Do We Need More Museum Teams or More Museum Auteurs?

I recently visited the excellent John Waters exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and as I was walking around the rest of the BMA, admiring site-specific pieces like Tomas Saraceno's "Entangled Orbits" (pictured at the top of this post) I started thinking about how exhibitions (and entire museums) get put together.

One thing I've noticed about truly unique and ground-breaking museums (like AVAM, City Museum, The Exploratorium, and Museum of Old and New Art) is that many of the most interesting things inside are the products of strong-minded individuals, not teams.  Which begs the question:

Do we need more museum teams or more museum auteurs?

It seems a lot more straightforward, if less democratic, to pursue one person's design vision than to sit through endless meetings trying to come to agreement among staff and advisors on the direction of an exhibition, or a set of exhibitions, in the case of a new museum.

Most granting agencies have essentially mandated an approach that makes all sorts of consensus-building techniques an essential part of the "creative" process --- but has this approach resulted in more interesting exhibitions and museums?

Art Museums seem more willing to turn over their galleries to individual artists for installations, usually with very good results. How can less "auteur" minded institutions like Science, History, and Children's Museums take advantage of a strong-minded individual driving the exhibit process forward, rather than the oft-venerated "Exhibits Team"? (I'd love to see Olafur Eliasson put together an exhibition at a Science Center!)

The "Creative Team" Conundrum also rears its ugly head when thinking about visitor studies and that Web 2.0 favorite, "crowdsourcing".

In the case of visitor studies, most visitors are only able to come up with variations of exhibits and exhibit themes they are already familiar with. Every museum stocked according to audience surveys would likely include a rocket ship or train, a dinosaur skeleton, and a mummy --- not bad, necessarily, but not exactly moving the exhibits field forward either.

Crowds and focus groups are notoriously bad at choosing innovations, which is why companies like Apple don't use them. Apple’s attitude is that sometimes, to truly innovate, you’ve got to go beyond giving people what they say they want. Building consensus often builds mediocre, and "safe" (rather than interesting) design decisions.

Maybe we need to bring in more "trouble makers" like Fred Wilson to shake up our staid exhibition development models. As Kathy McLean said in a previous ExhibiTricks interview, "I don't really need a lot of money or time to do my dream exhibitions ... I need organizations that are interested in presenting unusual, thought-provoking experiences."

What do you think? More museum teams or more museum auteurs? Let us know in the Comments Section below. (If you don't see the word "comment" at the very end of the post just click on the link that shows the posting time.)

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Can Social Psychology Predict Successful Museum Project Teams?

Did you ever notice how particular teams or working groups at some museums always seems to produce interesting, successful projects, while other museums filled with equally likeable and intelligent people never quite seem to get their projects to fly?

I kept coming back to memories of successful (and unsuccessful!) museum project teams as I read the fascinating article in the New York Times about the research conducted by the Project Aristotle group at Google, entitled "What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team."

The article is really worth reading for yourself, but I'll give you a bit of the punchline in this post.  (SPOILER ALERT!)

After looking at over a hundred groups at Google, the Project Aristotle researchers determined that the key factor for project teams to become successful was "group norms."

Roughly translated, that means that each group's "culture" determined the outcome of the group's work more than any other factors --- not age, gender, education, experience, even overlap between group members on different teams.

From the article:

"What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright."


Successful project teams shared two common qualities.  On good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion:

"As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well.  But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined."

Secondly, all the good teams had something the Project Aristotle researchers called high "social sensitivity."   Which means that successful team members were skilled at picking up on nonverbal cues --- like tone of voice, or facial expressions, to determine how other team members were feeling.

So given their findings, and Google's strong desire to improve the success of project teams, did the researchers draw up a list of prescriptions for teams to follow?  Not at all!  Rather, the Project Aristotle group shared their data and findings with people and assumed groups and their leaders were smart enough and motivated enough to incorporate the findings into each working group's "culture."

But most importantly, even for a data-driven company like Google, everyone in the organization came to realize that success was not always something that could be "optimized" or driven strictly by some one-size-fits-all business principles.

Again, from the article:

"Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized."

And I think that is what holds tremendous promise for the future of museums and our projects --- that our interactions with each other as museum workers, and our interactions with the people who visit museums, can be grounded in rich (and yes, sometimes complicated) emotional experiences.

Onward!

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Visitors Are Heterogeneous: An Interview With Erika Kiessner

Erika Kiessner is an Exhibit Developer and Prototyper who is passionate about great exhibit experiences and the wonders of the world we live in.  I'm so pleased that Erika was kind enough to agree to be interviewed for ExhibiTricks!



What’s your educational background?
I have a BASc in Industrial Engineering, where I focused on Human Factors, which I earned at the University of Toronto. I have an MFA in Media Arts, where I focused on Interaction Design which I earned at the Utrecht College of Arts (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) in Holland.



What got you interested in Museums?
I grew up in Toronto and always loved visiting the Ontario Science Centre (OSC.) My family also took yearly trips to Sudbury to visit both friends and Science North. But the clincher was participating in a program at the OSC called the Ontario Science Centre Science School. This program allows you to do one semester of your final year of high school in classes taught at the OSC
by educators from the OSC.

The program involved a lot of museum experiences, such as mentoring with OSC staff and running small carts on the floor of the museum with visitors. Seeing behind the scenes at the OSC was a magical experience. I loved everyone I met there. The people I met were all smart and enthusiastic about science. They were inquisitive and creative and they all seemed to love what they were doing.

I already had a love of the museum, but now I saw how great things were behind the exhibits and I wanted to be a part of that. I saw so clearly how this was a group of people sharing their passions with the world and that I could do the same thing. I’ve never lost the joy that I felt then even though I’ve moved on from the OSC.



Does working with teams to create exhibits inform your design process?
It absolutely does. I don’t think that creating exhibits is something one can do alone. Visitors are heterogeneous. So seeing things from multiple viewpoints is crucial to ensuring you reach your actual visitors rather than just people like you.

Plus, I find creative pushback very helpful in refining and improving ideas. Ideas rarely emerge fully formed and ready to go to production.



Tell us a little bit about how your tinkering and fabricating skills inform your exhibit design work?  I have interfaces on my mind all the time. When I am thinking about an exhibit concept or problem, the interface is the first thing I try to frame my solutions with. In that way the “what” of an exhibit is tightly linked with the “how” of it.  When it comes to a whole exhibition, I am thinking about what the theme is and how to give visitors access to its concepts through individual exhibits and experiences.





What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development? I’m not sure that I have an answer to this. I think there is lots of great maker stuff in Instructables. There are interesting reviews in ExhibitFiles. But when I want to know more about exhibition development, I tend to talk to people about it.

I think that Human Factors is a rich area to mine for lessons about how people use things and interpret them. Also, there is an amazing amount of research in the design of retail spaces (Journal of Consumer Research and the like), which gets at the psychological impact of design. I am interested in learning theory, but people are so different from each other in the way that they learn.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in developing their exhibitions?
Test things out. I am personally often guilty of assuming that I know what visitors will know, or what they will want. But it is tricky to guess and it is easy to miss some really great elements thinking that way.

Even if the museum doesn’t have the resources to try out whole exhibits, there is lots of value in testing out just the text elements. It is cheap and easy to do, and it can give a lot of value to the exhibition.



What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?
I think we are right on the cusp of an Augmented Reality(AR) breakthrough for museums. The tools for building exhibits that integrate AR are starting to reach a critical mass. Soon enough developers will get their hands on them and we are going to start to see some new ways of doing displays with them.

With smartphones becoming ever more common, visitors increasingly have the tools they need right in their pockets. I only hope that museums can agree on a shared platform so that the visitors do not need to download a new app every time they walk into a new institutions.



What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
I love Science North in Sudbury for how it handles its live animals and makes use of its space.  Seeing Galileo’s telescope in the travelling “Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy” exhibit really blew my mind. I love the Louvre because it is impossible not to be blown away by the sheer density of it. The City Museum is this beautiful, amazing thing that really challenges all one's preconceptions about museums.

The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis is wonderful both for how it showed the old building and how it used the old elevator as a really unique theatre.  The Johnson Geo Centre in St. John’s Newfoundland is dug into Signal Hill and the exhibits are walled in by the rock of the hill. The Utrecht University Museum has an amazing cabinet of curiosities in it. But to be honest, it is hard for me not to love something about every museum I have visited. I have yet to visit one that didn’t have some real treasures in it.



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?
The project I’m most excited about right now isn’t for a museum at all. We are building interactive set pieces for a modern dance company. It is a really challenging experience because the needs of dancers are very different from the needs of visitors!



If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?
I would love to do a science exhibition about a city, embedded in the city landscape. I imagine walk-up exhibits on street corners and points of interest that draw your attention to something in the vicinity and give a science-based explanation for it. From architecture to wind patterns, local flora to material properties, there are elements of a city that are easy to take for granted even if there are fascinating explanations for them.

For example, in Toronto one of the big downtown office buildings has a cantilevered portion that suspends 13 stories over the sidewalk. An exhibit there might draw an area on the ground with the statement “Standing here there are XX thousand pounds of concrete suspended above you!” Then an explanation about how the building is constructed to support the structure overhead.


Thanks again to Erika for sharing her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers! 

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

Is Creativity a Team Sport?

In a recent post, I asked people to suggest "Museums Worth a Special Trip." One thing I've noticed about the museums suggested is that many, if not most of them, are the products of strong-minded founders. Which begs the question, "Is Creativity a Team Sport"?

It seems a lot more straight-forward, if less democratic, to pursue one person's design vision than to sit through endless meetings trying to come to consensus among staff and advisors on the direction of an exhibition, or a set of exhibitions, in the case of a new museum.

The National Science Foundation, among other granting agencies, has essentially mandated an exhibits approach that makes all sorts of consensus-building techniques an essential part of the "creative" process --- but has this approach resulted in more interesting exhibitions?

Art Museums seem more willing to turn over their galleries to individual artists for installations, usually with very good results. How can less "auteur" minded institutions like Science, History, and Children's Museums take advantage of a strong-minded individual driving the exhibit process forward, rather than the oft-venerated "Exhibits Team"? (I'd love to see Olafur Eliasson put together an exhibition at a Science Center!)

The "Creative Team" Conundrum also rears its ugly head when thinking about visitor studies and that Web 2.0 favorite, "crowdsourcing".

In the case of visitor studies, many visitors are only able to come up with variations of exhibits and exhibit themes they are already familiar with. Every museum stocked according to audience surveys would likely include a rocket ship, a dinosaur skeleton, and a mummy --- not bad, necessarily, but not exactly moving the exhibits field forward either.

Crowds and focus groups are notoriously bad at choosing innovations, which is why companies like Apple don't use them. Apple’s attitude is that sometimes, to truly innovate, you’ve got to go beyond giving people what they say they want. Building consensus often builds mediocre, and "safe" (rather than interesting) design decisions.

Maybe we need to bring in more "trouble makers" like Fred Wilson to shake up our staid exhibition development models. As Kathy McLean said in a previous ExhibiTricks interview, "I don't really need a lot of money or time to do my dream exhibitions ... I need organizations that are interested in presenting unusual, thought-provoking experiences."

So what do you think? Better Exhibit Teams or More Exhibit Auteurs? Let us know in the Comments Section below.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Free Updates" link on the right side of the blog.