Building our community of objects with visitors of the Uitmarkt

Last weekend my museum presented itself at the Uitmarkt in Amsterdam. The Uitmarkt is an annual festival that opens the new cultural year. Instead of handing out flyers about our upcoming expositions, we decided to ask the visitors to contribute to our ongoing project the National Vending Machine. The National Vending Machine is a travelling exposition that tells the historical and personal story behind everyday objects. All these objects and stories together we call our ‘community of objects’.

I thought it was a perfect chance to put one of the ideas in Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum to the test. Her case study about Structured Dialogue in the Signtific Game in chapter 3 describes a project where people engaged in conversation online about wild ideas. For me the beauty of the Signtific Game lies in the way people are guided by a select number of possible responses to a wild idea. This structures dialogue and makes it more productive.

We translated this online game to an offline activity around everyday objects. I believe it worked brilliantly. Over the course of the weekend a small team (three people each day) engaged in conversation with hundreds of people, individually or in groups and encouraged them to contribute to our community of objects with personal stories and new objects.

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A broader perspective on participation – 5 things I’ve picked up outside of museums

Photo by kagey_b on Flickr.

In a few weeks my girlfriend Suzan will move to London to do a masters in Applied Drama. Applied drama is, amongst others, theatre aimed at social empowerment and often participatory by nature. When Suzan discovered Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, she quite correctly observed that if you search and replace “museum” by “theatre” in the book, the lessons in it are still true.

In fact, many of the participatory theatre book lingering around address the same issues, give the same solutions and occasionally go beyond what we in museums know about participation.

Lessons about participation and community work are not unique to one sector, I believe. They’re universal. A broader perspective to other sectors might help us to get further, sooner. Therefore I’m quite happy Suzan will be blogging about Applied Drama, so I can learn from what she learns. Maybe you’ll learn from it too. (This is shameless publicity, I agree.)

In the mean time, I’d like to share with you these 5 things I’ve picked up about participation along the way. I’ve learned them far from museums, but somehow they’re still useful (and probably utterly cliché).

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What would Lady Gaga do if she were a museum?

Inspired by the thought-provoking presentation below and the fact Lady Gaga has almost 80 million scrobbles on last.fm, all-time second after only the Beatles, I wondered: What would Lady Gaga do if she were a museum?

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