Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Play On: An Interview with Amy Dickinson


 In Spring, a designer's mind turns to ... PLAY!

Well at least mine did when I was given the opportunity to interview Amy Dickinson from the play-minded group KaBOOM! for the most recent issue of the Association of Children's Museums' (ACM) journal called Hand to Hand.

The post that follows below is based upon that interview, and is posted with the kind permission of ACM.



By way of reference, Amy Dickinson is the manager of training and education at KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit working to create a great place to play within walking distance of every child and dedicated to advocating for play in the lives of children and communities. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, and has served in both AmeriCorps and Peace Corps.

ORSELLI: What is the minimum kit of parts or the minimum requirements to make a good playground? 
DICKINSON: I have a really expansive notion of what a playground—or any playspace—can be. You don’t need a lot: any area where there are things that children can manipulate, have fun with and get engrossed in is playspace. Are you familiar with New York’s Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds? They put together reused and recyclable materials and take them out for a day or an afternoon to a park, a block party, a street closed to traffic, a festival—any public space—and invite the community to come and play: to build, paint and create as they see fit. 



ORSELLI: This collection of modular play materials builds on the tradition of adventure playgrounds, started in the U.K. and Europe, that took familiar materials and twisted them into playful situations. 
DICKINSON:  Exactly. Morgan Leichter Saxby, one of the two people who started Pop Up Adventure Play, was a U.K.-trained playworker who had worked with the well- known British playworker Penny Wilson. Trained playworkers are key to adventure playgrounds, and Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds are based on similar principles: supporting and facilitating the play process and acting as advocates for child-directed play when encountering adult-led agendas. 


ORSELLI:  What are some of the biggest impediments to fostering children’s play in any environment? 
DICKINSON:  The first one is a lack of safe places to place. Only one out of every five children has a park or a playground within walking distance of his/her home. A second impediment that is definitely transforming children’s play is rising media usage among children and youth. And a lack of awareness about the importance of children’s play is impeding active play. And third? Less and less time for recess as we increasingly focus on standardized tests. Children’s time is getting more and more overscheduled—too many structured activities like soccer practice or music lessons rather than time to just roam around on their own and play in a child-directed way. 


ORSELLI: When I was a kid in Detroit in the late '60s and '70s my parents didn’t have any compunction about letting me or my siblings spin around on our bikes or go off with our friends and come back hours later.  And this was in the pre-cell phone era when parents couldn’t be electronically tethered to their children.  Is it harder now for parents, rightly or wrongly, to turn their kids loose in unstructured play situations? 
DICKINSON: Yes, and changing community life has a lot to do with it. When I think about my childhood, and the ways that I played—my parents were rarely in the picture. I roamed around freely with neighborhood groups of kids. But now in a lot of places people don’t know their community and they don’t spend time outside getting to know their neighbors either—kids don’t play in their front yards. Some parents are scared to let their children outside. They have a perception that it’s not safe—and maybe in some places it isn’t. Without knowing who lives around them, parents are frightened to let their children out into the unknown. Parents are also under a lot of pressure, including social pressure, to make sure that they are doing the best possible things for their children. 


ORSELLI:  “You’re a good parent!”
DICKINSON:  Yes, but sometimes being a “good parent” is actually to the detriment of the child. Even with the well-meaning intentions of taking the best care and making sure that nothing happens to your child, in actuality, kids need some chances to fail, to make mistakes and to mess up so they can learn. It’s completely understandable that a parent wants everything to go well for their child, but with the social pressure from other parents, many parents feel like they’re being judged. Are they successful parents?  Are they setting the child up for success by enrolling them in this activity or that sport? It has become a little cycle that some people want out of.  But it’s hard when you feel that social pressure. 


ORSELLI: What aspects of play that KaBOOM! fosters might be transferable to other play environments, including children’s museums? 
DICKINSON: I’m not an expert on children’s museums, but last fall I visited the Providence Children’s Museum where it was wonderful to see kids so engrossed in many different child-directed play environments. Everything and everyone in that museum encourages play—interacting with multiple sensory materials, multiple environments, both indoor and outdoor. And the museum offers a lot of different ways that kids can experience risk or challenge themselves by moving up in different levels of an activity whenever they’re comfortable.


They have an awesome climber outside. In terms of physical structure, I’ve never even seen anything like it before. The whole museum is very thoughtfully designed for caregivers as well. The Power of Play exhibit, for example, has a lot of activities where children can direct their own play and try things out, like shooting little scarves through tubes. But the exhibit also has quotations, books and other prompts that encourage parents to stop and reflect on the importance of play. The exhibit both encourages children’s play while it encourages parents to stop and think about how their children are playing and the kinds of play that are occurring. One of the most eye-opening experiences for any adult is to watch children play without interfering with them and just think about what’s going on there. You gain a sense of awe about what happens when kids are playing. 


ORSELLI:  What is your take on indoor playspaces versus outdoor playspaces, especially in terms of safety and perceptions of safety? 
DICKINSON:  Play can occur anywhere. Outside play is important especially nowadays when children are spending less and less time outside. But playing inside is valuable, too. If it’s not possible to go outside because of neighborhood safety concerns, then create indoor play environments.

As far as physical safety goes, kids encounter safety concerns no matter where they play. You can get hurt doing anything. Heights come with the possibility of falling; sharp jutting things can cut people; people can get tangled in dangling ropes or fabrics. The idea is to weigh the benefits of an activity versus the risk that some type of harm might happen. When we walk, we could trip, fall and get hurt but we don’t ban walking.

Interestingly enough, if we try to make an environment too safe, we often encourage children to seek out other types of behavior that might bring the risk of more serious harm. British child development expert Tim Gill, author of the 2007 book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, talks about moving from the idea of “risk aversion” to “risk management,” and that makes a lot of sense to me. By simply starting conversations about play and risk and by encouraging people to observe children’s play and to think and talk about what they see happening—the risks they see being taken and the things that might be learned from them—can do a lot in terms of changing attitudes. And remembering how we played as children and by making it a point to take time to play—to experience the wonder and discovery of it for ourselves—helps us understand and value it. 


ORSELLI:  Are there any specific play researchers that you admire?
DICKINSON:  The American Academy of Pediatrics’ statement on play is one of the best and most comprehensive documents. It includes not just impediments to children’s play, but the benefits and value of play for children and for families. It’s easy to access online as a free, downloadable PDF. Dr. Ken Ginsburg, who I believe was its main author, is an eloquent spokesperson on behalf of children’s play, their rights and general wellbeing.

I also love The Playworks Primer written by British playworker Penny Wilson and published by the Alliance for Childhood. It captures what’s important about play, but is written in such a whimsical way that it doesn’t lose the magic of play. And is also available online as a free, downloadable PDF. Wilson is another powerful play advocate and somehow manages to capture your imagination and make you remember what it’s like to be involved in play—to give yourself over to it. That’s still an important feeling for children.

Joe Frost’s decades-long body of work on children’s play and designing environments and identifying obstacles to children’s play is invaluable. Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek are doing great work on the value of play in educational settings. The work of Tim McGill, mentioned earlier, on the topic of risk has helped shape the way I talk with people about what to include in play environments and how important challenge is for children—thinking about risk benefits, not just being averse to the idea of risk.  


ORSELLI: Do you mourn the loss of monkey bars, seesaws or their equivalents?
DICKINSON: The seesaw is my absolute favorite piece of playground equipment. I have a scar on my hand from falling off a seesaw. It’s ironic that I lament the fact that it’s really difficult to find an old teeter-totter, just a plank of wood going up and down. But equipment like teeter-totters teach us to overcome our fears; they also teach us to fall down and get back up again. 



ORSELLI:  And to be careful with who’s on the other side of that seesaw!
DICKINSON:  Right—social learning! It also teaches us how to do it better the next time. Learning self-regulation and how to work in groups comes into play a lot when kids have the opportunity to direct their play. Our tendency is to intervene when we see children roughhousing, which I relate to this whole conversation about risk.

Last fall I was working at the Ultimate Block Party in Baltimore where we had Imagination Playground blocks set up. Two young boys were sword fighting and hitting each other with foam pool noodles. I almost intervened, but I thought, “Practice what you preach. Let them go.” And so I did, and no other adults stepped up either. They played like this for a long time, and it came close to ending when one of the boys got a bloody nose at which point they both put the noodles down. The bloody-nose kid walked away and got a Kleenex. When his bloody nose was over, they went back to playing but in a more restrained way. They had taught themselves some limits—how much they could hit and not have someone get hurt. 


ORSELLI:  Have you noticed any commonalities or contrasts among people in different parts of the world in the way they think about play or play environments?
DICKINSON:  Wherever you go, kids play in very similar ways although they might use different materials, from manufactured soccer balls to balls made from rags tied together. When I lived in Paraguay, my thinking about children’s play underwent a revolution, and it had more to do with the adults’ attitudes towards children and their play. Kids played with things there that would shock people in the United States. Paraguayan children are given a lot of independence, but they also live in very tight-knit communities.

Big extended families live near each other, and people often stay in the communities in which they grew up so they know each other really well. I was in a fairly rural area where everyone knew all their neighbors. This allowed children a lot of freedom to run around and play with whatever they could find. There was a play structure in the town where I lived that would never be considered safe here in the United States. And interestingly enough, no one ever got hurt playing on it. Kids would play with whatever they could find, like scraps of lumber. They made their own mini-adventure playgrounds. And they just ran around a lot.

The other thing I noticed there that you don’t see very often in the United States was cross-age play or multi-age play—two-year-olds up to sixteen-year-olds all playing together. If I could change anything about play or community life in the United States it would be more opportunities for multi-age play. Young kids learn a lot when they play with older kids, who in turn learn through their teaching and watching out for the little ones. When you give kids independence they can manage a fair bit of it.  



ORSELLI:  Other than your seesaw scar, do you have any other play-related memories?
DICKINSON:  My dad was in the military, so we moved around quite a bit when I was young. Seems like we always ended up in developing towns, often in the Southwest, with lots of building going on. We didn’t have playgrounds or parks near us so we would go into houses under construction and find materials laying around—boards, nails and other hardware—and take them and go off and make forts. (Now when I think about it, it reminds me of an adventure playground.) We didn’t think of it as stealing. We considered scrap materials just laying around up for grabs.

Once, my brother and I and a couple other neighborhood kids took some lumber from a construction site and made a little clubhouse in a nearby stand of trees. My brother, the clubhouse president, inscribed his name “Casey Dickinson, President,” and phone number. My dad got a phone call the next day from the construction workers!

We also played a lot of games that sound really boring in retrospect but they were endlessly fascinating to us. We played physicist, which involved turning your bike upside down and using it as your “laboratory equipment.” We spent hours putting reeds or sticks through the spokes or pouring water over our pedals or things like that.  


ORSELLI: Describe your dream play environment—the sky’s the limit.
DICKINSON:  If you have dirt, water and materials you can move around, that covers it. When I think of my dream play environment, I think of my neighborhood growing up. There was a ditch behind our house. When it rained it would flash flood with all this rushing water and mud to play around in. There were little sandy parts, with reeds and other plants growing that you could pick and put together to make things. And other kids played there. A favorite playground is one where you have people to play with.



Thanks Amy! It was fun interviewing you.
 

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Friday, March 23, 2012

The Missing Letter



I had never been to a museum like this!  Around 1971, my family took a trip to Toronto.  Just a few years before, in 1969, Ontario Science Centre (OSC) had opened up and immediately started changing ideas about what an interactive science museum could be.  (In one of those zeitgeist-y moments in history, the Exploratorium opened in 1969 also.)

I'm not even sure how my parents found out about OSC and knew to take my brothers and me there, but from the moment we rode the escalators "through the trees" to enter the exhibit halls we were all excited and showing each other new things we had found.  In addition to the interactive components, I know I was especially fascinated by the live demonstrations --- somebody just blew a hole through a brick with a gigantic laser!

After we returned home to Detroit, I wrote a "fan letter" to the scientists at Ontario Science Centre and asked them if they could send me science experiments that I could do at home.  To my delight, a week or two later, I received a kind reply on official OSC letterhead with a little booklet of cool chemistry demonstrations. WOW!

One of the experiments allowed you to create a "carbon snake" with sulfuric acid(!) and sugar.  I showed my grade school science teachers the letter and chemistry experiments, and asked if they had any sulfuric acid I could borrow.  They did! So I took the big glass bottle with the faded label home as fast as my bike would carry me.

I didn't have any beakers, but my mom thought an empty jar would do the trick.  So I went into the basement laundry room with my supplies and started pouring sulfuric acid into the jar that had some sugar in the bottom.  Once the acid hit the sugar, bubbling and smoking commenced and an evil black looking cylinder snaked up and out of the mouth of the jar accompanied by the strong smell of burning sugar.  "Look! look!" I said to my family as I showed them the "carbon snake."  I tried other experiments with different amounts of sugar and acid to see how I could change the resulting "snake."  Everything was going great until I had the bright idea of quickly pouring some of the sulfuric acid into the jar with sugar in it and then screwing the lid on to see what would happen.

BOOOOOM!

Thank goodness the laundry sink was deep and made of sturdy metal, since I hadn't been wearing any gloves or goggles.  After the smoke cleared, and I cleaned up all the broken glass that the deep sink had captured after the jar exploded (and after my mom was done freaking out!) I learned a valuable (and memorable) lesson about the effects of containing a strong exothermic reaction in a closed jar.

Somewhere along the line, that letter and booklet of chemistry experiments have gone missing, although I had them for a long time.  I often wonder if any museum would be crazy enough to send some kid experiments using sulfuric acid anymore. Probably not.

I also think of all those letters I sent to museums (in pre-email and Web days!) asking for a job when I was about to graduate from college.  And how much the letters that offered even a small bit of encouragement or an idea or suggestion meant to me, especially compared to the obvious form letter rejections --- or no response at all.

Those messages that we as museum workers send, intentionally or unintentionally, can have a big impact on our visitors, and our potential future colleagues.

Electronic communication and the world-wide reach of the Web means that I often get messages from people asking for advice or for jobs, and I really try to give a thoughtful answer to each one of those folks who took the time to write me --- because I still remember how much receiving that letter from the Ontario Science Center meant, and I suppose still means, to me.



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Thursday, March 15, 2012

Design Inspiration: Project RE_


"Using familiar things in unfamiliar ways" is one wonderful definition of creativity.

Project RE_ is a great place to get ideas that play with the notions of upcycling (increasing the value of broken or unused objects by giving them new functions or forms) and creative reuse.

Project RE_ was started by Samuel Nelson Bernier,  an industrial designer from Quebec as a university research project.

There are some really novel DIY ideas on the  Project RE_ site, and each idea features a materials list and instructions for you to make your own "upcyclables"!

So look through your junk drawer or attic and head over to Project RE_ to get inspired to start your own project!


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Thursday, March 8, 2012

A Repertoire of Experiences: An Interview with Maria Mortati


Maria Mortati is a Museum Exhibit Developer and Project Planner. She lives and works in the Bay Area on a variety of projects that span the temporary to long term, and are often experimental in nature.

Maria was kind enough to answer a few questions for this ExhibiTricks interview:


What’s your educational background?
I have a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado in Boulder and an MFA in Design from Stanford University. I also spent some time in between those two degrees studying graphic design. I learned User Interface design on the job in the 90’s and taught in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and basic mechanical engineering design classes at grad school.  



What got you interested in Museums?
I was always interested in art, drawing, and design from a young age. My parents took us to museums, as did my school, sometimes unrelentingly. They let us know this was important in some way, even if I wanted to (and did) kick my brother.

Museums and galleries became my go to place as a young person.  As a teenager, contemporary art museums especially resonated. Modern art at that time was still “modern”.  I used to haunt the galleries in Greenwich Village and go home at night with my friends and draw. Nerds, I know.

After the inevitable post-BFA pay-the-rent-jobs, I worked in visual and user interface design for about a decade. It was fun, I learned a lot about engagement, identity, and teamwork.

After a while I wanted to do more conceptual work and work on larger ideas and environments than the Internet offered, so I went to get my MFA. During those 3 years I did an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a series of thesis projects that could be best summarized by “is it exhibit or is it art?” They were physical, highly interactive and often social in nature.

From there, the melding of my new creative skills and the museum world seemed a natural next step.



Given your varied background, is your approach to exhibition development different in the context of different museum types?
Do you mean I take a different approach based on the project? Not really, there is always the essential getting to know you, and development phases that help structure the work. Given that these are often large projects, good fences make good neighbors.



What is the San Francisco Mobile Museum project?
The San Francisco Mobile Museum (SFMM) is a “pop-up” project I developed in 2009. I’ve had two exhibitions and it has shown in a number of locations, primarily outdoors in the Bay Area. The SFMM is a platform that can be broken down to fit in my car. Past exhibits have been participatory with the public responding to a theme or prompt by making something. The next exhibition will be moving away from that model, and will focus more on onsite engagement. It will be called “Observatorium” and I’ll be posting about its progress on our blog.

(If you want to learn more about the San Francisco Mobile Museum project, there is an article on it coming out in Spring 2012 issue of Exhibitionist.)



Tell us a little bit about how your mobile projects inform your exhibit design work?
They help give me some grounding in reality. My work projects tend to span years into the future and don’t offer much room for experimentation. However, there is often a lot on the line. Having the SFMM there to test things out gives me some solid experience (if even on a tiny scale) with an idea or an approach. It’s not that I’m exactly testing out an idea for a specific project, but if I want to be a part of the conversation, then I need to be participating in the conversation.

A project I did in 2010 with Machine Project at the Hammer Museum (The Giant Hand) was also very important in terms of how it shaped my professional perspective and gave me insights. I had a chance to be both artist and designer, so I stumbled into some unique issues and challenges that museums face and got to be creative while doing it.



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
The report recently released by Machine Project on the above-mentioned residency at the Hammer Museum. And not just because I’m in it! It’s a great resource for exploring the potential of a museum.

Exhibit developers come in all types- that's’ good because museums do too. So there is no one compendium I turn to, but I do visit a lot of museums, take pictures, and write about it when possible. It’s good to always be developing a repertoire of experiences.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing aspects of storytelling into their exhibitions?
Storytelling or narrative is a tool or technique that is quite powerful- when dealing with human stories (as we often are). They are the glue that can give a visitor a point of access into a world of ideas.

With the SFMM, we let the visitors “tell” their own stories about their objects, but we provided the framework. Another project that did this very well was the Denver Community Museum, who we collaborated with on our inaugural exhibit. It’s a good and simple mechanism to draw participants out and the public in.

Storytelling isn’t the only approach. For example, Olafur Elliasson’s work: would it be more impactful if it had a storyline?

Each work, exhibit, or installation has its own set of options. The bigger question that helps sort out which way to go is what is your ultimate goal for this exhibit? There is a logic that flows from there to help drive which techniques to play with.

I tend to approach exhibits with the question: what can I do that would be fun or innovative to explore this idea? For the visitor, the institution, and of course, myself.

For smaller museums, determining the best impact you can have with your resources at hand is the central challenge and their greatest source of strength. It is their key differentiator. Edit down to a few powerful ideas and then save the others for another exhibition. Then find the most impactful technique to bring that choice to life.



What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?
I think museums need to excel at creating and joining ideas in ever-freer ways, and less focused on traditional notions of silo-ed curation and exhibition. I’m not alone in this idea and I’m also not saying throw our expertise out the door though. Keep it.

We have established dominance in framing and synthesizing concepts, now lets get serious about “engagement”. We are uniquely poised to claim this space, but it’s been slow going due to our institutional make-up and value systems. I'm talking about a paradigm shift from collect and preserve to select and engage.

If a museum could focus on one area it would be to foster an outlook that they are a place of creative production. One way to get there is by having a sense of flexibility with their content. Then having some staff that can design, develop, and produce. Be open to being sites of creation by others such as artists, scientists, thinkers and doers.

This takes a sense of experimentation that is often hard to make room for, but what else are we going to do if not be the best?



What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
Oh wow that’s hard. There are so many that I see and they are incredibly diverse. For nostalgia the MoMA, for local I like the diversity at the de Young, for wonder the Exploratorium of course, and for power of story on a visit, the Bird Museum in Iceland.



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?
At the moment I’m working with the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art on a new exhibition plan. They have been doing innovative work engaging the public with art, and they want to push the envelope further.

I’m also working on the next iteration of the San Francisco Mobile Museum.



If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?
I’d turn my garage and the apartment in our house into a collaborative exhibition residency with ongoing talks, exhibits, and studios. It would be a blast.



Thanks again to Maria for sharing her insights with us!  To find out more about Maria Mortati and her work, check out her website and blog.



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Thursday, March 1, 2012

Rhythm in Exhibitions



Why is there such a desire to touch things in an art museum?  Does all that concentrated looking create a pent up demand to use our other senses?  Or do we long to get a better sense of how an artist created something, and the materials they used?  Can a museum experience be "interactive" if you don't touch anything?

I was thinking about these things after a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with a group of my graduate students from Bank Street's Museum Education program.  (Yes, that's us touching sculptures in the picture above.)


Not in any way to pick on MoMA (since it's one of my favorite museums) but the galleries there (and in many other museums) often seem to lose track of the intellectual and design values of rhythm.

Rhythm in the sense of changing up and varying the sensory stimuli and patterns for visitors.  In the case of MoMA, a visitor is faced with the classic "pure white box" style gallery repeated over and over.  And within each pure white space, artworks are arranged linearly or in grid patterns on the walls or floors.  Couldn't an occasional gallery wall be painted red or blue? 

I'd contend that one reason for the amazing success of recent shows by Tim Burton and Olafur Eliasson at MoMA was (aside from the great art) that each installation deliberately broke away from the white/grid aesthetic.

And lack of rhythm in exhibitions isn't just an Art Museum issue.  My kids once remarked on a History Museum exhibition as a "bunch of old brown things" because the furniture, textiles, and documents on display were all old and brown!  The visual rhythm of "brown" and "old" became a sort of unvarying metronome that overwhelmed the ultimate content goals of the designers.  Each object in every glass case was set on sepia or earth-toned backgrounds as well.

Have some museum genres become like particular radio stations for both exhibition designers and visitors?  Tune into pristine white spaces on the Art Museum channel, and dimly lit galleries full of "old brown stuff" on the History Museum station?

Are the typical design "rhythms" of many science centers filled with bright colors, neon, and wildly varying architectural forms really conducive to thinking deeply about tricky scientific content?

How can we as exhibition creators find our "design rhythm" to help create more interesting museum spaces and content-driven experiences for our visitors?

Please share your own experiences or examples of rhythm in exhibitions (good or bad) in the "Comments" section below!


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