Great WebSpectations and other adventures in the digital and non-digital domains Part 1

 Janet Petitpas, Senior Associate, London


In thinking about interesting current happenings in museums here in the U.K., I noticed I was reading about museums using innovative social media and the internet to inspire participation and extend the museum experience. In particular an exhibition at the Cuming Museum in South London appealed to me as someone who loves shoes. The Cuming Museum is currently hosting an exhibition called “Stories of the World: Walking in my Shoes,” funded by the Cultural Olympiad project.

The exhibition features shoes from around the world and the journeys we make in them.  It features designs by area young people alongside displays of historic shoes from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition is augmented by a program in which young people in the Southwark neighborhood have been asked to send in photos of their own shoes and describe their everyday journeys.

Also, the Museum is building up a map of the area, based on favorite places, routes, and methods of travel as well as favorite footwear. Visitors are invited to post photos of their favorite shoes to the exhibition’s Flickr group.

In reading this description, I assumed that the journeys submitted and mapped would be done digitally and posted on the web, which I found quite interesting and was curious to see how museum visitors mapped a neighborhood. I searched around on-line, but was unable to find any maps in conjunction with the exhibition. Since I had never been to the Cuming Museum, I decided to go there in person to check it out and gather more information.

The Cuming Museum is a small Museum located within the Old Walworth Town Hall. It features the collections of the Cuming family, who collected almost anything for over 100 years. In addition to their interesting and pleasantly jumbled collections (ranging from ethnographic and natural history objects - the collection includes both real and fake items), the Museum presents the history of the Southwark neighborhood all the way back to Roman times.

The Museum’s permanent galleries show that great care has been taken to involve the current community, which includes many immigrants and houses people from all over the world. While the galleries were unstaffed, there were many opportunities for interaction with real objects, exploration sheets to pick up and fill out, areas for visitors to leave personal comments, and items you could make within the galleries. The Shoes exhibition was located in the one room temporary exhibition hall.

When I walked in and saw the map I actually laughed out loud at the difference between its physicality and my expectation that it would be digital. The map is a physical table top blow up of a Google map and visitors are provided with little Google map pink paper bubbles on which they write their favorite places in the neighborhood and then mount in Lucite photo clips. I loved concrete-ness of the map and appreciated the irony of the times we live in – that it would never occur to me that the map would be a three-dimensional object that sits in one spot on the planet. (Much less one inspired by the internet and made into a physical object!)

The exhibition simple and well executed. One wall contained a display of shoes designed by neighborhood young people along with explanations about why they created their designs. The artists were identified by their shoes (not the ones they created but the ones they wear) and it appeared to me that the shoes they did create were done through Converse. If you are inspired, you can design your own shoes through the Converse website.

There were ample opportunities to participate by trying on shoes, contributing a graffiti map of how you came to the Museum that day, and of course, interesting displays from the Cuming shoe collection.

The exhibition design was comprehensive and the exhibit furniture was all created out of stiff cardboard. A lovely and enjoyable exhibition, even if I wasn’t able to access people’s favorite neighborhood places and trips from the comfort of my home computer.

PALS at the Rancho Cucamonga CA library

Justine Roberts, Principal


Last week IMLS tweeted a video put together by clients of ours, the Rancho Cucamonga Library in southern California, about the PALS (Play And Learning Islands) which we designed and built.  The video is great and features library director Robert Karatsu who says: 


"We really think that our PALs in a small way start to bridge the worlds of public libraries (who are good at early literacy and programming) and children’s museum (who are so good at interactivity and sparking creativity among other things.)  Our missions are so similar that it just seems natural to try and find more common ground."





As their name suggests, PALS are free-standing and movable elements that contain hands-on inquiry-based activities.  They live in and among the stacks of the Rancho Cucamonga, CA library.  And in fact, the PALS are intended as an encounter with interactive playful learning as a complement to the more expected cognitive learning libraries support.  The PALS bring together a combination of interactives + library materials (books and media) + supporting materials about learning through play.   Although they can be docked in the children's room, they can also be located outside, or placed strategically for users to discover as they browse for books. We have uploaded photos to our facebook site from the opening.



The PALS are essentially a smaller, fast-tracked part of a larger vision for a children's museum in the library.  In the first phase we completed a community needs assessment and master plan for a children's museum addition.  After completing that work, the library wrote a grant to move forward with the PALS as a way to build staff capacity and pilot some of the ideas about bringing play into the stacks.


In thinking about the design of the PALS we considered the scale of the library and the space available for activities. Each PAL is about 25-50SF.  Each is designed to support a range of play styles including imaginative play, experiential learning, constructive play, aesthetic exploration, and creative problem solving.  Their topics range from science and engineering, to visual and performing arts, to history, and to environmental science.  Although the themes were selected to support the interests of library users and staff, the library believed the PALS would spark additional interest and demand in these areas.  So prior to installing the PALS the library developed their collections on these specific topics - including 500 new books.

The PALS require minimal power, water and lighting. Overall, the PALS are low tech, modular, and portable.  They include space for books and graphics, and utilize green, sustainable materials.  The PALS’ are designed to not need crates for transportation or storage, but smaller units have their own tops which allows them to be "closed" like a “suitcase”. 

The PALS may be small but the vision is ambitious. For the Library the PALS have the potential to expand the range of learning styles and services available through the library, making the library more inviting to families, more inclusive, and more relevant.  In addition the goals included:

     *Pioneering new ways of engaging families in learning in libraries, using interactive museum exhibits as inspiration.  

     *Creating a scalable model which could spread to other libraries.

     *Offer activities that tie into the big themes of literacy, arts and culture.   

     *Change how people think of the library by expanding and enriching the library experience.

     *Support literacy through layered activities that allow users with many interests and skills to be successful.

     *Make the library more family friendly.

Goals for visitors included:

     *Providing experiences that motive users to learn, light a spark of interest, and build self-confidence about creative exploration.

     *Help families realize the role of play in the learning process.

     *Encourage families to consider the library the hub of the learning community, not just a place to borrow books.

     *Increase access to playful activities, the time people in the community spent playing, and broaden the types of playful activities they engaged in.  

     *Bring joy into families lives.


The PALS create a unique blend of reading, browsing and doing at the Rancho Cucamonga library. They are an experiment that is working.