7 ways to make yourself and your museum more creative (and successful)

Photo by Aaron on Flickr.com.

“In the organisation of the future, the decisions that matter won’t be taken in some high-tech war room, but on the front line,” says Tim Harford in Adapt. You, more than your CEO, will determine the success of your museum’s next grand project. True, she gives you the direction and funds and – if you’re lucky – the mandate and freedom to design mind-blowing products, but it’s your creativity, cleverness and skill that will make a difference in the end. Here are 7 ways in which I try to stay on top of things, and come up with great ideas for future projects.

1. Plan playtime
   Is your calendar always full as well? Plan playtime. Playtime is not just time you leave empty to do whatever, that doesn’t work and you’ll probably sacrifice it to to-do’s anyway. Playtime is for instance 2 hours to go to a great store and look around, or an afternoon to go through your old notebooks.
2. Fill a random stuff folder
   I have a folder called “playground” in the root of my project folders. It’s my digital scrapbook, full of random stuff. In it, I don’t worry about design conventions, budget, or even copyright (sorry!). It’s simply random stuff, like the pieces of an as of yet unknown puzzle. Look through it repeatedly, and maybe the picture will become clear.
3. Learn basic coding and design tools
   The rapidest form of prototyping is the prototyping you can do yourself in playtime in the random stuff folder. But it’s not just knowing how to code a simple programme and design its front: simply learning about coding and design helps to spark creativity as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The best of the Museum of the Future of 2011

Photo by Paulo Alegria on Flickr.

Quite some blogs are offering “best of” lists at the moment (notably, Expert Enough, Know Your Own Bone and Time’s Best Blogs of 2011), and I find these surprisingly pleasant. Also, even on blogs I follow closely I miss some posts, which then turn out to be the best. That’s my luck; to help yours, here’s the best of the museum of the future of 2011:

1. 6 useful Google Analytics Custom Reports and Advanced Segments for museum websites
2. How the Google Art Project might revolutionize the physical museum experience
3. DOK Delft, inspirational library concepts
4. Integrated media strategies for museums
5. 30 do’s for designing successful participatory and crowdsourcing projects
6. Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)
7. What is good museum architecture?
8. Bumpy rides and dead-end streets
9. How to measure engagement and participation? An experiment with Google Analytics
10. Videos and blogs about museums, technology and media

It’s great to see the strategic and result-oriented posts get quite some attention this year. Also, without Google I would have been nowhere (in terms of topics and traffic). Read the rest of this entry »

Top-selling items in the National Vending Machine

One of the objectives of the National Vending Machine is to provide us and partners insight in popular historical objects. Stuff that gets people enthusiastic. In a way, we’re doing an extremely fancy kind of market research. The other day I received a provisional overview of Holland’s hottest historical objects (read: top-selling items in the machine). Here they are:

1. Volkswagen camper van: By far the most popular object in sales, comments and enthusiasm of buyers, probably due to its everlasting hipness and important place in the youth memories of the Culturally Engaged.
2. Cow: A replica of the famous Dutch grazer in Delftware, popular to more than just the tourists. Maybe owing to its cute smile or maybe because it’s a colourful object which boosts sales (we found when testing the objects).
3. Cheese slicer: The representation of being Dutch (in all its meanings) and a Norwegian invention. I’ve heard the tiny slicer actually works, especially with French cheese. Read the rest of this entry »