Being teachable
Hi. My name is Ed and I love conferences.
It feels vaguely discomforting to write that, like I’m exposing some shameful truth about myself. But, sometimes you just have to own it. I love conferences; the stimulation of meeting new people, learning new things, and being deeply in the roles of both learner and teacher.
In November, I got a heaping helping. In the space of three weeks, I attended three very different, supremely impactful events. And being a narrative-creating kind of being, I’ve been looking for the story that links them and distills and synthesizes the powerful energies running through each. It’s been a hard slog. Each event in own right would’ve merited a lengthy recap, but coming in quick succession it’s been a bit like getting swamped by a wave and fighting to get back up to the surface just as the next wave hits you. I really do feel a bit battered, but mostly I feel grateful to have been in places where magic was happening.
MCN 2016: The Human-Centered Museum
Good conferences, the ones that push you and inspire you to think anew, are like mirrors. You see yourself, your practices, and your institution reflected through them in all their imperfectness. The Museum Computer Network held out a vision of museums as progressive forces for social good; for both their publics and their staffs. If you’ve never been, then the choice of “The Human-Centered Museum” as the theme might seem counterintuitive, but the Venn diagram of museum digital types and progressive practitioners has substantial overlap. Given the maturity and penetration of the digital realm into all aspects of museum work, it is unsurprising that the MCN community has turned its attention to more fundamental, humanistic issues. And they were intense topics; empathy, vulnerability, discrimination, racism.
MCN 2016 was an intense conference. I’ve never been at a professional event where there was so much crying. Not that there was a ton of it, but the fact that there was any is kind of amazing, and a testament to the kind of community MCN has decided to become. I’m sure we’ve all been part of organizations or events that espouse excellent-sounding values. What matters is how those values are made manifest — the culture. And MCN’s culture is deeply nurturing, vulnerable, and willing to honestly engage with what matters. Which is good, because 2016 has been one hell of a year.
For me, the conference was a petri dish of the kinds of interactions I know we as a profession need to be having at our institutions. And the instruction the speakers provided was just what I needed to witness. I was in sessions that started off with speakers asking the audience to agree not to share anything online so people could speak freely. I watched my peers get up in front of rooms full of strangers to share personal, sometimes painful, stories that have shaped them. The Chatham House rule was invoked in another, and other sessions featured curators, and directors (the occupations most often maligned in museum digital events) sharing their perspectives on where our work intersects and what their experience of working with us is like. The challenge to the attendees is how to bring that culture home and adapt it.
Seph Rodney said in his write-up for Hyperallergic that everyone he talked to seemed convinced that “insights into innovations in their particular corner of the museum field were to be found in this gathering.” If I had to try to give a one sentence recap of what my time in New Orleans was like, it’d be, “What are you doing to make things better?” Over and over again, I felt like speakers and sessions were challenging me with their examples to step up. Actually, that sentence could be modified two ways that’d be equally accurate, “What are you doing to make things better?” and “What are you doing to make things better?”
The takeaway: “We need to talk.” And we do.
Alibis for Interaction Masterclass, 11 November, 2016
Malmö, Sweden
Interaction Alibi: A rule, object, or change of state that allows a human to interact. This idea is central to designing for participation. An alibi might be a role, a rule, a narrative, a game, a mask, an instruction, an introduction. An interaction alibi helps you understand what you’re expected to do, feel safe trying something new, and trust that the outcome will be worth your time.
Alibis for Interaction was a one day event that designed to provide creative practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines with “experience design tools to use today.” I went to Alibis to conduct interviews with some of the speakers for an upcoming PEM exhibition on play and contemporary art. The interviews were compelling and will make valuable additions to the project, but the event itself had a much more profound impact on me. In terms of immediately useful terms, theory, and practices, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a better professional event. The delight of being in a thoughtfully designed space was intense, and the opposite of how workplaces feel much of the time, where so much is transmitted by osmosis, taken for granted, or left unsaid.
Alibis fundamentally realigned my perception of myself as an experience designer. I don’t know where I internalized the idea that “design” was something that happened only in certain specific contexts with specific people, but it was clear that I had. Alibis demonstrated how everything is a designable surface if you’re willing to spend the time to design it. And Huizinga‘s concept of the “magic circle” could be applied to much more than games or play environments. A meeting could be a magic circle. So could the lunchroom. Or an exhibition. An experience designer will look for the designable surfaces in the world and see that virtually everything is.
“Culture is the manifestation of values.” — Jan Gunnarson
One idea that reinforced what I’d heard in New Orleans was Johnanna Koljonen’s admonition to make active choices, and to particularly challenge traditions to solve whatever your problem is. And the problems that people kept bringing up were institutional culture problems. Gunnarson’s definition of culture as manifestation helped me tease apart what was at the core of my deep-seated revulsion for most mission and values statements. Without recognizable manifestations, values have a tendency to be bullshit; feel-good words that change nothing. Translating them into a culture–actually acting on those values–is the really challenging part. Experience design is really community design and everyone’s experience of the “things” we design is our community’s (or institution’s) culture.
Whenever the YouTube videos go up, you should check them out. Sebastian Deterding’s talk on hacking meetings will make your day.
The takeaway: We accept too much tradition unquestioned, and take too many designable surfaces for granted.
Clash of Realities Conference on the Art, Technology and Theory of Digital Games
November 14–16, 2016 Cologne, Germany
Clash of Realities was an international academic research conference on game design; the artistic design, technological development, and social perception of digital games, as well as the spreading of games literacy. A different group from PEM was here to conduct video interviews. I didn’t get much chance to attend sessions, but the two events I was were worth the trip.
I was excited to hear about “Star Citizen — Open Development as a Disruptive Game Design Practice” by Ortwin Freyermuth. Indulge me in a bit of back story for those of you not immediately captivated by news of pending sci-fi games. The past couple of years of geeky space opera game news have been dominated by two titles: “No Man’s Sky” by Hello Games, and “Star Citizen” by Cloud Imperium Games. “No Man’s Sky” promised an incomprehensibly vast universe of procedurally generated worlds to explore. It also featured a very closed development process, steeped in secrecy, announcements, and missed deadlines. When the game finally launched, and the gaming world got its hands on the game, the reviews were…meh.
Star Citizen adopted a radically different model. It’s the largest crowdfunded computer game to date. Backers have provided more than $125 million in contributions to build the game, which is still in it’s alpha phase. Star Citizen is being created with the input of 1.6 million active “citizens”. Cloud Imperium’s experiences to date will probably seem unsurprising to folks who design participatory experiences. Building a passionate community has allowed Cloud Imperium to test out the game universe more thoroughly than they could’ve in secret. It has also forced them to be extremely responsive to their community in ways that a traditionally-developed title wouldn’t have to do until the game was released.
The big shocker for me, and what I think is the greatest endorsement for working in the open was Freyermuth’s casual statement that it was still undetermined how much, if any, of the current alpha universe would be transferred into the final release version of the game. In other words, he was saying that the universe that 1.6 million people had invested time, money and effort into might get completely abandoned if they decided it was better to start over for the release version. The early adopters and most fervent advocates of the game might have to start from scratch like everybody else.
That this idea could even be considered, let alone spoken in public speaks volumes to the relationship (and therefore trust) Cloud Imperium has cultivated with its audience. And I covet that kind of relationship. It stands in stark contrast to the typical closed model museums practice, where the community is an outside entity, to be kept at bay until we’re ready to part the curtain and let them quietly in.
The real highlight of the conference for me was Eric Zimmerman’s keynote, “Clash of Opinions: A Discussion on Games, Design, and Culture”.
He took the conference theme, literally excerpting phrases from everyone’s abstracts, then handed them out on cards. He then asked us to join up in small groups, posed two part questions about gaming that had blanks in each half, and had us break into groups to try to find pairs of cards that answered those statements. People who felt moved got up and read their answers and Eric responded to their answer and how it related to the state of the field today and invited the audience to weigh in.
He essentially remixed the conference by making it a card game, the audience remixed it again through the answers they picked to the questions, and then he brought it back around to where it started; the big ideas. And isn’t that what a conference is supposed to be about? You get together to parallel process the big things, break them down into manageable chunks and jointly reassemble a shinier, fuller understanding through discourse?
It was an incredible piece of game design and experience design. The way he used the designable surfaces of a conference keynote, the magic circle of audience members coming up on stage to read their answers, the audience riffing off those.
The takeaway: Game design is infiltrating everything. And it has a lot to offer us.
So after all that, and a long flight home, the pile of receipts from four countries in four currencies, what sense can I make of it? The statement that finally tied it all together for me was one I heard at my Quaker meeting, “Let us teach by being ourselves teachable.” That’s really what links the November events; the recognition that we have a lot to do, a lot to challenge and ask “Is this really the best way to do our work?” We have a lot to teach and share, but we will only ever be able to do it better by recognizing how much we have to learn and being OK with our imperfection.
