I’ve developed a pretty thick skin over the years and have a real appreciation for a diversity of opinions.  I have always worked hard in my role at the IMA to encourage and draw out folks who think differently than I do.  That’s why I was not very bothered by Nina Simon’s initial comments about the IMA during last year’s plenary session of the Museums and the Web conference held here in Indianapolis.  Nor was I particularly inclined to answer what seemed to be a rather snarky blog article that Nina wrote entitled Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto which was featured on her Museum 2.0 blog. I was glad that Linda Duke, our Director of Education, answered some of the charges in the comments to that post, but again decided to hold my tongue.  With essentially a reprint of that blog article appearing in the most recent issue of AAM’s Museum Magazine under the title “Bait and Switch”, I feel that not responding at this point would communicate that I don’t care about what Nina is saying when in fact, I really do.

What most disturbs me about Nina’s argument is the clear lack of background work she put into crafting what amounts to a pretty scathing opinion of the IMA.  It seems from Nina’s comments that she is basing her views on a single visit to our galleries during a conference reception. I have no way of knowing how many of those 3 hours Nina spent in our exhibitions and galleries, but it seems that she didn’t bother to ask any staff members of the IMA about efforts we might be making to engage our visitors on-site and around the city.  Aside from a brief two minute encounter in the conference hall after her comments, Nina failed to probe in any depth about what (if any) strategy their might be behind our efforts on-site.

Experience and Engagement

In case you haven’t noticed, Art Museums are frequently considered to be the “stuffier”, less “engaging” older brothers to our sibling science, technology, and “experience” museums.  Nina draws at least some of her professional experience from this field, so perhaps we should cut her a little slack for missing a crucial challenge faced by art museums.

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Filed under: Education, New Media, Technology

ArtBabble officially launched in the IMA Davis LAB one month ago today.  We have been attentively watching the invites that have been sent and accepted since that time.  To date, almost exactly one out of every three invites has been accepted.  Without a baseline it’s hard to say whether this is good or bad, but hey… we’ll take it.  A few days ago, Daniel posted a chart showing the number of new users per day on ArtBabble.  I would like to share some visualizations of the invites as of this morning.

You can click on any of the graphs to get a larger view.  The points in the graph are all ArtBabble users.  The lines between the points represent an invite that was sent.  The top point in this graph represents a fake user, “ArtBabble”, that has “invited” all the first tier of users.  The blue lines represent these pseudo-invites.  The red lines represent an invite that was sent and has not yet been accepted.  Finally, the green lines represent an invite that was sent and accepted.  This graph also lets us easily see that the longest invite chain included six people.

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Filed under: New Media, Technology

Thanks to Tad!

Last week I announced the opening of The Davis LAB and launch of ArtBabble. If you stopped by on Saturday to check out the LAB and chat with IMA staff, thank you so much. It was a good turn out. Our goal is to plan more events in the next year where we get to meet those in the local community interested in what we’re doing with the blog, technology and more. A couple of readers expressed some interest in seeing some photos of the LAB. We’re also setting up some times for other museums to visit, to learn more about the LAB, see the installation, and more or less, talk shop.

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Filed under: New Media, Technology

To our delight, The Davis LAB opened on the first gallery level of the IMA Saturday. (To learn more about the LAB, read Daniel’s most recent post.) From my opening-day-experience, I found that a wide range of museum visitors were drawn into the space, tempted by the shiny touchscreens or the cool pseudoscience, atomic age design and lighting. My favorite comments from the day included a little boy who was squeezed into a chair with his older sister watching live ArtBabble projected in HD on the wall.

“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Education, Marketing, Musings, New Media, Technology

Drum roll please.  After months of planning, coding, designing, critiquing, laughter, inappropriate laughter, sweat, blood, encoding, decisions, indecisions, mistakes, moments of ctrl-alt-del, late nights, early mornings, epiphanies, and many other things, I am pleased to announce both The Davis LAB, and officially ArtBabble.  To quote the artist, Willis ‘Bing’ Davis – It’s been a whole journey of love.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about plans for The Davis LAB, and shared some early design concepts.  Well, on Saturday it opens and you can see it for yourself.  Phil & Noelle in marketing, just sent out a Facebook invite to all of the IMA Fans.  If you’re free on Saturday, stop by our new space to meet staff, check out the final designs, maybe get some free stuff and…that’s about it.

Computer interface for The Davis LAB -We have some amazing designers on staff.

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Filed under: New Media, Technology