Yes! I really agree with your comments about including the rest of the staff in the exhibition. One strategy might be a feature to a program to encourage staff participation, but another way can be just to open a space for dialogue giving them time to explore the proposed interaction.

In our trial we invite all the staff one afternoon to come to the stand in the exhibition and leave a comment and get to know the project. The work done in that afternoon with cleaning staff, guards and guides was very useful.
a) some guards were proactive in inviting the visitors to leave messages because they felt comfortable and engaged with the project;
b) they came to tell me what has happened with visitors while leaving messages, they gave a lot of good critics and insides to our project;
c) in their free time in the gallery they answered some visitors’ questions and added provocative comments.
As I do not work in the museum, for me was important to have this contact with some of them.

In our case, in the map,the curator’s comments were displayed in parallel to comments coming from visitors but in an specific place of the map. Therefore, it was possible to navigate the map only reading curators’ or visitors’ comments but we did not separate staff comments. Only one comment was signed as coming from a staff member, but the others guards and guides preferred to be anonymous contributors.

Next time I would like to spend more time in co-designing with staff the possibilities of visitors’ participation.

I’ve been doing recording of visitor voices/stories in exhibits the last decade in a variety of exhibits, but I think it’s rare that staff actually become involved. (I can think of one example in Boston’s Children’s Museum, where a certain motivated staff member in the preschool Playspace area regularly added his own songs and puppet shows to the point where repeat visitors would begin to look each time for his new additions to the story kiosk).

I’m going to put this on my agenda: add a feature to my program that encourages staff participation. Really this might not be much more than text on the screen that says “Staff Comments:” so staff realize they can do this. (It often surprises me how literal we need to be sometimes when giving people instructions for ways they can use a creative technology in the short span of a visit interaction…)

Honestly, I think curators at most institutions need to figure out how to “get real with the people” and cut through the starched “Voice of the Curator.” This begs the question of just who is intended to hear the “Voice of the Curator” — and I would argue that in most cases it’s the pundits: critics and professional colleagues. This of course gets back to a key issue you’ve been raising for a long time. Professional critic in dialog with professional curator = closed loop. Closed loop = increasing irrelevance.

Before privileging (once again) the experience-voice of the curator, what about the guards, long-time volunteers, docents, cafeteria workers, cleaning crew, etc? They, as members of the museum-family have interesting perspectives on what and how we exhibit. Oh, I’ve learned so much from cleaning crew members! And, long-time volunteers at the Oakland Museum. We tend to dismiss our elders and the people who pick up after us too easily.

In my many museum visits this year around the country, I can’t think of a single exhibition I’ve experienced that is breaking new ground in regard to visitor voices without programmed facilitation by a live human. I did like Nathan Richie’s exhibition at the Chicago Peace and Freedom Museum on the electoral process. It incorporates dialog and a voting process. But, I still think that public radio is light-years ahead in the way they are combining the expert-voice of the curator-journalist with listener-voices.

Marjorie

Ah, you may say, but curators’ voices are already there—thus the need to emphasize visitors and others not traditionally incorporated into exhibitions. And I would argue that the ubiquitous Voice of The Curator seen and heard in almost every museum exhibition is not the same as “the voices of curators.” Rarely do we actually hear the voices of curators and staff who work on exhibitions, with their own personalities and character. We usually get the dry pedantic Voice of The Curator devoid of personality and character.

Also at the Oakland Museum of California, this past year they experimented with curators writing (and signing) comments about specific artworks in comment books in their Gallery of California Art, and visitor response was active and appreciative for the dialogue with real people—as engaged as they would be with other visitors.

In a recent exhibition in the Design Museum in Helsinki we asked visitors to leave their comments on design pieces. Our small exhibition was: The Secret Life of Objects, an Interactive Map of Finnish Design. It was a collaboration between Media Lab UIAH and the Design Museum. We put up a blog about the project: http://thesecretlifeofobjects.blogspot.com/

Visitors’ voices were gathered through a map (image that compile pictures of the design objects) and later on displayed beside the objects, on the walls and displays. Visitors’ comments looked like the comments in the digital version, they had a frame and background and were well integrated into the exhibition. These comments gave a fresh, fun and alive character to the exhibition. We collected comments that were poetic, creative and personal. We gathered lot of memories about the use of these objects since most of them were/are part of Finnish everyday life.

The lessons learned:
a) Pre-arranged material coming from the workshops was a source of inspiration and influence positively the visitors’ participation. We had previously collected in the map poems, music, drawing and videos.
b) Visitors while seeing others’ previous visitors comments displayed “respectfully” made an effort to leave something “meaningful”. Also previous visitors’ comments validate their own thoughts. The multiplicity of voices displayed made them grasp that there are different ways to comment and engage with the exhibition.
c) We could displayed more text than in other exhibitions because the informal language used made it easy to read. Visitors spend time and read the comments of others’ visitors actively.
d) The fresh and fun tone of the comments and the vocabulary of the visitors made the exhibition more accessible and easier to engage to others visitors.

It raise questions in the museum about how to conserve and relate to this material.

In my opinion visitors’ are not use to the practice of commenting and leaving their trace in the museum, but through encouraging this practice we are offering new learning opportunities. The strategies used to engage visitors influence the participation and with it the whole exhibition.

Mariana Salgado-
Media Lab- University of Art and Design Helsinki