Is your museum convivial? Have you visited a museum where you’ve felt particularly energized and alive? We invite you to share images and stories—and to join Kathleen McLean and me during the ASTC Annual Conference to celebrate museums that cultivate this essential quality of vibrant public places.

In our recent book, The Convivial Museum, we suggest that these are key dimensions of conviviality: a welcoming spirit, orientation to the community, comfort, opportunities for social engagement, and places for healing and renewal. The book focuses on physical features of museums—like approaches, entryways, seating, lounges, and nooks—because although they are often overlooked, they have profound effects on the quality of a museum experience. For more, check out the discussion Nina Simon hosted on her blog earlier this year.

Use the Bits feature of ExhibitFiles to submit your image, video, or story of a convivial museum experience, and be included in a dynamic discussion of successes and failures, obstacles and opportunities. Be sure to identify the image and include a comment about the convivial quality of the place, how you (or others) are working to make it more convivial, or a question or challenge it represents.

Log in and post a Bit; or share your image and story on Facebook (or email me). The conference session is on Monday, October 17, in Baltimore,10:45 a.m.- 12:00 noon.

About the images: Darcie Forhman’s photograph of visitors to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art (above) is in a section of The Convivial Museum about ambience. Erik Thogersen’s photograph of comfortable seating (left) is from his review of a new building at the Denver Art Museum. Another example is the Center for Creative Connections, which Kathleen McLean profiles in her case study.

Many thanks to designer and artist Maria Mortati for her solstice post about taking museums outside.

Last fall, I was on a panel that discussed exhibits on the waterfront, and Wendy thought it might be good if I shared some of that info here. I thought it might be helpful if I expanded upon some of that thinking for this audience.

My background is in exhibit development and design, and I spent a couple of years at the Exploratorium working on their Outdoor Exploratorium (OE) project during an r+d phase. We created a conceptual framework and developed strategies for siting exhibits on the streets of San Francisco, while building and testing prototypes. The final OE was installed long after I left and can be found here. In addition, I began an informal (and occasional) exhibit platform called the San Francisco Mobile Museum. Most of our exhibits take place outside in the city.

The opportunities and complexities of developing exhibits outdoors are as big as….well, you get the drift. So I won’t attempt to cover it all. Typically though, audience, duration, and partnerships have the biggest impact on any public outdoor project. In the center of that axis lie some possibilities.

Free yourself from permanence
One approach I have found to yield fairly quick results from a public, maintenance, and political perspective is to take a tack of “ritualized temporary” vs. permanent (especially at a waterfront). Ritualized temporary means that you’re putting something up in the same framework – be it location or time – and changing it out regularly. These can be just as impactful as a permanent installation, and create delightful change.

Why else might this work? Your audience’s appetite for change, and…
When working outdoors, oftentimes you may be dealing with an audience that sees it everyday. So accommodating some form of change is good. Think of anything such as a tidal indicator to Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (a.k.a. Millennium Bean). These objects reflect, frame, or rely upon the inherent change in the outdoors as their primary interactive aesthetic.

… your funders, naysayers, and just plain big teams
It’s much easier to get buy-in, sign off, or the big OK from a temporary installation than a permanent piece. Really. It’s also a great way to get a new partner, group, or space to make room for something new if it’s not going to be around forever (even thought sometimes it ends up that way).

It’s a growing experience
In the rare event I’ve been too subtle, it’s extremely complex and consumes a lot of resources to develop outdoor exhibits. However, I believe in any museum it’s important for exhibit teams (and individuals) to have experiences that offer them opportunities for practice. So using strategies such as a ritualized temporary approach ensure that happens. It helps grow institutional competency and can also broaden your reach.

Note: Here is a very rough list of notes and resources I have found inspirational and useful when looking overall at developing for the outdoors. As you can imagine, I’m far from the last word on the topic, so please feel free to suggest additions – it might be nice to flesh it out further and perhaps post it here!

Maria Mortati

With deep thanks to all of the museum planners, photographers, and authors who contributed to the making of this book, Kathy McLean and I would like to announce the publication of The Convivial Museum. The book explores key dimensions of a defining quality of vibrant public places that we call “conviviality”—a welcoming spirit, orientation to the community, comfort, opportunities for social engagement, and places for healing and renewal. The focus is on the physical character of museums, which, while all too often overlooked, has profound effects on the quality of a museum experience.

For all those who share a vision of the broad social role of museums, we offer The Convivial Museum as a timely reminder of the simple but deeply important practices that make museums critical components of civic life. Designed for ease of browsing, the book includes more than 130 images and thought-provoking quotations, some contributed by ExhibitFiles members.

The book complements an earlier, companion volume, Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, which advocated for active individual and community involvement in creating museum exhibitions and programs. Both books were supported in part by grants from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The Convivial Museum is available in a limited, print edition. To order either book (or both) visit the ASTC website.

It’s been a convention of long standing in the museum world that visitors should cover as much ground as possible, on foot. The economics of museums in the United States reinforce this syndrome.  Many have come to rely on earned income, buildings and related operating costs have grown, results often are measured in attendance numbers, and visitors have to keep moving in order for the museum to achieve adequate “through-put.” And if you’ve paid a substantial amount to get in, you probably want to keep moving so you can see as much as possible.

But as recent posts suggest, people feel an opposite tug, a desire to slow down and savor their experiences. Two recent contributors mentioned their trepidation about visiting (separately) a Picasso exhibition. Anticipating long lines and an $18 admission fee (plus parking) and in one case even fearing a “claustrophobic” experience, they steeled themselves.

But as Mallory Martin wrote, “as I turned a corner sure that I had seen all there was to see and was about to exit the show, a photographic time-lapse of the various stages of Guernica was on display. It was here I sat and lingered and watched how the master that was Picasso took an expansive canvas and turned it into an evocative and timeless piece of art….at this moment I had received all that I needed from the show…a personal connection and moment introspection facilitated by a work of art.” The other reviewer, Winifred Kehl, noted the “many alluring seats” in this multimedia area that “probably drew many people eager for a sit-down.”

There’ve always been those who have insisted on offering people a place to sit down. British museologist Kenneth Hudson predicted before his death in 1999, in fact, that the museums that thrive in this century will be not only those with some special charm, but, quite simply, “those with chairs.”

You don’t need a costly multimedia presentation in order to offer a space for rest and reflection. The Field Museum’s Matt Matchuk told Kathy McLean and me that his museum had moved some overstuffed armchairs from a furniture rental company into their galleries and that visitors happily “plunk themselves down” to rest. (The photograph above is from Saralyn Rosenfield’s review of the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art, which also offers places to sit.)

There’s more about seating and other comforts in our forthcoming book, The Convivial Museum, available from ASTC.

Sometimes the simplest thing can bring an exhibition into focus. In Water: Our Thirsty World, it was this plastic jug that most impressed Maraya Cornell and conveyed viscerally what it feels like not to have enough. In her review, she wrote: “When you lift it, which, unless you’re a body-builder, you do only briefly, you have a small but powerful notion of what it must be like to carry that jug on your back for several miles, as must the African women walking across the sand dunes in one of Lynn Johnson’s photographs.”

Dawn Eshelman wished for a component almost as simple in her review of an exhibition at the Morgan Library about Mark Twain. Although she found herself absorbed by the author’s handwriting and turns of phrase (“clownish self-loathing,” “skeptical tumble-bug”), a rocking chair and a volume of Twain’s writings might have evoked his presence, she reflected. “When occupied, it would frame Twain’s favorite hero, the everyman, in modern form. Either way, it would provide something Twain might call progress – a good place to read.”

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the most memorable.

One of the basic courtesies a museum can extend to people who come there is help getting oriented and finding our way around. But as Susie Wilkening’s recent account in the Reach Advisors blog suggests, there are museums that haven’t learned (or applied) the lessons of Wayfinding 101. In fact, one of the comments on her post, from a designer  who’s worked mainly in the commercial arena, is even more damning: “I found museums, parks, zoos, and aquariums to be some of the worst examples of institutions that simply didn’t care enough about their guests to provide a decent wayfinding system or graphic environment as part of their overall experience.”

It’s encouraging that a number of recent reviews on ExhibitFiles pay attention to the overall quality of the experience—what it felt like to enter the museum, how easily the reviewer found what she was looking for. It’s important to share positive experiences, and to pay attention to the design details, as Penny Jennings did in her October post about a wayfinding sign at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (The example above, in a photograph Kathy McLean took at the California Academy of Sciences, is another positive example, which she and I cite in our forthcoming book, The Convivial Museum.)

But as Susie and her commentator suggest, a basic attitude of care and human concern reminds us daily to see things from the perspective of those we’re there to serve. That way, we’re likelier to call to mind those design ideas when we need them most.

Paying attention: It’s at the heart of learning, an aspect of aesthetic experience, how we make meaning, a topic of recurring interest among those who design museum exhibitions. So how do we get people to pay more attention? In a major review of the topic commissioned by the Visitor Studies Association, Steve Bitgood offers background and practical guidance. Attention, he writes, “is a three-level continuum (capture, focus, engage) with a different combination of variables influencing attention at each stage.” People are making judgments all the time about where they direct their attention, he says. So “attention is perceived value (a ratio of utility/satisfaction divided by costs such as time and effort) of the exhibit element.”

The article offers a framework for thinking about things most of us already know, if only from being museum visitors ourselves. Fatigue, distraction, too many things to see and do all at once all work against attention.

But what about the value proposition–how do we make an exhibit that compels people to turn attention that way? It comes down to two simple things, Steve writes: “(1) by selecting high interest exhibit content; and/or (2) by designing exhibit elements that stimulate curiosity.” The heart of exhibition design, its mystery and challenge–and the reason we get to know the people we’re designing for.

“An Attention-Value Model of Museum Visitors” was published by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and is available as a downloadable PDF on the CAISE website.

Word of mouth: That’s how most members found out about ExhibitFiles.  Others stumbled upon it while searching the web. That’s by design: the site uses a number of strategies to make it likely profiles and posts will show up high on search results.

Once people have joined, why do they come back? For inspiration and help with a new project are two big reasons. But email from the site is number one – a reminder to come back and see what’s new.

That’s why we’ll be relaunching the newsletter soon. We’re looking forward to seeing members come back often, and contributing more.

These findings are based on a study carried out earlier this year by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting, St. Louis, Missouri.

We’ve listened to you. With your valuable feedback, we’ve been working on a new and improved version of ExhibitFiles, which opens today. Here are some of the features you may notice:

• Bits – Those short posts we added a few months ago are now visible on the home page.

• Profiles – We’ve added a tabbed section and place for you to pull in info from other social networking sites like LinkedIn.

• Members page - We’ve added a sorting feature that highlights top contributors. Users without full names are no longer prioritized.

• Search – Improvements include more targeted search and more result relevance.

• Other improvements – We’ve improved browser compatibility and boosted speed.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the results of the recent evaluation that helped us plan these and other changes still ahead. For now, many thanks to James Kassemi, Jim Spadaccini, and other members of the Ideum team; to Carey Tisdal, evaluator; and to our funder, the National Science Foundation.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve received a lot of suggestions for new features for the ExhibitFiles site. One recurring request is to allow members to post not just full Case Studies or Reviews of exhibits and exhibitions, but short message or media elements. In other words, members could share one image (or video) or just an idea or a question. We’ve been thinking about how best to incorporate this potential new feature.

We want to make it easy to add media so we are envisioning a system that would allow for direct uploads to the ExhibitFiles server or links to images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, along with other services.

Here’s a few mock-ups of how it might work. The first one shows the “Add” page, where members are asked what they would like to contribute to the ExhibitFiles site.

The next screen shows how the ‘Bits main page might look. (Obviously, the gray thumbnails would be populated with images.)

Finally, here’s a mock-up of an individual ‘Bits page. We’re hoping to add the ability to make comments that have associated media files. Notice there is an integrated media-player. This improvement would also be added to Case Studies and Reviews.

This is all preliminary and we’re still working through the details. I didn’t post the proposed form for adding ‘Bits, as this has many layers due to the multiple choices.  (There are lot’s of options for that screen, since we are allowing members to include images and video that already exists on external social media platforms).

We’re open to any comments or questions you might have about ‘Bits. We’ll let you know how this all progresses.