Make Museums Great Again? Fear of Change in Museums
Anyone who has worked for me has heard my favorite old adage, “Change is the only constant.” I have seen 200 interns (yes, I counted them) and numerous staff through countless institutional changes. The roils of change were so continuous we lived in a constant state of low-grade institutional motion sickness. Why is change so …
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Its Not the Destination OR Journey Mapping for Museums
Touchpoints Visitor experience is everyone’s job, not just those people who have “visitor” or “experience” in their title. Picture your visitor. What is the first thing that comes to mind? What are they doing? Buying a ticket? Standing in your gallery? Reading your labels. These are the types of touchpoints that are the focus …
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What Museums can Learn from Libraries
Museums and libraries are like sister institutions, descended of the same parent–the love of knowledge. However, like siblings, there are as many things that connect them as separate them. Both have collections. Both value education. Both serve the same general public. And, yet, there are so many differences. Why Libraries? First, let’s think about scale. …
Exhibition Cocktails or Why Museums Need User Experience Designers
I admit that I am biased. I am a trained User Experience Designer. But, you don’t have to has an M.S. to know that visitors come to museums for experiences. Now, we could get into a debate about the type of experience. Sitting quietly in a gallery is a type of experience. We often think …
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On Objectivity & What Museums Can Learn from News Organizations
Recently, Koven Smith retweeted an article from the American Alliance of Museums that unpacked the contention that museums are one of the most trusted sources of knowledge. An overwhelming number of respondents (87%) felt that museums were “one of the most trustworthy sources of objective information.” As the AAM article lays out, visitors did not …
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Intersectionality & Museums
Intersectionality, coined in 1989 by legal historian Kimberlé Crenshaw, highlights the fact that the many factors of being human, including race, gender, and religion, overlap in important ways. These points of overlap, or intersection, are often positions of oppression. Think of race and gender. In American society, the position of power in race is whiteness …
Big Trouble in Little Data #musetech
Big data is , well, big thing these days. Honestly, it has been for a while. We make so much data by interacting with digital tools. Daily 2.5 Exabytes are produced every day. That is the equivalent to 5 million laptops filled to the brim with data. Imagine yourself right now attempting to find one …
Where did the Museum Visitors Go?
Museum visitorship is down. You don’t have to believe me. The NEA, the Art Newspaper, and the Guardian are reputable sources who say just this. Colleen Dillenschneider, wunderkind audience lady, last year wrote extensively about audience declines. The number of people is tied to the amount of money going into museum operating accounts, both through …
The Danish word hygge is hard to translate. Books like the Little Book of Hygge, often translate the word as coziness. These authors go on to share how that word is but a scarce approximation of its actual meaning. This Danish cultural norm, a sort of way of being, is central to that nation’s high …
Five Reasons that Museums are Radical Spaces
Museums often hold diverse collections. Think of the Royal Ontario Museum whose holdings include dinosaurs, building columns, and moccasins in one collection. Accusations of privilege and elitism are regular criticism of museums as making museum more old guard than future leaning. Museums have acquisition policies and hierarchy, certainly, but even anarchists need to organize …
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