Museum Audience Insight

Creativity – The Cart Before the Horse?

A couple of weeks ago a new publication coming out of the UK crossed my desk.  Overall, Learning to Live, which focuses on young people and museum education, is excellent.

 

But I couldn’t help being annoyed by one thing.  It keeps talking about creativity, and how important creativity is.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I think creativity is incredibly important and should absolutely be nurtured in children, both in and out of museums. 

 

But I couldn’t help thinking that a critical step was missing. 

 

And that is the nurturing of curiosity.  If you are not curious about something, you are not going to bother to expend an ounce of creativity on it.  Right?

 

Granted, I have been curious about curiosity for a while.  And I must confess I have my colleagues curious about it too, now.

 

Why?  One of the things we have noticed is that museum visitors who are personally motivated to visit museums are much more likely to identify themselves as being curious.  And visitors who do not identify themselves as curious tend to be less engaged in the museum and its offerings (and tend to visit for reasons other than personal ones). 

 

We have been tracking curiosity as a motivation for museum-going in a few of our studies, and have found that visitors who identify themselves as “curious” are significantly more positive about the museum, more likely to believe the staff cares about them, and more likely to support the museum for philanthropic reasons versus just the family budget.  That is, curious adults are more likely to be what we call “Museum Advocates.”  

 

And we believe that curious adults are much more likely to raise curious children, for whom creativity is a natural outgrowth. 

 

We’ll keep studying this in our research, and would love to hear your thoughts about curiosity and creativity as we plan out future lines of inquiry.  To comment, please feel free to click on “Comments” below (or if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to this blog, please go to our website to add a comment.

-Susie

Seeking your thoughts: Economic change and long-term shifts

We’re wondering if anyone out there might wish to share observations about how the shift in the economic environment has forced dramatically different thinking about the long-term future for their museums or the field in general.  

We’ve been asked to participate in an International Council of Museums event on this topic, and would love to hear from the field on this point.  Note that we’re not looking for topics such as having to crank back budgets in 2009.  Instead, we’re looking at the kind of fundamental rethinking that’s going on in businesses and households across America about how they’ve been forced to re-engineer hard-wired behaviors, reset their long-term expectations, or realize that reliable past patterns simply won’t hold up in the future.  

If you have any comments on this, please feel free to click on “Comments” below (or if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to this blog, please go to our website to add a comment.  If it’s a sensitive comment that you wish to share with us, but not publicly, please feel free to email james @ reachadvisors.com.  

If this request for help generates enough interest, even if you don’t have a comment to share, let us know as we could always consider scheduling it as an upcoming Museum Conversation conference call for the field.

We realize that this is a different kind of blog post than what we typically send, but thanks for allowing us to call for input on this topic!

What I Learned in Philadelphia

So I am back from a week in Philadelphia, attending both the Association of Children’s Museums and the American Association of Museums annual meetings.  Here are some things I observed/learned/thought about:

 

• Children’s museums do a great job encouraging children to play.  Which got me thinking.  Why can’t museums be places that encourage adults (and kids) to play?  Where else is play encouraged for adults?  How would more play benefit adults?
• Objects are important.  We know that (most museums are in the objects business, after all).  But I was thrilled to hear Lou Casagrande (Boston Children’s Museums) talk about how important those objects are to young children. . . . and about how children’s museums should utilize local objects in their museums more often.  Our research echoes Lou’s comments . . . . and we would love to see more local history museums partnering with children’s museums to get more young children exposed to those collections.
• Next time you need to move a large object on top of a small car, ask an exhibit designer to help:

• In our session on Museums in 2034, Gail Lord asked a fantastic question about how important experts (e.g., the curator) are if the public contributes the content?  I think savvy curators will recognize this as a mechanism to increase knowledge and build relevance . . . and I think the experts who lead the discussion and invite contributions will garner even more respect both in and out of the field.
• The blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History has a Twitter feed, and I understand that no one knows who is responsible.  Just that it is not an employee.  Maybe it is the whale after all.    Check it out:  http://twitter.com/NatHistoryWhale.
• When forecasting the future, museum folks often have some rather interesting predictions.  Most creative?  A tossup between opening Hooters branches in children’s museums and the NRA underwriting outdoor history museums.  Hmmm . . . . we’ll see about that.

 

We’ll come back to all of these (and point you in the right direction to find out more about the other future forecasts) via the blog over the next few months.

And if you attended either conference, we would love to hear what you learned or were mind-boggled by.  Share your thoughts by clicking on "comments" below.  (If you are reading this from your e-mail subscription to the blog, please go to our blog's website to add a comment.)

-Susie