Pinterest

Over the holidays, to kill some downtime and satisfy my craving for handmade decorations and food and presents and goodness, I spent a lot of time on Pinterest. I'm not sure whether a lot of other people felt the same impulse or whether Pinterest has recently gotten more attention, but recently the number of my friends using it and the overall activity on there have increased quite a bit, especially compared to how closed and quiet it felt when I first signed up early last year. Another interesting development is how museums could be involved in Pinterest, both as sources of content and active participants.

Some of what Pinterest offers fits harmoniously with the concept of museums. Drawing on the trendiness of the idea of curation, Pinterest allows its users to "curate" their own boards developed around a theme or interest. While many users seem to use the site simply as a visual bookmarking tool, others (including myself) select images ("pins") to illustrate an idea and/or create a focused but ever-growing collection of, to put it blandly, stuff we like. Pinterest encourages both repinning (adding someone else's pin to one of your own boards) and gathering outside content through bookmarklets that make it easy to create a new pin. And while repinning does produce a lot of repetition, looking at the site on the level of individual boards, it seems reasonable to compare them to exhibitions: often relying on some recognizable, canonical images, but also pulling in things that are newly-discovered or at least newly-contextualized in order to present a unique perspective.

But while Pinterest gives its users a chance to curate and exhibit, it's not clear to me yet what the role of museums, as actors, would be. There are certainly pins floating around that came from museum sites, but I don't think the museums generally had any involvement in adding them. The IMA has a Pinterest account which they are currently using to share highlights of their collections. Personally, I would not go looking for museums on Pinterest if I wanted to see collection objects - I'd go to their websites. Digital collection databases are not always user-friendly, but to me this format is more suitable than Pinterest, if what I'm after is good-quality images and the museum's information about an object. Or, if I was interested in pinning images of museum objects to one of my boards, I'd still start with their website. I wouldn't expect the selections a museum had already pinned on their own account to necessarily include the things I'd be interested in.

That being said, I do think there's room for museums on Pinterest. Encourage visitors to create their own exhibitions using items from the collection. Lots of collection databases will let you create an account and save images, but if you want to do that for fun, to me it's a lot more appealing to do that in a social, open space like Pinterest. Or, have a competition and challenge visitors to pick a single object to use as inspiration for a board - a wedding board inspired by a painting, a room redesign inspired by a vase, a menu inspired by a still life.

Opening the museum's collections to this kind of social remixing would likely encourage engagement (at least online). I think the key is that museums have to do more than just be there on Pinterest - as with most social sites, they have to understand how the site's ecosystem works and then play along. That leads to the two-way interaction that makes it fun.