Talking in Public with Cards on the Table

Photos courtesy of the Zeeuws Museum, taken by Viorella

Lorna Cruickshanks is an Amsterdam-based freelance researcher, evaluator, and community participation consultant, working primarily in the museum and heritage sectors. As part of this work, she designs training and professional development systems. She is a long-time collaborator and friend of COTT. For this post, we spoke to her about her use of the game in two projects… as part of action research looking at the co-creation process for the exhibition Future Makers! and - in the perhaps more unusual way - as part of a panel session at the eenZM meetups.

You describe yourself (or your main interest) as training. Is there an element of trying to give people tools so that they won’t need your expertise on an ongoing basis? For example, the game is something you can give someone – a group, an artist, an organiser – so they can do the work of facilitating a group for evaluation on their own. Is that approach interesting for you?

Lorna Cruickshanks (LC): Yes, definitely. Which, I guess, is also something that I did in the UK when working there. I came from working in museums in the UK in community engagement and community partnerships team(s), and that was something I was always interested in doing. There was always a part of the role there, like being at conferences and reflecting on learning and sharing learning with others, but also coming out of projects with project funding, often creating a resource, with lessons learned at the end to support other people in the sector, to not have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. And doing evaluation projects in the UK for other organisations, always tried to upskill teams as part of this and leave a bit of a toolkit behind.

Giving people the tools to do the work - or some of the work - themselves is definitely something that I've been interested in continuing to do in the Netherlands: sharing my knowledge, expertise, and experience. I do a lot of work with the Heritage Academy (that’s the translation here). They are a professional development and training provider, offering courses and learning opportunities for people who already work in the heritage sector to develop around a specific topic or area of work. A lot of what I've been doing with them over the last few years is thinking about heritage participation, which is a topic that has a lot of growing attention in the Netherlands. 

I’ve also been doing more projects, which are about consolidation - keeping a good overview of what tools and techniques are already out there, but also packaging up what others have done and learnt and creating resources from that learning or making it more visible and accessible. This could be in the context of a training course, but also, for example, I’m writing a chapter on methods for participation in heritage for a handbook for heritage studies students, as well as people who work in the field already. 

In the UK, funding for cultural projects will often come with evaluation requirements.  Are there similar funding requirements for evaluation in the Netherlands? I’m wondering if that’s part of the motivation to develop these resources and skills in the heritage sector over there – does it match up with a growing requirement from those funding projects? 

LC: Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's always a requirement from funders to evidence that you've done something useful with the money. But what funders ask for is not always what the organisations want to tell them about the project. I guess it's not always the most interesting stuff that they want to know or are set up to ask for. Often, it's still numbers. But the more qualitative learning and real impact is not always a requirement to share back with the funder, which I think is still a familiar story to the UK. 

Yes, although at least at some level, there’s discourse around a need to shift that dynamic. But I wonder if that reflects a wider European context, and a wider European discourse, or if everyone's doing it in their own way, if everyone's muddling through these conversations in their own contexts. 

LC: I think something interesting is happening in the Netherlands at the moment. There have actually been a few events around what it means to measure impact recently. Impact was one of the themes of the eenZM meetups that I organised, which I'll talk about later.

At the beginning of the year, there was a big 10-day impact in the arts and culture event that was organised by several organisations in the Netherlands. One of these is the Boekmanstichting, which is a knowledge institute that does a lot of research and monitoring in the cultural sector. Then also the Impact Centre from the Erasmus University, so an academic partner, and then also a big funder, the Cultural Participation Fund. They teamed up to organise this big conversation. Through the 10 days, they had lots of different little events, as well as bookending it with two big conferences for practitioners working in the field, but also for policymakers and for funders.

It was based around what it means on the ground for people to be measuring impact. But also, what does it mean for people who are writing and creating policy, or big funders? What do they need? What are the considerations? How does everyone meet in the middle? What do funders need to be asking for, or what do they need to be open to, which is coming from the ground up? What works for practitioners and audiences, what kind of methods, what kind of approaches work for people? How can the sector try to think a bit more strategically about how they can work together to tell a better story to the funders about what they need? 

So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of attention for that kind of bigger picture conversation around being able to understand and then tell the story of impact. This is also all against the backdrop of a changing political landscape. There’s a feeling or need to prove the value and worth of the cultural sector; there’s a growing sense of urgency to prove ourselves and justify our position.

It’s interesting that depending on who you’re speaking to, the way you make the case, the language you use, will shift. What counts as proof will change depending on the conversation (or audience). Some audiences are more receptive to interesting, more reflexive stories as part of proving or showing value.  

To rewind a bit, can you tell me how you came to COTT?

LC: So, actually, I was around for the really early stages of development of Cards on the Table in a very light way. When I worked with Sian [Hunter-Dodsworth] at the British Museum (and when she was working together with Sophie [Hope], Sophie [Mallet] and Ania [Bas] on the cards), she organised workshops to think about the role that artists play within museums and how they relate to community projects and socially engaged art practices. At one of those workshops, I came across a very early version of the cards when they were being tested. I was at that workshop and at many of the network meetings that came out of it. It’s been on my radar since then, and I’ve followed the development from afar. Seeing how it has developed and been used by different organisations has been really interesting. I like the idea of a playful but very concrete tool that can be used within reflective discussions around projects. More recently, I’ve been involved in projects where I felt like it was particularly relevant and would really help the people that I was working with. So I got my set from you, Henry, thank you!

And now you’re the Netherlands pack holder for us, which is great because we want to have our network of pack holders as far and wide as possible. But anyway, tell me about how you’ve been using them recently. 

LC: There are two ways I used it earlier this year, which are very different from each other. One is more like the traditional use of the game; the other is different. 

Last year, I was working with an organisation in Rotterdam called Het Nieuwe Instituut, the museum and centre for design, architecture and digital culture. They were co-creating an exhibition about the future, together with young people (7 to 12 year olds) from the local area. There were a number of workshops at schools to come up with ideas and content for the exhibition. For example, one school made a model of a future city that ended up in the exhibition. And the museum worked really intensively with a team of 9 young people. I was following their co-creation process and reflecting on the project as an action researcher. At the end of that project, after the exhibition was open, we had a session using the cards with the team to reflect on how the project had worked, and how the collaboration between all the parties had gone. The museum was collaborating with the young people, but they were also collaborating across a big project team with an external exhibition designer, Opperclaes and a local community arts project, STORE Rotterdam, who were the main connectors with the young people. So we used COTT in the way it was designed to reflect on how that collaboration had gone, as a final reflection. 

A couple of things about that are interesting. It sounds like you've got people from pretty different professional backgrounds, and everyone is playing with an English game. How did that work? Did people play in two languages simultaneously? 

LC: I wanted to bring that up because obviously, the cards are in English, and although in the Netherlands everyone's English is incredible, English was not the first or native language of most of the team. There was one person in the team for whom Dutch was not their first language. We played in a sort of mix of Dutch and English. 

The team spoke a little bit of Dutch and English, depending on the context. I had said play in whatever language you are most comfortable with. But because the cards were in English, it triggered people to begin responding in English, and then they switched to Dutch if it became too tricky to really express what they wanted to. 

There are some very English things within the pack, like the ‘tea and biscuits’ cards. Obviously, people drink tea and eat biscuits in the Netherlands, but the whole concept of tea and biscuits feels very British and needs a little bit more context and then an explanation of what the real point of that is. 

In another blog post, when I spoke to Sian about playing in Mexico, she talked about the challenge of trying to translate something like “tea and biscuits” into Spanish for a Mexican context. Ultimately, although there might be similarities with some phrases, practices, foods and drinks, she decided against translating that card. How did you find that in the Dutch context? Is there something close you could use?

LC: No. Maybe I would say coffee rather than tea and biscuits, but it’s not the same, and I can’t think of the equivalent that gets the same idea across  

Each individual word might not be so difficult to translate, but the connotations are often quite specific, especially depending on the working context you're in. That can be as much about languages as it is about different fields interacting in a context. Along with direct linguistic translations, were there any other things that highlighted differences between the group on a professional or field-based level? A card like ‘Administration’, for example. 

LC: No, not really, but people selected the cards they were going to talk about, probably based on what they mean to them coming from a certain position. They chose the card that resonated most as the inspiration for what they wanted to say. They ignored other cards that resonated less, or because they couldn't place them in the context. 

A word that I remember talking about was ‘Tokenism’; we had to discuss that one. I think often people just use the English word if they're going to talk about that, actually. A word like tokenism, which comes up all the time when you're talking about participatory practice, maybe doesn’t mean the same thing to an exhibition designer, not necessarily. Or doesn't come up so much in the same way. 

I felt like the time went very fast and we covered a lot, but we couldn’t delve into everything in depth within the time of the game. Maybe we couldn’t give so much time to explore some of these differences in interpretation and the nuances in what the cards mean to different fields, and what that meant for the collaboration, too.

One thing I found really hard when playing the game by the rules, which I generally find hard here, is the timekeeping. I had the alarm on my phone, but obviously the alarm went off, and then people were still like “... let me just finish my point…” for another 2 minutes. But it's hard to cut people off when they're in their flow, when it feels like people finally have the platform to say what they’ve wanted to say and when it’s an interesting insight. 

Yeah, two minutes often feels really long, or too short, but rarely just right. But I mean, that’s a general challenge with facilitation. But you just touched on an interesting feature of the cards, the idea that professional fields have their own languages, and it's not necessarily about English, Dutch, or whatever; it's about the language that comes with professional practices. Perhaps the game prompts people to recognise that they, or others, sometimes exhibit these qualities.

Anyway, let's talk about the other way you used the cards at the eenZM meet-ups

LC: Yes, this was the events at the Zeeuws Museum in Zeeland. ‘eenZM’  is a bit of wordplay as eenzaam is the word for loneliness in Dutch and ZM refers to the museum. The event was a two-day meetup that concluded a 4-year funded project at the Zeeuws Museum. For 4 years,  the museum had been trying to work out how it could play a bigger role in addressing loneliness within its city and the wider area. The project was paid for through structural government funding, and sharing learning was part of the project.  

So, interestingly, they actually had a researcher employed at the Museum throughout the time of that project. She was an impact specialist whose role was to look at the program and all the different projects within it, and feed her findings back into the process of designing and planning new initiatives. This meant the museum could be iteratively developing its practice throughout the project.  It’s quite unusual for an organisation to carve out a specific role and employ someone to do that reflective work within a project.

They came to the end of the 4-year project with a lot they had learned and wanted to share. But rather than organising an event only about what they'd learned, they wanted to also have a conversation with other people doing similar work, and make it more of a conversation. This ended up as two big, two-day-long events. As an output, they are working towards a publication about social impact and loneliness, which will be usable for the whole sector. Those events were in January and February (2025), and the publication will come out at the start of next year. 

Four big themes came out of the project and impact research (each day addressed two). The first one was around loneliness and how art helps to make that topic easier to talk about and easier to understand. The second topic was about artistic strategies and how exactly they can play a role in combating loneliness. The second event in February was more focused on partnership work and the value, significance, and importance of working together with different partners in society and then also on impact. If people and organisations collaborate, what kind of impact can they then make? The days were full of different workshops, presentations, and conversations.

Did you facilitate one of these workshops? 

LC: No, I helped them organise both meetups and moderated both. Obviously, the topic of partnerships and collaborative working is more up my street. One of the things that they were interested in doing was reflecting on their partnership work with all the partners that they'd worked with over the 4 years as part of the event. That's why I thought COTT would be an interesting tool to use and to guide that reflection, as well as a way to showcase COTT as a tool that the other attendees could use at their organisations. We had a panel session at the event with a few of the partners and used COTT to frame a live conversation. We'd done a sort of mini version of the game in preparation for the panel session.

Did you play the game live in front of an audience!?

LC: Well, no, I thought that would be very intense, and people would feel too vulnerable. So first I showed them the game, and we talked about the game at the museum, and then with four representatives from partner organisations. There was Museum Plus Bus, a charity that provides a bus service to bring older adult groups to museums or to bring museum people and collections out to older adult groups. There was someone from De Vrolijkheid, a charity that provides arts activities for children at the refugee centres across the Netherlands.  Someone from a local anti-racism student collective from University College Roosevelt. And then the final panel member was from what they call ‘social programmes’ at the museum. So, a range of different partners who had experience working with the museum over the last four years. 

During the preparation, we talked through COTT, and then I asked them each to pick the quote cards that resonated the most. And then we talked about some of the theme cards that were most relevant to their experiences. We didn't play the game exactly, just used the quotes, themes, and keywords to prep the session.

Then, in the panel session at the event, each person had one or two cards projected up on a PowerPoint slide, a card they’d selected beforehand, which acted as a prompt or starter to talk about their experience around that quote in relation to the project. Other people could also add and respond. So it was more to guide the reflective conversation on partnership working, and to draw out the lessons learned through the project. As far as I know, quite a different way to use the game. 

Yeah, I guess it gives the audience a way to understand where the speaker is coming from, moving away from a monologic form so prevalent in public presentations and giving a more behind-the-scenes perspective. 

LC: Exactly, it grounded the conversation in very real experiences. The fact that the quotes come from other projects made the conversation a little more neutral and made speakers feel a bit more comfortable. People didn’t want surprises coming out on the day, but everyone felt comfortable being open with each other, and with the museum.

Also, because the meet-up was also around impact, we wanted to show COTT as a tool that others could use; it was also another little window into a useful tool for reflecting on one's own work, how it works and what you can learn from or gain from using it.

Everyone was open to the process, and the audience responded and asked questions; maybe the cards helped with that as well. One of the cards was ‘Inherent inequality needs to be explored and discussed’. After the panel discussed this card, someone in the audience added that when the quote first came up, they interpreted it in a different way and asked if the panel also had experience of it in that way. They were able to share their own experiences in relation to this quote, too.  It was nice, the way that the audience responded to the cards; they resonated with the audience as well as practitioners of collaborative projects.

That’s great, I always struggle to ask questions in public, at conferences or talks. I often worry my question will come across as stupid or irrelevant. I feel like I’m putting myself on the line a bit. Do you think there's a way that the cards could be used, or the way you used them, that allows people to enter the conversation a bit more easily?

LC: Yeah, definitely. Because if the person says a card resonated with them, a real quote from someone else, no one can argue with that. It might also help people ask slightly different questions. It invited people in the audience to reflect on their own experiences and invited other people to be part of the conversation, while keeping it relatively focused, too, because everyone was looking at the same cards. 

Coming back to the idea of language from earlier, I had asked people to choose their cards in English, as everyone in the panel could speak English, but then we translated them into Dutch for the audience. So we projected them in both English and Dutch. There was actually one person in the panel who didn't speak Dutch, and so we had an interpreter; I’d never done a panel with an interpreter before. It was interesting to hear how she translated the panellist’s response.

Do you think that if you organise another panel, you’d use the cards again? Do you think this is a way that the game could be used more regularly, as a preparation for, and prompts during, public discussion? 

LC: I think so. Obviously, my experience is very specific to the context of doing this event about partnerships, with all of the partners being involved. But I think if I were to do it again, I’d actually really like to play the game properly first. The people on the panel had all worked with the museum, but they hadn’t worked with each other necessarily, so the game could have introduced them to each other. It wasn’t a collaborative project between them all; it's the museum and its partners.

I like how the cards help people make sense of their own experiences within a project and help them express those experiences, but you see how people also make sense of the cards in their own way and draw on their experiences to interpret the cards. So in a more public space involving others who haven’t been involved in a project, maybe it’s more about collectively reflecting on the card and its implications for collaborations more generally - in this case, on collaborative work around the potential of museums, collections and artistic interventions to play a role in addressing loneliness. 

It’s important for the people playing the game to have a shared anchor point. It doesn't have to be that everyone's actually working together, but there's this shared thing that everyone can relate to, like a concept or theory, or a fantasy project. Sometimes that works better than others, and it changes what the game is like. It becomes a little more speculative when it's about a subject that people are thinking about, rather than the experiences of the project they are reflecting on. 

LC: I think the real strength is in the quotes, especially, and the fact that it's a good hook to hang their experience on. The game is obviously about everyone’s own experiences, and while that’s really personal to each individual, using quotes from others makes it feel a little bit less personal, a little bit less vulnerable. Players see that someone else has said something similar that they’d like to, that they’ve had a similar experience and put it into these words, it makes it okay to bring a subject up. 

It’s also easier to frame ideas when you disagree with a quote or find an aversion to a particular word. ‘Administration’ and ‘Management’ often seem to provoke a reaction. Did you have anyone actively disagree with any cards?

LC: I'm trying to think, actually, in both contexts, we didn't really have anything that people fully disagreed with. I guess people interpreted things in slightly different ways, but didn’t actively disagree. Or they chose the cards they felt applied to the project and their experiences.

My inclination is that players tend to go for cards they agree with, and people tend to try to be positive-ish about projects

LC: Dutch people are quite open and direct, and they're quite vocal. If something's a problem, Dutch people will usually say that it's a problem for them. But that still doesn't necessarily always lead to very deep conversations. I'm interested in how COTT can bring a bit more nuance to conversations and a bit more structure. I guess the cards actually give people who might hold back or who tend to be more positive a way to speak more critically. They offer a space and also a language for this.