Webby Awards

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Kudos to our Smithsonian colleagues who are nominated for a webby award, hailed as “the Oscars of the Internet.” Please go online and vote for them at peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com!!! 

Nominees:
Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies
SmithsonianEducation.org is the Institution’s central education website.
– Nominated for Best Cultural Institution Website (Society category)
– Selected as an Official Honoree in the category of Best Education Website

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s People’s Design Award
Cooper-Hewitt’s People’s Design Award allows website users to make their design voice heard by nominating and voting for examples of good design. www.peoplesdesignaward.org
– Nominated for Best Art Website (Entertainment category)
– Selected as an Official Honoree in the category of Best Cultural Institution Website.

Smithsonian Photography Initiative

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative exists to broaden public understanding and appreciation of photography at the Smithsonian.  www.Photography.si.edu
– Nominated for Best Cultural Insititution Website (Society category)

In addition, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s main website and the Feeding Desire: Design and Tools of the Table, 1500-2005 exhibition site have been selected as Official Honorees in the Art and Best Navigation/Structure categories.
The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s “Del Corazon! Latino Voices in American Art” website has been selected as an Official Honoree in the category of Best Education website.

Congratulations to all!

Conference ideas

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Affiliations staff have the privilege of attending regional museum conferences throughout the year, which help to keep us in touch with potential issues facing affiliates.  This year, affiliations staff have attended at least six regional conferences across the nation.  

As expected, the conferences offered tons of ideas and stimulated the energy to try them!  We’ll be sharing those ideas in preparation for the Affiliations conference June 3-5, 2007.  In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few of the most striking ideas I heard.

The question that stays with me still from my conference-attending this year was, how can museums become more like libraries, which are, more and more, taking on the role as the true civic centers of our time?

This is not an abstract concept – in my travels last year from Grand Lake, Colorado to New Milford, Connecticut, “LIBRARY” meant the same thing, almost like a brand.  Seek out the library in whatever town you’re in, and you already know that you can check email with free internet access;  a bulletin board will announce community events that might be of interest;  you can work on a report or budget if necessary at one of the computers, even if it’s old;  you can check out headlines through local and major papers;  you can get a flavor of the local community through the exhibitions or children’s work on view;  and most importantly, if you just want quiet to prepare or unwind, there’s no better place – a Starbucks can’t even provide that.  And the other great thing about libraries – they are centrally located and there are an appropriate number of them; competition among them seems irrelevant. 

Of course museums have different missions, and different contraints, from libraries.  But in general, libraries are easy to find, always free and reliable, and accessible and welcoming to all ages, races and classes.  Imagine if we could describe the nation’s museums in similar terms?!

I kept thinking about this at other conferences, and attended meetings on ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘contemporary anthropology’ which posed great ideas – let’s make gift cards for our museums available at the local Target or grocery store.  Let’s stop dictating what a “family” membership entails, when 75% of American families are nontraditional.  Let’s use data on generational values to influence programming, building in community service to our family events. 

So let’s hear it – what ideas did you garner from conferences this year?  What would you like to see at the Affiliations conference?!

Smithsonian Teachers Night logo

Smithsonian Teachers’ Night

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si_teachers_night_2006_sm.gif    Thanks to our local affiliates who made the Affiliations table at Smithsonian Teachers’ Night such a smashing success!!  Over 1600 teachers attended Friday night’s event (October 20), and Affiliations staff could hardly keep up with their zeal for materials!

We had a nice sampling of American history resources – a lesson plan website on the French and Indian War from the Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center;  history labs information from the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar; information on the new education center and programs at George Washington’s Mount Vernon; and a wealth of African American history resources from the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. 

We also had a nice smattering of science, with field trip information from the Virginia Museum of Natural History and school tours and programs from the National Museum of Dentistry.

While the overwhelming majority of teachers were from DC, Maryland and Virginia, we met a principal from California that we could send to the Blackhawk Museum, and a teacher from southern Colorado that we encouraged to visit the Pinhead Institute. 

Mental note for next time – any giveaway (in this case, apple-shaped stress balls from the Reginald Lewis Museum) will go faster than any other thing on the table, so bring twice as many as you think you’ll need!

Do you have an experience design strategy?

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In conjunction with its renovation, the American History Museum has sponsored a staff development series, bringing leading consultants, authors and thinkers to SI to challenge our paradigms about museum-going and our attitudes toward an experience design strategy.

A few months ago, we heard from David Norton of Stone Mantel (gostonemantel.com), presenting research from the influential book, Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage. For me, the most memorable point in that lecture was his asking the audience to reconsider ‘in-between’ places –  how hallways, lobbies, cafeteria lines, elevators and bathrooms play, in many ways, as significant a role for meaningful experience as the galleries themselves.  Where people gather, orient, chat and debate is as important a design concern as the exhibitions they came to see.

This week, SI staff were treated to a lecture by Paco Underhill, CEO and President of Envirosell, Inc. (envirosell.com) and author of Call of the Mall  and Why We Buy. 

He started with an acute observation – museum people assume that audiences know who we are and how to use us.  But the idea of a museum was conceived over 100 years ago with a demographic in mind that largely, doesn’t exist anymore.  In his words, “the world is changing faster than you are.”

He quoted statistics of which many are familiar :
– Less than 25% of American families look like the Cleaver household, with married parents & 2   kids 
– Audiences’ visual acuity is highly sharpened because of rapid technology changes
– Time is accelerated.  People expect experiences to fit into a framework of accomplishment
– We are a nation of immigrants
– A museum’s competition ranges from Animal Planet to Playstation 2 to ESPN Zone

With this in mind, he proceeded to ask poignant questions to probe these issues:
– What does family membership mean?  Does that include grandma, cousins, the nanny?
– What are you doing for the divorced dad who has his kids only on weekends?
– Can a visitor find lunch at your museum for different price points – $7, $12, $18 ?  to accommodate both a family, or a couple on vacation?
– How does the Apple store accomplish $200 impulse buys on a regular basis?
– Did you know that the ubiquitous MySpace.com suggests taking a first date to a museum? How are you reaching this audience?
– Can you rate museums in the same way that you do films?
– Can a visitor learn something new at your museum, AND get a margarita?  Is that an appropriate question to ask? 
– The newest tourists are those from emerging markets like Russia and China.  How well can you service them?

These questions and issues are not new.  but being confronted with them again in such a pointed way reminded me of their relevance.  His last challenge?

“If it isn’t fun, you shouldn’t be here.  If you can’t make it fun, then why will your audience come back?” 

Tourism and Dining – end of the summer pleasures at Cooper-Hewitt

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I had the pleasure of experiencing two lovely exhibitions at Cooper-Hewitt this weekend.  They are closing soon, so if you find yourself in NYC before the end of October 2006, treat yourself and do not miss them!  (cooperhewitt.org)

Yellowstone, Thomas Moran  It might surprise you to know that Cooper-Hewitt has the largest collection of works by Frederic Church and Winslow Homer, in the world.  The current exhibition Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape shows them off beautifully.  The show transports the visitor to Niagara Falls, Yellowstone, the Adirondacks, Acadia, the Grand Canyon, and beyond, to illustrate how the influential works of these 19th century artists embedded images of iconic American landscapes into our national collective consciousness.  Their sketches, drawings and paintings inspired decorative arts as well, that brought these landscapes home to the armchair traveler, including stereoviewer cards, wallpaper, games and tableware, all of which are on view.  Their images even influenced public policy, which, together with photographs from land surveyors of the time, spurred Congress to set aside large tracts of land for public use.

   Who would guess that in the early 20th century, potato chips would be served with this beautiful silver spoon from Tiffany’s?!  You’ll find this and a plethora of additional interesting facts about gastronomy through the ages in Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005.  This delicious exhibition begins with the chronologies of the fork, knife and spoon, in which the visitor learns, for example, that the fork suffered discrimination because of its association with the devil, and was not adopted into regular table use until the late 18th century.  In the 16-17th centuries, people traveled with their own cutlery;  it became proper etiquette to point the sharp edge of one’s knife toward the user to avoid offense or confusion about the implement’s role as weapon or eating utensil… a tradition which continues today!  The exhibition shows off Cooper-Hewitt’s impressive collection of cutlery, including train and airplane tableware, ergonomic and colorful utensils, and those carved from wood, ivory and metal.  Examples cover the gamut of decoration and style, from naturalistic to ritualistic, and from 16th century Europe to 21st century Chicago.

But by far my favorite part of the exhibition was devoted to specialty tools.  Here one learns that, for example, the first written American recipe for ice cream is in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, and that ice cream used to be served via hatchet or saw, and always eaten with a fork.  19th century Americans debated whether olives, a must at fashionable parties, were better served with a fork or spoon;  Tiffany’s responded by fashioning an elegant compromise, opposing the fork and spoon on either end of a silver rod.  Asparagus tongs, spaghetti twirlers, clawed ice tongs… all flourished with possibility.  In a recent 2004 innovation, Chicago chef Homaro Cantu made corkscrew utensils, designed to hold fresh herbs to stimulate diners’ olfactory glands while they ate.  Test your knowledge of cutlery with the Museum’s online quiz.

Are you hungry yet?!     

  

Why do we collect this stuff? Does anybody ever look at it?

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…the intriguing title to the final lecture in an excellent series by Undersecretary for Science, David Evans.  The entire series is available online at https://www2.si.edu/research/spotlight/lectures_2006.html.

The question that formed his title is a good one, considering that the largest portion of SI’s collection, some 126.5 million objects, reside in the Natural History Museum.  And did you know that 70% of that Museum is occupied by scientists and their labs?  It’s hard to imagine given the size of their public space.

But who uses the collection?  Dr. Evans gave several examples.  SI’s bird collection is used in a program with the Air Force to determine the interactions between birds and planes.  By studying the birds’ habits, flying patterns, migratory routes and physical characteristics, determinations can made regarding plane travel.  How, and why?   Well, for example, if the Air Force needs to set up an emergency take off strip for rapid troop deployment, it helps to know how to avoid the indigenous area’s bird population.

And SI’s science collections can also influence public policy, for example, in determining the history of the Earth’s climate and the effects of global warming.  How?  One example is that the toxicity in poison ivy increases as carbon dioxide in the environment increases.  Thus, by comparing former samples in our collections to those of today, scientists can begin to construct the evolution of CO2 levels in the atmosphere.  Especially important in similar studies is the use of type specimens for comparison.  A type specimen is the actual example of a plant that was used when scientists originally described and named the species.  The Smithsonian has 80-90,000 such type specimens in our collection, all of which have been digitized in high-resolution for optimized study.

My favorite question of the series came at the very end when an audience member asked, “why do scientists collect hundreds of the same type of insect, like a moth” for example?  David Evans wisely answered, “look around.  Can you imagine trying to describe the human species by having one example of a male, female and juvenile specimen?”

I never thought about it that way.