Abstract
What type of museum experiences can be designed when local communities are involved? And where does technology fit? How can museums as places to nurture community engagement also become spaces to have cultural, transformative experiences? Museums and cultural heritage institutions are not only custodians of the some of the world’s most valuable natural and creative works; they are themselves creative institutions that reflect and shape cultural production. Especially since the advent of the New Museology, this creative potential has been understood in interdisciplinary terms, bringing theories and methods such as postcolonial studies and poststructuralism to bear on these processes of production. The impetus has shifted from museum professionals guarding their silos of expertise to seeking multiple, even overlapping perspectives from as diverse a range of the public as possible. In a world where digital technologies are increasingly embedded in the lives of their visitors as well as their own practices, museum practitioners and researchers both turn to disciplines that can inform this element of cultural production. In this paper, some cases will be presented where an answer to these questions will be sought and, more in general, some insights will be drawn from them of what the road ahead of museums might look like in the coming future.
Keywords
museums; empathy; CAP; community engagement; digitisation.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.477
Citation
Calvi, L.(2023) Museums at a crossroads, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.477
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Museums at a crossroads
What type of museum experiences can be designed when local communities are involved? And where does technology fit? How can museums as places to nurture community engagement also become spaces to have cultural, transformative experiences? Museums and cultural heritage institutions are not only custodians of the some of the world’s most valuable natural and creative works; they are themselves creative institutions that reflect and shape cultural production. Especially since the advent of the New Museology, this creative potential has been understood in interdisciplinary terms, bringing theories and methods such as postcolonial studies and poststructuralism to bear on these processes of production. The impetus has shifted from museum professionals guarding their silos of expertise to seeking multiple, even overlapping perspectives from as diverse a range of the public as possible. In a world where digital technologies are increasingly embedded in the lives of their visitors as well as their own practices, museum practitioners and researchers both turn to disciplines that can inform this element of cultural production. In this paper, some cases will be presented where an answer to these questions will be sought and, more in general, some insights will be drawn from them of what the road ahead of museums might look like in the coming future.