Engage with Us and with the Creative Museums Movement

Over the past few months we’ve been thrilled with the response to Creativity in Museum Practice. The most heartening part is that museum professionals are telling us it’s already making a difference: they’re boosting or renewing their own creative practices, talking to co-workers about creativity, and taking steps forward in their work. We love talking to colleagues about creativity–hearing your stories, answering your questions, strategizing your creative challenges–because our goal all along was not just to write a book and call it a day, but to start a creative museums movement that would spread throughout the field. So with that in mind, here are a few upcoming opportunities to engage with us and with creative museum practice:

If you’re attending the American Alliance of Museums conference in Seattle May 18-21, please join us for one (or both) of our creativity events:

1. We’re holding an informal creativity meet-up in the skybridge between the two halves of the Museum Expo (Level 4 of the Washington State Convention Center) from 4:00 to 5:00 on Monday, May 19. We’ll have creativity tattoos, art supplies to trick out your name badge, and fresh pressed juices from Evolution Fresh. Bring your creativity questions and meet other colleagues working to build creative museums.
2. We’re signing books in the conference bookstore (Level 6, Washington State Convention Center) from 3:00 to 5:00 on Tuesday, May 20. Bring your own copy or buy one from the bookstore.

For folks in the Boston area, we’ll be holding a workshop and book signing, sponsored by the Boston Emerging Museum Professionals, at the USS Constitution Museum from 6:00 to 8:00 on Thursday, June 5. This event is a twofer: Anne Ackerson, co-author (with Joan Baldwin) of the recent Leadership Matters, will also be there signing books and talking museum leadership. Creativity + Leadership = Creative Leadership–what could be better?

If you can’t attend any of these events, have no fear–we’ve got a couple of new online resources to help you engage:

1. Colleagues from across the country joined us on April 30 for a lunchtime webinar sponsored by the New England Museum Association. We were blown away by the level of interest and discussion–it was NEMA’s highest webinar participation to date. You can replay the hour-long webinar here.
2. On April 4 Linda spoke about creative practice with Carol Bossert on her radio show The Museum Life. You can listen to the hour-long interview here.

Every day, you inspire us. Together we can build a creative museum field.

 

We ♥ Peer Reviewers

Jose Carlos Norte via Flickr

I know we’ve been a little quiet lately. It’s because we’re holed away, furiously working on the book manuscript, which is due to Left Coast Press on January 15. And because the deadline is fast approaching, we’re also starting to think seriously about the next step after that: peer review.

We’re working with Left Coast to identify some specific peer reviewers who represent different parts of the museum field, but we also thought we’d throw it out to you, our M&CPeeps, and see if any of you are interested in taking on the laborious but incredibly important task of reading and commenting on the manuscript. You’ve demonstrated your commitment to and curiosity about this topic by following our progress thus far; therefore we think you’d have some insightful feedback to strengthen the final result.

We’re looking for some colleagues to read the manuscript in its entirety, of course, but we’re also considering the possibility of having people comment on only one section of the book at a time, to make room for some reviewers who simply can’t commit to the whole thing. The sections are:

• Theory: everything museum people need to know about the creativity research
• Barriers: what’s stopping us from being creative and what we can do about it
• Creative cultures, creative fields: issues like leading for creativity, hiring for creativity, and building field-wide infrastructure to support creative practice
• Try This: no- to low-cost activities you can start today to ramp up your own–or your museum’s–creative practice

If you’re interested in participating in peer review, please email us at raineytisdale@gmail.com or linda@lindabnorris.com and let us know how much you’re willing to take on (the whole book or just a section, and if so, which section). From the responses we get we’ll narrow it down to a diverse and manageable group.

Help Us Envision the Future of Museum Professional Training with Electronic Brainstorming

PLEASE… by Jeppe Hein, Boston MFA

October 15-19, click here to participate

Have you ever taken part in an electronic brainstorming session? Have you ever even heard of electronic brainstorming?

Electronic brainstorming takes place on the Internet instead of in a conference room. A moderator proposes the topic and invites participants. As a participant, you work individually to post as many ideas as possible to an online bulletin board set up for this purpose. You can see everyone else’s ideas, and you are encouraged to build on the ideas posted by your fellow participants. Because it all happens online, many more people can take part, and you don’t have to generate ideas in the same place at the same time. Moreover, you can be anonymous, which sometimes makes the session more effective (ever been in a face-to-face brainstorming situation where the office politics prevented you from voicing a particular idea?). And because the session takes place over a longer period of time (ideas accumulate over hours and days as each person adds them at his/her own pace), the creative process can unfold a little more naturally.

As we write this book we have looked for opportunities to experiment with different tools for developing and expanding creativity. The more we read about electronic brainstorming, the more we want to run a session with our museum colleagues. So we set one up for next week.

For any kind of brainstorming–in real time or online–you want participants who have a deep understanding of the topic at hand but also bring a variety of different experiences and skills to the table. We though the future of museum professional training would be a great topic for our electronic brainstorming session because it meets both of these criteria. If we chose a topic related to collections or fundraising or family programming then only some of you would have the knowledge needed to come up with good ideas. But so many of you have been students or teachers in museum graduate programs, each with your own experience of what worked and didn’t work. So we hope you’ll join us to see what we can come up with together. What does Museum Training 2.0 look like? What new skills are we looking for in our 21st-century museum workers? How can we prepare museum studies students to improve the field from the inside out?

The session will run from Monday morning, October 15, through midnight on Friday, October 19. We’re using an online tool called wallwisher. No log-in is needed and participation is very simple; all you have to do is follow this link, which will take you to our brainstorming bulletin board. Take a minute to read the instructions at the top of the page, and then double-click anywhere to start posting ideas anonymously. Please actively build on other participants’ ideas as much as possible.

You don’t have to monitor the session the entire time–we suggest you check in for 30-minute spurts a few times throughout the week. We will periodically organize the ideas by theme to make them easier to digest. We will also weed out any comments that evaluate the ideas of others (this process is strictly about generating ideas, not evaluating them).

At the end of next week we’ll see what we got and assess how well the electronic brainstorming went. We’d love to hear your feedback at any point in the process–through email, in the comments section here, or on the wallwisher wall itself.

We’re looking forward to meeting your ideas!

Attending AASLH This Year? Come to our Meet-Up!

We’ll both be at the American Association for State and Local History conference next week (October 3-6) in Salt Lake City.  If you’re also attending, we’d love to talk to you about creativity. We’re holding a Museums & Creative Practice meet-up at the conference on Thursday, October 4 from 12:00 to 1:30. Bring your lunch and join us in the South Foyer of the convention center–we’ll have a little Museums & Creative Practice sign.

At the beginning of the meet-up we’ll update you on the project and run through the most important things we’ve learned so far, with the goal of sending you home from AASLH with some quick hits you can immediately start using at your museum. Then we’ll spend the bulk of our time working together on a brainstorming activity designed to help all of us find new ways to approach one of the core functions of history museums and historic sites.

Can’t come to the meet-up but want to talk to us about creativity anyway? Shoot us an email (linda@lindabnorris.com or raineytisdale@gmail.com) and we’ll find some other time at the AASLH conference to get together.

Help Us Win 45 Minutes of Fame

We need your help, M&CPeeps. We have entered a contest to win a keynote slot at this year’s New England Museum Association conference in November. The contest is called 45 Minutes of Fame; if we win we’ll use our 45 minutes to talk with conference participants about seeking creative inspiration outside the museum, one of the topics we’ve been exploring as part of this project.

Everyone vying for 45 Minutes of Fame submitted a two-minute YouTube video. Whichever video gets the most LIKEs by September 28 wins the keynote slot. We are up against some stiff competition: a zombie volunteers presentation from Andover Historical Society and a here’s-how-you-start-a-museum story from the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace. Both institutions have been mobilizing their staff and constituents to vote. Since we don’t have staff and constituents, we need you to help us win. And then, of course, to come to the conference and see our awesome, interactive presentation.

Head on over to YouTube now and cast your vote!

Creativity on a Shoestring?

One of the big questions Linda and I have been working to pin down is whether you can be creative on a small budget. Based on our own experiences working in and with small museums, our gut reaction is to say yes, you absolutely can be creative on a small budget, and in fact, sometimes lack of funding forces you to be even more creative than when you have resources.

On the other hand, when we asked you about barriers to creativity in our survey back in May, lack of resources topped the list as the number one barrier, cited by a third of respondents. Here are some of the comments people made:

It takes money to staff some of my big ideas and money to bring them to life.

There are lots of things we would like to try, but we can’t afford it. Our staff does amazing things with a very small budget, but it reaches a point when creativity is stretched to breaking. On the other hand, we can’t afford to be traditional either.

I am very new to my position, but upon first impressions, it seems that a lack of resources prevents creativity. A very small budget and a very small audience are challenges for us.

I think our lack of substantial resources make us more creative, but sometimes executing creative ideas does require funding.

Two of these responses acknowledge that you can be creative on a small budget, but only to a point—you can make some improvements but you can’t actually transform your institution without more resources. While we too have certainly felt the pain of having a really great big idea and no money or staff to execute it, we don’t want lack of resources to be an excuse for sitting on your hands and doing nothing. And we are also holding out for the possibility of full-blown transformation through creativity. See, for example, Nina Simon’s post this week about doubling attendance at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, using public programs with budgets of less than $100.

Doing things the same way you’ve always done them (or the same way everyone else does them) versus implementing creative ideas and solutions is like the difference between putting your savings under a mattress and putting it in a high-yield bank account—the creative projects accrue interest. Small museums need this interest just as much, if not more than, the big ones. We worry that there are a lot of small institutions that might be spending their limited resources putting stuff under the mattress—acquiring a larger collection when they haven’t yet figured out how to use the artifacts they already have in a compelling way, or spending a lot of effort keeping the doors open 40 hours a week to serve a handful of daily visitors even if it prevents the staff from getting out to be present and involved in the community.

But we want to hear from you. Tell us about some creative ideas you’ve implemented on the cheap. Or suggest a creative small museum we should study for this project. How have you overcome the lack-of-resources barrier? What would you say to your colleagues who are worried they can’t do this without more staff and funding?

What You’ve Told Us So Far

One of our Museums & Creative Practice meet-ups at the AAM conference

We are really heartened by the response we’ve received to this project. Since we launched this website three weeks ago, more than 1,000 of our museum colleagues, from the US and from all over the world, have checked in to learn about our plans. So far 83 of you have also completed our survey (it’s not too late; you can find it here). And a handful of you even took time out from a very hectic American Association of Museums conference two weeks ago to give us input in person. Your feedback has already proved immensely helpful as we set the goals and structure for this project, and we look forward to continuing our dialogue with you at every step of the way. We’re currently hammering out our formal book proposal and diving into our research, and we’ll update you periodically as things fall into place.

We’re still analyzing the results from our survey but I want to comment on a few key issues that have emerged so far. Our survey respondents were pretty evenly arrayed in terms of years of experience in the field—equal numbers of emerging professionals and veterans. And every museum department is represented in the results, although we heard disproportionately from educators (45% of respondents; the other departments ranged from 7ish% [directors, visitor services, technology, administration] to 15ish% [curators, exhibition developers, collections, independent museum professionals). We don’t know if that’s because educators are more passionate about this topic, or because the project was better publicized among educators. Nonetheless, even though our sample size is fairly small, it’s encouraging that we’re hearing from people all over the field, with different amounts of experience and varied backgrounds. It supports our conviction that creativity really is for everyone, regardless of your job and standing.

One survey result that really piqued our curiosity is that most of you consider yourselves to be creative individuals, but you don’t consider your museums to be creative institutions. Indeed, 64% of respondents rated themselves as very or extremely creative, but only 20% of you thought the same of your museums. Maybe it’s just that no one wants to admit they don’t consider themselves creative, but we are wondering if instead we’ve struck a chord with a particular segment of the museum community that feels like they are shouting (or creatively practicing) into the wind, and that these are the folks who were most compelled to take our survey.

So how about it? Do you feel like you are shouting into the wind about creativity at your museum? If so, what does that look like for you on a day-to-day basis? Are you the only creative person on your staff or are you one of a few like-minded colleagues? Are you trying to lead creatively from the top or are you infiltrating creatively from the bottom? Are you challenging the system, are you finding small ways to be creative that don’t rock the boat, or are you simply saving your creativity for your life outside of work? And if that’s not what it’s like for you at your museum we want to hear about it too. Comment below to help us understand the issues and how we might address them through this project. Or, if you don’t feel comfortable going on record, email us offline: raineytisdale@gmail.com or linda@lindabnorris.com.