engaging cultural audiences

Flickr Credit ~adforce1

CONVERSATION

STRATEGIES TO CULTIVATE MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT

& COLLABORATION

WITH CULTURAL AUDIENCES

Robert SteinDeputy Director for Research,Technology, and EngagementIndianapolis Museum of Art@rjstein - http://rjstein.com

CAN MUSEUMSDENT THE UNIVERSE?

Why is your community better off because it has a museum? The answer must necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence.

Stephen Weil, Making Museums MatterFlickr Credit ~Sweetie187

TOWARDS

ENGAGEMENT

Art museums have for decades described their role as interpreter of cultural inheritance. In our new socially networked world, interpretation is no longer a one- or two-way street. Transparency changes the museum dynamic from registrarial fortress to public square. Interactivity allows for questioning, augmentation, and dispute of official interpretations by scholars and informed observers. Art museums host conversations among experts and enthusiasts, rather than privileged glimpses into the working methods of curators. Works of art themselves ‘converse’ through loans and exhibitions. Teachers, students, and museum staff and volunteers exchange ideas about the objects in our care and the experiences to be had in our facilities and on our websites. Visitor comments and market research initiate conversations that permeate the former comfort zone of institutional remove. Blogging by museum staff and by others about museums opens up new engagement, exchange, and conversation.

Maxwell Anderson, The Art Newspaper, June 2010.

GATHER

STEWARD

CONVERSE

If museums had just one purpose, our jobs would be much easier. But museums address multiple needs, regardless of the era in which we find ourselves. For art museums, those needs include collecting and caring for examples of cultural heritage and providing the public with avenues to understanding the intentions of artists in their time and the relevance of works to the present. But the Web has altered this last-mentioned obligation, from dispensing information alone to soliciting new forms of participation. And while museum professionals will always offer the “official” interpretation of objects in our care, we also should welcome the opportunity to attract the notice and to encourage the engagement of people anywhere.

Maxwell Anderson, Dallas Museum of Art

GIVING THE

PUBLIC A VOICE

In a world shaped by immediate access to a vast sea of digital data, museums will serve as: sources, sharing information emerging from their collecting and research; aggregators, finding and integrating information from the many sources touched by their work; curators, selecting and annotating content to help people find reliable information; and educators, providing context and commentary. Technology will enable museums to scale up these core functions, which are already embedded in their work.

In the future, museums also will become mentors, recruiting and training people to contribute and interpret content; and moderators, encouraging people to engage with content, sharing views, opinions, and their own expertise. And museums will continue to be welcome havens of respite and retreat, where people can unplug, disconnect, and immerse themselves in silence, beauty, and wonder.

Elizabeth Merritt, Center for the Future of Museums

AGGREGATORS,

CURATORS, MENTORS,

AND MORE

PARTICIPATORY

CULTUREA participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another…

Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Confronting the Challenges of

Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.”

The mass media, by and large, do a bad job of it, and the proliferation and success of demagogues at hijacking the public debate have made it almost impossible for people to disagree respectfully…

Making museums places that you go to in order to be an active citizen is something I’d love to see more of us attempt. That means making space available, making time available, and making our ears available to hear what matters to our constituents.

Ed RodleyMuseum of Science Boston

CULTURE HAS A

NEED FOR

DIALOG

ARE WE FAILING?

Empirical data supports the view that visitors spend little time at individual exhibit components (often a matter of a few seconds and seldom as much as one minute); seldom read labels; usually stop at less than half the components at an exhibit; are more likely to use trial-and-error methods at interactive exhibits than to read instructions; that children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than adults, and that attention to exhibits declines sharply after about half an hour.

From Learning in the Museum by George E. Hein, Routledge, 1998, p. 138.

Studies of 150 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a mean time of less than 30 seconds viewing an object to be typical, with most spending significantly less time. Douglas Worts, former interpretive planner and audience researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario and museologist, summarizes this behavior as “grazing” and theorizes that the pattern may arise from a mismatch in the goals of curators and visitors. It is relatively rare to watch a visitor spend more than a minute with any individual artwork.

Spending Time on Art” by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith in Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 19, Number 2, 2001.On the Brink of Irrelevance? Art Museums in Contemporary Society” by Douglas Worts, 2003.

Flickr Credit ~Petereck

GRAZING

Enrich Permanent Collection

Time spent looking typically averages

between 12 and 35 seconds

STUDIES AT

THE IMA

THE VALUE OF MUSEUMS IS NOT A SURE THING

The work of organizing museums has not kept pace with the times. The United States is far behind the spirit of its own people…

This can not long continue. The museum of the past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts.

Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums of the Future. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums of the Future. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

A NURSERY

OF LIVING

THOUGHTS

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Albert Camus

Flickr Credit ~gerlos

ON THE LOOKOUT

FOR ENGAGEMENT

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT

PRESENCE…is it real?

The Museum of Modern Art, 2010

PRESENCEWalter Benjamin, 1936

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

AURAWalter Benjamin, 1936

I LOVE THIS ROCK

I LOVE THIS ROCK

I LOVE THIS ROCK

I LOVE THIS ROCK

AUTHENTICITY IS

THE CORE STRENTH

OF MUSEUMS

Flickr Credit ~paulwatson

EPIPHANY

OPTIMIZING FOR

It probably has a million definitions. It's the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way.

Maya Angelou

EPIPHANY

“… moments that leave a mark on people’s lives”

Jean-Paul Sartre

EPIPHANIES

Flickr Credit ~measter2

WHAT’S

MODEL?

THE RIGHT

ENGAGEMENT

Flickr Credit ~shutterhacks

A REVIEW OF

THE LITERATURE

1.Pekarick and Doering2.Samis3.Csikszentmihalyi4.Falk

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

Developed by Andrew Pekarick and Zahava Doering at the Smithsonian Office for Policy and Analysis

Results from a series of surveys of exhibitions at the national museums

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

Visitors tend to favor interpretive materials that focus on one of either ideas, objects, or people

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

IdeasGaining information or insight

Enriching my understanding

ObjectsSeeing rare, valuable, or uncommon things

PeopleFinding out what its like to live in a different time or place

Getting a sense of the everyday lives of others

ReflectionReflecting on the meaning of what I see

Being moved by beauty

These predispositions tend to drive the experiences they seek out – and are highly correlated to exit-satisfaction results for those types of experiences.

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

“Visitors are happiest when they encounter experiences that are unexpectedly satisfying”

IDEAS

PEOPLE

OBJECTS

Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

“Experientially richer visits seem to be rated higher”

Flickr Credit ~da100fotos

ATTRACT, ENGAGE, FLIP

“Most of the visitors we observed and interviewed revealed a primary orientation, but—if given the right contents or presentation—could flip to unexpected discoveries of a different type.”

VISUAL VELCRO

Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

VISUAL VELCRO

To illustrate, let us imagine the humble Velcro patch. It consists of a strip of tiny loops, originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface. Now imagine a sensory impression, in this case an artwork, arriving in your perceptual field. Unless the visual impression has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific LTM “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.”It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.

Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.

quinnanya/

Photo Credit Alan Levine

The work of interpretation, then, is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception.

Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.

Flickr Credit ~samhames

Flow

Flickr Credit ~samhames

FlowThe flow state is an optimal state

of intrinsic motivation, where the

person is fully immersed in what he or

she is doing. This is a feeling everyone

has at times, characterized by a feeling

of great absorption, engagement,

fulfillment, and skill—and during which

temporal concerns (time, food, ego-

self, etc.) are typically ignored.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal

Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Flickr Credit ~samhames

FlowIf a museum visit can produce this

experience, it is likely that the initial

curiosity and interest will grow into a

more extensive learning interaction.

Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why

Does One Want To Learn,

Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson

Flickr Credit ~photograham

IN THE GROOVE

Flickr Credit ~photograham

IN THE GROOVE

To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. Both skill level and challenge level must be matched and high; if skill and challenge are low and matched, then apathy results.

Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi, 1997.

Flickr Credit ~paulwatson

EPIPHANY

OPTIMIZING FOR

Flickr Credit ~phineasx

THE MUSEUM VISIT

CAN HAVE MANY

FACETS

Founder of Institute for Learning Innovation

Professor Learning and Science Education at Oregon State University

Research conducted primarily at zoos, aquaria, and science centers.

But also with art museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Denver Art Museum

JOHN FALK

FREE-CHOICE

LEARNING

FREE-CHOICE

LEARNINGAccording to tourism researcher Jan Packer, most people visit museums, parks, and other similar venues in order to “experience learning” or what she calls “learning for fun”

Falk suggests that learning and leisure are becoming one and the same experience

LEARNING AND

IDENTITYAcademic Learning

Learning is about the mastery of facts and concepts in order to orally, or in writing describe or defend an idea or proposition

Free-Choice learning

Primarily driven by intrinsic motivations. Typically for personal rather than public reasons and often strongly motivated by the needs of identity formation and reinforcement

John Falk, 2006

IDENTITY-RELATED

VISIT MOTIVATIONS

Explorers: motivated by a need to satisfy personal curiosity and interest in an

intellectually challenging environment.

Experience seekers: aspire to be exposed to the things and ideas that exemplify what

is best and intellectually most important within a culture or community.

Professional/Hobbyists: possess the desire to further specific intellectual needs in a

setting with a specific subject matter focus.

Rechargers: motivated by the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually

recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment.

Facilitators: motivated by the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with

someone whom they care about in an educationally supportive environment (parental

facilitator and social facilitator).

ENTRANCE

Flickr Credit ~aunto

NARRATIVE

WHY FALK?

Flickr Credit ~aunto

• It is simple and easy to understand.• It is fairly well documented in the literature.• It has been tested and used in many

museums.• It can be used by more than one department

in the museum.• Falk has developed and tested a simple

method to identify visitors motivations.

BASELINE

MOTIVATION SURVEY

EXPLORER

RECHARGER

FACILITATOR

PROFESSIONALS

HOBBYISTS

EXPERIENCE

SEEKERS

AFFINITY SEEKERS

Results (371 participants)

The most common visitor types were explorers (22.6%), experience seekers (22.4%), and rechargers (21.8%). Affinity seekers were the least common visitor type (2.7%).

Explo

rers

Experie

nce s

eekers

Recharg

ers

Facilita

tors

Profe

ssio

nal/Hobbyis

ts

Affinity

seeke

rs0.00%

5.00%

10.00%

15.00%

20.00%

25.00%

Parental vs. Social Facilitators

Of the 63 respondents who identified themselves as facilitators, 54% were parental facilitators (visiting with children under the age of 18) and 46% were social facilitators (not visiting with children under the age of 18). These correspond to 9.10% and 7.8% respectively of the total participants.

parental facilitators social facilitators0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

4054%

46%

ACTIVITY INVENTORY

Flickr Credit ~zomerstorm

Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

WHAT ABOUT

ONLINE VISITORS?

2011 Web Stats1M Visits (3.6M Hits) +7%56% (566K) not in Visit 6%58% (580K) not in IN +5%2011 Museum Attendance

381,026 (-11%)Mobile 8.8% (2x 2010)

Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

WHAT ABOUT

ONLINE VISITORS?A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrées, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same. Web site designers assume that the visitor already knows what to choose. That's not true. People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.

Csikszentmihalyi, WIRED, 1996.

WHAT’S THE ONLINE

Flickr Credit ~aunto

ENTRANCE NARRATIVE?

Flickr Credit ~measter2

WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?

Prior Work:

1. Haley-Goldman & Schaller, 2004

2. Peacock & Brownbill, 2007

3. Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman &

Falk, 2008

Flickr Credit ~measter2

WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?

In Summary:

• Using the site to plan or follow up a visit to the physical site

• Using the website to locate subject-based information

• Accessing the website as part of browsing activities on the Web

• Using the website to interact or transact with the museum

Flickr Credit ~measter2

WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?

It seems (at least on the surface) that motivations for visits to physical museums are different than for museum websites:

Experiences, identity-building vs. communication/information seeking

Investment in visiting the physical and virtual museum is not the same

Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman & Falk, 2008

HOW CAN WE

FIGURE THIS OUT?

Google Analytics Is Not Enough

Initial Open-Ended Survey

0%10%20%30%40%

Coded Results from Open Ended Online Motiva-tions n=113

Follow Up Categorical Survey

A Much Better Response

0.00%

20.00%

40.00%

60.00%

5:407:09 6:19 5:56

12:00

Online Motivation by Type and Time n=4076

Percent Visits Average time

Plan a

Visi

t

Find S

pecific

Info

rmatio

n for P

rofe

ssio

nal Reaso

ns

Find S

pecific

Info

rmatio

n for P

ersonal R

easons

Casual B

rowsin

g

Make

a T

ransa

ctio

n0

102030405060

Average Time per Page by Motivation Type

time/page (sec)

Visitor Flow

Visitor Flow

Visitor Flow

IN THE MEANTIME

Flickr Credit ~nicholasjon

LOOKING

AND SEEINGFlickr Credit ~rocketjim54

Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow

Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow

EXPERIMENTS IN TRACKING GAZE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Audience Engagement

Tiffany Leason, Audience Engagement

Charlie Moad, IMA Lab

Ed Bachta, IMA Lab

MUSEUMS CANDENT THE UNIVERSE.

Flickr Credit ~Sweetie187

Thank You