29th November 2010

A Fruitful Workshop with Nina Simon at the Museu Picasso

Coming up with formulas to encourage the active participation of the public is still a pending issue in many museums. For the staff of these institutions, the presence of Nina Simon in Barcelona provided an exceptional opportunity to discuss this challenge, learn about the participatory initiatives being implemented in other countries and share experiences.

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15th November 2010

e-interview with Nina Simon by Museu Picasso

I first met Nina in Indianapolis at the Museums and the Web 2009 Conference, but I had been reading her instructive and witty blog, MuseumTwo, for quite a long time then. Precisely for her blog she won an Award at the MW09 Best of the Web. As we have been disseminating, we are happy to welcome Nina at our museum, where she’ll give a talk on Wednesday 17th November 2010.

Nina just published her first book a few months ago, The Participatory Museum. You can read a review on a recent post we wrote. I had the opportunity to interview Nina as a prologue to her coming to Barcelona. Here you are: Read more »

5th November 2010

How can we make museums more participatory? Nina Simon provides a lot of ideas in her book The Participatory Museum

To get us nicely warmed up before the lecture that Nina Simon will give at the Museu Picasso on Wednesday 17 November, we offer you a review of her widely acclaimed book.

The concept of public participation is associated above all these days with the track opened up by social media. And it’s true that the social networks provide endless options to share, comment, recommend, co-create and, in short, participate so easily and so immediately that we’re still getting used to. But the idea of participation goes far beyond the Web 2.0. The museum visitor, now accustomed to being an agent in the virtual environment must also be offered channels of expression and participation in the physical environment of the museum. Read more »

11th July 2009

5 ideas from “The Museum of the 21st century” talk between Directors of Tate & British

Yesterday in London, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum and Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, discussed about the Museum of the 21st Century in front of an audience of 500, at the London School of Economics. The event was coorganized with Thames & Hudson. While the announced podcast is not yet available, here are 5 ideas I’ve chosen from the excerpts publishes in Guardian and in Social media and Comunications:

1. Museum’s future lies on the internet: the relationship between institutions and their audiences would be transformed by the internet. Museums would become more like multimedia organizations.
2. The Museum will address audiences across the world and will be a place where people across the world will have a conversation. Those institutions which take up this notion fastest and furthest will be the ones which have the authority in the future.
3. The future has to be the museum as a publisher and broadcaster: there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.
4. The growing challenge will be to look for online capacity and encourage curatorial teams to work there as much as they do in the galleries.
5. In the past, there has been an imperfect communication between visitors and curators. The possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now.

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