all know
how a powerful social object

can bridge a gap
that otherwise we won't cross.

And that leads me to my last point
which is that when do we this work,

when we invite people to participate,

when we see objects
as loci of conversation,

we can transform museums
from things that are nice to have

that things that are really necessary
to move our communities forward.

It isn't just happening
here in Santa Cruz,

it's happening all over the world,
in Toronto at the Ontario Science Center

where they are inviting visitors
to invent solutions to global problems.

It's happening in Minneapolis
at the Institute of Art

where every ten years,
they have an exhibit where they say,

"Anybody and everybody in the community
can bring in a small artwork,

and we will hang it on the wall
of a world class museum."

It's happening
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art,

where we're using technology
to experiment with new ways

for people to engage
with artifacts and with each other.

Again, when I look
at any of these examples

what I'm looking at are the people.

So when people at my museum
are doing a craft activity together,

I don't just see people
who are cutting up magazines,

I see people who come from
different walks of life,

who've been brought together
through a cultural experience.

In Santa Cruz, perhaps
one of the most powerful experiences

we're having with that
is happening outside the museum

at a historic site called
Evergreen Cemetery.

About a year ago, the museum teamed up
with the homeless service center,

and every Monday, museum volunteers
and homeless volunteers come together

to restore this important,
historic site for Santa Cruz.

And yes, it's incredible that they are
beautifying it, and making it safe,

they are literally uncovering history

as they reveal gravestones
of Santa Cruz's founders.

Everybody who comes out
and works at Evergreen

has a powerful experience with history.

But more importantly,
everybody who comes out to Evergreen

has a powerful experience
with somebody who is not like them,

somebody who they might be
fearful of in another situation.

And it's this kind of social bridging
that culture can do

and can do so powerfully
and so importantly for us today.

I want to leave you
with just one last story of that kind,

a really special thing for me
that happened at the museum.

A couple of months ago,
we had this space set up

where people could make
collages in the museum.

I walked through, and I saw
this pretty typical museum scene.

In the background,

you have four young adults, Chicanos,
who are making collages,

and in the foreground,
you have a separate group,

one of our staff member, Stacey,
who is meeting with an artists named Kyle,

and there is his baby just looking cute.

So two separate groups
doing their thing in a museum.

But the next time I walked through,

I realized that, "Oh my gosh!
These girls have gotten up,

and the baby and the collages,
two great social objects,

have mediated a conversation
between completely strangers

about making art, about being a parent,
about making a child.

And then, the thing that happened next--

and I wish I had a picture of this--

the next time I walked through,
Kyle has handed his baby to these girls,

and they are sitting and making collages,

and he is continuing
his conversation with Stacy.

(Applause)

I know! I thought to myself,

"My god, if our museum
can be the kind of place

where somebody will willingly give
their baby to a stranger"

(Laugher)

then we are doing a lot to overcome
fear and divisiveness in our community.

We live in a really divided world,

politically, economically, culturally.

I feel that we desperately
need places that allow us

to have positive interactions
with people who are not like us.

The ultimate measure of what we're doing
right now at the Museum of Art &History

is not about the experiences
that happen inside the museum.

It's about how those experiences transform

the ones that people have
when they go outside.

I dream of a time when all of you
can come participate in our museum,

can connect with culture, and can walk out

and have a better connection
with somebody else on the street.

I dream of a time
when you will walk down the street,

and you will look around, and you'll say,

"Gosh, this is our community."

You look at a stranger
who is walking towards you,

and you won't think,
"I'm going to ignore that person,"

or, "Well, I should turn away
and go the other way.

Instead, you'll get excited
because you'll say,

"I'll collaborate with this person.
I want to get to know that person."

You may not hand them your baby,
there on the street

(Laughter)

but don't worry.

You can come to our museum and do that.

Thank you.

(Applause)