Advice the Focus of Recent Exhibit
 One of the many user generated submissions gathered by UW Museology students for the upcoming Advice exhibit. Photo by mskogly |
When Nina Simon, visiting professor of Museology, assigned her class a final project, the directions were simple: design an exhibit to get strangers to talk to each other.
The students’ response was an interactive exhibit about advice, in which visitors were able to view, contribute to, debate, and even deride advice submitted in a huge variety of forms. The exhibit was on display at the UW’s Husky Union Building (HUB) during commencement weekend.
Fourteen graduate students in Museology spent spring quarter conceiving the effort, collecting contributor-generated video, photo, voicemail, email, and Twitter advice. The exhibit included physical displays and interactive installations where visitors were able to view, post, and debate advice.
“We wanted to pick something that was applicable to everyone who would be passing through this space, whether you’re graduating or you’re visiting or you’re looking to go to this school,” explains Museology student Whitney Ford-Terry. “Advice is something that is overarching and can apply to everyone because we readily relate to it.”
The title -- Advice: give it, get it, flip it, f**k it – is the first indication that exhibit was far from typical. “In many exhibits, there is a set object,” says student Nicole Robert. “But in this case, the contributions really become the content itself.”
Students employed an array of social networking tools to solicit advice that would serve as the content for the exhibit. “We have utilized accounts with Vimeo, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook,” says Ford-Terry. “We’re feeding in content from all the other accounts into our Tumblr page to gather all the submissions in one place.” (All submissions can be viewed at http://adviceexhibit.tumblr.com/.)
Faced with a slim $300 budget, the students had to manage every aspect of the process. “We’ve been the exhibit designers, the fabricators, the artists, the marketers, the content-providers, the evaluators, the graphic designers,” says Ford-Terry. “You don’t usually do all everything. It’s a pretty huge task.”
Perhaps the most unique feature of the project is the prominence of the interactive element, traditionally relegated to the background if not absent from exhibit installations. That interactivity seems a double edged sword, since opening up the conversation to so many disparate voices is necessary for content generation but also prone to abuse.
“People want to hear alternative commentaries. I’ll admit that not everyone has something really relevant to say,” Ford-Terry says. “But, I think that when given the chance, and when encouraged to provide quality content and to be involved in the conversation, people really do say some inspiring, incredible things.”
Simon, instructor and nationally prominent adviser and developer of interactive museum exhibits observes, “For many people, museums are like church. They don’t want it to change due to notions they have about preserving tradition… but, at the same time, they may never go, because, for some of those same people, it is stale and boring.”
When asked what advice she would give to her students, Simon offers, “Move quickly, try lots of things, be willing to fail. You can make just as many bad decisions with lots of money and time as you can with nothing.
“If you have an incredible idea that seems too wacky to do, you should pursue it. Passion is more important than hitting all of your outcome goals.”
