For all the idle hands of the world – this Calendar Scarf by Patrick Frey is so tempting, so satisfying. Each day you get to pull & unravel just a little bit of the year.

And it works. I found the calender installed in a friend’s office. See that sticky note in the background? This is what it says – if this calendar does not belong to you, please don’t unravel it. A sign of good invitation & incentive to participate is when you have to remind people of their manners!

If you ever had trouble remembering to flip the date on your calendar – this satisfying little action is enough incentive to keep you going. Imagine the satisfaction of coming back to work from a weekend and getting to pull three days worth of string… YES! You want to do it!

Maybe not quite as satisfying – what you have at the end? Maybe Patrick could take donations for recycling, or start a flickr page for creative crafts to do with a great big pile of string.

Interactive technology that takes it slow and fast at the same time – The Walker Art Center created analog tweets for the 2012 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting & Museum Expo in Minneapolis.

The idea – You write it, we tweet it. The analog tweet system was created in partnership with Lunalux’s Jenni Undis. It’s a system for connecting with people but done on two very different scales – There is an in-person one-to-one exchange of hand written messages with lovely letterpressed card. Those notes then get sent out to the great wide twittersphere of Walker’s twitter & facebook followers. So that’s one in-person smile and a message out to roughly two thousand people at the same time.

On the Walker blog, Scott Stulen explains how it works:
We partnered with local print shop Lunalux to create telegram-like letterpressed cards. Each card contains metered spaces for the 128 characters (140 minus the #analogtweet hashtag). You are invited to compose your message, remove the perforated receipt, and we will tweet the message and include a picture of the physical card. It is actually hard to compose a tweet without the ability to have characters auto counted and writing it in one draft…don’t worry we have scratch paper!

If you missed the April conference, you can still stop by and send out your own analog tweet through the summer at the Walker’s other long-time lovely project – Open Field.

Photo credit: Scott Stulen

Visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’ll reach the very top floor with a sun-filled terrace where gracious Blue Bottle Cafe staff serve great coffee. It feels like an oasis within the museum journey. But the story gets better.

Coincidentally, a recent New York Times article by Edward Rothstein speaks to the rooftop cafe oasis experience – Rothstein describes the phenomenon of ‘Museum Mind’. You know the condition, the fatigue which sets in after so much art gazing. Visitors need to let their brains take a break, refocus before diving back into more consumption. As the author mentions, this is why you’ll find visitors flocking to gift shops to decompress.

What if you could design a better way to let people decompress, not necessarily stop thinking about art, but just shift thinking?

This is what you find on the 5th floor rooftop terrace. Here’s the magic. Blue Bottle Cafe bakers make their own cakes. It occurred to them that they could start making treats to accompany coffee, inspired by the art in the museum. Each treat is a little experiential treasure.

Sculpture Garden Cookie Plate
It’s a scavenger hunt. Clues come in cookie form and helpful hints are printed on the accompanying napkin. See that stripy cookie? Have a look at the rooftop of the building across the street and see if you can find the stripy sculpture.

Frida Kahlo Mexican Wedding Cookies
Celebrating a moment frozen in time by a painting – the wedding of Madame Kahlo and Diego Rivera. You’ve got to go down to the 2nd floor to find the 1931 original.

Tony Cragg Ice Cream Cone
Eat your gorgeous stripy ice cream cone while standing next to the real thing.

Build Your Own Barnett Newman
Just what it says in the title – instructions included in the package, plus a handy postcard to re-create the whole setting in miniature at home. *HINT: Can you find one of the other scavenger hunt cookie sculptures in the photos?

What happens in the Blue Bottle Cafe? The overall rhythm of the museum journey is improved. For a little while, there’s a space that lets you breathe easy. You’re not separated from art, but you taste it, get curious after tasting it to go and search for it, maybe revisit a piece you’ve already passed but see it in a new way. This is what gives visitors the energy and incentive to stay a little longer, and even get more excited to consume art. Check out the full menu of delicious offerings in their dessert gallery here. Be forewarned, gamely staff will give clues but NOT the answers to the scavenger hunt!

Purveyor of fine goods for monsters of every kind.
Bespoke and everyday items for the living, dead and undead. Located at 159 Hoxton Street, London.

This is a great shop, the only one in the world we know of which supplies such fine goods for monster consumption. It’s also a great way to get people interested in creative writing. The Monster Supply Shop is a front for the Ministry of Stories – behind a secret door is a free space for workshops and one-to-one mentoring for writing by young people. The services are provided by volunteers: local writers, artists and teachers, all giving their time and talent for free.

This place oozes creativity and just being in the shop gets visitor imagination buzzing. It’s a well-crafted effort to convince supporters and writers with any inkling of hesitation to come on in and stay.
Opening Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 11am – 5pm

Fine selection of tinned fear: Mild Sense of Unease, Cobbly Wobbles, Heebie Jeebies, Escalating Panic, and Mortal Terror. Not shown but also available: Fang Floss, Human Snot, Zombie Mints. Excellent prices.

Also available: Miniature eyeballs, flayed skin, fresh farts, vilest bile and varieties of human blood.

Death certificates available. Monster hot line at your own risk. Magic beans not accepted for payment.

Staff portrait wall.
One favourite – Filthystein, Shop Manager 1990 – 1993. Once ate his own brother then vomited him back up. Profiled by the 2010 Year 4 Class at St. Monica’s RC Primary School.

Community notice board. Where the undead and other creatures swap info and source hard-to-find odds and ends.

What a reward! It’s exciting when your museum takes an add out in the New York Times to show your participation. Comment cards from the Museum of Modern Art, New York are published though newspaper advertisements. It’s a great way for them to embrace and communicate all kinds of visitor experiences at the museum, and that they don’t have to be high brow!

Talk about feedback mechanisms! Paul Cocksedge’s Kiss installation in Milan invites couples to kiss under a giant sprig of mistletoe. When two people touch the central leaves of the mistletoe branch a chain reaction occurs, sending a trickle of light up to the giant canopy overhead a central plaza. A small human gesture creates a spectacular illuminated reaction.

You should really see it through the video clips on Cocksedge Studio’s site, right here.

Photo credit: Mark Cocksedge, for Cocksedge Studio

Banners outside say the Wellcome Trust is for the incurably curious and they live up to it.

The Wellcome Collection is the vistor centre for the Wellcome Trust, the world’s ‘largest independent charitable foundation funding research into human and animal health’ which was funded by Sir Henry Wellcome. It’s an easy quickie detour from Euston Station in North London. A bit of background – Sir Henry Wellcome was a frontiersman, collector of strange things related to medical science and later founder of a giant pharmaceutical company.

When they say they’re for the curious, it’s a strength that keeps visitors interested. The Wellcome Collection has cracked the formula for how to get people excited about medical science – they boil exhibitions down to universal themes, topics that anyone can understand and find compelling. How are the incurably curious satiated here? Let’s get to it!

Outside, fetching window displays catch pedestrian & bus travellers passing by, displaying explorations of human science as explorers would – with intrigue and wow factors. On display here –
What if emotions were read by machines?
What if we could evaluate the genetic potential of lovers?
What if clouds were geo-engineered to rain ice cream?

They’ve got a great permanent collection upstairs, built from Henry’s collection of medical oddities. You can snoop around opening cabinets to read labels – the sort of details that make you want to explore.

You can grab a chair off the stacked shelves to go and sit wherever you please.

In the main lobby, a constant rotation of exhibits always get me coming back. What’s the trick? They’re so well curated, exploring compelling universal themes, backed with top notch science. Design is always attended to, so exhibits look as exciting as the content. Favourite exhibits from recent past –

Identity
Exploring our sense of who we are, with examples including the story of a man without memory, twins separated by time, juicy diary excerpts from the 1600s, gender identity and genetic testing. * Note the detail – the exhibit text is made via a mirror and reflection through a window, it makes your own refection a part of the exhibit image once you enter.

Things
An evolving temporary exhibit to add to & update the Wellcome Collection, with all objects gifted or loaned by the general public. You can browse all entries here.

Ambient details encourage curiosity & active exploration.

‘Ask Us’ shows up around signage, give you the feeling they really mean it.

In the permanent gallery, video booths lean over and invite you in. The physical language welcomes onlookers but also optimises sound.

Visitors are invited to leave their impressions on topics inspired by the collection. Large tables with postcards are well stocked with crayons. Cards invite visitors to create drawings inspired by the provocation words printed on the back – molecular – intestine – artificial – nature – life – art – free – beauty – sleep – amputation – microscope – etc. What’s most encouraging is that the display wall is HUGE and it’s DIY. Once you finish your drawing you don’t have to wait for a moderator to choose yours for display, just find an empty spot and voila! Seeing hundreds of other cards makes it easy to come up with your own drawing.

The Wellcome Trust is located at 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. Exhibitions are free!
www.wellcomecollection.org

How to make gallery visitors look at a collection in unexpected ways? The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, uses playful tools to engage visitors in looking up closely at contemporary artwork – Benches & Binoculars revisits 19th century displays by stimulating personal investigation through the use of binoculars.

Yikes! This handy rental car reminder serves as preemptive feedback, integrated right into the natural environment of use. Explaining rules can be so simple. And it’s pretty powerful incentive for me to not lose this key…

Customers, visitors, audiences, participants are weary of a pitch. When does participation turn from a worthwhile exchange and start to feel more like a ploy? I recently felt that itchy sense of suspicion while eating breakfast and considered how participation can tip the balance towards serving one party, rather than feeling like an exchange.

This is my container of orange juice. It’s offering ‘juicy rewards’ in the form of points which people can ‘collect online for healthy savings and fun’ and ‘One carton saves you $15′. This is advertised exhaustively over the carton. It sounds like it may be a good deal. It seems as it’s as easy as lifting off the top to reach the reward. It’s not. The steps required in order to receive points are:

- purchase the juice
- look under the cap to get a code
- go online
- register at www.juicyrewards.tropicana.com
- mandatory fields include full name, age, address, email
- pick out a password
- agree to company terms and conditions
- enter the code from under the cap
- chose from a selection of discounts with specific partner product offers (in other words, you don’t get a $15 rebate, you get a discount through spending more money)
This is getting complex… with so many steps, it’s easy for users to ask, ‘what am I getting out of this?’. Without having signed up for my own Tropicana Juicy Rewards account, I can’t completely verify the rewards system, but did find a pretty detailed account here.

The gist of the consumer benefit:

Eligibility for a $15 discount, though with limitations – only with selected company partners, and only if you can find a product or service you want from the selection available.
And the company benefit:

Direct consumer profile data, and if consumers run through the setup to redeem points the consumer profile data begins to grow through connections with purchases from company affiliates who also benefit from the exchange.
In the end it’s the company who benefits the most, and this feels obvious from the structure of the transaction. When designing an experience which requires a lot of steps, users need reassurance along the way, to feel like the exchange is a fair one. In this case the experience feels like a lot of giving for what ends up as a strings-attached reward.

Blog posts are usually a good resource to dig to the bottom of a rewards scheme. In this case, that too is a bit awkward – there are plenty of positive customer reviews online, but almost every one ends with the following text: Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in the Tropicana Juicy Insiders Ambassador program by Mom Central on behalf of Tropicana. I received 12 free Juicy Rewards points and a $50 Visa gift card to use in redemption of the points and to facilitate my review. The overall story driving the Juicy Rewards experience just isn’t convincing.

Good customer – brand relationships do exist. Want to hear about a good one? Take a look at the experience Powell’s Book Store based in Portland, Oregon uses to drive consumers online, here. And have a look at Nike + Livestrong’s Chalkbot project here.
We’ll be posting about these shortly.