New museum design cultures: harnessing the potential of design and ‘design thinking’ in museums

Abstract

IntroductionMuseum design research has matured significantly in recent years and continues to unfold in increasingly experimental, collaborative and practical directions. Prior to 2000, there was very little consistent, focused and analytical museum design research and the relationships and collaborations that now define the field were almost non-existent.1 Since then, and linked to the transformation and increasing complexity of museum design itself, research in museum design (including museum architecture, exhibition design and/or what is now commonly referred to as experience or interpretive design) has been shaped and progressed by a growing number of museum design researchers, representative of the diversity of museum design itself. 2 The result is a small but dynamic research community comprising a whole range of people from museums, the creative industries, and academia and who span fields as diverse as architecture, various design disciplines, visitor studies, learning, theatre, animation, film and museum studies.The cross-sector and multi-disciplinary nature of the network means that it is populated by professionals of all career ages with exceptional thinking and research skills, highly sophisticated design skills as well as museum-based skills, knowledge and, importantly, agency. The network is unusual in academic terms because it has many of the characteristics that other research fields and academic teams hanker after but find hard to create: genuine 2 cross-sector links and a deep desire to join forces to create new ways of working, new knowledge and, again importantly, contributions to real and positive change in museums.Through an array of conferences, design classes, and events, in addition to publications, teaching collaborations and research projects, the network has begun to develop a shared language and a series of shared preoccupations, or research questions. 3Those interested in museum design can now draw upon a diverse literature including increasingly analytical studies of exhibition making and architectural forms, 4 historical analyses of exhibitions and the visions of visitor use embodied within them, 5 theoretically informed approaches to understanding museum experience 6 and, perhaps most significantly, preliminary understandings of the place of the physical stuff of museums and galleries in experience. 7 In addition to this diverse literature, students of museum design can draw on a whole body of research produced by design practitioners exploring and dissecting methodologies of museum design and explicating the thinking and design processes of specific interpretive projects. 8 These include: theatre-led, or scenographic approaches to museum design based on the notion that the physical material of the exhibition or display is, like the stage set in theatre, interpretive and active in the experiences and meaning making of visitors; 9 and the closely related narrative approaches to museum design based upon understandings of human subjects as, essentially, narrative, meaning-making bei...

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