Guest post written by Nina Simon of Museum 2.0.

Last week, I visited the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, Washington, USA. I’ve long admired this museum for its all-encompassing commitment to community co-creation, and the visit was a kind of pilgrimage to their new site (opened in 2008).

I’m always a bit nervous when I visit a museum I love from afar. What if it isn’t what I expected? In the case of the Wing, I shouldn’t have worried. The institution is community-funded, staffed, and designed. The new building was designed to meet neighborhood needs–not just in the content covered, but in the inclusion of spaces made for particular kinds of activities sought by locals (i.e. a “wedding worthy” community hall). It incorporates work by local artists, old and new construction, and is completely gorgeous. The exhibits are exciting. And the staff have a dizzying commitment to the neighborhood. They’re involved in everything from job creation to sanitation to promoting local musicians and restaurants. I was immediately inspired to make a donation.

But the thing I loved the most shocked me. It was the tour of the historic part of the building. I am not typically a fan of museum tours. I avoid them. They’re so frequently one-way drone fests. But I would go on the Wing’s tour again in a heartbeat.

What made it so special? The guide, Vi Mar, was an incredible facilitator. She did several things over the course of the tour to make it participatory, and she did so in a natural, delightful way. Here are four things I noted:

1. She started the tour by having us all sit down and introduce ourselves. There were eleven of us on the tour, all adults, mostly couples. Vi started joking with us about our relationships and hometowns while making sure we all remembered each other’s names. She made it clear from the start that we were expected to address each other by name and have fun with each other. This immediately led to cross conversation. One man (Gordon from Kirkland) told us that “Vi is kind of a celebrity” in the Seattle Chinatown community, which made the rest of us more excited about taking a tour from her.
2. Wherever possible, Vi personalized the tour to individuals in the group. At one point, when talking about the Chinese men who had built the railroads in the Western US, she asked each man in the group how tall he is. 5′11″, 6′1″, etc. “You’re all giants,” she said. “The men who built the railroad were only 5′1″, 5′3″ max.” Vi didn’t have to do this–she could have just given us the facts about their heights or added in something generic like, “you’re all taller than they were.” Instead she drew people personally into the stories again and again, asking us to compare our own and our ancestors’ experiences to those she described. She frequently directed information towards individuals in the group based on their background, gender, or occupation, which made us feel like she was customizing the experience for us. (Note that there was a research study at Hebrew University published in Curator last year about improving a nature center’s tour engagement and content retention through exactly this technique.)
3. Vi was unapologetically personal about her own relationship to the content on display. Because the Wing is a community-driven museum, Vi (and all the tour guides) are from the community and have strong ties to it. In Vi’s case, this was extreme. We walked into her family’s historic association hall and a replica of her uncle’s dry goods store. She showed us her name on a donor wall in the museum. Again and again, she told personal stories of her interactions with the historic and monumental people and events she described. She was political. She told family stories. It felt like she was letting us into her world in a generous, funny way–and that encouraged us to relate and share as well.
4. Several times on the tour, Vi said, “I once had someone on a tour who told me…” and then recounted some related fact or history. I found this particularly remarkable. Vi is unquestionably an expert on Seattle’s Chinatown and on the building we were touring, but she repeatedly shared information she’d learned from visitors. This brought other voices into the tour, but more importantly, it modeled a potential interaction that we could have. We were encouraged to share what we knew, and she demonstrated that she would listen and potentially carry on our knowledge to others.

Vi didn’t exhaust us with content; sometimes I actually wished she’d explain more about the room we were in or the artifacts in it (a feeling I never have on tours). But she left me wanting more, and I’m confident that when I return to the Wing, I can take the tour again and learn something new.

I believe that the points above could be applicable to any tour guide in any museum. But Vi’s tour also reminded me how dramatically different a community museum is from a typical institution. Vi is not a typical guide who was trained to interpret a building with which she had little prior connection. She is a pillar of her neighborhood. She has a personal connection to everything we saw on tour. I even met her brother in the lobby–a man who also gives tours at the museum. The first thing Vi talked about after asking our names was the capital campaign that built the new museum. She spoke at length with great pride about the $23 million the community raised to build the museum, punctuating her comments with prompts like, “Don’t you think that’s pretty good?” and “That’s a lot of money, right?” It was clear that Vi isn’t just someone who talks about history. She is deeply entwined in the stories, in the place, and in the institutional mission, and that came out powerfully in her tour.

Think about how this impacts staff recruiting and training. Vi is less like a low-paid interpreter and more like a senior curator. She can give a freewheeling, idiosyncratic tour because she has the confidence, the connection to the content, and presumably the institutional support to do so. I know this isn’t easy–for every guide who is as engaging as Vi, there’s probably a community member who’d drone on about his or her pet content. But participatory facilitation can be taught. Passion, confidence, and personal connections to the content–those are the hard things to teach.

What kind of participatory techniques have you seen work well on tours? Have you ever seen this kind of approach fail because the guide’s passion was misaligned with visitor expectations?

This blog post was reproduced with the kind permission of Museum 2.0

By Nina Simon

In November and December of 2009, I spent four wonderful weeks working with museums across New Zealand on strategies related to visitor participation (see the slides from seminars here). I learned a great deal – about bi-culturalism, creative ways of involving audiences in institutions, and the challenges staff at New Zealand institutions face in their work.

There was one question that came up repeatedly during my time in New Zealand that I found it difficult to answer. Again and again, someone would raise their hand at a seminar about participatory engagement and ask, “is the desire to participate culturally determined?” I gave the best answer I could at the time—a qualified “sort of.” But now, six weeks later, I have more informed thoughts to share.

Is the desire to participate in cultural institutions culturally determined? This question presumes two things. First, there’s the idea that not everybody wants to create content, share their own ideas and stories, or actively do work while visiting museums. And second, there’s the suggestion that maybe people from some cultures or countries are more interested in this than others. Let’s look at each of these separately.

It’s absolutely true that not everyone wants to be an active participant in her own cultural experience in a museum. Even on the Web, where participatory activities are most frequently available, there is great “participation inequality” among those who choose to create, critique, curate, and spectate user-generated content. On sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, the vast majority of users are consumers, not creators. While participatory technologies have changed the kind of content available to consumers quite significantly, smaller percentages of people have chosen to actively produce their own content. For this reason, I often encourage cultural professionals to think “beyond creation” to other kinds of participatory activities that are more broadly popular, like voting for things, sharing comments, or collecting favorite artifacts or stories. For more information on different types of participation in a cultural context, I encourage you to check out this blog post.

But this brings us to the second question—the one that was really being asked—about culture and participation. Being an American coming to New Zealand, I inferred that the questioners were asking, “Might Americans like to do this kind of thing more than Kiwis?”

The answer, after much consideration, is no. I’ve researched and worked on participatory projects with people and museums all over the world, and while there are cultural aspects that often impact the participatory approach, the desire to participate appears to be universal. I have yet to meet people from any country who do not have personal stories, reactions, or creative impulses relative to cultural institutions that they would like to share. In Hanoi, at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, community members give voice to exhibits with their own stories and objects. In Barcelona, at the Museu Picasso, illustration students make art about their observations of the comings and goings of visitors in the museum. And in Wellington, at Capital E Theater, young immigrants co-developed an opera about their experiences with professional writers and composers.

The desire to share personal stories, connect with others socially, and make a meaningful contribution to something larger than yourself are universal. In every society, there are particular hot issues or cultural preferences that make some kinds of engagement easier than others. For example, at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, they take a communal rather than individual approach to participation, encouraging groups of visitors to participate together intact. This fits with cultural preferences around deferring to elders and making decisions in a consensus-based way that doesn’t prioritize any single voice. In contrast, at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, the In Your Face project, in which visitors created and shared their own self-portraits in an exhibition, was highly successful with an audience that was comfortable expressing themselves as individuals.

If visitor participation sounds overwhelming, or if you are uncertain of its utility for your audience, ask them. What would visitors like to share relative to their museum experiences? What kind of social opportunities are they not able to create for themselves? What do they wish they could respond to, and what are they happy to consume without comment? By engaging with visitors institution by institution, community by community, participation can shift from something vast and unknowable to something easy to perform and valuable to visitors and institutions alike.

About Nina Simon

Nina Simon is the author of the Museum 2.0 blog and the new book, The Participatory Museum, which will be available in March.