Digital Participation and Engagement in Museum and Gallery Public Programs and Learning
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An exploration of how museums, culture and heritage are using technology to engage with their audiences. Alex suggests that it is through making, directed by Constructionist pedagogy, that people have meaningful and powerful encounters with creativity.
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Digital Participation and Engagement in Museum and Gallery Public Programs and Learning
- 1. Designing for Digital Engagement in Galleries Alex Flowers @axflowers
- 2. What is important to you as an organisation and as an individual?
- 5. Current driving factors in the UK: • Emphasis on STEM or STEAM • New Computing Curriculum • The challenge of educating for a fast changing future Key reports: • “Designing the Digital Economy: Embedding Growth through Design, Innovation and Technology”, All Party Design and Innovation Group • “Next Gen”, Nesta • “The UK STEAM Education Landscape”, The Royal Academy of Engineering • “After the reboot: computing education in UK schools”, Royal Society, 2017
- 6. Doug Belshaw (2011) The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. 1. Cultural 2. Cognitive 3. Constructive 4. Communicative 5. Confident 6. Creative 7. Critical 8. Civic
- 11. • The biggest brands in the world for young people at the moment are all about making and collaboration • Making and hacking is about sharing knowledge • Digital tools and platforms are a space for self expression • Expectation from young audience to be able to participate, shape and create media • Easier than ever to connect the physical and the digital
- 12. Constructionism (Harel & Papert, 1991) “Learning by constructing knowledge through the art of making something shareable” Martinez & Stager, 2013
- 13. 1 – The learning should be related to a larger task 2 – Students should be able to take ownership of the problem 3 – The task should be authentic 4 – Reflection is central to the learning process 5 – Allow and encourage learners to test ideas against different views in different contexts
- 14. Depth of participation & engagement Numberofparticipants Influence others Develop confidence, capacities & context Online General Audience Workshop Participants Mediators & facilitators Team & Collaborators
- 16. The Samsung Digital Classroom is a programme for 16 – 24 year olds which offers hands on, practical workshops with designers exploring the latest in digital art and design and paths into study and industry.
- 17. ‘This is so different to school - art is more just learning about history and artists - this encourages you to develop your own style and ideas’ ‘I liked how it prepares you for what you are going to need later on. A learnt a lot about what universities expect’ ‘I want to do a creative career and I already am considering game design so this has just made me more keen’
- 18. Digital Print for Fashion/ Virtual Reality / Wearable Technology / Engineering / Projection Mapping / Portrait Photography / Crowd Funding / Creating Digital Portfolios / Video Game Design / 3D Printed Jewellery / Digital Animation / Sustainable Design/
- 27. Scan The World
- 28. “…there is a different class of amateur creators that digital technologies have enabled and a different kind of creativity has emerged as a consequence.“ “This is a free gift to many who could pay for it, no doubt. But it is an extraordinarily valuable gift to many who could not, but who still want to create.” Lawrence Lessig, “Freesouls”, 2007
- 32. “It was amazing to to have this 3D printer on the ward and to see the young people so focussed on what they wanted to make. It was such a good project for young people in isolation as everything was done on a tablet. Plus, I never thought that I’d ever see them so interested in C17th sculpture!” Amy Crowley, Play worker
- 33. I thrive on collaboration and learned early on as an aspiring painter in art school that I couldn't picture myself poor and alone in a cold garrett smoking unfiltered Camels. I need heat, hot water, nice linens, and the sound of two hands clapping. Carin Goldberg
Editor's Notes
- I want to talk about digital engagement and museums, but not about websites, apps and YouTube. But rather face to face encounters in hybrid spaces, where the walls of the galleries and collections meet with visitors, us, the museum staff and digital tools. By creating these hybrid experiences of the tangible and digital worlds, we open up possibilities to expand the definition of what digital engagement is, allowing us to meet our visitors needs in a much more personal manner and create active experiences. We have the opportunity to design experiences which change what people know, how they feel and leave with new inspiration.
- When talking about digital trends, I often get asked, what is the next big thing, what will change over the next 10 years. I never get the question what is not going to change. And that second question is always more important of the two, one that you can build a strategy around and one which stays stable and useful over time. When something you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. I would suggest that in finding the core mission of your collection, your organisation – you are trying to find what the value for your visitors are. Many places forget this, but as public organisations for the people, we need to focus outward. For me over the past few years this has been around inspiration, creativity and invention.
- At both the V&A, the UK’s national museum of art, design and performance, and Museum of London, a museum which tells the story of the city from per-historic ages through the modern day, I have been embedded within Learning and Education. My background is in teaching, although throughout my life I have enjoyed tinkering with technology. As a child I regularly got into trouble after finding a screwdriver and taking apart radios, televisions and anything with an electrical plug. I was encouraged however to be creative and to use technology to play with, to re-engineer and to break to see how it worked. Although I have been based in Learning, my work at both institutions covered so much more than that. There has been a blurring in many places between the roles that individuals do and their engagement with the public and with collections. At the V&A it was common to find curators doing educational project work and for learning teams to be curating displays. This interdisciplinary practice demonstrates the changing nature of museums and how we engage with our audiences. That need to communicate, to have dialogue with and to directly meet with your public is at the front and centre of C21st practice. Having the word “Digital” in my job title has always been a blessing. It covers so may different areas of practice that I would find myself working with archives, exhibition teams, web editors and in marketing. All this adds to my understanding of what digital engagement is.
- That said, this interdisciplinary practice is quite often the affordance of larger, more digitally mature organisations. At the opposite end of the scale, I am working on projects where digital engagement is something new. Most places know that they need to engage with their audiences in new ways, but are unsure of how to – lacking the resources and skills to be able to effectively communicate, commission or carry out digital work. It has been a pleasure for me recently to go to a C12th century church and work on a large funding bid to carry out conservation work on large mural paintings by twentieth centruy British artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Coming from the V&A to work in south England’s rolling green hills, to have meetings in the vicars back garden with chickens pecking around our feet, has beena culture shock. But what a great challenge? What does digital engagement mean to a place like this? What kind of impact does it want to make on its audiences. These are types of questions that are being dealt with across the culture sector and some that I want to tackle today.
- In education and government policy, the rhetoric around digital skills is one around the economy. Talk about the education policy being directed by economic policy. The relationship of digital to all these aspects is economic. However in the creative industries, the creative uses of technology in job role, particularly those as artists, does not pay. In the UK, most artists will earn less than a third of the median wage – so why is creativity important? And why should cultural orgs care?
- Well, culture and museums should care because digital literacy, engagement and creativity is multi-faceted and contains more than just technical aspects. What is the context of literacy? The differentiation of literate and illiterate is range of greys. It is a contested term encompassing creative and critical skills that allow creation, understanding and sharing meaning through digital media. There is no one umbrella term or definition but Belshaw’s model allows us to understand and recognise some of the key competencies involved. Cultural – literacy is redefined as result of tech. change Cognitive – Not ability to use tech tools but rather cognitive ones Constructive – use and awareness of tools to enable constructive social action Communicative – unique “rhetorics” of interactive comms Confidence – the value put on those who can use tools to solve probs and manage their own learning Creative – The creative adaption of tech and risk taking Critical – literacy req the critical refelction of digital mdeia Civic – Understanding the opp of civic particpation thru ICT Oxford University publication, “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?” by Carl Benedikty Frey and Michael Osborne. “School education has tended to focus on developing the core cognitive competences — for example, reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, in a recent speech. “Smart machines have long since surpassed humans in their ability to do the first and third of these. And they are fast catching-up on the second. That begs the question of whether there are other skills where humans’ comparative advantage is greater.” Three things that AI/Machine Learning/Automation cannot replace: Creativity Empathy (Be nice) Human dexterity
- Alongside this there is a renewed interest in Authenticity – an interest in traditional hand craft in a digital world. This links to many pertinent factors, from sustainability to the desire to reclaim personal power in a world of mass production and mass media. Things such as the repair manifesto talk of the power of repair. As it says, if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it. We all have technology in our pockets, little balck shiny boxes of our smartphones, but how many of us can say that we could fix a broken screen? Across many industries, the power to repair and modify products is being taken away as the become software based and filled with tighly controlled and patented software. There is a growing black market in agricutural machinery to allow farmers to hack their own tractors, ploughs and harvesters. Without this illegal technology, they have to use licensed suppliers, being expensive and taking their independence and market choice away. Repair is sustainable, we understand now that materials are limited, that the waste we create is poisoning the earth. If we can fix and understand our technology, we can make better use of our resources and gain useful skills along the way. The same goes for craft. In the UK there is endless reality TV of competitions where people make ceramics, bake cakes and knit jumpers. These crafts may seem old fashioned, but people are rediscovering the joy of learning these skills and the wonderful feeling of being in a flow state as you do them.
- So how do we bring some of these trends into galleries and use them as a way to engage people digitally? One way is to bring making in to museums and encourage people to be hands on with craft, and especially from my perspective, be hands on with craft and technology. At the V&A the DDW is our largest event of the year and forms part of LDF, For all audiences, it is a chance to meet and engage with contemporary digital artists, designers, makers and researchers. We invite in 50 or more artists to show their work in the galleries and to be there present alongside it. It allowed us a couple of key approaches to take in trying to engage our audiences in new ways through digital technologies. Firstly, it created way for us to bring actual making back into the galleries. The act of craft – not just the outputs of it. We encourage work which is still in prototype stages or unfinshed. It requires some confidence from those taking part to open up their processes and be vulnerable by sharing it. Making is still something that happens in digital ways, it is still something which takes place in people’s sheds, in their offices, where ideas are experimented with, new approaches tried and creative solutions appear. It is just usually that with digital products, with online websites, apps or physical pieces of technology, the process is so opaque, so magical to those of us who are mere humans and not Bill Gates or Elon Musk, that we just see the end product. That product that is polished, perfect and market tested. People still want to see the steps that lead up to the final thing. Still see the marks of the maker.
- Run open workshops and hack events with artists and organisations such as the Met Office, BBC R&D, Microsoft, NASA. These companies are massive, they rely on being seen as magical in some way. By revealing the process, bringing the human endeavour and creativity out to the forefront alongside their “magic”, it creates an opportunity to tell new stories and to excite people in new ways. Everyone who takes part is there with there work so you as a member of the public can come and speak to the maker. This Encourages discussion and reflection on the role of technology in different fields of life as well as celebrating some of the mot exciting research that takes place out there. For the designers, they can get feedback and have conversations with non-typical audiences. For the public, they get this privileged opportunity to speak to makers, to demystify the act of being creative.
- Secondly, this approach at the Digital Design weekend created a chance for us to make an impact through new experiences that couldn't be had anywhere else. It allowed us to use the galleries in way that created unexpected moments. Diamandini, a robot which used machine learning to adapt its behaviour. Blended in to the renaissance gallery and the sculptures around it. We wanted to create this kind of moment...a time when technolgoy becomes magical, when that unexpected moment surprises and thrills you with the creative potential of technology.
- So in thinking of digital engagement, we need to think about what our audiences expect from their experience, that being the key word, and where we can meet them in the middle. When thinking about our younger audiences, we spoke to them and came across the following findings which helped form the delivery of our work.
- In terms of how we frame this as educators, as learning specialists, we can theorise it around the pedagogy of Constructionism. Constructionist learning is when learners construct mental models to understand the world around them but also use the process of learning as an opportunity to make things physically. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use information they already know to acquire more knowledge.[1] Students learn through participation in project-based learning where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through coaching rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance. Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism. Constructivism holds that individuals will bring their personal memories, interests and values to any learning or knowledge, and this makes the educator take on the role as a negotiator of subjective experiences. Constructionism says, lets take that personal experience and direct it into real world, physical making as a way to explore ideas together.
- We can use the following five strategies make problem-based learning more effective: 1 - The learning activities should be related to a larger task. The larger task is important because it allows students to see that the activities can be applied to many aspects of life and, as a result, students are more likely to find the activities they are doing useful.[10] 2 - The learner needs to be supported to feel that they are beginning to have ownership of the overall problem.[11] 3 - An authentic task should be designed for the learner. This means that the task and the learner's cognitive ability have to match the problems to make learning valuable. The outputs of their work should be used to solve part of that problem. [12] 4 - Reflection on the content being learned should occur so that learners can think through the process of what they have learned.[13] 5 - Allow and encourage the learners to test ideas against different views in different contexts.[
- When we engage with people we want to take them on the beginning of a journey. Where their aims as visitors cross over with our’s as institutions lies an opportunity to design an experience which builds deeper engagement with each other. This is a useful model of how scale effects participation and engagement and it can also be used as a road map as to where you want to take your audience once they engage with you. With the vast majority of online engagement, although the engagement with your audience is relatively low, attention spans short and interaction is limited, you are able to reach a lot of people. As we move up the horizontal X scale, the depth of our participation and engagement deepens, drawing the visitor and institution into a closer relationship. When we think of our general audiences, their visits may be quite passive, with little interaction with the museum or gallery besides being there. Working within the galleries making, learning and doing opens the door to building deeper engagement. Through this we can develop the audiences confidence, in engaging with culture, their capacities, which may be their ability to interpret and understand the collections and topics on display or even if workshop based, their skills. At the far end of the scale we have mediation, facilitation and teams and collaborators. For some organisations, this is where they want their audiences to be, the eventuial aim of engaging them in the first place. This may include things such as co - design, collaborative curation or training and internships with a path to becoming an employee or volunteer within the museum. With workshops and with making and doing within the galleries, we can also use this scale to think about what we are doing and why we are doing it. With family activities we may just want to add an experience to the family groups visit which creates a chance for dialogue. We may not want an in-depth “learning” experience for every visitor we engage with.
- Sometimes the engagement can be shallow. By thinking about your audience and their needs and expectations you can create an experience which builds on what they want. The examples are from Winnie the Pooh and Bottecelli. Two exhibitions with mainstream taste which attracted families. Most families going to a museum or gallery will thinking about a learning experience that they can have together but the overriding desire is for the creation of memories together as a group. We can meet their needs in the middle, creating souvenirs, entertaining and using that as a way of creating a learning experience which deepens their engagement with the exhibitions and creates a lasing memory. Both used photography and low tech approaches, digital photography and green screen, building on already established behaviours. Most families will already be taking photos as a group in the galleries, why not direct that experience to something where their is face to face engagement with staff. Take home a postcard which will live on the refrigerator for months afterwards, creating a memory and association with their time with you. Through the two “Digital Kids” activities delivered to families visiting the museum through the school holidays we explored the exhibitions through very low tech digital engagement. With Bottecelli – pose, style, his most fmaous paintings, The Birth of Venus and Primavera With WTP – illustration and storytelling Create digital and physical outputs. We would encourage families to share via social media, spreading awareness of what we do through word of mouth through personal and meaningful engagement and content.
- Other digital engagement can be much deeper, thinking back to the scale, less engaged but more deeply. The SDC is a programme established to fill gaps in the school curriculum around not only digital skills but also creative subjects. The push towards STEM education has seen many creative subjects stop being offered to students or so poorly resourced that students have terrible experiences. Since 2010, the number of students taking design as a subject in schools has fallen by 50 %. With other creative subjects such as tehatre and dance, the effect is much more severe, with a 60% drop. We wanted to show through this programme that having a solid technical education is not as the loss of creativity. Students can learn about the latest engineering, science and design through technology while still being creative. Over 6 months we worked with our young people’s panel and local colleges to identify their needs, what excited them and what they felt they needed in order to succeed in a rapidly changing world and worksplace
- Consultation - what we know. Their motivations and needs Independence Preparation Validation
- Speaking to young people, design studios and educators, we started to get a sense of the types of creative practice we could cover in sessions. The ones which appeared were either emerging practice that was difficult to teach in formal education, such as VR and Projection Mapping, or subjects that students felt they needed more help on and educators told us were missing from many colleges and schools. This includes things like creating digital portfolios for university applications. Many schools still relied on students taking photos of their physical portfolios rather than designing digital versions which could be emailed on application.
- Typically all of our digital workshops took place within our learning studios. As great as these were a number of factors encouraged us to try a new approach. While a new entrance and gallery space was being built in a historic wing of the museum, we had to close our learning centre. We were temporarily moved to rather dark and hidden away spaces in an opposite corner of the museum. These spaces lacked inspiration and made it difficult to travel across a massive building, especially when we had students in sessions with mobility issues.
- So we started to rethink what a classroom could be. Working with students from the Royal college of Art, we set a brief of creating a mobile, pop-up classroom where creative digital sessions could be held in the galleries. It had to be easy moveable and quick to assemble. The students created a light up led structure with 3d printed joints which could take different forms and be used for a range of purposes.
- We took this out in to the galleries and where able to run truly open and public sessions, engaging people with creative digital practice in front of the collections which inspired the sessions.
- Create – beacon for learning Space for learning -reinvigorate the architecture - bring contemporary in - Raise curiosity
- Sometimes although the making and learning is better situated within the studio spaces, but there is still an opportunity to take the outputs of that time into the public spaces. Being able to share the work which is created in sessions and display it to the public creates a virtuous circle of learning for those taking part. They are able to see a project through from beginning to end, understanding the total process from the seeds of ideas to iteration through to letting go, and giving it over to the visitors at the museum. “Synchronicity” is an interactive installation which reveals a journey through imaginary cities. Developed with the artist Michele Panegrossi and 16 – 24 year olds taking part in V&A Samsung Digital Classroom, the installation was displayed in February in the V&A Sackler Centre. Over two days participants learnt about projection mapping, stop frame animation and sensors before building their own interactive work for display.
- Working with animation, coding interaction and projection mapping, students were led through the process of creating a narrative to the work and then to the technical aspects of realising their ideas. They did visitor research, speaking to users of the museum and understanding how they used the galleries and interactives in the spaces.
- Young People installed and went through the process of setting up their display The work was installed in the Sackler Centre for Arts Education for 9 days and was enjoyed by 1,200 visitors of all ages. Based on the 1972 novel “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, the table encourages you to explore, communicate with others and experiment with the interactions. In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan and despite not sharing a common language, Polo describes 55 fantastical cities. These cities become ruminations on life, death and knowledge, their poetic framing taking them from travelogue to meditations.
- The digital engagement you do does not even have to be with people walking through your doors or visiting your site. Sometimes that engagement can come from reaching out and developing audiences that never visit or are unable to for whatever reason. This year GOSH Arts collaborated with the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) to deliver a 3D printing project with young people in Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) wards at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), bringing the V&A’s incredible sculpture collection into the hospital. The process of BMT replaces damaged blood cells with healthy ones and can be used to treat conditions such as lymphoma, leukaemia and other rare childhood cancers. One of the risks associated with BMT is that pre-transplant patients receive such high doses of chemotherapy or radiotherapy that their immune system is seriously compromised, leaving them open to infection. As a result the children and young people undergoing treatment have to stay in high level isolation for up to 3 months, which can result in them missing out on key social and cultural experiences and lead to feelings of loneliness. GOSH are currently trialling a new experimental transplant treatment and subsequently there are more teenagers on the BMT wards than normal. This project was a perfect opportunity to engage these young people in the possibilities of contemporary digital design techniques and methods of making whilst also providing opportunities to explore the V&A’s collection.
- Used STW, a repository of high quality 3d scans created by the public. It now features 10,000 sculptures from across the world and allows people to download and use them as they want to. The licensing is still something which is being negotiated. Many museums had no 3D scanning policy like they would have done for photography in the galleries. I had been raising this point for a long after seeing a sculpture from our collections being 3D printed and sold, but it took 7 years to even get a basic one in place. In the meantime, I took advantage of the lack of rules and policy and engaged the community to start to use our galleries to scan the sculptures. Now the V&A has a pre-digitised collection which can be used in many different ways. Sometimes, communities will just engage themselves with your collections to persue a passion. Which is exactly what happened in this case. But it really shows the power of free, open source, creative commons digital releases of collections to get people looking at your objects and exploring what you do.
- Lawrence Lessig, the creaotr of the Creative Commons license put this so well.
- Young People installed and went through the process of setting up their display Burger – desire – no food, pug dog.
- Young People installed and went through the process of setting up their display
- This extraordinary sculpture of a vulture is from the porcelain menagerie commissioned by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, for the 'Japanese Palace' in Dresden. This commission is one of the great landmarks in ceramic history. Nearly 600 life-size animals were planned, and at least 458 were made. Work began in 1730, only 20 years after Meissen had become the first European factory to make porcelain in the Chinese manner. Patient had been reading Phillip Pullnas “His Dark Materials” Trilogy, you may have seen or read The Golden compass or The Northern Lights as it was originally called in the UK. Daemons....Create new world, new story.
- Young People installed and went through the process of setting up their display. Although digital engagement it was also people focussed. It was dedicated to their needs, it is too easy to assume a universal approach, one size fits all. What are their needs as an audience, how can you design an experience that meets them halfway?
- Coming back to that idea of asking – what things do not change. What are the most important things to you? Giving support, giving validation as creatives, as inventive mean a lot to everyone. Wrap up – digital engagement is more than your online presence, more than your social media and more than your memes.