Thursday, April 26, 2012

Occupy AAM?



I must admit I've become extremely ambivalent about the annual AAM Conference.

As time has gone by and the strictures (on methods and modes for presentations) and control (especially of the former "Standing Professional Committees") from AAM have increased, I often question the value (to me, at least) of attending the AAM Conference.

For those of you in the 1% (or thereabouts) of the museum profession who will be attending the festivities in the Twin Cities, I hope you'll take some time to think carefully about, and press AAM leadership on, whether changes to the Standing Professional Committee structure and representation (for example) are truly for the benefit of the 99% of the museum profession, or merely to consolidate control for the AAM administration.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Designer Toolkit: 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People


Author Susan Weinschenk has put together a great reference for every type of designer called "100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People."

Inside this pithy volume, Weinschenk gives 100 examples of the psychology of design and why some design choices work better than others.

Dividing her 100 examples into thematic sections such as "How People See" and "How People Remember" the author not only provides illustrated examples of design approaches but provides links to research, websites, and online talks that let you explore specific design topics in more depth.

For example in item #12 "The Meanings of Color Vary by Culture" Weinschenk references the work and "Information is Beautiful" website of David McCandless and a "color wheel" that shows how different colors are viewed by different cultures.

This book is filled with the sorts of ideas that will immediately get you thinking more deeply about your design decisions.

You can get a copy of the book at Amazon or other online outlets.


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Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Convivial Museum (and a CONTEST!)

 
"The Convivial Museum" is a favorite book of mine because it touches on so many important aspects of the entire museum-going (and museum-making!) experience.  So I was delighted to be able to review the book by Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock for the current issue of Exhibitionist, the journal of the National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME.)  My review first appeared in Exhibitionist (Spring 2012) Vol.31 No.1, and is reproduced below with permission.

To share my enthusiasm for both Exhibitionist and The Convivial Museum, I've decided to run a little CONTEST for ExhibiTricks readers --- I'll be giving away a copy of The Convivial Museum to one person and copies of the latest issue of Exhibitionist to two other winners. 

All you have to do to be eligible to win is to either leave a comment describing your most "convivial" museum experience in the "Comments" Section below OR to sign-up to start receiving ExhibiTricks updates via email (by clicking near the top right of the blog home page) before Friday April 20th, 2012.  I'll choose one random winner each from the new email subscribers list and the Comments Section for the copies of Exhibitionist, and award the copy of The Convivial Museum to the best comment overall.


So without further ado, here's my review of "The Convivial Museum"


What does it mean to foster a “convivial” museum?  Co-authors Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock have answered that question masterfully in The Convivial Museum, a book that every museum worker should keep on a shelf nearby (or better yet, in the bag or briefcase you carry with you to work).

I found the book interesting from both a visual and structural standpoint. Rather than ticking through a checklist of convivial “dos and don’ts,” Pollock and McLean have instead packed their book with evocative black and white photographs as well as short text passages and quotations that serve as landmarks rather than mile markers to contemplate along the road to more convivial museums.. (Here each picture is certainly worth a thousand words!)

The Convivial Museum begins with a discussion of conviviality itself, then moves into broader sections of “Welcome, “ “Comfort,” “Being Alive Together” and “Convivial Practice.”  Each one of these main sections addresses key components of conviviality in the form of “Entry” or “Seating,” as aspects of “Comfort,” for example. Every page offers words and images to help you consider (and reconsider) your own notions of conviviality in a museum context.

Early on in the book, the description of a dinner party effectively helps illuminate ingredients of a convivial social experience --- making people feel welcome and comfortable, and seeding interesting conversations. This social/food analogy is a good one since it emphasizes sharing and finding ways to entertain and delight guests.  It sets up the notion of allowing museum visitors the time and space to approach things in a way that makes sense to them,  to offer surprises, and to reward contemplation. This rather than setting visitors trudging along a path of knowledge in between paying their admission fees and exiting through the gift shop.

So what sorts of things make for a more “convivial” museum?  Let’s take a brief walk through some of the key aspects that McLean and Pollock highlight in their book.


Welcome

Let’s start with “Welcome,” the place where every museum visit begins, even before you walk through the front door. As The Convivial Museum indicates, a museum with legible signs on nearby highways, a ramp for strollers and wheelchairs, a clear entrance, is truly open to all. There are thoughtful nuggets to consider here: Christopher Alexander says that if a grand museum building is not thoughtfully oriented to its surroundings, it will become “socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.”   This is followed up with a series of images showing a variety of   approaches to museums, both inside and out.. While all these physical welcome sequences are different, they are all accessible with clear signage and orientation. Convivial.

Ways to soften the often monumental stairs and entrances of the classical “Temple of the Muses” approach are featured in the “Welcome” section as well: a long bench in front of the sidewalk entrance to the Tenement Museum, or entrance doors for cyclists during “Bike Night” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. There are no “right answers” or dreaded “best practices” here, just good ideas to pick and choose and adapt.


Comfort

Next we follow the convivial path to consider the importance of “Comfort” in a museum-going experience. How do you make everyone in your museum, from senior citizen to babe in arms, feel “at home”?  No small task, but it is surprising how often simple elements, like seating, are glossed over, or worse, deliberately eliminated from museum spaces. The call to arms (or bottoms) in this section of The Convivial Museum may well be “more places to sit, please!” 

No matter how well designed an exhibition space may be, or how carefully cultivated the “vibe” of a particular institution, McLean and Pollock rightfully point out that no single space, however well designed, will meet the needs and preferences of everyone. So another takeaway from the section on “Comfort” might be to emphasize the need to vary or even change up the rhythms and types of spaces, even within the same institution. These types of possible variations are explored through words and images that ask the reader to consider where concepts such as “Ambience,” “Light,” and “Sound” fit into the convivial mix.  It is interesting to consider how much emphasis museums and exhibit designers may focus on lighting while often being deaf to the cacophony inside exhibitions that detracts from the overall experience.


Being Alive Together

In the final broad section of The Convivial Museum, the authors take up the social construct of museum experiences, the notion of “Being Alive Together.”  As McLean and Pollock posit, “It is not enough to bring people together. There are plenty of places where people congregate, socialize, and talk. Convivial museums deepen the conversation and foster a genuine meeting of minds by offering up somethird thing as a focus of common interest or concern.”  

In a way, this part of The Convivial Museum asks the reader to move back and forth (like a visitor) between the “active” experiences and objects in the galleries, to the “interstitial” spaces like lounges and cafes that hold the entire convivial experience together. How can we encourage active participation or deep contemplation in our museums, but still offer places for a “time out” ? There’s lots of good stuff to consider here.


Convivial Practice


The Convivial Museum ends with a coda of sorts, by offering up its final section, entitled “Convivial Practice.”  And here Pollock and McLean help us consider, and wrestle with, aspects of museum and exhibition practice that might well be “baked in” challenges to conviviality, like the notion of admission. If we as a field are truly willing to consider Elaine Gurian’s premise that “... general admission charges are the single greatest impediment to making our museums fully accessible...”(2006) what do we do about it? How do we unspool or recast a huge institutional and cultural notion to become more truly convivial?   Again there are no clear prescriptions here, but there are examples and thoughts to help us consider such roadblocks (or merely speed bumps?) on the road to more convivial museums.

The section on “Convivial Practice” ends by acknowledging one of the primary difficulties in becoming a more convivial practitioner, or of helping to foster or create more convivial museums: running out of time. While every museum job description seemingly includes the phrase, “and other duties as required...,” The Convivial Museum asks us to step back from our sometimes overwhelming quantitative concerns and to slow down, try things out, and talk things over. In our headlong rush to “keep our numbers up” we need to acknowledge that the qualitative aspects of our jobs and institutions are essential as well.

The Convivial Museum is very much a work that asks you to take the time to consider these qualitative properties of our museums. This book makes you think and ponder. Like a satisfying museum experience, it sets the stage carefully for contemplation and rewards your patience and consideration. Pollock and McLean help you remember the types of museum experiences that got you into this business in the first place. And what could be more convivial than that?




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Thursday, April 5, 2012

ReWind: Museum "Easter Eggs"

In honor of the season, we repeat our homage/post to museum "Easter Eggs."  Enjoy!
 


Museum designers often add "Easter Eggs" to their work.  But not the brightly dyed or chocolate-y varieties --- these are more akin to the hidden "Easter Eggs" that you may stumble across (or deliberately search out) inside video games, crossword puzzles, or DVDs.

For visitors, it's fun to feel like you've found a little "secret" inside a museum building or exhibition, and for designers it's a little "trick" to reward visitors for carefully observing and examining things inside the museum.

"Exhibits as advent calendars" as Dan Spock has observed (to mix religious holiday metaphors a bit!)  So here are a few of my favorite museum easter eggs:


• The Hidden Cat: Starting with the picture at the top of this posting is the "cat" hidden in the atrium of the Science Discovery Museum in Acton, MA.  It's fun to point out to visitors, and it really reflects the playful nature of the building and exhibits inside.



• Secret Elves at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science: Artist Kent R. Pendleton worked on many of the Museum's dioramas, but supposedly he wasn't allowed to sign his name to his work.  Instead, Pendleton included little "elfin" figures hidden throughout many of the displays.  There's a great blog posting (with video) about Pendleton's retro easter eggs!




• The Magic House Mouse:  The "Magic House" Children's Museum outside St. Louis has some wonderful exhibits, but one of my favorite "hidden gems" is the tiny decorated mouse hole near the baseboards in one of the galleries.  If you were just whizzing around you might not ever see it, but if you're willing to get down on your hands and knees you might see (as in the photo below) a "presidential" mouse:





• The "Hidden Tunnel" at Casa Loma:  Casa Loma is a gigantic historic house outside Toronto that is filled with enough crazy details to keep even little kids interested during the self-guided tours.  One of the things I remember from a family visit (nearly 40 years ago!) was the cool secret tunnel, nearly 100 feet long, that was hidden behind a pivoting wall section (just like in all those scary movies --- but this was real!)  that led to the Casa's underground wine cellar:


Of course some museums, like The City Museum, also in St. Louis, or the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A., are practically interlocking collections of "easter eggs" or in-jokes, but that's certainly one aspect that makes them so popular.

What are some of your most memorable "Museum Easter Eggs"?  Let us know in the "Comments Section" below!  
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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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