9. The Museum Selfie with Dustin Growick Museum Archipelago

Dustin Growick is in charge of audience development and the team lead for science at Museum Hack. Growick and Museum Hack treat a museum as a platform to build something more personal and fun.


One of the tools that they use to make it more personal and fun is the museum selfie. The theory is that taking selfies is easy way to put yourself literally and figuratively in the context of the museum.


In this this episode, Growick discusses the philosophy (as well as some dos and don'ts) of museum selfies.


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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 9. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear, and only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




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Welcome to Museum archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.



Dustin Growick: You take a photo of yourself in a museum, you look smart, you look cultured. The lighting is often pretty sexy.



Dustin Growick is in charge of audience development and the team lead for science at Museum Hack.



Dustin Growick: We run subversive, nontraditional, incredibly fun, two hour museum adventures at the museum of natural history and the metropolitan museum of art here in New York City.



When talking to Dustin, you realize that he treats a museum as a platform to build something more personal and fun and one of the tools that he uses to make it more personal and fun is the museum selfie.



Dustin Growick: We find that not just selfies but using phones and taking photos and sometimes selfies as well. It's actually when given the right context is a great way to give people a personally engaging experience within a museum that isn't necessarily thought of as a context for them or a place for them or relating to them and doing. Taking selfies is easy way to put yourself literally and figuratively in the context of the museum.



Part of the curriculum of museum hack is to encourage tour goers, to take selfies in a way that feeds back into the tour. For example, in the museum of natural history tour, Growick get a tiny dinosaur and they have to go on a fossil hunt to find their species of dinosaur



Dustin Growick: and then approve. They found it. They have to take a dino selfie and then also learned one thing about it and then we come back and share out the things that we found in our, our stupid silly selfies, but it's part of a larger experience. Again, it just gives people like a personal inroads to make connections in a room or space they might otherwise just breeze through.



For Dustin, it's all about the context.



Dustin Growick: If you're just walking into like, I'm taking yourself and then walk over there and take yourself. You'll walk over here and take yourself, but you're right. Like there's, that's not really going to add to the experience, but when it's part of a larger context that we reall