Museum Studies Blog at Tufts University

Many museums struggle with maintaining a good balance of technology – enough to attract (and keep the attention of) younger crowds, but not so much that visitors who go to museums to “unplug” are unable to do so. The best solution is to give visitors options. They can sign up for the facebook and the instagram feeds; they can walk past the video touch screens. Museums Gone Viral brings you real ways that museums have used technology and the internet to reach a variety of visitor groups.

I know I’m a little late to the party, but I just recently discovered the Peabody Essex Museum’s “Mood-O-Meter.”

A few weeks ago in the Tufts course Museums and Digital Media, we were treated to a fascinating discussion with Jim Olson, Director of Integrated Media at PEM. Among the many examples of digital media at the museum was an interactive piece created for the “Turner and the Sea” exhibition in the summer of 2014. The exhibition focused on Joseph Mallord William Turner’s work and his multitude of work focused on different depictions of the sea. Turner has such a wide variety of emotions poured into his work, some more abstract than others, that the PEM team decided to create a “period-appropriate” apothecary website. The site takes you through a series of questions and choices based on your mood, and then spits out a Turner painting that might match your current feelings.

I think this is a great way to get people more involved in the exhibition, and I love that you can access it at home as well as in the exhibition (when it was up, the space included ipads that hosted the site). The Mood-O-Meter is fun and slightly cheeky, which makes you want to use it again and again, finding a Turner piece for every mood you might have. Beyond the amusement, it dives deeper into Turner’s painting methods, asking users to pick a color of paint that they feel drawn to and explaining how it was created or used.

The website fosters a feeling of personal investment in the painting – after all, your mood might be close to Turner’s when he painted it, or perhaps to the mood of the sea on that day, and it creates a desire for visitors to take a closer look at the painting and spend more time with it. You can even access the Mood-O-Meter at any time, even though the exhibition closed over a year ago. If you know that the website is there, you can continue exploring Turner and his artwork for as long as you please. Check it out here.

Here is what the Mood-O-Meter decided I would enjoy looking at based on my mood (click on the image to zoom in):

I have to say that I did enjoy it, probably more than I would have if I was just encountering the painting on my own. I don’t generally like or truly appreciate works of art that are more abstract, but I found myself looking more closely at the chosen painting for ways to connect my mood with the piece.

If you want to know more about how the Mood-O-Meter came about, check out this discussion with creators Jim Olson and Caroline Herr.

I recently came across a great NPR story about the benefits of school gardens. When I lived in Wisconsin while getting my teaching degree, I student taught at an alternative high school that was just getting their school garden off the ground. Now it’s fully flourishing, and hearing from the teachers who are still at that school, many of the benefits NPR discusses were also present: students are more invested in their school, both as a building and a space for community, they are more engaged in many of their classes, they have an opportunity to be outside and away from stress or technology, and they are taking what they learn about growing food and nutrition home to their families and friends. The community gardens that are jointly created and maintained by students and staff are effective ways of empowering students while helping them make healthy choices. Museums like Strawberry Banke and the Enfield Shaker Museum offer public spaces for community members to participate in collaborative gardens. I love this idea, because it helps bring the museum into the community in a different way – it’s not necessarily about the history, for example, but it’s still fulfilling the museum’s mission. It’s community building but more equally focused on how the museum can listen to its community members and give them more say over how museum assets are used.

But what if we took it a step farther? Instead of only letting the community take charge of the gardens, which is already a great idea, what if we saved a portion of the garden to use in educational programs? Museums who are looking for a way to start after school or long-term programs can use the garden to help kids learn about a wide variety of projects like seed germination, or the historical uses for certain plants. The Buttonwoods Museum has created an herb garden that is maintained by both staff and the local Boy Scouts, and is used to teach school groups how early colonists in the Merrimack Valley learned (largely from Native Americans) how to use herbs as healing entities. If students are given the authority to take control of both what is planted in the garden and how it is taken care of, museums can add scaffolding through the expertise of its collection and staff. This is not to say that educational garden programs should be very structured and formal – on the contrary, the students should be given an informational foundation and then allowed to make their own meaning through tending the garden. Isn’t informal learning, that “making meaning,” something that museums are constantly striving for? Groups like Groundwork USA can partner with museums to help get garden programs up and running.

Do you know of museums creating these kinds of educational programs through long-term educational partnerships with students? How do the programs fit within their mission? We would love to hear more about this topic!