{"id":1376,"date":"2009-12-15T09:19:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T17:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2009\/12\/building_the_right_metaphor\/"},"modified":"2014-07-22T20:51:46","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T00:51:46","slug":"building_the_right_metaphor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/building_the_right_metaphor.php","title":{"rendered":"Building the right metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was fortunate to take part in a planning session in New York last week, hosted by Fractured Atlas<\/a>, to begin sketching out an open-source solution to a vexing but central part of engaging audiences with art: ticketing. Fractured Atlas is the project leader on ATHENA Tix<\/a>, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which promises to be the first stage of a multifunction software system for the arts.<\/p>\n

The meeting gathered arts professionals and ticketing specialists from around the country, most from New York, to begin the community design and development process. Our main goal as a group was to discuss the first process flows and feature needs that would inform version 1 of the software. The first version seeks to solve basic problems first — ticketing for a general admission venue of under 100 seats with a single price for every seat. Then it will expand to a more nuanced and featured initiative in versions to come.<\/p>\n

It was a great group (list of participants and summary of discussion is available here<\/a>), but a question kept nagging me throughout the conversation: What, exactly, should a ticketing system be designed to do?<\/p>\n

The obvious metaphor we’ve used for performing arts ticketing is sales. We have a product. In the case of performing arts, the product is an access right to a seat in the house for a specific performance. That product is perishable, since its value expires sometime after the performance begins (some discussion as to when). And that product is scarce, because there are only so many seats we have to sell. As a result, our concepts of ticketing systems involve a marketplace, a set of potential customers, a set of actual customers, a churning set of seats for sale, and a price.<\/p>\n

But what if we thought of the process in a different way? What if our goal was to gather expressive individuals and prepared individuals in a common space? What if our product didn’t actually exist until both artist and audience were in that space? And what if the product was actually the meaningful co-production between the two (or three or five or 99)?<\/p>\n

Under that interpretation, the facilitating software system wouldn’t be about sales, but rather about human resource management — getting the right people in the right space at the right time to produce the meaningful moment (essentially hiring not only performers but receivers, as well). Or, alternately, the system would be about outsourcing — identifying audiences or artists with a need to experience or express, and creating a marketplace where they could find each other to complete the production.<\/p>\n

As ever, I’m lingering on semantics and metaphor. And yes, there’s a transaction in there somewhere, either way. But it struck me that when we design a system from scratch, or we redesign anything, we have a unique opportunity to rethink its purpose and its process. The trick, of course, is not confusing or abstracting the design process and its need to address immediate, observable problems for those who hope to use it.<\/p>\n

Still and all, I’ll be wandering around to learn more about human resource and outsourcing software systems on the web, just as I explore best practices in ticketing. And as the development community stumbles onto better, different, or potentially useful metaphors for what they’re developing, I’ll be following those, as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was fortunate to take part in a planning session in New York last week, hosted by Fractured Atlas, to begin sketching out an open-source solution to a vexing but central part of engaging audiences with art: ticketing. Fractured Atlas is the project leader on ATHENA Tix, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}