Nina Simon, executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, designs and researches participatory museum experiences. As author of The Participatory Museum, she continues to explore how Web 2.0 philosophies can be applied in museum design through her blog, Museum 2.0. [Thanks to Dan Hellmuth of Hellmuth+Bicknese for pointing me to Nina and her amazing work!]
In "Dreaming of Perpetual Beta: Making Museums More Incremental", she writes:
When I started this blog in 2006, I made a multi-media introduction to the concept of "museum 2.0" based on Tim O'Reilly's four key elements of Web 2.0:
- Venue as content platform instead of content provider: the museum becomes a stage on which professionals and amateurs can curate, interpret, and remix artifacts and information.
- Architecture of participation with network effects: each person who participates contributes something meaningful and lasting. Visitors' interactions allow them both to personalize their museum experiences and to engage with other visitors through their shared interests. The museum gets better the more people use it.
- Perpetual beta: the museum is always in flux, incrementally releasing new versions, refining procedures, and responding to audience desires.
- Flexible, modular support for distributed products: inviting people to plug-in their own creations, whether those be DIY audio tours, pop up events, or co-created exhibitions.
From 2006-2011, I focused almost entirely on #1 and #2, playing with ways to invite visitors to actively participate with professionals to co-create powerful experiences around museum objects.But in the past year and a half as a museum director, I find myself increasingly interested in #3 and #4. In a lot of ways, our successful turnaround at the MAH has been driven by both embracing incremental change and opening up clear opportunities for community organizations and individuals to "plug" their cultural brilliance into our space. We're using #3 and #4 to achieve #1 and #2 in the Museum 2.0 playbook. READ MORE >>
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