The bikini bridge and other social objects

In The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon discusses the “social object,” which seems to be a term coined in 2005 to mean “conversation piece.” (I prefer “conversation piece”, because to me “social object” sounds like an object that is social rather than something that has a social function.) These are items that spark conversation, like dogs or babies or a bizarre hat. They provide easy entry points to human interaction that may be less threatening than directly initiating a conversation.

They may also be curious or controversial sculptures, websites, or memes — things (not necessarily physical) that get crowds of people talking. A recent example I encountered is the bikini bridge meme.

In this case, the meme was deliberately fabricated by 4chan, but once they got the ball rolling, the word quickly spread throughout the internet. Arguably, the social object here was the hashtag: #BikiniBridge2014.

Simon lists four ways that objects can be social: make a personal connection (e.g., an Erector set invites someone to relate a story about *their* first set), impose physically (e.g., a car crash nearby), provoke a response (e.g., graffiti on a wall), or create interactions (e.g., a football). The bikini bridge is definitely provocative (responses range from people who think they’re sexy to people who think the idea is yet another way to objectify women), and for many, also personal (e.g., those who posted a selfie to share their own bikini bridge with the world).

At JPL, we make use of social objects to connect with people outside the lab. Speakers often bring a life-size replica of one of the Mars Science Laboratory’s wheels to let people experience for themselves how big they are and examine the design up close.

I can think of several social objects that inspired me to interact with others just in the past week:

  • a purple origami necklace in the shape of a rocket
  • a USB flash drive shaped like a storm trooper
  • a curiously shaped iPhone case that turned out to be created by a 3D printer

… and the entire poster session at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), filled with more than 600 posters, was a smorgasbord of social objects, deliberately created to invite interaction!

Perhaps research posters could borrow ideas from Simon’s suggestions about how to make museum/display objects more social:

  1. Ask visitors questions: The goal is for the visitor to personally engage with the exhibit (poster). Perhaps questions like “when did you first see a solar eclipse?” I’ve yet to see an interactive poster that allowed you to post or write in contributions as a visitor, but it might be fun to experiment with!
  2. Provide live interpretation: This is already a built-in feature of poster sessions. When the presenter is present, that is.
  3. Make it provocative: Everyone loves a controversy!
  4. Offer visitors ways to share: Create your own hashtag? Microblogging was rampant at LPSC. More pedestrian: hand out business cards or printouts of the poster.

What’s your favorite social object?

Cataloging on the edge

The first major assignment for my Cataloging class was to round up 20 books and create catalog entries for them. Any books, so long as no more than three were “literature.” After getting stuck for a while on trying to decide what exactly “literature” was, I settled on my books (mostly non-fiction, which apparently was the goal), and dove in.

This was hard.

This was hard because there are no good resources out there (that I know of, or that my class knows of) for exactly how to “catalog a book.” This astonished me, since a system that allows many many people to contribute data is exquisitely vulnerable to any inconsistencies in how those records are created. Surely there are standard rules for what information to include, where to find it, and how to express it?

Kind of.

The currently cataloging ruleset, RDA (Resource Description and Access), sets forth guidelines about what kind of content should go into a bibliographic record, but not how to format it. RDA seeks to implement FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), which is a statement of cataloging philosophy and what user needs are out there. FRBR also contains an entity-relationship diagram that traces out how works, creators, and subjects are (or should be?) connected. FRBR is silent on how to actually create a record, though.

Further, no real system out there actually implements FRBR yet, and even RDA only spells out a partial path to it (parts of RDA are not yet defined, like what kind of relationships between subjects should be captured).

In the meantime, real systems use something called MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) to encode bibliographic records. So that’s what we used to catalog our 20 books. MARC provides some guidelines about formatting (e.g., when to end a field with a period and what field separators to use) but is silent on other aspects like capitalization and bigger questions like where to get the required information from. For example, how do you go about extracting the publication date from a book? How should you express the author’s name?

Here’s where the assignment gets pedagogically interesting, for two reasons.

First, we were operating at the “pleasantly frustrating” level. James Paul Gee listed this as an effectively learning principle in his guide to “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” He suggested that a good learning challenge stays within, but at the edge of, the student’s “regime of competence.” We weren’t just executing a set of well understood rules; instead, there is a lot of ambiguity and nuance, and each question pushed us to dig deeper.

Second, we were working with books in the wild. I gather that most cataloging professors assign their students the same set of books to practice cataloging on. The real answer is known, any questions or gotchas have already been anticipated, and the result is a controlled, sandbox experience.

My professor instead flung the doors wide open and let us each pick our own 20 books, without any sense of what would turn out to be easy or hard to catalog. The result was a chaotic, challenging, and ultimately far more educational experience.

This approach only worked because we had a discussion forum and a professor who monitored it assiduously. Students plastered the forum with questions. “What if the book is a translation?” “What if the pages aren’t numbered?” “What if there are multiple publishers?” Our professor responded quickly to every question, and over time I realized that I was quite possibly learning more from the forum than from my own small set of 20 books. With 88 students, we had something like 1700 books being catalogued (some are duplicates), and the array of issues that came up was dazzling. It was great to have the practice of actually creating my own records (and hunting down resources to allow me to deal with my books’ issues), but it was also fantastic to get to eavesdrop on my classmates’ questions and learn vicariously through them.

In that assignment, we only had to create fields for each book’s title, publisher, publication date, etc. The next assignment had us add the authorized form of the author’s name, and we are just about to revisit our records again to add appropriate subject headings. Each iteration makes our records richer and increases our understanding of the cataloging process. And I have to applaud Prof. Mary Bolin for structuring the process in such an interesting and valuable way.

Participatory exhibits

We’re now reading The Participatory Museum (by Nina Simon) for my class on Maker Spaces. This book (freely available! and you’re encouraged to read participatively, too!) advocates for innovation in creating truly valuable participatory experiences for museum visitors. That means going beyond a comment card or a build-your-own-X to first ask questions like:

  1. What would the visitor personally gain by participating? (personal)
  2. What would the visitor gain by having other visitors participate? (social)
  3. What would the museum gain by having visitors participate? Does it align with the museum’s goals or is it just entertainment? (institutional)

In retrospect these seem obvious. But how often are they employed?

Developing a participatory experience, Simon argues, “doesn’t require flashy theaters or blockbuster exhibits. It requires institutions that have genuine respect for and interest in the experiences, stories, and abilities of visitors.”

I was struck by this comment. I think it often happens that interactive exhibits are viewed as eye candy or entertainment, something to draw people in but perhaps not as serious or contentful as a static, traditional display. This view equates interaction with condescension, e.g., “You’re not smart enough or serious enough to focus on the real stuff, so we’ll entertain you instead.” This statement turns that around by instead equating interaction with respect, e.g., “We want to get your input because it will enrich what is already here.”

I also appreciated Simon’s discussion of how not everyone wants to participate by being a content creator (creating a video or a poster or an essay or…). She identifies five ways people can participate: creating, critiquing, collecting, joining, and spectating. She is also quick to assert that there is no moral hierarchy in these different modes of participation. Some people are driven to create, while others prefer to spectate. Your desired role likely changes depending on the topic and venue. And that’s okay.

She notes that content creators are in the minority, for a variety of reasons that you can probably guess off the top of your head. But she makes a strong case for the importance of other kinds of contributions. You may personally have benefited from movie, restaurant, or book ratings by previous consumers; from connecting with old friends on Facebook even if they do not post daily status updates; or from having an audience for your blog, whether or not the audience leaves comments.

There is some pushback against the transformation of the traditional static, hushed environment of the museum into something more participatory. Dobrzynski argues that museums will lose their current identity and that participatory experience will change “who goes to museums and for what”. Simon addressed this point as well: participatory experiences may only appeal to some, but traditional museum experiences are similarly focused on only a sub-population. The most successful museums will integrate elements of both.

So how do you create a meaningful participatory experience? Simon suggests that constraints are your friend: they lower the barrier to entry. Nothing is more daunting than being asked to write a story on a blank sheet of paper. But anyone can do Mad Libs (and it’s fun!). The motivational effect of a constrained art form has been celebrated from the haiku to the sonnet, and it applies here too. Finally, Simon emphasizes the importance of giving participants feedback. How will their contributions be used? Displayed? Shared? Can you send an email when their work goes “live”?

I’ve mentioned the Idea Box before as an example of participatory creation, but it bears another mention here.

I’m finding this book to be engaging and exciting. It makes me want to go out there start participating… maybe by creating my own participatory event. Like a soldering workshop for Kids Building Things. :)

This library is your library

In my class on Maker Spaces, we are discussing innovation: where it arises, how to encourage it, and how it manifests in different personal styles.

One article we read this week is It’s All Around You: Creating a Culture of Innovation, which offers several suggestions for inspiring innovation. These range from putting whiteboards at watering holes to creating innovation prompts to taking (and sharing) photos of unique things. The author even suggests that “libraries should have analog developer environments” akin to the dev spaces used for software and web prototyping. I’m not sure exactly how that would manifest as a physical space (one room set aside as the “dev library”?), but I was intrigued.

But what really caught my eye was the section in which the author discusses public involvement:

“People have a lot of personal attachment to their home libraries, and with that a need for customization. By bringing more of our patrons into the conversation, we can improve those feelings of involvement across the board, hopefully upping our usage in the process.”

I’m not convinced there’s a real idea here — what does it mean to “bring patrons in to the conversation” and how does that relate to creating an innovation cultur? — but it inspired new ideas in ME!

How can you make a public library your library?

What does “customization” mean in a library context?

How about these ideas:

  1. Capital One allows you to upload your own photo to personalize the printed card. This is absolutely brilliant. It probably costs Capital One basically nothing. Card owners feel more invested and connected to their “personal” card — and probably more likely to use THAT card versus other ones in their wallet! Why not give library patrons the same option for their library cards?
  2. If it’s your library, then they’re your books. (Literally so, in the taxpayer-supported sense.) Why not bookplates? I raised this idea at my public library as a thank-you recognition for our volunteers, and we tried it out. Volunteers get to pick any book, and we put a thank-you bookplate in that says “Volunteers: A Gift to the Community” and “So-n-so invites you to love this book.” Volunteers love it!
  3. If it’s your library, you get to influence the hours. Can we poll patrons to find out what hours would suit them best?
  4. If it’s your library, you get to pick the books. For most libraries, new books are selected and purchased by an expert librarian without direct patron involvement. Our library takes book suggestions from patrons, but the patron has to initiate that suggestion, and I suspect that many patrons don’t even know that this is an option. Further, there is no guarantee that the suggestion can or will be followed, and no timeline for when it might happen. Could we periodically put out a list of candidate books and let patrons vote? We could then feature the resulting purchases in a display to emphasize that “These are the books you chose!”

This is a brainstorm, so some of these ideas won’t be feasible or might not be effective. But let’s keep thinking creatively.

What would make you feel more invested in and engaged in your public library?

Be an Anthropologist to spot human ingenuity

I’m reading “The Ten Faces of Innovation” for my class on Maker Spaces. The book was written by Tom Kelley, the CEO of IDEO, a design firm that by definition is invested in being creative. Kelley begins by demonizing the Devil’s Advocate, which he claims “may be the biggest innovation killer in America today.” Critical thinking is good, but the DA is just too negative and squashes creativity.

Instead, Kelley identifies ten different “faces” (or roles) that people can employ to generate new ideas, solve problems, and otherwise innovate. Here I’d like to focus on just one, the Anthropologist, and the interesting view of the world that it encapsulates. (Possibly I find it interesting because it is so foreign to my usual modus operandi.)

Anthropologists gain inspiration by watching people. They observe them struggling with metro turnstiles or pushing that door instead of pulling it. In watching how people interact with the world, they learn not only what things are problematic but also what creative workarounds people already have devised. I figure an Anthropologist was behind the hands-free liftgate feature of my new car: he or she probably watched people approach their car with both arms full of stuff, then fumble or have to put things down to open the back. Now I can just swing my foot under the bumper and the liftgate opens automatically. Bingo!

An example of learning from workarounds might be the pave where they walk approach of planting the quad with grass, waiting a week while people walk the paths they want to walk, and only then pouring cement to create the sidewalks to match.

Kelley suggests an exercise to allow you to try out the Anthropologist face (or hat, or glasses, or whatnot):

“If you take a close look at your world, you’ll notice clever people playing the modern-day role of fix-it man. We’ve all seen the Post-it note with a helpful little instruction on top of the photocopier or the handwritten sign taped to the front of the reception desk.

To see how many exist in your world, try this exercise one day. Write down every fix you see at work, at home, or out on the town. Watch for things that have been duct-taped or bolted on. Look for add-on signs that explain what’s broken or how a machine really works.” (p. 29)

So, I did this.

My first observation was that post-its are rampant. The walls and the computer monitors in our Mars rover tactical operations room are filled with post-its. They include tips on how to disable the screen saver, how to “fix” the projected image when the refresh rate is wrong, who to call for certain problems, etc. In a meeting room, I found that the light switch was annotated with a sticker that says “Off: click down.” The light switch is a slider, which makes it seem like you can turn it off by sliding it all the way down. It’s dim enough at that point that it’s hard to tell whether it’s on or off. But instead you have to press hard enough to make it click before the light turns all the way off. I’m guessing that there was a lot of energy wasted before someone decided to just add the “click down” instruction. Solved!

In the break room, I found the following amusing sign taped to a cabinet above the sink:

“Please, only water-soluble liquids in sink.

Anything else will clog it.

Ok, so H2SO4 is water soluble,
but don’t put it down the drain either!”

Note that these are not just commands being inflicted on others. In most cases, they are work-arounds developed to address a design or use flaw. When the problem itself can’t or won’t be fixed, people step in to indicate how to deal with it. These are generous acts that may transpire between people that never meet face to face… but benefit regardless.

What fix-its have you seen today?

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