Episode #4 - So about the book...
Navigating life as a newly-published author, running book-related events, and planning for upcoming conferences.
I’ve been working on Designing for Playful Engagement in Museums for so long that it is strange to finally be on the other side of that long, solitary process. I’ve got the physical object on my desk, people are buying it, people have read it and said nice things about it (thus far), and I’m figuring out the mechanics of being a published author with a product to hawk. It’s a novel experience for me and my hat’s off to those of you who’ve been down this road before. It’s weird.
It’s been a little over a month since the book came out and I was finally able to share it with people. I was fortunate to to be invited to attend Museum Booster’s Future Museum event in Boston this June. It was a great meeting of minds and I was able to buttonhole both John Falk and Michael John Gorman at the bar at Drinking About Museums and convince them to blurb the book, for which I am deeply grateful!
Even though the idea for the book predates the formation of The Experience Alchemists, I have thought of it as a tool for the business. Sounds logical in the abstract, but in terms of specific tasks, I’m still feeling my way around. The first thing that I’m trialing is to use the book as the basis for a new TEA product offering; a daylong workshop on playful engagement, the magic circle, and immersion, emotion, narrative, and games. I was helped along on this process by having two institutions approach me to ask, “if we bought a bunch of copies of the book, would you come talk to our staff about it?” Yes. Yes, I would. If this sounds interesting to you, don’t be shy. Drop me a line and we can talk!
Answering their questions allowed me to flesh out a day-long event, and I’ll be running the first one next week in D.C. at the Smithsonian (SITES). It’ll be part book club and incorporate a lot of the “Experiencing the Visitor Experience” workshops Bruce Wyman, Kate Haley Goldman and I used to run at the Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference. It will also hopefully include some current projects we can explore to see how playful engagement can inform work under way. Doubtless, it will evolve from this first prototype event, but I’m excited to get in front of an audience of live humans and see what resonates with the people the book was written for in the first place. Not a bad way to launch a book, all in all. My author friends who have written novels were a bit scandalized that I wan’t having a book launch and speaking tour, but it doesn’t seem to make as much sense for a topic as specific and frankly, as niche as this. My friend Frank, who ran the Harvard Book Store for decades agreed and suggested going where the audience already gathers, like conferences. If any of you more experienced authors of academic/trade books have an insights or suggestions, send them my way, please!
I’m also experimenting with virtual formats. Kyle Bowen at Museums as Progress (MaP) asked me if I’d run a weekly series of events in August with MaP members to go through the ideas in the book a chapter at a time. There are still a few slots left if you want to join us. These will be more book group-y, where we’ll dig into the content of each chapter, though I will also ask participants to talk about their current work how the ideas relate to real world projects and problems.
By the time the MaP events are over, it’ll be September (!?) and school will be bak in session. I am especially excited to be offering my museum studies class for Harvard Extension School for Fall 2025. It’s been a couple of years since I taught it, but the book would not have gotten where it is without my past MUS E-138 students who helped me work through the confusing thicket of ideas and concepts that eventually turned into Designing for Playful Engagement in Museums. It’ll be so much more straightforward now to say “Read Chapter Three” instead of “Here are seven journal articles on emotion and the brain, most of which were not written for museum audiences. Have at it!” I will confess it feels a bit weird requiring students to buy my book to take my class, but I’ll get over it! ;-)
So, all things considered, I can say that the book will be getting a real test drive over the next few months. I am happy to announce that it has already gotten its first real world application! My lovely and talented wife Jennifer, along with some of our close friends, decided that there would be a launch party, whatever I thought, so last week, a bunch of friends descended on us for a playful engagement-themed event. Since Jen was my primary reader and co-indexer she is very familiar with the content of the book, and very clear that there would be an immersion room, a storytelling room, etc… and I had better come up with some fun activities and interaction alibis. And it was marvelous. Highlights included an effigy head made out of Rice Krispie treats which I decapitated with a sword, and some truly strange exquisite corpses, outrageous food labels, and more.
I received one of the best compliments I think an author can get from my friend Allan, who has been building museums exhibitory for decades and has little patience intellectualizing. Towards the end of the evening, he sought me out and said, “In mind my, your book is bullshit. But I read some of it and …it’s pretty compelling.” I almost fainted.
So, a lot going on in book land. One thing I have learned the hard way is that you don’t wait for the book to come out to ask journals to review it. I spoke to one editor friend who said they might be able to get it in next Spring. Rookie mistake… If you have any connections to publications, let me know.
I’m in Davenport, Iowa, right now, where I’ll be running a workshop with friends on disruption in the museum workplace at the Association of Midwest Museums (AMM) conference. It will be interesting to see what executive leaders make of the BANI and Cynefin frameworks as they apply to the current moment here in the U.S.
It will also be a chance to reconnect with some of my old Getty Leadership Institute (GLI) cohort, like Melissa Mohr, who’s now Director of the Figge Art Museum. She is graciously hosting us and has promised that their staff mixologist will design a signature cocktail–“The Disruptor”–for the event. Clearly, I have not been working for the right kinds of museums until now. I’ll let you know how disruption tastes after the event.
Looking ahead, I’m planning to attend the MCN conference in Minneapolis in October, and hoping to present on work TEA has been doing with Adrienne Lalli Hills at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma. If you’re going to be there, do look me up!
Til then!
All the best,