Physical Digital: making cultural spaces conversational

By Molly Flatt

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Physical Digital conference, organised by Audiences Central and attended by arts organisations big and small from the Midlands, including two where I used to study/work/play – Warwick Arts Centre and the RSC. Now this was my kind of crowd.

I’m always fascinated by how this industry is approaching word of mouth. In my presentation I highlighted lots of the great work going on around the world, such as Flickr’s The Commons, the Coffs Harbour Voice of Time podcast archive, the National Museums Online Learning Project, and the ongoing brilliance of Brooklyn Museum with their hugely engaged blog, 1st fans Twitter art, mobile apps and more.

However, much of this activity is focused on digitising content rather than finding creative ways to get people to love the venues themselves.

Making the experience of a real life visit conversational is essential for the survival of arts venues.

With the Museum of Online Museums proving that you can create and disseminate as much niche content as you like but someone will always have a Fried Chicken Pantheon to lure your online visitors away, museums need to remember their original role as vibrant social spaces where people have thrilling shared experiences.

We need to look to the past as much as the future and bring a bit of Great Exhibition spirit back.

My suggestions on how to do this?

Personalise, disrupt and react.

In practice, this might range from an anti-social exhibition (where visitors are stripped of all digital devices and individually admitted to a room which holds only one object, with no explanation or context), to listening out online for people planning to visit your gallery and giving them a VIP welcome and voucher for a member of their community when they arrive.

For something a bit different, take a look work we did for The V&A’s Cold War Modern exhibition – a little teaser of which is below (get in touch if you’d like us to talk you through).

The V&A: Cold War Modern from 1000heads on Vimeo.

It was a day full of great inspiration, and I was particularly impressed with Toby Welch from Company Pictures and the work he’s doing with the Channel 4 drama Skins; Charles Hunter from Mudlark, creator of the Such Tweet Sorrow project; and Nic Millington from The Rural Media Company, who talked about using digital media to strengthen rural communities (something I’ve touched on before here).

So join the discussion: what are your top examples of WOM in the cultural space?

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Brought into the world on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 and filed under Case Studies, Events, Offline/Online.

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