Webinar Review: Engaging Your Audience With Participatory Exhibits

Hi everyone! Today I am bringing you a review of a recorded webinar from the Indiana History Society. This webinar is meant to help you as museum professionals figure out how you can engage your audience in creating exhibits, and how you can allow your visitors to participate in exhibits in a variety of ways, whether that is through a dialogue or giving them a chance to tell their own personal stories. Finally, this webinar provides you with advice on how to engage with equity-deserving communities who have long been ignored by museums, and help you co-create and collaborate with them to tell their stories. It was presented by Jeanette Rooney, the Assistant Director of local history services at the Indiana History Society, in 2020.

The webinar began with a discussion of the general process of creating exhibits, as presented by
Nina Simon in her book The Participatory Museum. This book (available online through Simon’s website) is an excellent resource in general for developing any participatory exhibit, but in this case, it is also used to help explain step-by-step how curators can keep visitors and local communities in mind when creating participatory exhibits, as well as involve them in the planning and creation process. This can range from community partners and members helping find the need to an exhibit, all the way to involving them in prototyping the exhibit before the final product is unveiled. While it is beyond the scope of this review to dig into the Participatory Museum, it is highly recommended that you read and consider it while developing any exhibit.

The next step in understanding participatory exhibits is understanding the different ways in which the community can be involved. There are three distinct ways noted here:
Partnerships: Not the same as a sponsorships, typically between two similar organizations and built
around similar goals.
Key Community Members: Involving key voices from a community (of any kind) will allow that group to help guide the exhibit
Visitors/Audience: Never forget that your audience should be given the chance to provide input and
help guide any changes made!

Once you have a better understanding of how community members can be involved, your organization can then consider the steps to starting any community exhibit. As with any exhibit, these steps include defining your audience and Big Idea, selecting a project manager or single point of contact, and ensuring all elements work as a cohesive narrative, with community exhibits it is doubly important to develop community relationships at the beginning of the process. Because these networks are central to ensuring community participation in exhibits, make sure you take the time to really develop these relationships. It is particularly important to recognize that you will have to give up some control in the process and be flexible. This flexibility will more than likely allow for a better product in the end. However, it is also important not to lose too much control, especially when there are multiple communities involved in planning an exhibit, so make sure you keep your intended audience as your primary focus for any changes.

Another valuable tool to developing participatory and community-led exhibits is called a logic model, which allows curators and project managers to ensure that their inputs and resources match their desired outcomes. It begins by examining your intended long-term impacts and short-term outcomes from the exhibit, then examining the direct outputs from this (stories told, etc…), and the activities you will use to get there. Finally, you will list the inputs and resources you have and will use to set up these activities. By beginning with your intended outcomes and moving backwards, it will allow you to keep these outcomes in mind at every point in the process, hopefully making your exhibit more cohesive and allowing the participating community to be involved more effectively.

After understanding the steps involved in planning a participatory exhibit, the webinar then moves on to understanding the variety of interactive elements available in planning a participatory exhibit. Most  important to note is that interactive does not just mean hands on activities, though these are a possibility. Rather, they can also include activities that encourage visitors to examine and share their own analysis of a subject, or to share personal stories and experiences connected to the exhibit. These can be particularly effective when telling community stories and should be considered very thoroughly during planning. In the end, it is key that you use the relationships you are developing with communities and your intended audience to figure out what activities work best in each unique case. It is also important that interactive elements are done properly, as they can easily drag down the best of exhibits if done poorly. Ensuring that they are as accessible as possible, are not overly complicated and are not mandatory for understanding the exhibit are key to creating great interactives, so make sure to always keep that in mind.

Finally, the webinar shifted to a discussion with a variety of museum professionals in the United States who have done community and participatory exhibits before, and their own experiences and advice for anyone looking to create one in the future. While there is not enough space to discuss these in depth here, and I do highly recommend watching the webinar to see what they specifically mention, I will take this opportunity to mention some of the most important takeaways and notes from this discussion. Please note that this is just a sampling, and the webinar recording will have many more ideas available to you.

1. Be Prepared
While most museums are ready with a Plan B in case things do not go as planned, one thing noted in the discussion is that participatory exhibit often require Plans C-Z as well. Because participation of some sort (whether it is community or audience based) is key. Since you cannot know in advance how many or what percentage of your desired audience/community will actually participate, you should plan as best you can for any number to participate, from 100% participation all the way down to absolutely no participation. This will allow your exhibit to still be effective regardless of what happens. 

2. Involve Multiple Perspectives
While you clearly cannot involve every member of a community, no matter how much you try, it is important to ensure that you are involving as wide a variety of perspectives from any community as is feasible. No one single voice can effectively represent a community, especially for larger communities like those based around race, gender or sexuality (for example) and thus you need to make sure you consider what different people might think based on their circumstances. This is why building relationships must be done early on, as you want to develop as many as possible. 

3. Participation is Not Just a Checkbox
While making sure that communities are involved in planning exhibits is important, we must also make sure we are not just doing it to “check a box” or prove our diversity. Make sure that by including the  community members in your discussion, they are actually being listened to and consulted, and that they  are treated as full partners in these endeavors. Otherwise, it can be seen as somewhat offensive and  frustrating to many in these groups, as they will still feel unheard and ignored.

All in all, I would highly recommend this webinar to anyone interested in planning participatory exhibits in the future, or those looking at getting more involved with outside communities when it  comes to planning. By considering many of the points discussed in this webinar, I believe many  organizations and museum professionals can improve the way they consider community engagement and participatory exhibits in general.

Watch the webinar here.