As we discussed in class, knowing about who visits your museum is vital to the overall relevance and success of your institution. How a museum goes about attracting and getting to know their visitors—and what each museum does with that knowledge—can support growth and stability into the future.
With visitor engagement and empowerment in mind, assess either Nina Simon's TED talk OR Maxwell Anderson's Hirshhorn talk, discussing how your selected museum director views their museum's specific audience. What strategies does he/she implement to learn about their visitors and what are the strengths and weaknesses of the approach? Discuss these questions using specifics in at least four sentences, posting to the blog no later than 5 pm, Monday, November 7. Thanks!
In his Hirshhorn talk, Maxwell Anderson focuses a lot on the idea of “informed risk-taking,” viewing the Dallas Museum of Art’s members as important participants in the success of the museum. To learn about those visitors, and to try to bring more in, the Dallas Museum of Art has been experimenting with DMA Friends, a free membership program that allows participants to earn rewards when they visit the museum. The visitors gain points each time they scan a barcode on their membership card (in various locations in the museum), and they can use those points later to gain access to special events and activities. This approach seems really effective in tracking who is coming to the museum, what rooms they visit the most, what they are interested in, and how they feel about certain aspects of the museum, as well as in incentivizing higher museum participation by offering rewards. One thing I worry about, though, is that the whole badge/rewards system might be more appealing to kids than adults. That in itself might be a strength, because getting younger people to visit museums can be really difficult, but it may also be a weakness if adults without children feel like they’re being babied into getting involved in the museum.
ReplyDeleteNina Simon’s TED talk addressed active visitor participation and cultural engagement through having the community or the visitor be the “co-creator” and the “creative agent". Through this approach, Simon has included content and designed an “invitation to participate” in her museum where the visitor will feel valued and open to share their individual creative voice which she believes each of us has. For example, Simon set up a typewriter station where visitors could be inspired to slow down and write poetry and love letters. Another station included creating a jar that held a memory using craft materials. Nina seeks to use these participation opportunities as stimulants for conversations that we need to have about the past, present, and future. She strives to connect people who are from all different walks of life and have the conversation be mediated by the objects in front of them to overcome fear and divisiveness. The strengths of her approach are clear through the success of her museum which has doubled in attendance and increased in cash flow to a sustainable level. However, I find weaknesses in a few of her ideas as they seem geared towards children and reminded me of the Children's Museum in Richmond that I went to when I was younger. When I go to a museum, I go to see the artwork and to get away, so I would not be one to participate, but then again I think these ideas are more catered to the people who don’t typically go to a museum or aren’t artists themselves.
ReplyDeleteIn his talk, Maxwell Anderson mentions that the Dallas Museum of Art created new program “DMA Friends” to cultivate participation and engagement in the museum. By scanning badges, people can earn points and get rewards in the end. This strategy encourages people to go to the exhibitions. People can earn more points at the exhibitions few people going, which is a clever strategy to stimulate people to explore the unpopular exhibitions. However, the visitors’ main purpose might only be getting rewards rather than gaining knowledge from exhibitions. It’s true that some people are enlightened after exploring the exhibitions, but many people might just scan the badges and don’t pay too much attention to the exhibitions themselves. We know that people go to certain exhibitions, but we can’t tell whether the visitors really learn something from them. Moreover, reward system has a problem: if one day we withdraw the reward system, are people still willing to go to exhibitions? I think reward is a good stimulation but can’t be a long-tern plan. It’s important that people are eager to go to museums for learning and recharging instead of getting rewards. What will it be like if someday we ask a person why he/she goes to the exhibition and his/her reply is “Because I can get 1000 points from this exhibition!” Some small scale museums don’t have enough funds to offer free memberships and rewards, which might be discarded by people even if they are good museums. In addition, the program can only track the people who are the members. I think to reach those people who have never been to the museum is what needs to be concerned.
ReplyDeleteI’m investigating Nina Simon’s approach to museum audiences and participation. I’ve watched her TED Talk in a previous class and I’m reading her book The Art of Relevance right now. I don’t know if I would like Simon as much as I do if I hadn’t gotten to hear her talk. She’s an amazing public speaker and very convincing. It is likely because of Simon’s perspective as an “outsider” that she focuses primarily on the need to connect viewers to the museum in completely new ways. For her, the “stuff” in the museum is secondary to what people can do in a museum. Many of her projects, whole exhibitions even, don’t seem to directly relate to anything in the museum, but instead, they directly relate to the community. The greatest strengths of her approach are her many levels of success in connecting audience members to each other. The greatest weakness is how far she strays from the traditional role of a museum. Her greatest areas of success do not involve the more traditional goals of museums to connect viewers to culture and history through objects. Now that she has vastly improved her levels of attendance and increased the sense of community in museums, I think she should focus on pulling that audience towards the objects in the museum (which to her credit it sounds she is attempting to do). However, while I think her analogy of museum objects being like dogs in a park is a good similarity to aim for, I don’t think we are quite there yet. People may have related reactions to objects in a museum but how do you get them to feel comfortable sharing them with strangers, the way you feel comfortable sharing how cute you think someone’s dog is? Museum objects are much more complex than friendly dogs.
ReplyDeleteFor Nina Simon, the greatest emphasis is placed on using the museum as an environment for creating affective experiences. According to her, people from different backgrounds can be brought together over a common experience. The quality of that experience is helped by providing the participants with a feeling of legitimacy. People need to be made to feel that their contributions are valuable and worthwhile. In order to foster these experiences and give participants confidence in their contributions, Simon’s museum has various participatory exhibits that highlight the importance of the participants’ contributions. Writing poems about different objects they encounter, “bottling” memories and providing a short blurb about them, and being given the opportunity to give suggestions for improving the museum are just a few of the strategies by which Simon hopes to encourage a truly participatory experience. The main strength of Simon’s approach is that it seems to truly bring revelations and ideas out of people that they never expected to share. She sites the example of the man who shared a memory about the military and how he most likely never thought he’d be talking about that experience when he first visited the museum. By interacting with the museum, though, a new aspect of himself was expressed. Simon sees this progression as a success. On a similar vein, she feels that people are strongly impacted by having conversations based on the shared experience they can have with the other visitors to this participatory institution. It takes the interaction between people to make the experience everything it can be. Even though she acknowledges that the museum still makes use of its objects, a weakness in Simon’s system is that it lessens the importance of the objects themselves. Because so much of the experience is based around the reflection and conversation the stems out of the actions the participants take, they don’t have to give as much focus to those parts of the museum that are already present when they get there. They are more affected by what they create than what already happens to be there.
ReplyDeleteIn order to learn about her audience, Nina Simon has taken a more personal approach that allows members to choose to engage with the museum. Her three main points highlight the community as a co-creator, artifacts as social objects, and in the end, through the previous two goals, wanting to create museums that matter. Her innovative ideas connect visitors not only with her museum but also with other visitors. A few strengths to this approach are that people can put effort into the activity and get something out of it, and something more than they probably expected like their own memory jar on display. Also, these activities bridge gaps between visitors who may not have interacted with one another prior to their choice to participate. The weakness, though, is that the museum staff does not learn about the demographic of visitors. Also, these art activities are not going to be completed by everyone, therefore it does not give an overall representation of who has visited the museum. They do, though, share visitors' stories. That seems to be Simon's main goal as a director. She wants people to feel comfortable enough in a museum to share their stories that way they can leave knowing that it would be worthy of a return since they were comfortable enough to engage and connect. I personally would not always choose to participate in the activities, but I already love going to museums because to me they are my happy place. But, for others who may feel that museums are not for them, this option of participation can make the museum matter to them at the end of their time there.
ReplyDeleteIn Anderson's talk, he emphasized that the DMA views its audience as people rather than attendees. He spoke about the DMA Friends program they established that helps them learn everything about their visitors like how often they visit, where in the museum they go, where they live, and what they do in the museum. The DMA Friends program is a smart program that stores and tracks patrons information and their movement and activities throughout the museum based on points and activities located in certain exhibitions. This helps the DMA see who is visiting on a very specific level; however, it is not a perfect solution because not everyone will participate in this program. There is also a concern that people will just visit exhibitions without actually experiencing the art so that they can earn points. Since the points don't require having a moment with each work in an exhibition, people may be driven to gaining points rather than experiencing the works.
ReplyDeleteIn Maxwell Anderson’s talk at the Hirshhorn he addressed the Dallas Museum of Art’s use of a program called DMA Friends. The program allows the visitor to voluntarily and actively participate in the museum experience. Visitors earn points by going to certain areas in the museum and scanning a barcode on their membership card. The points can later be turned into rewards like free parking or access to certain activities or events. Overall I think this approach is a good way to track visitors within a museum and get an accurate count of which exhibitions are most and least popular. It is also gives visitors to explore the museum more, by urging them to go into different exhibits. On the other hand, this approach also has some weaknesses. By encouraging visitors to go to unfrequented areas of the museum by giving them rewards, there is no way of making the visitors see the exhibition. By implementing the participatory factor there is a chance that visitors forget the reason for going to a museum and that is the art and the artifacts. The program also has a specific target market geared toward younger museum goers. Although DMA Friends is targeted towards a key demographic it also targeted towards the people who already go to museums and not new visitors.
ReplyDeleteI found Nina Simon’s TED talk very inspiring. One of her best characteristics as a museum director is her fresh look into the museum experience, especially since she comes from a completely different background. Nina believes that the museum is not just about displaying the artwork and for the museum to educate the public. Instead, she believes that there is an inter-relationship between the museum and the public where the two learn and enhance each other. She demonstrated this idea through the interactive opportunities the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History has given their visitors. To give a visual of the relationship between the museum and the public she showed a diagram with arrows pointing back and forth from the museum and the visitors. However, I believe there is something missing in this diagram. There needs to be arrows also pointing from visitor to visitor. I think the diagram needs these arrows because with these interactive opportunities the museum isn’t just learning from the public but the visitors are learning and being inspired by the other visitors. The strength in Nina’s strategy is that the visitor becomes an important focus and consideration in the museum experience. I believe that this is the future of museums: visitor engagement. However, a weakness in this approach is if the museum becomes more focused on the engagement than on the artwork, there needs to be a balance so they can enhance one another.
ReplyDeleteMaxwell Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art since 2012, underscores his lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum with the concept of audience attendance as somewhat implicitly independent of revenue via visitor turnout. It appears that implementing this mindset in conjunction with the museum’s reinvigorated free admission managed to turn around the significant drop in visitation that took place during the brief interim in which DMA actually charged an admission fee. The DMAs core engagement themes of “Cultivating Participation,” a “Culture of Caring,” and “Informed Risk-taking” all hinge upon the idea of investing in the visiting community via a system of voluntary, free museum membership through which new members are engaged in a “challenge-reward” app for mobile devices. Essentially, users are granted rewards points via the app that comes with membership after completing challenges for certain “badges” throughout the museum to then be put toward a specific membership-dependent goal such as free parking. The badges themselves are designed in such a way to signify what thematic elements or exhibits draw certain groups or greater or lesser numbers than others and can therefore be utilized as an indicator of visitor data day by day. While creating this alternative avenue for engagement may negatively impact a certain amount of the revenue the DMA receives from their standard “upper” levels of membership, implementation of the “DMA Friends” program fortunately resulted in an increased visitor diversity across the board in comparison to even the numbers prior to the period in which the museum began charging standard admission.
ReplyDeleteNina Simon is working towards opening up museums and connecting people through valuable experiences. She advocates for active visitor participation and engagement within a museum. Simon views her audience as people who genuinely care about culture, but are just pursuing that creativity outside the museum setting. In her museum, she has implemented programs to encourage visitor participation. Some of these programs include painting open studio Sundays, asking visitors how the museum can be improved, and bottling up memories for others to see. I’d say her approach is effective, as their money and attendance has doubled. She believes that inviting people to participate and surrounding them with objects that can bring people together, they will be able to find meaning and have a transformative experience in a museum.
ReplyDeleteThe main goal of Nina Simon’s approach is to build a sense of community among people, who visit the museum. In her TED talk she emphasized the importance of bringing people of different backgrounds, social, and financial statuses together in order to give people a chance to get to know persons they would not have known otherwise and through that to build a stronger community of Santa Cruz. She talked about the program of restoration of the historic cemetery in Santa Cruz, where volunteers from the Museum of Art and History and volunteers from the homeless shelter get together to restore the historical monuments and talk to each other and get to know each other. In order to learn about the museum’s visitors Nina introduced the board, where people could share their opinion and advice on pieces of paper. Nina also believes that the museum artifacts are social objects and through them she wants to build a stronger sense of community among people, who visit the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. The strength of her strategies is that people indeed communicate with people that are very different from them, for example, homeless people. I think it’s an effective way to rid people of prejudices that they may have against houseless people, change the way they view and communicate with these individuals and consequently to build a stronger community. However, the weakness is that people need to be willing to participate in social activities. If person does not really care about preserving the cemetery or communicating with strangers, that person will not participate in the program. Or other individuals will not write on the board, provided for them, because they simply do not care and they visit museums to view the historical artifacts and not to make new friends.
ReplyDeleteListening to Nina Simon's Ted talk I really connected to her personal ideas and thoughts about museums as institutions and the interaction with its visitors. Her goal is to bring in visitors with the understanding that they will not just stand and look at art. Instead they will interact and find that the museum is a sanctuary of a cultural experience. This really spoke to me. Moving towards a world of humans thriving for experience and memories, having a museum as a place to find that can change the outlook of many visitors.
ReplyDeleteNina Simon's strategy for maintaining the relevance of the museum as an institution is to transform the museum into a community center designed to mediate social engagement and innovation. Simon argues that the best way to learn about a museum audience is by asking them about themselves, and requesting their input into how the museum space should be utilized. Simon even suggests that museums should include public input on which museum objects should be kept by the institution, based on the relevance of the object to the community. A key element of Simon's proposal for community engagement is her call to create "meaningful" substantive experiences that guide guests to create or collaborate with the museum community in specific projects designed to empower the guest by asking for their biography to intersect with larger community projects or themes. I think that Simon's vision for creating a community focused institution that provides conditioning for pan-socio-economic/racial/cultural interactions beyond the museum is lyrical, but still a tad vague, as most utopian manifestos for institutional change tend to be, however I believe that her approach is essential for reinvigorating a cultural industry that many find inaccessible. I think that her approach would benefit from supplemental data/research/analysis on museum attendance and interaction practices, sociological mindfulness, and a concrete elaboration/defense on why objects are still necessary (or not) for her interpretation of community engaged museum.
ReplyDeleteNina Simon focuses on active participation of visitors, and how this in turn can create relationships with each other. She views the audience as central to the museum - and she gets the audience to participate to the growth of the museum by making them feel valued and included. Two of her strategies really stand out to me. She discussed the idea of making the participant feel "worthy", by giving them materials just beyond a sign book at the entrance of the museum - but materials to create memory jars or their own art pieces, making the viewer know they are an important part of the museum. She also uses the analogy of the dog -- an "object" that brings strangers together, and have conversations without feeling intimidated. She wants her own projects (like the craft project that brought the artist, his baby, and a group of women) together, strangers who find common ground in the museum, and create a new dialogue. Her success is obviously in how much money the museum has gathered in just the few years she has implemented the programs and visitor attendance. However, while I see these projects bring people together in the physical museum, I think the participation could be more geared towards the actual art in the museum itself? I think it is important to still keep the art at the foreground of participatory activities. She seems to focus a lot on fostering relationships with the community, but the main purpose of a museum should still be sharing and learning from these already created art pieces themselves.
ReplyDeleteIn his talk at the Hirshorn, Maxwell Anderson talks about his strategies of audience-building and participation at the Dallas Museum of Art. Anderson and his colleagues have developed a program for the museum called "DMA Friends", which is a very intellectually-chosen name for a museum membership because this allows for a friendlier and more personal approach to asking people for donations. Strategies Anderson has developed for understanding the audience members is an interactive museum experience, where members use their cards to be scanned every time they come into the museum. This is a great strategy, because the audience member collects rewards over time, making them want to come back to the museum more often, as well as DMA getting a good count of how many members are still coming back. A weakness to this approach may be that visitors will not want to take the time to have their cards scanned every time they come to the museum, and also the worth of the rewards may not be to the standards of the member.
ReplyDeleteMaxwell Anderson in the talk at the Hirshorn mentions his new way to engage the audience. By creating a rewards system for museum patrons, he tries to encourage attendance. I think that this is a good way to measure how many people are actually coming to the museum. By having this card it also encourages people to try to rack up points to go to the exhibits. I think that this also encourages people to try to visit some of the exhibits that aren't so popular. I think that if a show is really lacking in attendance, they could offer double points to go see it. I also think that if certain points are offered at certain places in the museum, it encourages people to explore. There could be a smart phone app that keeps track of the points or there could also be kiosks set up around the museum for people that do not have smart phones. I think that this system encourages people to go out of their way to search for things. I think that it would also give an opportunity for children and families to engage on the hunt. I think overall that it is a good idea.
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