Sunday, December 30, 2012

2012: A Year in Lessons and Thanks

 
Thanks to Nina Lesaout for this photo

I wasn’t going to write an end of the year looking back, looking ahead post on Museum Notes for 2012. In fact, I have been working on a post I have long wanted to write about putting children at the center of our work. As I wrote, read, and thought–and wrote, read, and thought some more–I was struck by how often I  learn from and am inspired by the thinking of generous colleagues, just-in-time insights, and the children and parents we serve. And so 2012: A Year in Lessons and Thanks bumps Children at the Center for the moment.

With my great thanks to…
  • The searchers, seekers, and surfers who have followed links to fresh ideas, new designs, and remarkable images hovering at the intersections of design and thinking; and have passed them on as kindling to spark imaginations. 
  • Those astute strategic planners who have let their commitment and critical eyes track implementation of their plans; and have directed their fine-tuning up-stream to support fuller, sustained, and committed follow-through on plans.
  •  The masterful museum planners who show how to look at and link everything with everything else and then follow the vibrating connections to new spaces, places, and platforms.
  • Those who share their delight in logic models, great appetite for questions, and who enthusiastically search for new, meaningful, and sometimes unusual measures of how museums matter. 
  •  The thinkers, linkers, writers, and friendly provocateurs, those past and still active, who agitate against complacency, challenge self-congratulation, open new perspectives, and spark new experiments with their books, blogs, articles, and questions.
  • The attentive and alert souls who demonstrate that listening is an active verb with a power to convert old certainties into new possibilities.  
  • Those who test easy assumptions with bold simple experiments.

  • All the parents who have shared their well-thought out agendas for their museum visits and their understanding of how their children will benefit from time in a rich environment, interacting with other children, and expanding their worlds.
  • The children, to Eli and Levi, Harper, Cyrus, Ian and Sara, and children whose names I have not yet learned, for the privilege of letting me glimpse what fascinates them, what they know and are figuring out, and all that they can do.

Best wishes for a grand 2013.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Play Spotting

 

Bouncing along the snow-rutted streets on a recent hectic, errand-ful Saturday, I listened to The Splendid Table on Minnesota Public Radio. Host Lynne Rossetto Kasper was interviewing John Moe about 3 food apps he recommended for techie foodies. One recommendation in particular caught my attention: Foodspotting. Moe described Foodspotting as the Facebook of going out to eat. First, you enter your location. Available foods nearby then pop-up showing what someone has ordered, photographed, uploaded. Later a comment is added about how the dish actually tasted.

It wasn’t the food focus of the app that caught my interest. Rather it was imagining play as the focus, as in playspotting. What if people were as interested in, alert to, and enthusiastic about spotting and sharing wonderful, found moments of children (and families) at play as they are about finding a delicious key lime pie or pasta Bolognese served on pappardello?

Admittedly, there are lots of resources and blogs about play, play resources, and playgrounds. A few I enjoy regularly reflect the variety.
  • PlayWatch is a community discussion listserv hosted by the Providence Children’s Museum. It shares and connects people, ideas, and resources to safeguard and promote children’s play.
  • Playscapes is a blog about playground design spotlighting examples of a wonderful variety of unconventional and unlikely play spaces from around the world: artistic, historic, rustic, and found. Some, but not all are planned as playgrounds.
  • Just Let Children Play has a list of the best play blogs  along with regular postings about play in many forms and settings.
Play spotting is some mix of these blogs and foodspotting. It picks up everyday, anywhere, on-the-spot play, those moments when children have escaped from the structure and linearity of their lives to find, direct, and become absorbed in their own play, brief or extended. Not limited to play in museums, libraries, playgrounds, nature centers, or the play corner at the clinic, it focuses on children at play on the beach, at the hardware store, in the check-out line, in the yard, taking out the trash, waiting for the parade to begin. Play spotting follows children’s play as they hide in leaves; disappear between the overcoats on the store rack; inhabit a cave under the blanket-draped picnic table, or construct an elaborate cardboard arcade at a parent’s shop. Caine’s Arcade is an excellent example of play spotting. A customer at Caine’s father’s car parts store noticed and was curious about Caine’s construction. He checked out the arcade, talked with Caine about it, and uploaded a video to share with others.

The spirit of play spotting is pausing and observing children at play. It is watching them and getting to know them and their thinking through their play. It is noticing what fascinates them and glimpsing the intensity they invest in play. If there were a play spotting app, for instance, you might share a series of photos of two young cousins fashioning swords and scabbards out of aluminum foil and duct tape. You might capture three friends standing in front of a giant fan shifting their bodies and bobbing their heads until the blowing air lifts their caps off and they chase after it–only to return to for another round of “blow-away hats”. You might notice children at Costco calling out spontaneously and exuberantly to one another from passing shopping carts. “Pickles!” shouts one. “Pickles, yum!” replies another. A final “Pickles yeah!” ends the call-and-response. As their laughter fades, you’d upload the photo or video to share with and delight the rest of us.




Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Serving the Museum’s Full Age Range



When one museum tackles a big question about serving their audience, I am likely to hear audience in many other questions museums are considering. So it has seemed recently. Over the last few months, I have been in multiple master planning sessions, on conference calls, and pouring over marketing studies that focus on serving the upper end of a museum’s age range. That’s one reason why I re-posted Audience, An Area of Enduring Focus last week.

Like all museums, children’s museums struggle with how to serve the full range of their intended audience. Their more specific challenge is how to serve the upper end of their target age range and whether to serve children 7 or 8 to 10 years, tweens, and youth at all. This dance, shared by many museums, has a long history with many variations.

At one time children’s museums opened their doors to welcome children 3 - 12 years old, their parents and caregivers. Children 3 - 6 years arrived, returned, and began owning the museum. With time, many children’s museums rethought their audience and offerings and often landed on serving newborns - 8 year olds, occasionally targeting children up to 10 years. This change, it seems, brought younger children to the museums. More 2 year olds showed up as well as loyal 3 - 6 year olds. Wanting to expand their audience, serve the community well, and sometimes responding to internal pressure to “own” a wider niche, some children’s museums pushed on serving 7-10 year olds.

Evidence supports decisions to serve a younger audience and top out, for instance, at 6 years. Concern about the skills gap has meant more communities now offer universal pre-K. More 4 year olds are spending more of their day in school with less time for weekday visits to the children’s museum. Elementary schools are cutting budgets and classroom time for anything but teaching to standards and tests. School group attendance that draws children 5-6 years and older is dropping. Out-of-school hours are filled with afterschool out-of-home care , with sports, scouts. and music lessons. Growing competition among science, history, and art museums for 6-12 year olds in family and school groups is also impacting attendance. Finally, some children’s museums seem to feel resigned to losing the upper end of their target age, citing KAGOY–kids are getting older younger–and the “boo” factor–bigger children don’t want to be around younger children.  

On the other hand, the lower end of the age range, newborn to 2 years, is fairly secure for children’s museums. Parents with infants and toddlers have fewer options of places where their very young children are truly planned for and welcome. These parents are also strong, very strong, advocates for their needs and those of their babies: nursing spaces, clean and safe places, less busy times, times with fewer or no big kids. And while art, science, and history museums may be interested in serving 6-12 year olds, serving infants, toddlers and preschoolers is a significantly greater stretch to serve well. Many children’s museums are telling me that they track the average age of their audience and it is dropping. Last week I heard one museum say its average age is 4.5 years. A reasonable decision is to concentrate resources on serving a narrower age group well.

Not So Fast…
Physical challenge in play, part of a healthy childhood
That certainly isn’t the only choice. Before abandoning the upper end of the age range, I would encourage a children’s museum to look hard at the convergence of its strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families. Children are an audience for many museums. For children’s museums,however, children are more than an audience. They are the heart of the mission and central to the museum’s reason for being. Children’s museums have become places where children can be children. They are full of experiences and encounters that enrich millions of childhoods annually. As advocates for healthy and full childhoods, children’s museums have an opportunity, and perhaps a responsibility, to play a major role in stemming the erosion of childhood. The compression of childhood means children suited for play with toys want cell phones. Compression wears away a sense of freedom, safety, and promise children need for their well-being.

Many parents and grandparents don’t want their children aging up so fast. They want to enjoy their child at each age and stage rather than find themselves saying, “When the children were young,” regretting time passed unnecessarily quickly. Even children remain attached to their childhoods, at least occasionally. Regrettably lacking a study to back this up, I do have examples from experience: focus group summaries of tweens who are nostalgic about their childhoods and marketing studies citing 11 year olds wanting “lap time” with their parents. In children’s museums I see and listen to 10 and 11 year olds and remember overhearing an 11 year old announce, “I want to do this for a living when I grow-up,” as he pressed his 10th paper pulp medallion. Museums can make experiences better, much, much better for 7+ year olds by recognizing and responding to parents’ and children’s attachment to childhood.

Holding onto childhood favorites
Any of the 7 year olds we know hover at several points on the developmental spectrum at one time. This is typical. A child may be more like a 5 year old in social development and more like an 8 year old in language development. The broad developmental ranges typical of all children’s development are characteristically greater for children with special needs. A children's museum is a place where an 8 year old  with special needs fits in. These variations expand the picture of the 3, 5, or 7 year old a museum serves. Differences in children’s background and family experiences also account for variations. What is developmentally engaging and challenging to a 6 year old with varied and wide-ranging experiences may be more similar to an 8 year old with limited experiences. Clear-cut developmental breaks simply do not occur. Even the designations of early childhood (birth-8 years) and middle childhood (6-12 years) overlap. If a museum is planning for 6 year olds, how can it not plan for 10 year olds–who may also enjoy aspects of being 6?

A developmental perspective across the full range of early and middle childhood is invaluable. It shifts the primary focus from chronological ages and grades in school to what is happening for the child. Understanding the full developmental range involves understanding each age and stage. Recently I facilitated a half-day discussion with a leadership team to affirm their target age range–newborns through 15 year olds–and how to serve them. At the workshop’s conclusion, one participant noted that serving the age range well means knowing not only where a child is developmentally now, but also where that child is headed developmentally.

Families with children across the age range
Not only are children wonderfully varied, but their families are as well. Many families have children ranging in age from newborn to 10 or 11 years. They want to do things together as a family–in one place. With experiences that engage a 2, 5, and 8 year old and amenities that make it easy for families to explore together, a children’s museum can be family, child, and mission centered.

What other considerations do you find at the convergence of a museum’s strategic interests, the developmental interests of its young audience, and the needs of its families?



Focusing on the Audience
What is interesting to 7 year olds?
By engaging the marketing, developmental and design expertise that has been a hallmark of children’s museums’ growing audience (if perhaps younger audience), a museum could have success serving 7-8 year olds in ways that resemble their success serving 4.5 year olds. This is not the realm of magical thinking and crossing fingers, closing eyes and muttering, “I hope, I hope, I hope they come.” It is the realm of focusing and deepening a museum’s understanding of children 7-10 or 11 and 12 years; of experimenting, stretching, and revising assumptions about how to serve them. This exploration requires plain thinking and a few guidelines about audience.
  • Trying to serve a museum’s full age range is not the same as “aging up” or changing the target audience to  older children. When a museum works to better serve its full age range, it builds on a foundation of serving that audience: attendance data with school group numbers; member and visitor surveys often with age group information; and relationships with members and teachers. An approach to better serving the upper end of the current age range may also be helpful to a museum expanding its age range from, say, 6 years to 8 years or 8 to 10 years–but the starting points differ.
  • All parts of a museum’s audience are valued. All must be served well. Here’s the catch: all parts of the audience will not (and can not) have a high presence. An equally high level of services, offerings, programs, and exhibit real estate is not needed for all groups. Groups with a lower presence at the museum, typically the youngest and oldest, should have comparably fewer but high quality experiences. The 7-10 year old set is in this “older shoulder” group.
  • Serving any and all age groups well relies on understanding them well. Get to know 7-10 year olds. Bring varied perspectives and sources of information to this exploration. What do these children say is fascinating to them? What does the museum do consistently well that other venues do not? What’s happening for them developmentally? What do their parents say interests them? What do their parents think is wonderful about them? Check assumptions about who they are and their interests. Ask them and observe them. Don't guess.
What other considerations of the audience prepare a museum for serving the upper end of its age range?


Getting Started
If serving the upper end of the museum’s targeted age range better is central to mission, attendance, and visitor experience, a deliberate and thoughtful approach is necessary.  By no means comprehensive, the steps below can get a museum started. Lessons from these steps should point to new ones.
Clarify the starting and end points. Decide on the age group to focus on and be specific. Gather information on the number of children in this age range currently served and how: in exhibits? in programs? If no information is available, a survey may be in order. Be clear about what you hope to accomplish with this effort. Is it an increase in the number of children in the age group? If so, what’s a realistic stretch? Is it satisfaction among families with children across the age range? Keeping families as members for longer? Keep in mind that 7-10 year olds flooding exhibits and programs and pushing their share of attendance from 5% to 25% is unlikely. An increased presence will occur gradually as 5 and 6 year olds grow up and stay hooked on museum offerings; as word gets out to more families; and as the museum improves its pitch for older children. 
Get to know the age group. Visit places where children 7-12 years spend time and are engaged in ways the museum hopes to engage them. It may be in your museum, another museum, at the library, park and rec, or Boys and Girls club. Observe them, listen to what they talk about, notice how they relate to one anther. Take notes and photos. Refer to books like Yardsticks by Chip Wood which has a good feel for children 4-14 years and to the Search Institute’s Developmental Assets.
Know your own museum. Take a very good look at where children in the upper end of the age range currently have the highest presence in your museum's exhibits and document it. Observe them; talk to them. Ask what attracts them to the area, what they like about the activity, why, and what else they'd like to do there. Photograph them and what they are doing; make notes. Record numbers of children, ages, and times on a floor plan in the area. Then, build on their interests, responses, and insights. Modify or develop activities and incorporate them into exhibits. Be sure to revisit these areas, observe, and compare before-and-after data. Has the presence, activity, or dwell time of this age group changed? Repeat this process; it may take several rounds to get a good feel for a good match. Apply the approach to programs as well.
Open-ended materials: water,mud and gravel
Rethink spaces with older children in mind. Many museums have spaces designated for infants and toddlers up to 3 or 4 years, both as specific galleries and as “tod pods” in other galleries and exhibits. Seldom used for older children, a designated gallery has both possibilities and challenges. Allocating significant square footage often isn’t justified for a small age cohort. Even when it is justified, identifying experiences that appeal to older children without being a magnet for much younger ones can be a challenge. Material intense maker spaces, multi-step processes like stop-action animation, physical challenges requiring coordination, cultural explorations, engineering feats, and creative applications of technology and media are possibilities. These engage the increasing capacity in middle childhood to think abstractly, apply complex problem solving strategies, persist, and use fine motor coordination. 
Tweens area (right) set lower 
than children's area (left)
Targeted age strategies are one approach. Strategies that transcend age are another. Open-ended experiences and materials engage children across the age and developmental spectrum differently. A child’s expanding repertoire of experiences that come with age and development play out differently with build platforms, material explorations, and sensory phenomena such as light and shadow. Design choices can also reinforce these strategies. Adjacencies might locate early child spaces out of first sight at the entry. Changing levels and sight lines can visually separate areas and age groups. Selecting a look-and-feel of spaces to appeal to a broader age range can expand rather than shrink age appeal. 


Taking a cue from children's thinking
Build on strengths. Children across the age range are delightfully curious. Even as babies they express preferences; as soon as they can talk they make observations and share wonderful ideas. Learning from children and how they think can (and should) happen at any age. With development, however, children enjoy increasing capacities to think, imagine, explain, solve problems, and express ideas. In serving the full age range of the museum, take full advantage of these exciting age-related developmental capacities of children 6 and 7 years old and up. These children can draw. They have a wider range of experiences to draw on. They can explain their ideas and use increasingly complex and creative thinking and communication strategies to do so. They can tell you a lot. Perhaps the answer to how to serve children 7 years and up is to ask them.

What strategies have you found that are effective in serving children 6 and 7 years old and older?  

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Rewind: Audience, An Area of Enduring Focus


 
Several years ago on a strategic planning project, my planning partner Andrea Fox Jensen referred to a museum’s audience as an area enduring focus. Someone on the strategic planning team had commented that the museum had already been through discussions about their audience and what it should be.

The group seemed reassured by Andrea’s characterizing audience in this way: important, in fact so important, consideration of it is never complete. In any case, they engaged wholeheartedly in lively and productive discussions about age ranges, audience groups, and geographic radius. Later when the planning team brought the board into the discussion, members conveyed the value of revisiting this important question without a “been there, done that” subtext.

Andrea’s observation was so smart and helpful. Every project I work on–a strategic plan, learning framework, exhibit master plan, or something in between–involves a key discussion about audience. I don’t mean a back-up-and-start-from-scratch audience conversation. Typically these are fruitful discussions that review, check, or affirm the current audience. They relate the audience to the current project and get everyone on the same page. Sometimes they help bring new staff or board members along. These discussions are also opportunities to share new information or a chance insight about the audience like the arrival of universal pre-kindergarten in a community, declining school group visits, or an increase in moms’ groups.

These and countless other discussions about audiences, museums, and public value point to features that distinguish audience and other possible areas of enduring focus. Moreover, they underscore the critical role of audience in a museum acting intentionally and steadily on its aspirations and long-term value.


Of Persistent Interest
Enduring assumes a long-term, continuing interest. Nothing could be more central to a museum’s aspirations and reason for being than its audience. Who a museum intends to serve is as fundamental at start-up as it is during periods of growth and change, as it is at each step of fulfilling a promise to the community.

A sound and shared understanding of a museum’s audience is essential. Museums go about this in many ways and on an on-going basis: identifying primary, secondary, and emerging audiences; surveying visitors; analyzing attendance data; and sometimes conducting audience research. Museums then apply an understanding of the audience to shaping and presenting collections, engaging experiences, and educational services in order to open up possibilities of learning to its visitors. 

Sometimes, however, it seems that the persistent focus of audience is confused with attendance. A focus on attendance can, in fact, distract from the centrality of audience to a museum’s value. If, for instance, the challenge of audience was simply about more visitors, a museum could just send out a bus, pick up visitors, and hand out free passes.


A Significant Difference
An area of enduring focus must be capable of making a major contribution to a museum’s public service. Audience is pivotal, from community-wide awareness of a museum to making a difference in the learning lives of children, building social cohesion across neighborhoods, or increasing science literacy among citizens.

In this respect, the challenge is less about bringing more visitors to the museum than about bringing the right visitors to the museum. To be certain it serves all parts of its audience well and serves priority audience groups fully, a museum must be knowledgeable about, alert to, proactive, and respectful towards its audience. Stories spread about museums realizing the consequences of being vague about or indifferent to their audience.

Using a current and well-informed understanding of its audience, a museum needs to effectively reach and actively engage families, school, and community groups, children and adults, both current and potential visitors. The informal learning experiences it offers must address age-related development; be relevant to visitor interests, expectations and everyday lives; and align with its own aspirations.   


A Sharpening Perspective
Perspectives on critical, complex, and constant areas are never static. They evolve, advance, and become nuanced. Museums as well as their audiences exist in multiple, dynamic, external contexts. Successes and failures produce new insights that affect understanding and reaching audiences. New practices help refine and advance audience knowledge.

In only a few decades, museums have shifted from being about something, to being for the general public, to serving specific audience segments, to being concerned with who is not coming to the museum. Learning from and about actual and intended visitors shifts perspectives, reveals interests and expectations of visitors, and produces new insights about what is attractive to them.

A body of audience knowledge builds from multiple sources: surveys, focus groups, and visitor panels, census data, and information generated by other organizations. New practices and insights come from the work of other museums, from research conducted in the field on behalf of museums, and from audience development work supported by, for instance, the Wallace Foundation. Continuous scanning of emerging community and audience trends, sharing and interpreting observations, and following the implications of new information sharpen perspectives.


Supporting Practices
An intense commitment to audience in a pocket of the museum is inadequate in serving audiences well and catalyzing the mission. A museum must operate with a shared understanding of priority audiences, an organization-wide value on relationships that serve the audience well, and a strong belief that improving service to the audience will make a difference.

Robust audience-centered systems and procedures, integrated with practices, supported by resources, and reaching across the organization are necessary to grow audience knowledge, facilitate its transfer, and apply it effectively to experiences. Supportive practices must permeate developing and designing exhibitions; involving audience groups in planning programs and exhibitions; training staff for interaction; calibrating the variety of offerings and pace of change; and evaluating programs and exhibitions and their impact on the audience.

This is a museum’s everyday version of enduring focus. It circulates and re-circulates, interprets and re-interprets audience information and visitor studies. Staff look for evidence for-and-against goals and hunches. Teams address audience interests and engagement strategies at the forefront of every project and initiative. They prototype and revise experience goals, activities, messages, and designs. They evaluate the impact of experiences on the audience. And they begin again, playing it forward.


Intensifying Attention to Audience
In my work, I have found that identifying audience as an area of enduring focus is useful in intensifying attention on this critical piece of a museum’s potential to make a difference. It clearly signals to staff and board that the people and communities they hope to serve are the highest priority, at the center, at every step, now and in the future.