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Exhibitions as service?

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Change is coming from within our museum.

We’ve got a new identity.

Our staff is turning over. We have a new chief �of design, new chief curator and a retiring director, to name a few.

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But not just us.

Change is coming �from within museums.

“Protesters 'occupy' New York's Guggenheim over Gulf labor abuses,” 2015 Photo credit Al Jazeera

David Koch leaves American Museum of Natural History board in 2016 Photo credit The Wichita Eagle

Museums are Not Neutral T-shirt

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And don’t forget the changes outside museums.

For example,

Museum of Ice Cream’s Sprinkle Pool. �The Color Factory�29 Rooms by Refinery 29�Escape Rooms�Disney MagicBands�A Doduo in the Pokemon Go app found in the Holocaust Museum in D.C . (Screengrab by Andrea Peterson, Washington Post)�Crowd photographing the Mona Lisa

�

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How do we weather all this change?

A reporter recently asked me to name the biggest barrier standing in the way of museums adapting to the forces shaping the future.

My reply was “ourselves—the funding and organizational structures that tether us to outdated models and failed strategies.”

However unsuccessful these models are, sometimes the barrier that keeps us from discarding outdated ways of operating is simply too high to scale.

—Elizabeth Merritt, Center for the Future of Museums

Paraphrasing my boss’ soon to be released book chapter: “While innovation and improvement are generally considered desirable by both corporate and large cultural organizations,we just aren’t set up change. What this translates to is that when tasked with innovation and improvement, suddenly we have the additional burden of organizational change management…

Clare proposes rather than defining at the outset, content organization, educational messages, gallery parameters, and design strategies, and then progressing in a step-like fashion through implementation, an experience-based model would begin by establishing values and principles, and then allow the final form of the exhibition to evolve through a human-centered, iterative development process.”

While Acknowledging seismic shifts that could bring us to an iterative nirvana state, I find that service design offers adhoc ground up methods that I can bring into my day to day work.

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In order to manage �all the potential change, service design is becoming part of my job.

Here’s how and why.

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We are looking at an exhibition �as a journey, �inside of a museum journey.

So the more I think about exhibitions as a service, the more I want to bring that thinking into exhibition design and development. Exhibition journey, inside a museum journey. And it pretty much maps to the museum journey except more contained, less orientation, more options YET the human needs are exactly the same. Where’s the rest point? Where’s the bathroom? How long do I have to be in here?

And even more useful, how does our message connect to other messages outside this space? Visualizing exhibition messages and the museum’s content landscape could actually be very useful to finding low-tech ways of connecting “static” exhibition elements to “dynamic” museum offerings like events, tours, classes. I’ve started looking at blueprinting as a way to visualize and capture the journey and staff actions (or lack thereof).

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Response to blueprinting has been positive.

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We are doing a little research. Then a little more.

And more and more.more and more.more and more.more and more and more.

we can get closer to uncovering the unknown by just asking our visitors (and other staff). People-centered research, not abstract content research. What do visitors know about this topic? What are their assumptions and biases about it? What would they like to know more about? What do they know they don’t know? We’ve started doing this with Special Olympics. We went out with Smithsonian social scientists and did a series of quick qualitative interviews. We also invited the curators to join us on the floor and though they were interested, timing didn’t work out for this round. The angle on this case is that the special olympics was founded in response to discrimination and rampart institutionalization of intellectually disabled children and adults. This was the curatorial message which was a far cry from the popular culture representations of the special Olympics. We wanted to know the range of assumptions and understanding about special olympics and also ask who benefits from the special olympics. We learned that more people had personal, emotional connections to the special olympics than we thought. A curator was deeply concerned that people perceived special Olympic athletes as charity cases, merely vehicles for assuaging able-bodied guilt. We found that people commented on special olympics as an event that made them feel inspired and good about their community.

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We are doing a little research. Then a little more.

And more and more.more and more.more and more.more and more and more.

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We are moving into a more agile process.

We need to do more research and synthesize more.

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We need to both maintain momentum and accept that listening to visitors/responding to research requires putting on the brakes.

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‘There are known knowns. �There are things we know �that we know.

There are known unknowns. �That is to say, there are things �that we now know we don't know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.’

—Donald Rumsfeld unofficially commenting on service design in museums.