1. CONVERSATION
& COLLABORATION
STRATEGIES TO CULTIVATE MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT
WITH CULTURAL AUDIENCES
Robert Stein
Deputy Director for Research,
Technology, and Engagement
Indianapolis Museum of Art
@rjstein - http://rjstein.com
Flickr Credit ~adforce1

2. CAN MUSEUMS
DENT THE
UNIVERSE?
Why is your community better off because it has a museum? The answer must
necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn‘t. Museums matter
only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve
something of value beyond their own mere existence.
Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter
Flickr Credit ~Sweetie187

3. TOWARDS
ENGAGEMENT

4. GATHER
Art museums have for decades described their role
STEWARD as interpreter of cultural inheritance. In our new
socially networked world, interpretation is no longer
a one- or two-way street. Transparency changes the
museum dynamic from registrarial fortress to public
CONVERSE square. Interactivity allows for questioning,
augmentation, and dispute of official interpretations
by scholars and informed observers. Art museums
host conversations among experts and enthusiasts,
rather than privileged glimpses into the working
methods of curators. Works of art themselves
‗converse‘ through loans and exhibitions. Teachers,
students, and museum staff and volunteers
exchange ideas about the objects in our care and
the experiences to be had in our facilities and on our
websites. Visitor comments and market research
initiate conversations that permeate the former
comfort zone of institutional remove. Blogging by
museum staff and by others about museums opens
up new engagement, exchange, and conversation.
Maxwell Anderson, The Art Newspaper, June 2010.

5. GIVING THE
PUBLIC A VOICE
If museums had just one purpose, our jobs
would be much easier. But museums
address multiple needs, regardless of the
era in which we find ourselves. For art
museums, those needs include collecting
and caring for examples of cultural heritage
and providing the public with avenues to
understanding the intentions of artists in
their time and the relevance of works to the
present. But the Web has altered this last-
mentioned obligation, from dispensing
information alone to soliciting new forms of
participation. And while museum
professionals will always offer the ―official‖
interpretation of objects in our care, we
also should welcome the opportunity to
attract the notice and to encourage the
engagement of people anywhere.
Maxwell Anderson, Dallas Museum of Art

6. AGGREGATORS,
CURATORS, MENTORS,
AND MORE
In a world shaped by immediate access to a vast sea of digital data, museums will serve as:
sources, sharing information emerging from their collecting and research; aggregators, finding
and integrating information from the many sources touched by their work; curators, selecting
and annotating content to help people find reliable information; and educators, providing
context and commentary. Technology will enable museums to scale up these core
functions, which are already embedded in their work.
In the future, museums also will become mentors, recruiting and training people to contribute
and interpret content; and moderators, encouraging people to engage with content, sharing
views, opinions, and their own expertise. And museums will continue to be welcome havens of
respite and retreat, where people can unplug, disconnect, and immerse themselves in
silence, beauty, and wonder.
Elizabeth Merritt, Center for the Future of Museums

7. PARTICIPATORY
CULTURE
A participatory culture is a culture with
relatively low barriers to artistic expression
and civic engagement, strong support for
creating and sharing one‘s creations, and
some type of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices. A participatory
culture is also one in which members
believe their contributions matter, and feel
some degree of social connection with one
another…
Participatory culture is emerging as the
culture absorbs and responds to the
explosion of new media technologies that
make it possible for average consumers to
archive, annotate, appropriate, and
recirculate media content in powerful new
ways. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. ―Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.‖

8. CULTURE HAS A
NEED FOR
DIALOG The mass media, by and large, do a bad job of it, and
the proliferation and success of demagogues at
hijacking the public debate have made it almost
impossible for people to disagree respectfully…
Making museums places that you go to in order to be
an active citizen is something I‘d love to see more of
us attempt. That means making space available,
making time available, and making our ears available
to hear what matters to our constituents.
Ed Rodley
Museum of Science Boston

9. ARE WE FAILING?

10. Empirical data supports the view that visitors spend little time at individual exhibit
components (often a matter of a few seconds and seldom as much as one minute);
seldom read labels; usually stop at less than half the components at an exhibit; are
more likely to use trial-and-error methods at interactive exhibits than to read
instructions; that children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than
adults, and that attention to exhibits declines sharply after about half an hour.
From Learning in the Museum by George E. Hein, Routledge, 1998, p. 138.

11. Studies of 150 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a mean time of less than 30 seconds
viewing an object to be typical, with most spending significantly less time. Douglas Worts, former
interpretive planner and audience researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario and museologist, summarizes
this behavior as ―grazing‖ and theorizes that the pattern may arise from a mismatch in the goals of
curators and visitors. It is relatively rare to watch a visitor spend more than a minute with any individual
artwork.
Spending Time on Art‖ by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith in Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 19, Number 2, 2001.
On the Brink of Irrelevance? Art Museums in Contemporary Society‖ by Douglas Worts, 2003.
GRAZING
Flickr Credit ~Petereck

12. Enrich Permanent Collection
STUDIES AT
THE IMA
Time spent looking
typically averages
between 12 and 35
seconds

13. THE VALUE OF MUSEUMS IS NOT A SURE THING

14. A NURSERY
OF LIVING
THOUGHTS
The work of organizing museums has
not kept pace with the times. The
United States is far behind the spirit of
its own people…
This can not long continue. The
museum of the past must be set aside,
reconstructed, transformed from a
cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery
of living thoughts.
Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums
of the Future. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office. Goode, G. Brown. 1891. The Museums of
the Future. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office.

15. A man's work is nothing but this
slow trek to rediscover, through
the detours of art, those two or
three great and simple images in
whose presence his heart first
opened.
Albert Camus

16. ON THE LOOKOUT
FOR ENGAGEMENT
Flickr Credit ~gerlos

19. PRESENCE
…is it real?
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: THE
ARTIST IS PRESENT

20. The Museum of Modern Art, 2010

23. The presence of the original
is the prerequisite to the
concept of authenticity.
PRESENCE
Walter Benjamin, 1936

24. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is
lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its
unique existence at the place where it happens to be
One might subsume the eliminated
element in the term 'aura' and go
on to say: that which withers in
the age of mechanical
reproduction is the aura of the
work of art.
AURA
Walter Benjamin, 1936

25. I LOVE THIS ROCK

26. I LOVE THIS ROCK

27. I LOVE THIS ROCK

28. I LOVE THIS ROCK

29. AUTHENTICITY IS
THE CORE STRENTH
OF MUSEUMS

30. OPTIMIZING FOR
EPIPHANY
Flickr Credit ~paulwatson

31. EPIPHANY
It probably has a million
definitions. It's the occurrence
when the mind, the body, the
heart, and the soul focus
together and see an old thing
in a new way.
Maya Angelou

32. EPIPHANIES
“… moments that leave a mark
on people’s lives”
Jean-Paul Sartre

33. ENGAGEMENT
WHAT’S
THE RIGHT
MODEL?
Flickr Credit ~measter2

34. A REVIEW OF
THE LITERATURE
1. Pekarick and Doering
2. Samis
3. Csikszentmihalyi
4. Falk
Flickr Credit ~shutterhacks

35. IDEAS
OBJECTS
PEOPLE
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

36. IDEAS
OBJECTS
PEOPLE
Developed by Andrew Pekarick
and Zahava Doering at the
Smithsonian Office for Policy
and Analysis
Results from a series of
surveys of exhibitions at the
national museums
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

37. IDEAS
OBJECTS
PEOPLE
Visitors tend to favor
interpretive materials that focus
on one of either
ideas, objects, or people
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

38. IDEAS
Ideas
Gaining information or insight
OBJECTS
Enriching my understanding
PEOPLE
Objects
Seeing rare, valuable, or uncommon things
People
Finding out what its like to live in a different time or
place
Getting a sense of the everyday lives of others
Reflection
Reflecting on the meaning of what I see
Being moved by beauty
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

39. IDEAS
OBJECTS
PEOPLE
These predispositions tend to
drive the experiences they
seek out – and are highly
correlated to exit-satisfaction
results for those types of
experiences.
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

40. IDEAS
OBJECTS
PEOPLE
“Visitors are happiest when
they encounter experiences
that are unexpectedly
satisfying”
“Experientially richer visits
seem to be rated higher”
Flickr Credit ~ellenlove

41. Flickr Credit ~da100fotos
ATTRACT, ENGAGE, FLIP
―Most of the visitors we observed and
interviewed revealed a primary orientation,
but—if given the right contents or
presentation—could flip to unexpected
discoveries of a different type.‖

42. VISUAL VELCRO
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

43. VISUAL VELCRO
To illustrate, let us imagine the humble Velcro
patch. It consists of a strip of tiny loops,
originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or
velvet‘s fuzzy surface. Now imagine a sensory
impression, in this case an artwork, arriving in
your perceptual field. Unless the visual
impression has a hook that can fit into one of the
loops on your specific LTM ―patch,‖ it will glide
right by and be forever forgotten. If there is
something in the artwork, however, that strikes
you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation
resulting from the artwork‘s massive or
minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied
narrative connection—then we can say that
artwork has ―Visual Velcro.‖It has hooked into
your cognitive structure and stands a chance of
remaining in your memory.
Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a
Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.
quinnanya/

44. The work of interpretation, then, is to give
cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure
that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that
they can successfully land in the mental fabric
of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have
a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions,
emotions and reflections can weave
themselves into the fabric of perception.
Peter Samis, New Technologies as Part of a
Photo Credit Alan Levine
Comprehensive Interpretive Plan, 2007.

45. Flow
Flickr Credit ~samhames

46. Flow The flow state is an optimal state
of intrinsic motivation, where the
person is fully immersed in what he or
she is doing. This is a feeling everyone
has at times, characterized by a feeling
of great absorption, engagement,
fulfillment, and skill—and during which
temporal concerns (time, food, ego-
self, etc.) are typically ignored.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flickr Credit ~samhames

47. Flow If a museum visit can produce this
experience, it is likely that the initial
curiosity and interest will grow into a
more extensive learning interaction.
Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why
Does One Want To Learn,
Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson
Flickr Credit ~samhames

48. IN THE GROOVE
Flickr Credit ~photograham

49. To achieve a flow state, a balance must
be struck between the challenge of the
task and the skill of the performer. If the
task is too easy or too difficult, flow
cannot occur. Both skill level and
challenge level must be matched and
high; if skill and challenge are low and
matched, then apathy results.
Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi, 1997.
IN THE GROOVE
Flickr Credit ~photograham

50. OPTIMIZING FOR
EPIPHANY
Flickr Credit ~paulwatson

51. THE MUSEUM VISIT
CAN HAVE MANY
FACETS
Flickr Credit ~phineasx

52. JOHN FALK
Founder of Institute for Learning
Innovation
Professor Learning and Science
Education at Oregon State University
Research conducted primarily at zoos,
aquaria, and science centers.
But also with art museums including
the Art Gallery of Ontario and the
Denver Art Museum

53. FREE-CHOICE
LEARNING

54. FREE-CHOICE
According to tourism researcher Jan
LEARNING Packer, most people visit museums, parks, and
other similar venues in order to ―experience
learning‖ or what she calls ―learning for fun‖
Falk suggests that learning and leisure are
becoming one and the same experience

55. LEARNING AND
IDENTITY
Academic Learning
Learning is about the mastery of facts and
concepts in order to orally, or in writing
describe or defend an idea or proposition
Free-Choice learning
Primarily driven by intrinsic motivations.
Typically for personal rather than public
reasons and often strongly motivated by the
needs of identity formation and
reinforcement
John Falk, 2006

56. Explorers: motivated by a need to satisfy personal curiosity and interest in an
intellectually challenging environment.
Experience seekers: aspire to be exposed to the things and ideas that exemplify what
is best and intellectually most important within a culture or community.
Professional/Hobbyists: possess the desire to further specific intellectual needs in a
setting with a specific subject matter focus.
Rechargers: motivated by the yearning to physically, emotionally, and intellectually
recharge in a beautiful and refreshing environment.
Facilitators: motivated by the wish to engage in a meaningful social experience with
someone whom they care about in an educationally supportive environment (parental
facilitator and social facilitator).
IDENTITY-RELATED
VISIT MOTIVATIONS

57. ENTRANCE
NARRATIVE
Flickr Credit ~aunto

58. WHY FALK?
• It is simple and easy to understand.
• It is fairly well documented in the literature.
• It has been tested and used in many
museums.
• It can be used by more than one department
in the museum.
• Falk has developed and tested a simple
method to identify visitors motivations.
Flickr Credit ~aunto

59. BASELINE
MOTIVATION SURVEY

66. Results (371 participants)
25.00%
20.00%
15.00%
10.00%
5.00%
0.00%
The most common visitor types were explorers (22.6%), experience seekers (22.4%),
and rechargers (21.8%). Affinity seekers were the least common visitor type (2.7%).

67. Parental vs. Social
Facilitators
40
54% Of the 63 respondents
35 who identified
46%
themselves as
30 facilitators, 54% were
parental facilitators
25
(visiting with children
20 under the age of 18)
and 46% were social
15 facilitators (not visiting
with children under the
10 age of 18). These
correspond to 9.10%
5 and 7.8% respectively
of the total participants.
0
parental facilitators social facilitators

68. ACTIVITY INVENTORY
Flickr Credit ~zomerstorm

69. WHAT ABOUT
ONLINE VISITORS?
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

71. 2011 Web Stats
1M Visits (3.6M Hits) +7%
56% (566K) not in Visit 6%
58% (580K) not in IN +5%
2011 Museum Attendance
381,026 (-11%)
Mobile 8.8% (2x 2010)

72. WHAT ABOUT
ONLINE VISITORS?
A Web site that promotes flow is like a
gourmet meal. You start off with the
appetizers, move on to the salads and
entrées, and build toward dessert.
Unfortunately, most sites are built like a
cafeteria. You pick whatever you want.
That sounds good at first, but soon it
doesn't matter what you choose to do.
Everything is bland and the same. Web
site designers assume that the visitor
already knows what to choose. That's not
true. People enter Web sites hoping to be
led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.
Csikszentmihalyi, WIRED, 1996.
Flickr Credit ~quinnanya

73. WHAT’S THE ONLINE
ENTRANCE NARRATIVE?
Flickr Credit ~aunto

74. WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
Prior Work:
1. Haley-Goldman & Schaller, 2004
2. Peacock & Brownbill, 2007
3. Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman &
Falk, 2008
Flickr Credit ~measter2

75. WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
In Summary:
•Using the site to plan or follow
up a visit to the physical site
•Using the website to locate
subject-based information
•Accessing the website as part of
browsing activities on the Web
•Using the website to interact or
transact with the museum
Flickr Credit ~measter2

76. WHAT’S THE RIGHT MODEL?
It seems (at least on the surface) that
motivations for visits to physical
museums are different than for
museum websites:
Experiences, identity-building vs.
communication/information
seeking
Investment in visiting the physical
and virtual museum is not the
same
Ellenbogen, Haley-Goldman &
Falk, 2008
Flickr Credit ~measter2

77. HOW CAN WE
FIGURE THIS OUT?

78. Google Analytics
Is Not Enough

79. Initial Open-Ended Survey

80. Coded Results from Open Ended Online
Motivations n=113
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Plan a Visit Find Specific Find Specific Casual Make a
Content for Content for Browsing Transaction
Professional Personal
Reasons Reasons

81. Follow Up Categorical Survey

82. A Much Better Response

83. Online Motivation by Type and Time n=4076
60.00%
12:00
50.00%
40.00%
7:09
30.00% 6:19 5:56
5:40
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
Plan a Visit Find Specific Find Specific Casually Browse Make a
Information for Information for Transaction
Professional Personal
Reasons Reasons
Percent Visits Average time

84. Average Time per Page by Motivation Type
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Plan a Visit Find Specific Find Specific Casual Browsing Make a
Information for Information for Transaction
Professional Personal Reasons
Reasons
time/page (sec)

85. Visitor Flow

86. Visitor Flow

87. Visitor Flow

88. IN THE MEANTIME
Flickr Credit ~nicholasjon

92. LOOKING
AND SEEING
Flickr Credit ~rocketjim54

95. Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow

96. Utagawa Hirōshige (Japanese, 1797-1858) - Nihonbashi in the Snow

97. EXPERIMENTS IN
TRACKING GAZE

99. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, Audience Engagement
Tiffany Leason, Audience Engagement
Charlie Moad, IMA Lab
Ed Bachta, IMA Lab

100. MUSEUMS CAN
DENT THE
UNIVERSE.
Thank You
Flickr Credit ~Sweetie187