Last summer I was scribing in Venice at Communicating the Museum, a conference looking at the relationship between the worlds of branding and museums. Drawing pictures in 34°C heat in front of a couple of hundred people and surrounded by Tintoretto masterpieces made it an interesting challenge. The line-up of speakers on day one included Robert Jones, Head of New Thinking at brand consultants Wolff Olins and Juan Cabral, creative partner at Fallon and creator of the Sony Bravia ‘balls’ and Cadbury ‘Gorilla’ adverts, who also worked on the Tate Trails and Tate Tracks projects. In different ways both speakers emphasised a shift in mindset away from museums as temples of learning, towards social spaces that take themselves a bit less seriously and facilitate activities that compliment the visitors own life and interests, even helping the visitor to initiate those activities themselves. A museum’s branding isn’t so much its logo or the exhibitions it displays as the way in makes you feel when you go there, the way you talk about it to friends and the complex mixture of thoughts and feelings which compel you to go back. Leading neatly on from that, the big topic on day two was user-generated content such as that hosted by websites like Flickr and YouTube, and how these sites are becoming increasingly valuable tools for museums in reaching and engaging new audiences. We heard from Patrick Walker of YouTube and George Oates from Flickr, both of whom demonstrated how museums might use their inherent ‘creative content’ to provide the catalyst for creative activity in their own visitors, and in the world at large as part of the web community.
Anyway, here are a few pieces of scribing from the event…
The energy required to maintain
this website has been offset.
Design based on Modularity by
Graph Paper Press
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