Visitor Comfort, Part 2: Visiting the Museum in Character

This is the second part of a multi-part video series documenting our October 25 pre-conference workshop on visitor comfort at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, San Diego.

Participants role-played as visitors with either learning differences or physical disabilities. They based their roles on brief, half-page profiles, written by Paul Gabriel (differences) and Beth Katz (disabilities), that described the important characteristics of their personas. Participants did not see their profiles before the day of the workshop. Each was randomly assigned a persona and had about 15 minutes to get familiar with it before going out into Balboa Park and naively visiting the museum in character, from entering the building to leaving.

This segment deals with participants’ experiences with some of the most very basic aspects of visitor comfort: labels, seating, and interactives.

Personally, I’m struck by the depth and seriousness with which the workshop participants experienced the museum from the viewpoints of their characters. They took their rather brief (if detailed) profiles and just ran with them. This gave them some valuable insights into comfort and accessibility issues, I think.

-Steve Tokar

Visitor comfort, part 1

By Stephanie Weaver

On Sunday, October 25 WMA held a pre-conference workshop at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts called “Getting Comfortable with Visitor Comfort.” The goal of the workshop was to help participants and the museum assess how the museum’s experience met visitors’ comfort needs, and therefore was an experience they might want to repeat. The facilitators (in alpha order) were Paul Gabriel, Vivian Haga, Beth Katz, Steve Tokar, and myself. We were extremely fortunate to have Kenshi Westover with us, an amazing videographer and editor, as well as Joaquin Ortiz from the museum staff. During the workshop they shot a total of 6 hours of video, which Kenshi is editing down into segments.

This first segment is about entrances and exits. The workshop participants were each given cards with roles to play, and sent out into the museum with very little priming to see how the museum experience worked for them in this role. Roles varied from temporary physical conditions, like pregnancy, to learning differences like dyslexia.

In the video, you’ll see the participants identified by name and then the role they were playing.

Visitor Comfort: New Approaches in San Diego

Hi, I’m Steve Tokar, and I’d like to invite you to a couple of San Diego Conference sessions that we’ve organized on the topic of visitor comfort.

Here’s what we mean by comfort. The last time you and your family visited a museum, could you find your way around easily? Were there enough places to sit? Were the labels readable? Were there multiple/alternate ways to enjoy and learn? Were the restrooms comfortable? Was there reasonable food, and a nice place to eat it? Were there spaces to just chill out and take a break from museum-ing?

Think about it for a minute, then sign up for our Pre-Conference Workshop and/or Session. Also, please share your thoughts on the topic here on this blog.

Pre-Conference Workshop

Increasing Visitor Comfort to Encourage Return Visits

Sunday, October 25, 1-5:30 PM

In this tough economy, we need to do everything we can to welcome visitors and encourage them to return, become members, and support the museum financially. Visitor comfort is known to aid learning, promote mental and emotional receptivity, and increase the likelihood of a return visit; yet in many museums, comfort is not a priority.

In this pre-conference workshop at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park, participants will explore practical, economical, and simple ways that museums can help make visitors comfortable by accommodating their physical, psychological, neurological, and social needs. Participants will work together to assess public areas of the host museum in terms of comfort and accommodation and suggest potential improvements.

Most critically, they will collaborate with the host museum staff to examine potential barriers to making those improvements and create strategies to address and overcome those barriers. Findings will be presented in a session at the conference.

If you can’t make the workshop, please come to our session. Prior attendance at the workshop is NOT necessary in order to have a good, meaningful time!

Conference Session

Getting Comfortable with Visitor Comfort

Wednesday, October 28, 9:55-11:15 AM

This session offers practical and simple visitor comfort tools to apply at your museum, using the results from our pre-conference workshop at the Museum of Photographic Arts as a starting point.

Joan & Irwin Jacobs Theater at the Museum of Photographic Arts

Experts in design, visitor experience, and physical and learning disabilities will deconstruct what we learned from our host museum and how it might be more broadly applied to museums in general, while museum staff weigh in on the workshop results and share what they learned. Panelists and attendees will suggest and critique practical, economical, and simple ways in which all museums might increase visitor comfort-physically, psychologically, neurologically, and socially.

Meet the presenters:

Steve Tokar Writer, exhibit developer, media consultant, advocate for seating, readable labels, & more comfort in general “Please Be Seated” blog: http://stevetokar.wordpress.com/

Stephanie Weaver Founder and Principal, Experienceology http://www.experienceology.com/

Paul Gabriel Educational Consultant and Learning Specialist – advocate for those who process information in non-standard ways

Vivian Kung Haga Deputy Director, Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego http://www.mopa.org/

Beth Katz Registered Nurse, museum evaluation consultant, advocate for museum environments that enable, not disable.

See you in San Diego!

Mapping the Digital from Minnesota to #sfmetrix

By Lesley Kadish

San Francisco Elevation and Right of Ways

Before I came to San Francisco for Seb’s talk, I read a post on SFStreetsblog called “Eyes on the Street: The Ghost Streets of San Francisco” about ‘secret’ right-of-ways around town. You know, those steep steps that lead through an art garden or behind a house, where you’re never sure if you’re on public or private property. Being a map person, I majorly geeked out: I downloaded the San Francisco street centerline GIS shapefile, sorted the attributes by class code, added an elevation map, located the SFMOMA, and plotted my little adventure!

It only took an hour… and all with publicly available data! I’ll admit, before Seb’s talk, I would not have considered this  little exercise more than pre-trip geekery. What Seb highlighted was the fact that this is happening all over the place, all the time, with an ever increasing availability of data. Folks like me, with interests in snooping around urban nooks, are taking what’s out there and making it their own.

I’m always excited to see what emerges with maps and public data. My name is Lesley. I’m the Curator of GIS at the Minnesota Historical Society. A funny title, right? I’m not lucky enough to rest on the laurels of a historic title like Curator of Art. You guys have it easy!

As the Curator of GIS, I spend a good amount of time mulling over the quandary of archiving born digital material. But I spend even more time thinking about place… as you can imagine.

So, I was especially excited to see the Powerhouse Census Explorer, and their new Collections Mapping interface. It’s a direction we’ve been heading in for a while. A couple of years ago we launched something in a similar vein. But rather than use the maps as a background to collections data, we wanted the layers of MAPS to tell the stories themselves. We gathered the available GIS layers from state agencies and created an online GIS tool for school kids to layer up to 150 transparent maps atop each other.

For example, 6^th grade classes studying immigration could see areas where people settled, with maps of soil productivity, original vegetation, and natural disasters overlaid atop. At the end of the day, an average kid could say, “Why yes, the Germans Did take up the heavily mollisol area, because they Are good at Farming, but Too Bad, they lost their crops to a grasshopper plague when trying to tame the Prairie!”

Throughout the Minnesota Historical Society, we’re engaging ‘place’. We’ve tweeted photos like the White Castle on Wheels, asking followers Where was This? We have a wiki about place, called Placeography, for the public to add content about places in their own lives. We’re experimenting with fun little KMZ files to see our historic map collection in Google Earth, and we’ve even got a searchable database of Minnesota placenames. I’ve found that it’s one thing to geotag land-based objects, like maps, or things that don’t move, like buildings (oh, nevermind White Castle). That stuff is FAIRLY straightforward. But it’s a whole other thing to talk about geocoding collections. I imagine Seb and his team are working through some of the same things we are.

I think we’ll all agree, when collections get digitized and put ‘out there’ they can become imbued with new life. New contexts are discovered, old stories are told. Take the fireman’s hat that gets recognized when it’s put online. Before, its provenience is listed only as Minneapolis Fire Station No 18, circa 1920. But suddenly, with recognition, the hat has a head it belonged to. Fires it fought, cats it rescued. Thinking somewhat philosophically, how would we place this canary yellow No18 hard hat on a map? Certainly it could be located at the old station (now an artist’s loft). Or at the fireman’s house (his daughter still lives there, even better). Or at that big blaze down on Lexington where ten lives were saved in a moment.

Digitizing a collection lets us see its multidimensionality. Here’s where this principle of whakapapa fits in, I think. My take on whakapapa is that objects, like people, carry history with them; each has a genealogy of life and place. Thinking this way about collections fits with the semantic web and can be somewhat confounding for old school curators.  But it may help us take a step closer to understanding the layers our collections have and create when we put them out there.

Oregon Heritage Commission: Facing Adversity

By David Porter

To follow up on my earlier post, I wanted to note that the Oregon Heritage Commission,  a state chartered entity which oversees grant programs and other similar activities, heard testimony about the challenging state of affairs among heritage groups across the state at a meeting early this summer.

Under the leadership of Chairman George Kramer,  the Commission pledged to charter an investigation of the situation and to use its standing to make recommendations to the Legislature early in 2010.

The starvation budget which Oregon’s government is operating under, combined with the continuing economic gloom, will make their work more challenging.  Importantly,  the idea of engaging in global scrutiny of the situation and looking for broad solutions is a first.

It may well set the stage for a stronger fabric to support heritage museums and related institutions in the future.

Morning Coffee and On-Line Metrics

By Susan Spero

Susan Spero

As I sit with my cup of coffee this morning and think through yesterday’s tour de force by Seb Chan,  I too realize that like a tweet on #sfmetrix stating that a tornado of ideas was spinning through the tweeter’s mind, mine too feels like it has been hit by a storm.

Tremendous kudos are in order for the organizers for sponsoring a great day:  the National Arts Marketing Project, Theatre Bay Area, American Express, The San Francisco Foundation, the Wallace Foundation,  SFMOMA, AAM Museum and Technology, Museum Computer Network, WMA, along with other organizations and certain individuals.

The star of the day was Seb Chan who literally held the podium for the entire day showing how the team at Powerhouse Museum (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/) have, through time, built a smart online system.

Their considered online philosophy and care has given them results:  the Powerhouse collection has been pushed to the forefront of their visitor’s online experience. A larger percentage of visitors spend time on pages that have to do with the collection more than with any other offerings.  Their visitors engage and use the collections information available: from the fabric swatches for creating a new issue of the designs or even as insights into objects for an ebay transaction (buying or selling, who knows).  The Powerhouses’s willingness to share incomplete material from their collections data base has even triggered new knowledge about the collection based on interested visitors sharing what they know.

Seb walked us through the choices their producers and in-house developers make as they consider open options for looking at the collection. Simple things like visitor language tags, and statements of significance as to why and object is important help make the objects relevant for an online visitor (scroll down on the link and browse through these amazing book dresses).

Over and over Seb implied that the Powerhouse philosophy is to listen, learn and seek ways to understand how their audience uses and/or wants to use their collection.  The team constantly wonders: What is the relevance of the collection and how can digital tools let us serve that need?

Go to where the audience is already living, is a key phrase for those who promote social software, and the Powerhouse museum understood this idea from the get-go.  They were the first museum on the Flickr Commons, and by putting their Tyrell Collection of  historic photographs of Sydney on board early, they increased awareness of the Powerhouse museum with the community that cares about photography.  What intrigued me is that this intense audience-interest in photography online has had an impact on the curatorial choices the Powerhouse Museum is making; they are going to (or have) hired a curator that can support the photographic collection.

Additionally, Seb noted that, at least in his mind, curators now and in the future need the skill sets to be able to work in the digital realm. In fact as part of their official curatorial responsibilities all  Powerhouse curators blog.  The web is a communication platform and everyone on staff needs to know how to use it to help audiences connect with museum resources.

The afternoon session was a geek’s dream in that it focused on the many metric systems that can be used to analyze just who uses your website and how they use it.  What was most telling though was how Seb admitted up front that many of the numbers tell you nothing when thrown out as just numbers.

Seb Chan, Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies, Powerhouse Museum at the podium at SFMOMA

The key, as with all statistics, is that you know how to read them so they can influence future actions.  Find patterns over time.    So, for example, is there an upward trend when you open an exhibition or open up registrations for summer camps?  Is there a downward trend on holidays (usually, weekends are evidently down for all internet users: guess what we read while we are at work).  And look at how others in your area are doing:  if a competing institution has a sudden spike in their numbers and yours are flat, can you figure out why and how that happens.

You want to know how many people touched your content.  Let the analytics help you understand this.   If not already known, concepts like dwell time, bounce rate, and ISP logs are now a part of the mindset of every listener in the Friday’s room .  Dwell time measures how long visitors stay at your site, but even then those numbers have issues since you can only measure how long someone was at the second to last page they were on while visiting your site as there is no way  (yet?) to account for how long a person is on the last landed page of a session.  So you could discover that the average time spent on your site is four minutes, but who knows what amount of time passed when visitors finally found that great educational video you produced. Bounce rate is how quickly someone is in or out of your site; you want bounce rate to be low on education pages, but high if you are buying tickets for an event (get in and get the sale done quickly).

And ISP logs help you gain a finer grain view of your visitors, although the privacy invasion is real and alive on the web;  you can be tracked for where you’ve been browsing, and while I have always understood this, Seb’s reminder made me pause.

One of the most solid pieces of advice Seb offered is for institutions to use freeware for online analytics, but PAY someone to help you customize your specific number crunching.  You need to understand what the numbers mean, and HOW they will impact your future behavior   The twitter #sfmetrix site notes that there were tons of free “Kewl Tools” out there for the using (search twitter for #sfmetrix and you can read through the tweets of the day).

There were many big take-away thoughts:

1. Beta Test:  Don’t hesitate to beta test your site putting it online sooner than later: it doesn’t have to be finished before you go live.  In fact some of the things you learn that are most valuable are when you go live and real visitors are using it. Seb thinks we should also try to work the same beta testing for some exhibition efforts.

2. Be Adept Enough to be Relevant:  Web thinking, with its open, speed driven approach needs to work backwards into how our institutions function. Remember the photography curator story developing from increased interest built in Flickr commons.

3. And finally: Note to self.  Scour the Powerhouse’s web site.  I mean really look at it very carefully.  There is much to learn about collections access and smart web design.

Lastly, Seb has a blog that presents many of the ideas and projects seen yesterday: it is a great resource.

Others of you were there. What are some of your biggest take-aways? And those of you who were not, any thoughts on collections access or museum metrics? Great examples or challenges in practice?

WMA Gets the First Glance: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts New Campaign

[Editors' note: Special to members of WMA and westmuse blog readers, thanks to Bonnie Powers and Volume Inc., here's a preview of the look and feel of the new summer campaign for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.]

By Bonnie Powers

Enticing audiences: Volume Inc hijacks generic images in campaign for YBCA. Highlights contemporary art’s equally subversive and approachable character with surreal illustrations and humorous dialogue

Looking to escape the mundane? Try art, suggests Volume Inc.’s new campaign for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), invading San Francisco streets in July.

More of today’s contemporary art is inclusive, meant to be embraced by everyone, and Volume Inc. is helping YBCA bring this new message to the people. The energetic and edgy guerrilla campaign–spread across city streets, transportation hubs, and even the sides of buses –operates like street art, where surreal illustrations hijack stock advertising images to deliver the message. The prank sends a clear message: Art is subversive, approachable, even fun. Visit the YBCA and get in on the action.

“I am very excited about this new campaign and the way it communicates the essence of YBCA to the general public,” said Ken Foster, YBCA Executive Director. “We strive to be both provocative and fun, and through that approach we hope to encourage people to see how contemporary art can also relate to their own lives.”

The campaign comes alive with vibrant color and an infestation of cheeky character illustrations against the flatness of various black-and-white scenes. Humorous dialogue disrupts the dull routines of daily life: a guy vacuuming, suburbanites barbecuing, kids running through a field.

One scenario shows a black-and-white photo of a businessman talking on his cell phone, but don’t expect the ad’s message to sell a new wireless plan. This generic image has been reappropriated and reengineered. A bright blue cartoon bubble above his head playfully shows his inner thoughts: “I worry that my cell phone is more interesting than I am.” Whimsical creatures tell the man to “Set Your Life to Vibrate” and get to YBCA. The promise is the Everyman will escape banality, and get a (artful) life. YBCA to the rescue.

[YBCA is a great, multi-media, contemporary art space with exhibitoins, film, performance, etc., right in the middle of a downtown museum center in San Francisco with SFMoMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and Zeum, all in very close proximity.  And, in not too long, The New Mint as the home of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society.  Check out these westmuse links on: YBCA and The New Mint.]

Helping Friends: Posting Survey Links

Securing Future Audiences at Your Museum

Need some creative and cost-effective ideas on how to attract todays young cosmopolitans to your museum? Help us find out!

This new and unique study examines and raises awareness of programs across the country that engage this younger, socially minded, and creative adult audience known as young cosmopolitans (YoCos).

Your input is crucial to finding out how to attract the next generation of museum visitors and donors. Please help us by filling out this very brief survey. It will only take 5-10 minutes and the results will be emailed to you directly by the end of the summer. Click here to start http://tinyurl.com/yocosurvey

Thank you for your help!

Matthew Edling, Science Museum of Minnesota

Alexandra Gregg, University of Toronto

Jessica Koepfler

Adam Rozan, Oakland Museum of California

YBCA Inside Out & Art Babble

Hello folks,

My name is Isaías D. Rodríguez, Interactive Media Producer, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, YBCA in San Francisco, CA. I’ve been with YBCA for over 4 years  and in the last year transitioned into my new role as an in-house media producer. I produce media on our exhibitions, performances, film/video screenings, and events.

I’m really excited about our new web-based video series, YBCA Inside Out, that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what happens at a contemporary art center. YBCA was just added to Art Babble, a great site that features media content from several arts orgs from around the country. I welcome you to view our videos and leave your comments. I love the feedback! I take the good, the bad, and the ugly. My audience is you, so hit me up with your thoughts.

I look forward to providing you with some juciey content and invite you to visit us at ybca.org.

Have a great day and thank you for your time.

Isaías D. Rodríguez
Interactive Media Producer
irodriguez@ybca.org

http://twitter.com/irodriguezybca

Rockin’ the Mint: WMA in the House

The vaults downstairs at the Mint were lit up and the spaces were packed.

Last night in San Francisco Standing Ovation productions put on a huge party and fundraiser for The Mint Project.

Click here to see a lot of familiar Bay Area museum faces who are working on the Mint Project — many of whom were in attendance at last night’s event, including Nina Simon, Debbie Frieden, WMA’s own Susan Spero and Ed Prohaska and, of course, Erik Christoffersen, Director and Master of Ceremonies.

Gypsy McFelter, Development, The Mint Project, James G. Leventhal, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA, Susan Spero, JFKU Museum Studies and advisor to the Mint Project, Elida Zelaya, Executive Director, WMA and Ed Prohaska, Monterey Bay Aquarium and advisor to the Mint Project.

Also in attendance from the museum world were Kelly Brisbois and Kevin Consey, formerly of BAM/PFA now leading the life of an international scholar, adjunct professor in Curatorial Practice at CCA and nature activist.  Lots of other familiar friends were there, including Leah Garchik and her husband Jerry, but we are just focused on the Museum folks here.

This is a truly awesome project in scope scale and implication.  The whole event felt very San Francisco.  To quote one of the evening’s honorees Paul Kanter of the Jefferson Starship, San Francisco is “49 sq miles surrounded by reality.”

Jefferson Starship wrapped up the show