Letter from Museum Camp

Dear Folks,

I just got back from Museum Camp in Santa Cruz, and I wanted to tell you about it, and show you some pictures I took there.

First off, the "official" title of Museum Camp was "You Can't Do That in Museums Camp" or the somewhat edgier alternate title of "Hack the Museum Camp."  Anyway, whatever you call it, the Camp was launched by Nina Simon (a museum rock star, if there ever was one) at the museum where she is the director, the MAH (aka The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, pictured below.)

Nina invited me to come to Museum Camp and be a "counselor."  (More on that later ...) Just like summer camp there were campers and counselors --- some of the campers even slept on the floor of the museum in sleeping bags, but I got to share a house with some of the other counselors --- museum "rock stars" in their own right.

Just getting to be part of the same event with fellow counselors like Maria Mortati, Eric Siegel, Julie Bowen, Jason Jay Stevens, Dan Spock, Kathy McLean, Darcie Fohrman, Kevin von Appen, and Merilee Mostov was big fun.  (Also the Camp counselors brought a lot of professional horsepower to the enterprise.)

So the big idea of Museum Camp was this: bring together about 75 people (Campers and Counselors) for two-and-a-half days, break them up into 15 counselor+camper teams, let them choose from 20 or so museum collection objects, and then have an entire exhibition ready for the public opening party!   So check-in on Wednesday and check-out Friday night after the exhibition party.

Woohoo!  The perfect high-stakes, high-pressure antidote to the usual museum whining ("we don't have enough time, we don't have enough money!" ) And honestly, miraculously, it all came together --- there were 15 exhibits lined up with bright, shining faces to form an entire exhibition.  A wild, eclectic exhibition, but everyone delivered the goods!

So how did this all shake down schedule-wise?  Everyone checked in starting Wednesday morning (since I was a counselor, I got a whistle!) and we had a series of workshops throughout the afternoon related to exhibit development topics like prototyping, writing prompts, emotionally-engaging exhibitions, etc.  (I got to do a workshop on becoming an "Office Supply Ninja" prototyper!)

After a scheduled "siesta" (really --- it is Santa Cruz after all!) we played a game to choose the artifact (or artifacts) that each team would use as the basis of their exhibit.  After that was sorted out and after a delicious group dinner (with carefully delineated vegan and gluten-free options --- still Santa Cruz, right?) we used the time between 8pm and midnight on Wednesday to lock down the initial "Big Idea" and crank up the concept and development phase of our project.  Knowing that everything had to be ready to go before the Exhibition Opening Party at 5pm on Friday didn't leave much time for monkeying around (which was good!)


So let me tell you about our team, Team #10 (aka "Perfect Ten.")  My three team members were super!  Diana Kapsner is a staff member at MAH --- it was great to have a "local" on our team when we looking for materials and resources!  Emily Black Fry works at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City --- she had tons of great ideas and enthusiasm.  And last, but not least, Karli Kendall from the Red Deer Museum, in Alberta Canada --- Karli was definitely our "organizer" but in a good way!

The "Perfect 10" team chose a large (7 feet wide by 6 feet tall) painting by Joseph De Giorgio, entitled Oceanside No. 8. (Pictured below, but it looks better in real life.)   I'm no art historian, but I liked it, and it used a sort of pointillist approach which led directly to our team's "Big Idea" namely, "One Painting, Many Points of View."

So my way of describing the idea(s) behind our team's exhibit would be that we wanted to reward visitors for being careful observers of Oceanside No. 8, and that we also wanted to give visitors many multi-sensory ways to look at the painting more than once, and to experience the painting in different ways.  We set out to do this by creating a physical "beach scene" tableau complete with beach chairs, cooler, table, etc. set up in front of the painting.  Objects you might expect to find at the beach would all be used to allow visitors to experience this one painting from many different points of view.

Then it was just hard work! Pulling materials together and editing down our ideas, our team pretty much worked from Thursday morning up until midnight.  It was a loooong day!  I think it helped that our team conversations were honest, but respectful, even if we pushed back on each others' ideas now and then.  I think my role was less counselor as "exhibit Yoda" but more as an equal team member (albeit with a bit more museum exhibit development experience!)  I think we all left with a clear sense of what we needed to accomplish in the few hours remaining on Friday and how we could work together to do it.

I don't think any of our team felt stressed at all when we gathered together Friday morning.  We articulated the things we "had" to finish, as opposed to the things we'd "like" to finish so we had a clear sense of our priorities.

I'm really proud and happy with where we ended up with our team's exhibit. I feel that the Big Idea is a strong one, and that we gave visitors many ways (sights, sounds, smells) and reasons to engage with De Giorgio's painting.

Would I have done anything differently with Museum Camp?  Not much actually.   I might have added one more day to the process,  and also added an optional mid-day activity to break up the intensity of the long day(s) of work.

Also we spent a lot of time talking about "taking risks" and making "risky experiences."  I'm still not sure what that means exactly.  In the end, I think notions of "risk" became a bit of a distraction to the exhibit development process at Museum Camp.

So would I participate in Museum Camp again?  In a heartbeat!  It definitely reinforced some of my ideas about "quick and dirty" prototyping, but also stretched me professionally in thinking about new and different ways to twist the "traditional gallery experience" in more visitor and community-centric ways.  (Also, I'm sold on the idea of installing more beach chairs inside Art Museum galleries!)

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Revisiting A Bulgarian Museum Revolution

I am now in Bulgaria as part of the team kicking off the process to create the first Children's Museum in Bulgaria --- in Sofia the Capital.  When I last visited Bulgaria in late 2010, pilot interactive exhibition galleries were just starting to open around the country.  These "Children's Corners" have since been enormously successful and popular with children, parents, and teachers.

Now the dream of creating a full-fledged Children's Museum in Sofia is marching down the road to reality.  While much has been accomplished by our Bulgarian Museum colleagues, it is interesting how the lessons learned from the pilot Children's Corners are still informing the burgeoning Children's Museum project.  While I'll be reflecting on my current Bulgarian trip in future posts, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit my (slightly modified) posting from my 2010 trip below:

A Bulgarian (Museum) Revolution

What would you do if you lived in a country that had no Children's Museums?

That's currently the state of affairs in Bulgaria.  Fortunately for the Bulgarian Museum community, and Bulgarian museum visitors in particular, a determined and resourceful young woman named Vessela Gertcheva ably assisted by Nadia Zaharieva of the America for Bulgaria Foundation are working to change all that.  In fact, Vessela, Nadia, and their colleagues in the museum and cultural sectors are on the brink of a true Bulgarian Museum Revolution.


I just returned from a trip to Bulgaria to observe and provide advice on the pilot project designed to develop five "Children's Corners" (really better thought of as small interactive exhibition areas designed to introduce children and family groups to hands-on exhibits) into five different museums around Bulgaria.  (Note: remember that this post refers to my first trip to Bulgaria in 2010.)

Vessela is spearheading the "Children's Corners" project as a way to build public awareness for the possibilities of interactive learning spaces in Bulgaria, and to ultimately pave the way for a free-standing Bulgarian Children's Museum there.  In this blog posting, I'll share some of the experiences of my trip to Bulgaria, as well as some of the museum and exhibit ideas I came away with.

But first, a little background.  Everyone I told about my trip before I actually left for Bulgaria was surprised and/or fascinated by my destination.  But most people (including myself, originally) weren't really sure where Bulgaria was located.  So, here's a map:

Bulgaria is bordered to the south by Greece and Turkey, to the west by Macedonia, to the north by Romania, and to the east by the Black Sea.  My sense of central Sofia, the capital, was that there were a few beautiful buildings surrounded by much blocky, oppressive architecture reflective of the Soviet-dominated, totalitarian past of Bulgaria.  This is changing since Bulgaria's entry into the European Union, but slowly.

Similarly, the Bulgarian museums we visited were decidedly "old school."  Large buildings whose interiors were dominated by rows and floors of artifacts and objects in glass cases (or as our Bulgarian hosts charmingly described them, "cages.")  While many of these traditional Bulgarian museums provided interesting staffed programs (such as weekend bazaars or the popular annual "European Bat Night" at the National Museum of Natural History) museum staff have become increasingly interested in exploring ways for integrating interactive exhibit areas geared toward children and families into their museums.

The first of the five Children's Corners opened in September 2010 at the Regional Museum of History in Blagoevgrad, in the southwestern part of Bulgaria.  Having seen the finished gallery, I am very impressed and think that the Blagoevgrad exhibition raises the bar high for the succeeding four galleries in this project to match.  (You can read my entire review and see a batch of pictures from the Blagoevgrad installation by clicking over to the ExhibiFiles website.)

I also learned a new exhibit trick from our Bulgarian museum colleagues: their animal track stamping component makes use of "Moon Sand" in the central stamping area, which makes for sharper track impressions as well as limiting some degree of the messiness associated with traditional loose sand.

In visiting the other museum sites that will be creating their own Children's Corners, and by meeting with their directors and curatorial staff, I was struck by several things:

• It is exceedingly difficult to imagine the possibilities or develop interactive exhibit ideas if neither you, nor your visitors, have directly experienced a hands-on gallery or museum.  This is a key part of both the challenge, and the revolution, inherent in the Children's Corner project.  Fortunately, the completed gallery in Blagoevgrad is already serving as a model and benchmark to Bulgarian museum professionals and visitors alike.

• Prototyping and testing your ideas is the most effective way to achieve good results.  There was a little bit of the tendency in Bulgaria (as there is in the U.S. and elsewhere in the museum world) to want to design and develop the interactive children's exhibitions inside meeting rooms with a quorum of experts.  Fortunately, by the end of our trip to Bulgaria, our hosts seemed to be warming up to the notion of using prototyping as a way to answer exhibit design and development questions.

• Failure IS an option.  As I often say to my kids, "It's o.k. to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them, and don't keep repeating the same mistakes over and over."   There is an enormous degree of professional pride and pressure at stake for the Bulgarian Children's Corner project sites --- which might make some people decide to stick with very safe exhibit design and development choices.   Fortunately, the vast majority of project partners we came in contact with seem to realize that this is a time and opportunity that favors choices that may be difficult and risky.

We really are witnessing the start of a truly exciting museum revolution in Bulgaria, and I can't wait to see what happens next!  (Feel free to contact me with questions or to request addition details about my work in Bulgaria.)

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ReWind: Grocery Store Exhibits?

I've spent this week in beautiful Knoxville conducting community input groups for The MUSE, an emerging museum here.  Even though we weren't soliciting specific exhibit ideas at this stage, people couldn't help share their excitement for exhibit areas they had seen at other museums around the country.

Inevitably (perhaps) when the discussion turned to young children, and children's museums, the old exhibit warhorse of the kid-sized grocery store reared its head.  So I thought now would be a good time to re-post the reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits so, in a screed entitled:
 

"NOT Another Grocery Store Exhibit!"

At the end of a recent conference presentation, I threw a chunk or rhetorical "red meat" to the crowd by saying that I'd be quite happy if I never saw another kid-sized grocery store exhibit in a children's museum ever again. Given the raised eyebrows and open-mouthed stares from many in the audience I thought I'd share the top five reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits:

1) Grocery store exhibits are the anthithesis of "green design."
Dumping a truckload (literally!) of fake plastic produce and grocery items onto shelves and into bins sets a tremendously bad example for sustainable exhibit design practice.

2) Grocery store exhibits are unfair to museum floor staff and volunteers.
These galleries might more accurately be called "entropy exhibits" since the main activity for young visitors seems to be to madly rush about pulling every facsimile grocery store item off the shelves, shoving them into the miniature shopping carts or onto the phony checkout conveyor and then leaving. The poor floor staff and volunteers assigned to this area then, Sisyphus-like,
engage in resorting the mess left behind again and again as new visitors enter the mini store.

3) Grocery store exhibits are just creatively lazy.
When I visit a museum with one of these areas, I instinctively think, "well, they must have run out of good exhibit ideas." Despite all the high-minded rationalizations --- "the kids are learning about food groups" or "our grocery store shows visitors where milk and tomatoes actually come from..." I say if that was really what you wanted to get visitors thinking about, there are only about a dozen more entertaining and interesting ways to address those particular topics in an exhibition format than riding the tired mini grocery store warhorse once again. (Although if food groups or farm to store topics were high on your exhibit"wish list" to begin with, I'm not sure I'd want to visit with my kids in the first place.)

4) Grocery store exhibits send at least as many unintended messages as intended messages.
I'd really rather not send the message that it's alright to tear up an exhibit area and make a mess and then leave it to other people to clean up, or that shopping for food is some sort of wacky leisure activity instead of a necessity. If we really thought carefully about the ideas that kids are leaving grocery store exhibits with instead of blithely, and automatically, assuming that frenetic activity in an exhibition area equals "fun" or "learning" we might try out some different ideas.

5) Grocery store exhibits are the worst sort of craven fundraising ploys.
One of the most common reasons I hear directors defend their choice of a kid-sized grocery store exhibit is "We can easily get a sponsor for this." Believe me, after 27 years in the museum business, I understand the need to fundraise, but are you trying to create unique, amazing exhibit spaces, or just sell chunks of museum real estate?

Unfortunately most museum "sacred cows" come from just the sort of "well this is the way we've always done things" or "I've heard it works amazingly well at Museum X" sort of thinking.

What do you think? Do you have some of your own favorite museum "sacred cows" you'd like to throw on the fire? Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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ReWind: The Cake Boss is a Great Prototyper!

What could an expert cake baker teach you about prototyping your exhibit design projects?

Find out by reading our latest ReWind posting below.  (And if you need help "cooking up" some ways to improve your museum's prototyping practice, feel free to contact me directly!)



Learning to be a good exhibit prototyper is a lot like learning to be a good swimmer or a good baker.  You could read about any of those skills, but to really catch the nuances and notice the little tricks, it helps to watch somebody else model the techniques a few times before you start out yourself.

So where can you find a TV show with a funny Italian guy on the East Coast to teach you some great prototyping approaches? (No, not me!  But feel free to contact me if you'd like me to run some in-person prototyping workshops or exhibit test sessions with the staff and visitors at your museum.)

No, I was actually thinking of Buddy Valastro, better known as the "Cake Boss" from the cable TV show of the same name.  I'm serious --- this guy is an ace prototyper!

So what are some things you can learn about exhibit prototyping by watching a few episodes of Cake Boss?


1) Know your customer
Before Buddy starts making a specialty cake, he sits down and has a conversation with the client to find out more about the things they like, and to bounce initial ideas around.

Obviously, you won't be having a chat with everyone who comes to your museum, but how can you leverage your museum's social media sites (like Facebook or Twitter) or your newsletter to let visitors know you'll be working on new exhibits, and would like their ideas?  Similarly, asking for help as you test out actual physical prototypes inside the museum is fun and exciting for visitors, and you can learn a lot from the conversations and comments around such prototyping sessions.



2) Prototyping can be a team sport
Usually after some initial sketches and rough ideas about a cake are prepared, Buddy gathers his team to solicit input for things to try, and for which sections of the cake people would like to work on.  Lots of little ideas and input from the bakers and designers result in cool cakes like the "Aquarium Cake" below that includes a real fish-filled tank behind it!

Similarly, when you're putting together ideas and changes for prototype exhibits, give your staff a sense of ownership and pride in the process by soliciting input and showing that even if you haven't incorporated every single idea into the final product, you were willing to sincerely try things out. 



3) Stay loose, and keep a good supply of "stuff" nearby
Don't give up on "crazy" ideas --- even if they seem impossible at first.  The Cake Boss crew wanted to make a cake for retired fire fighters.  Once they knew that their intended audience (firefighters) wouldn't be satisfied with just a plain cake, they started talking about fire engines with flashers and a building/cake with smoke billowing out.  That's great, but how do you do it?   Buddy sent somebody out to buy some toy fire engines and a theatrical smoke machine to create the finished cake. (He stripped out all the electronics from the toy and incorporated them into an edible fire truck cake.)

To be able to realize the exhibit equivalent of a "Fire Engine Cake" be willing to throw some crazy ideas against the wall to see what sticks.  But to prototype those wacky ideas it helps to have some simple building stuff (masking tape, paper, cardboard, markers, etc.) handy so you don't lose the enthusiasm and momentum of the moment.



4) Sometimes you drop the cake

Occasionally, something catastrophic (cakeastrophic?) happens on the Cake Boss show. Somebody drops a finished cake down a flight of stairs.  Someone else delivers the wrong wedding cake.  Yes, there may be some yelling, but after everyone calms down they take a deep breath and figure out how to solve the problem.

Sometimes, try as you might,  a favorite exhibit idea is a flat out bust.  Or you follow an idea into a dead end.  Fuhgedaboutit!  There will be prototyping flubs, and exhibit mistakes.  Admit up-front that there will be unexpected challenges to resolve.  That's part of the fun (but leave some time and money in your budget for remediation...)


Now I hope I've inspired you to watch a little Cake Boss and to do a little more prototyping in your museum.  Hey! Maybe TLC should start a new show --- Exhibit Boss!


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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!)