Museums are like Silly Bandz: Crafting Valuable Experiences, Part 1
If experiences are the mainstay of museum education, how can we be sure we are crafting valuable ones for our visitors?
This episode kicks off a 3-part series diving into some of the latest research into what makes a museum visit worth a person's time.
Key takeaways include:
Value is determined by the user, not the producer.
Visitors today are looking for more than experiences; they want transformation.
Transformation happens when you create settings and offer experiences that meet your visitors' well-being needs.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
This episode (and the workshop it is based on) is influenced by a few books I highly recommend to all my museums friends. You can get your own copies by clicking the links below, or you can read my reviews on my Bookshelf page. (As always, thank you for using my affiliate link. Affiliate commissions help support this site and the work I do with museum educators. You can read my full disclaimer here.)
Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, I am Rachel, a resource expert and career coach for museum educators who are stretched thin, but long to fall in love with their world-changing work. After over 15 years with my own hands in the glitter, I know how it feels when your Board thinks your work is childish because you work with children.
I know how hard it is to lead a tour on a difficult subject, and I know the frustration of waiting on a school bus that is 20 minutes late or worse, 10 minutes early. As I'm heading towards the second half of my career. I find myself with a passion to help my fellow educators reverse the chronic state of being overworked and underappreciated so that they can reclaim their creativity and emotional energy.
Join me and my museum buddies as we share our best tips, tricks, and techniques for modern museum education.
Hi, welcome back to the modern museum education podcast. I'm your host, Rachel and I am so grateful that you [00:01:00] are returning to us for another episode. I sincerely hope that this podcast is. Valuable to you and that you find it interesting. If there is something particular that you would like me to cover on the podcast, please reach out and let me know, or even better.
If you are a museum educator, and you would like to come on the podcast and share your journey or an interesting project or something that you use every day that informs your best practices, I would absolutely love to invite you to join me. So if that describes you and you're interested in being a part of the modern museum education podcast, make sure that you go to my website, modern museum education.com/podcast and you can find more information there. Okay, so let's get started now, first of all, let me say that this particular episode if you are listening to it through a podcast [00:02:00] App, you might want to hop over to YouTube and watch this episode there because I'm going to be sharing some of my slides that I use when I present this information as a workshop for museum education and interpretation departments.
So this is a workshop that I present primarily to interpretation and education departments. But also if you have a small museum, I think that this information would work well for your entire staff because the whole point of the workshop is that every person who works in a museum matters greatly. The work that we do matters to our visitors, and what's really interesting is that what visitors take away from our museum experiences is almost well, rarely, what we plan for them to take away from their visit. Now, this workshop is like a 90 minute long workshop that I do, [00:03:00] so I'm not gonna be talking about every aspect. It's not the whole entire workshop. It's just I'm gonna hit some of the highlights for this particular podcast episode, some of the, some of the things that I think are the most impactful and will help you in your work today.
Okay, so let's dive in to the value that museums provide to visitors and why the work that we do as educators matters.
So if you were with me for episode two, then you already know a little bit about the spectrum of museum work between curation and knowledge creation on one side, and education and visitor experience on the other side. Okay. Now, as I mentioned in that episode, it is important that we have people who sit along every part of this spectrum.
Your museum ought to have people across the whole spectrum working together to provide a holistic visitor experience. [00:04:00] That's important.
But for the purposes of this particular information, I wanna kind of help you center yourself very particularly on the education experience side of the spectrum, particularly pretty close to the experience side.
So we're really gonna be leaning into the visitor experience, what it's like for them when they're on our site and in our museums and it's less about what we are giving to them and it's more about what they are getting, which is wholly dependent on factors that we have very little control over.
So let's dive in a little deeper and to get started understanding the visitor experience it's really helpful to stop and think and even say it out loud. Why do you want visitors to visit your site? When [00:05:00] I do this workshop with education and interpretation departments, we stop right here and have a conversation. What is it that you want visitors to do when they're there?
Why do you want them to come? Why does it matter to you if visitors walk through the door? You really need to understand this point in order to move forward. So it might be that you want visitors to learn about your site's history. If you are a, , let's say you are a small community museum. So your museum is all about the history of your town or your, your rural area or your county, and you want people to come to you so that you can tell them the history of, of the place where they live.
Right? You want them to know about the past that directly impacts where [00:06:00] they live today. Or perhaps like where I worked in a mid-sized historic house museum, one of the biggest reasons that our staff wanted people to visit was because we wanted to educate them on the history of slavery, African American history, and the impact that that legacy has on life today. So if you are, you know, not a history museum, maybe you're a science museum, you want people to learn about the world that we live in and how it works. The reason that we want them to know these things is because it impacts our daily life.
When you understand more about the world than, and nature than, maybe you are more inclined to recycle or work towards, , you know, species preservation. , Zoos are very focused on that, for example. Or if you're an art museum, you want people to learn about the art, how to make art, what makes good art, the history of the art, the impact of the [00:07:00] art.
All of these things are great, but when you talk to most museum professionals, you often hear this answer when I say, what is it that you want visitors, like, why do you want visitors to visit? They say, I want them to learn something. Okay. Most of us working in the museum field, particularly as educators or interpreters, I use the term educator very broadly here, docents, guides, even curators and exhibit developers, what we want is for people to learn, right? That's pretty standard. We want people to learn, and this is not an unreasonable expectation. Most Americans consider museums to be a highly trustworthy educational resource, so visitors themselves expect to learn when they come to our museums.
[00:08:00] However, there are a lot of other things happening in a visitor experience that has nothing to do, particularly with learning or, or does it actually? So that's what we're gonna talk a little bit more about as we go through this today.
So a lot of this information that I'm sharing with you today comes from a couple of different books that I want to make sure I call out because this is not my original research. The first one is a book called "Come Stay Learn Play" by Andrea Gallagher Nails.
And it was published I believe in 2021, and the other two books are authored by a thought leader in our space, Dr. John Falk. So one of the books is "Learning from Museums," which the second edition of that book was published in 2018, and then his most recent book, which came out last year in 2022, called The Value of Museums and that book I [00:09:00] highly recommend, so you can read all of my reviews of these three books and get links to them on my website.
So if you just go to this episode's show notes, so that's at modern museum education.com/podcast/003, that will take you to this episode's show notes, and you can get the links and all the information. But these three books are very helpful as we think about crafting quality experiences for our visitors that not only set them up for success in learning what we want them to learn, but also helping us as museum professionals focus our attention in the places where it can make the most difference.
This is important because when we are talking about value, we need to think about who it is that determines the value. When we talk about what we want visitors to experience, we are [00:10:00] assigning value to their experience that they may not be experiencing. Things they may not find valuable, that we think are valuable. Things that we think are not valuable are the things that they might find the most valuable.
Here's the point. Value is determined by the user. Not the producer. And for an example of this, I'd like to call our minds back to the silly band craze of the early 2000s. So if you are younger than me, you may have been a silly band user. I was not in school when silly bands became a thing, but I was working in a museum at the time and we actually gave silly bands to kids because they were so popular. We sold them to them. And, um, the, here's the thing about silly bands. If, if you don't know what silly bands were, they're [00:11:00] essentially rubber bands that are shaped in different, um, you know, there, there's all these varieties of shapes.
So there might be animal-themed silly bands, and when you lay them out on the table, they look like a giraffe or an elephant or you know, a rhinoceros. But then you can put them on your wrist as you see here, and they're just, it, it's, they're just rubber bands. It's like, it's literal garbage. But children went bananas for silly bands in the early 2000s. Here's the cool thing, when I was looking into silly bands. There was an actual collector's market for silly bands among student populations. And I, I saw this happen with kids that I, you know, worked with at the time. They would trade silly bands. And they would barter for silly bands.
There were certain silly bands that were more highly valued because they were rarer. Just like any collector, like baseball cards or um, anything like that, silly bands [00:12:00] had a collector's market, and it's crazy because they're literally just rubber bands. They're just colored rubber bands. But the users, the children found them highly valuable.
The teachers did not find them highly valuable. In fact, I found a 2010 Times article talking about how silly bands were being banned by school districts across the country because they were causing so much disruption in class. Here's the point. Different user groups, in this case, teachers and students, establish different parameters of worth and value.
The teachers found silly bands to be of no value. The students found silly bands to be of high value. The silly bands themselves didn't change. The users changed and determined the value of the item.
So what does this mean for museum people? [00:13:00] This means that visitors determine the value that they get out of our experience. So in order for us to set them up for a valuable experience, it helps us to know what they want in the first place. And this is where the three books that I mentioned before come into play, "Come, Stay, Learn, Play," and "Learning in Museums", but especially John Falk's book, "The Value of Museums." This book made such a difference for me in thinking about crafting visitor experiences. I, I could not recommend it enough. If you read no other book about museum work, you should read this book.
Like I said, you can get the links to that in the show notes.
So what is it that visitors want?
So, so let me, if you aren't super familiar or you don't remember , what the experience economy is, let me break it down for you. It starts at the bottom. That's the commodity. So let's take coffee [00:14:00] as an example.
Coffee beans themselves, that's a commodity. If you roast and grind them, you have created a good, so you have gone one step up from just the coffee beans. You've made it a little bit easier for users to use this product. So that is now a good. If you go one step further, maybe you have a coffee shop where you prepare the coffee yourself and then sell the prepared coffee to the user.
That's one less thing the user has to do. They, they don't have to make the coffee themselves. It's made for them. That's the delivery economy. Okay. So we're very familiar with this.
If you're looking at this particular graph here, you can see that the, basically everything from commodity to delivery has low customization, low time saved. It's a low [00:15:00] margin, so it's not offering a whole lot to the user. But when you move beyond the delivery, beyond the service economy, into the experience economy, you've really leveled up.
It's highly customizable. You, the producer are spending more time, but the user is saving time because they are not doing all of the work to get the cup of coffee in the first place. So it's highly, for the user, it's highly customized, and there's, less effort on their part.
Okay. This is the experience economy. So if you're talking about coffee, the experience here would be like luxury coffee, your favorite coffee shop. You walk in and you know the smells and you know what the seats feel, and you know where to find the plugs so that you can work in there, you know which seats are the most comfortable, you know which ones sit right under the vent, so you know, either to go to that seat or to avoid it depending on whether you're hot or cold. All of that is the experience economy. [00:16:00] Okay. I can make a cup of coffee for myself at home, or I can go to my favorite coffee shop and and they can make me a special customized cup of coffee and I can sit in at my favorite seat, and that is the experience. Okay?
But economists are now saying that we are moving beyond the experience economy. If you're not offering experiences, you're already left behind. The next kind of level of this economic system is the transformation economy, and this is what people are looking for now.
They expect no less than the service economy. They honestly, most visitors to your museum are gonna expect the experience economy. They're gonna expect to have a good experience. What's gonna push it over the edge for them is to have a transformation experience. Okay? So how do we create these transformation experiences?
[00:17:00] According to Dr. John Falk, we need to tap into our visitor's most primal needs.
Okay, so go with me here. This part of his book at first was a little bit hard for me to wrap my brain around, but once I stepped back and really read the words that he was writing and thought about what he was actually saying, it made such perfect sense.
Okay. Essentially every decision that we make in our lives is intended to help us move further along a path of wellbeing. And when you say it out loud, it makes perfect sense. We don't wanna do things that would in any way hinder our wellbeing. We wanna make choices that make us safer, healthier, and happier.
Okay, so understanding what [00:18:00] kinds of choices make us feel safer, healthier, and happier, we can then infuse those kinds of experiences into our museum world so that our visitors experience them and then feel transformed to be healthier, happier, and safer. Okay. Follow me on that?
So here are the four quadrants of John Falk's model that he presents in his book, "The Value of Museums". They are this: the personal, the intellectual, the social and the physical. And so for me, when I was reading this compared to some of the other things I was reading, particularly about the experience and the transformation economies,
I realized that when we talk about social and physical areas of wellbeing, we are talking primarily about experience economy.
But when we're talking about intellectual and personal areas of wellbeing, we can move, that's where we can really see [00:19:00] impact along that idea of the transformation economy. Okay, so this is a whole lot to take in and I don't want to overwhelm us with too much information today. So what I'd like to do is break this episode up into smaller bite-sized portions so that you can really dig your teeth into what it is that we're talking about.
Okay, so let me recap what I've talked about so far, and then in the next few episodes we'll go into the experience economy, social and physical aspects, things that you can do in your museum to help people along those lines. And then in the third episode of this series, we'll talk about transformation, personal and intellectual growth.
Okay, so just to wrap up here, in terms of what we've set up so far. For visitors to come away from your museum and say, [00:20:00] "that was worth my time", we need to set up experiences that are based around what the visitor not only expects to see, but what they want to see, even sometimes in ways that they don't know that they want.
We need to tap into their primal instincts, the things that make them feel safe, healthy, and happy. We need to create and craft experiences and settings in such a way that the visitor experiences it, and as the user says, this was a valuable use of my time and my money.
Okay, so I hope that that was helpful to you and I look forward to the next episode where we're gonna dive a little deeper into this topic and talk a little bit more about how we can impact our visitor's physical and social experiences when they're on [00:21:00] our site, so that they have the most valuable time possible.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me. You can find all of the show notes and the links to these books that I've referenced on my website at modernmuseumeducation.com / podcast / 0 0 3.
So thank you so much for joining us, and I'll see you back next time. And in the meantime, please remember that your work is not childish just because you work with children.