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TEDxAdelaide

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to be in the live audience of the inaugural TEDxAdelaide event, which was organised by Bridge 8 and held at the RiAus.

For the uninitiated, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design; and goes by the strapline “Ideas Worth Spreading”. TED conferences have been happening for over 20 years now, with hundred of talks being recorded and posted online.

The ‘x’ bit refers to the fact that this was an independently organised TED event – local convenors take the basic TED format, branding and guidelines to run their own show. These TEDx events have spread like wildfire across the world – on Saturday alone Adelaide was one of some eight cities staging TEDx events.

So what sorts of things are talked about at a TEDx event? The Adelaide event had the theme “Ideas on the Edge” and there was an emphasis on Adelaide-based speakers, showcasing local talent and creativity. We had the technological (Christian Sandor’s augmented reality combining real and virtual worlds); emotional (Wend Lear teaching Palestinean teenagers how to create powerful photoessays – not a dry eye in the house!); “fancy-that!” facts (Frank Grutzner presenting complicated dance of 10 – count them! – platypus sex chromosomes); societal (Jodie Benveniste on how we could be better parents if we stopped trying to be perfect ones); as well as perspectives from surprising places (for instance Nick Palousis started out by confessing he was a ‘non-greenie’, only to go on to present an elegant manifesto for how Industry could take a leaf or two from Nature’s book).

There were also Burundian musicians, a documentary on the making of an Urban Art festival, and the whole day was punctuated by a fast-paced twitter stream from the audience (nearly 2000 #TEDxADL tweets over the course of the day).

I won’t go into details of speakers or presentations as this is all on the TEDxAdelaide website, plus podcasts of all the talks are being uploaded as I write. There is also a flickr stream, forum and much more online which will doubtless grow over the coming days – so check it out for yourself. . .

At drinks after the event, participants were keen to continue the conversation and it was great to meet so many interesting and passionate people. Many people agreed that Adelaide is the right size of city to bring together different skills, expertises and perspectives in creative ways: much smaller and the diversity wouldn’t be there in the first place; much bigger and the “two-degrees-of-separation rule” that can bridge cultural and disciplinary divides would no longer work.

In other words, Adelaide dreamers, creators and thinkers are less constrained by categorical boundaries because they have to be – the only way to get a critical mass together is to look over a few fences and see what other people are doing.

This brings me to one of the main underlying themes that jumped out at me during the day – sometimes things just defy categorisation and we need to be comfortable with that. This is not to say that categorisation is a bad thing – we can’t be experts at everything and categorisation has allowed specialisation and thus the great expansion of the sum of human knowledge. But at this stage of human history, there are probably numerous instances where categorisation is more of a hindrance than a help. There were so many examples of this over the course of the day – people challenging assumptions and testing boundaries and thus breaking into new ground. I can think of no better summary for this than to quote one of the most re-tweeted tweets from the day:

I think when people started to regard art & engineering as separate disciplines is pretty well when the world jumped the shark. (MoMcKinnon, we thank you for that pearl of wisdom!)

Another unifying theme was that of working with human nature, not against it. Humans are creatures of habit and inertia, and the decisions we make are just as much “paths of least resistance” as they are active choices. So it’s not just the nature of the choice that’s important, but the context in which that choice is made and presented. Environmental scientist Tim Jarvis introduced the concept of Choice architecture. By making certain decisions ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ (for instance selecting green energy sources or allowing organ donation), take-up rates can be dramatically increased. In a similar vein, marketing scientist (no I didn’t know they existed either) Byron Sharp blew apart some marketing myths about brand loyalty, describing our loyalties as “polygamous” and as much about what’s available as what we feel a personal affinity to.

There’s so much I could say, but I’d like to round this post up by relating the lessons from TEDxAdelaide to my main interests: culture and the visitor experience. Firstly, the idea of categories and boundaries is something we will increasingly have to grapple with – the definition of culture: who defines it, creates it, and ‘owns’ it is rapidly changing. What will this mean for traditional cultural ‘authority figures’ such as museums? Secondly, if you’re trying to connect with people, you really can’t get away with not understanding how they tick. If changing the design of tick-boxes on a form can dramatically affect the choices people make, what seemingly minor changes could heritage sites make to dramatically change the level of audience engagement?

One final note – someone asked me at the end of my day what my favourite session was. I said I think it’s too soon to know – my head was so full of ideas – and it probably still is. It will be those ideas and concepts that stick which are the most important, and only time will tell which they are.

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A different kind of ‘park’ visit

Today was Adelaide PARK(ing) day, where groups take over a city centre parking space and turn it into something else for a few hours.

According to the website, it started in San Francisco in 2005 and has since gone global with around 100 cities participating.

It is based on the idea that a parking space is just rented space – so if it can be occupied by a car, then why not something else? So for a few hours either side of today’s lunch hour, around a dozen city centre parking spaces were turned into art installations, outdoor design studios and miniature market gardens (including live chickens in one instance!).

Hosking Design's 'Happy Days' cutout figures

I managed to see all but one of them, which either wasn’t there or I blinked and missed it among the usual hustle-bustle of Gouger St.

Quoting the website, PARK(ing) Day is all about:

* Calling attention to the importance of urban public spaces
* Rethinking the way we use our streets
* Creating diverse conversations about design and how we make sustainable cities

JPE Design's comment wall

So how well did the parks achieve these objectives? Well based on my experiences, the most successful ones had at least two of three following ingredients:

  • Good Location: some sites were just better positioned than others. I had a map and systematically looked out for all of the parks, but I would have been in the minority. Most people would have stumbled across them on their lunch break. So those which were on reasonably busy thoroughfares (but not so busy that they were lost in amongst all the other goings on) seem to have the best conversations and interactions with passers by.
  • Something to do: those who had a way for the public to get involved somehow, for instance Hosking Design’s large cut-out figures which doubled as comment walls for people’s ideas about sustainability. (Although I think this might have worked better if it the topics for comments were bit more specific and focused – I probably wasn’t the only one who was at a loss for words when a pen was shoved in my hand). JPE’s artwork where people could map the paths they’d taken that day in lengths of string was another creative idea and primed thinking about the journeys we make.
  • Passionate people: parks who were staffed by energetic teams who seemed to genuinely enjoy engaging with the public, explaining what it was about, and getting passersby involved.

To get a flavour of the different parks, there is a Flickr stream on the PARKing day homepage.

(PS. I give the “sense of humour” prize to design company Enoki. Their park, entitled ‘All my friends are dead’, comprised a sole dinosaur skeleton made from large orange profile-cut pieces. There may have been a more profound story behind this installation, but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to look too closely as there was a huge crowd of school kids lining up to get into the cinema right next to them. Wonder what they made of it?)

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A "restless and disgruntled visitor" writes in The Monthly

What’s the point of museum objects?

It’s not all that often that an article on museum practice shares column inches and prominence with articles on Barack Obama and female infanticide. But that’s what’s happened in the latest edition of The Monthly. In an essay entitled “The Absent Heart”, novelist Amanda Lohrey laments that “so much exhibition design is pedestrian, or worse, confused and at some times chaotic”.

The core of her criticism is the “fetishising” of the object ahead of a wider story or narrative: “I come away with the impression that our curators are more conserned about the preservation of the artefact than they are to give any account of the history that produced it. Where is the passion for meaning, for making sense of the world? Where is the desire to create an experience for the visitor?“

As someone from an interpretation background, I can find much to agree with in this quest for wider meaning. Interpretation is all about answering the question “So What?” – and for this author at least, that question has not been adequately answered.

The essay challenges a lot of shared assumptions in the museums sector, and raises some intriguing questions:

  1. Have we reached the limits of letting people ‘make their own meanings’ in exhibition spaces? How much evidence do we have that this is a successful strategy? (And in some cases is ‘let visitors decide’ being used as a convenient fig leaf for avoiding controversy and not venturing an opinion?)
  2. From the point of view of storytelling, how important is the ‘real’ object? Lohrey makes the point in relation to showing the size of Phar Lap’s heart: “if you are concerned with meaning then a model will do, but if you are in the market for fetishising objects as magical tokens – “the real thing” – then it seems that only the pallid tissue of the original will suffice.” Here I could easily present a counter example: the Apollo capsule in the Smithsonian would be nowhere near as compelling if it were just a model, and not the scarred and burned vehicle that safely brought three men back to Earth after an incredible journey. But all this proves is that the value of the object is completely dependent on the point you’re trying to make.
  3. There seems to be an implicit assumption in the essay that an exhibition should follow a single specific narrative (at one point Lohrey observes that “the visitor is wandering along no clear path at all . . . “ Is this the prejudice of a novelist, whose chosen medium is by definition very linear, or is it of wider concern to visitors in general? Is it unrealistic to expect that a three-dimensional environment will easily lend itself to a single linear narrative?

In reading this article, it reminded me of a passage that really leapt out at me from the book “Thriving in the Knowledge Age” by John Falk and Beverly Sheppard (p127): ” . . .our collections bring value to the museum in direct proportion to the “knowledge” they provide. The objects do not “speak for themselves”. The intellectual value of a museum’s collections is directly tied to the use of these objects to provide answers to questions society finds valuable.”

This seems to reflect well the overall point of the article – what socially relevant questions is the display of these objects addressing?

Bottom line is that this article raises several legitimate questions, and I’m not sure how much evidence we have as a sector to properly address these questions. More research into how different audience groups relate to the exhibition environment is definitely needed.