VSA Workshop: Creative Problem-Solving in Visitor Studies Methods : Monday, February 26, 1:00-2:30pm ET  / 10:00-11:30am PT

Creative Problem-Solving in Visitor Studies Methods : Monday, February 26, 1:00-2:30pm ET  / 10:00-11:30am PT

What do you do when traditional data collection tools just won't work for your project?  This session will explore strategies for learning from visitors in tricky physical contexts, in hard-to-wrangle programmatic situations, and in leisure experiences you just don't want to interrupt. We invite you to join us for a 90-minute session to begin exploring these issues and begin working through them as they relate to your own context. Come for the practical tools to support your planning processes; stay for a sense of fun and a focus on making research and evaluation more friendly. 

This interactive workshop will be facilitated by Dolly Hayde and Laura Weiss (COSI’S Center for Research and Evaluation). We bring experience with a wide variety of informal learning contexts, and we’ve also worked as internal evaluators, as members of big research teams, and as contracted consultants. Whatever the scale, we love “making it work” in research and evaluation studies – while also thinking about how to make systematic data collection a positive part of visitor experiences. We hope that participants will come away with:

• new ideas for how to creatively approach data collection for their projects

• comfort with new tools for planning context-sensitive data collection

• a commitment to documenting and sharing their own creative methods with the field 

The workshop is designed to help people working in visitor studies bring fresh perspective and playful energy to the technical challenges that emerge in informal learning settings. This session is appropriate for anyone interested in exploring the practical aspects of data collection from new angles. There will be time to think through examples from your own practice, so please bring a data collection challenge of your own to work on. This can relate to a particular program, exhibition, or space, or it can relate to broader research or evaluation questions you are pursuing.