Thinking about the future of museums: fourteen key issues
Today I participated in a Future Directions Forum at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, which after 20 years in its current location is looking to the future.
To provide some context, the Powerhouse is specifically branded as a science and design museum, implicitly being about technology and it’s impact on people’s lives. It’s worth looking at the excellent online resources section of the Powerhouse Museum website, which provides value to many people who never visit the museum. I’ve previously written abouut the very interesting Web 2.0-style initiatives of the Museum (and listed them in the Top Australian Web 2.0 applications), which among other features enables user tagging of the museum’s collection. In a number of cases visitors to the website have corrected or provided more detailed information on the museum’s collection, exemplifying how to tap collective wisdom.
The session raised many interesting questions and thoughts for me. I haven’t been significantly involved with museums in the past, and was struck by many of the issues raised. The points below represent my perspectives as well as reflections on issues raised by people at forum. While the issues below were raised in the context of museums in areas like science, technology, and design, I think they apply across most kinds of museum.
Below are fourteen key issues in the future of museums.
What is a museum?
On the face of it, a museum records and makes accessible artefacts the past that have cultural value. The curatorial process is one of showing people things that enrich them. Museums need to have a clear idea of why they exist. In most cases (in addition to any financial imperatives) the objective is to benefit society, by educating and creating culturally richer and more well-rounded members of society.
Entertainment vs. education and onto experience.
Entertainment and education are quite different intents, but they can be integrated to achieve both aims. Certainly the demand from younger people has shifted strongly to only paying attention if content is truly entertaining. Beyond that, museums are fundamentally about providing experiences. People will seek engaging and powerful experiences, and if museums can provide them, their can fulfil their roles.
Complement formal education.
Recent developments of school and adult education have not kept pace with external change. There is in particular an important role for experiences that help prepare people for the future.
Speed of response.
Exhibitions are a slow medium, often taking 6 months or far more to put together. This means that any exhibit will be historical rather than truly contemporary. As people grow used to a faster informational cycle, ways of bringing together information quickly in a meaningful way is often required to engage people.
Being credible and authoritative.
In a world of infinite information, people are looking for credible sources. The brand and identity of a museum can assist in being a preferred source of information.
Physical vs. Virtual.
A museum is in almost all cases a physical space with physical exhibits. Yet access can also be provided online, including in three dimensional worlds. It is not a question of choosing between them, or even doing both. Rather the issue is how to integrate both physical and virtual so they complement each other.
Potential for geolocational tagging.
As a specific form of integrating the physical and virtual, I think geolocation is a very useful technology. This can for example enable visitors to geo-tag exhibits, making their comments visible to others moving through the physical space. Video glasses or mobile devices can allow people to pick up on and add to conversations about what they are seeing and interacting with.
Engaging younger generations.
Today schoolchildren going on a museum visit often do their reports by typing notes and taking pictures on their mobile phone. However they are far from passive consumers, and unless you allow them to be active in engaging with content, you will lose them.
Getting museum experts to interface directly with users.
The existing interface between the knowledge of the museum staff and users is the exhibit. Social media and social networks are ways to enable this more direct connection, interaction, and knoweldge sharing.
Energizing the community.
Because museums touch so many schoolchildren, they have an opportunity to engage them far beyond their visits. MIT’s ThinkCycle, which takes an open source approach to designing solutions to problems thaat touch many underprivileged people.
Helping people to answer new and important questions.
Therapeutical cloning, genetically modified food, embryonic genetic modification, are all new technologies that we as individuals and a society must work out how to respond. A museum can help people to understand these issues to help people to make up their own minds in an informed way.
Moving from gatekeepers to enabling access and building communities.
Not so long ago museums were essentially gatekeepers, choosing from all of the wonderful things they have access to, which will be on display. Now that access can be provided digitally, the issue becomes more one of making these valuable resources more accessible and visible, and building communities to share perspectives.
Museums as media organizations.
During the discussions it struck me that museums are basically media organizations, providing and editing (i.e. curating) content. Exactly the same issues apply, including that of whether to control or open out the editorial process.
From interacting with exhibits to interacting with people.
A great interactive exhibit is one that makes people visiting the museum to interact with each other. There are many fabulous technologies that can take the old push-button style of interactive exhibits into an entirely new dimension. However building live and asynchronous social networks on many levels is really where interactivity needs to go. Both stimulating and enabling conversations is where museum interactivity needs to go.
I think the issues facing museums are extremely interesting, and relevant across a far broader domain, as they fundamentally deal with the intersection of the virtual and physical in our experiences. Despite the rise of the virtual, there is extraordinary value in physical artefacts. To move into the future we absolutely need to understand and draw on our past. Physical objects are the crystallized manifestations of our collective thoughts and history. Museums are on an extraordinary journey which will see many thrive, and often look very different to how they do today.
It’s refreshing to see perspectives on the future of museums from someone who isn’t deeply entrenched in the “museum world.” I’ve been working quite a lot on your last point. I see museums evolving from places that provide experiences with content into places that enable participatory experiences–with other people, both visitors and experts. We’ve honed a variety of media for engaging visitors with the content we want to show them and worked out some novel ways to allow them to engage with the content interactively. Now the next step is to network those individual experiences so that visitors are aware of, informed by, and able to engage with each other.
To me the real questions about the future of museums are: how do you create high quality visitor experiences in a participatory design environment? Where is the elegant hardware that can allow us to track, network, and collaboratively filter in-person artifact experiences as invisibly as we can on the web?
Hi Nina, yes absolutely agree re the experiences with other people. Just as making high-performance companies is now largely about enabling the right connections between expertise internally and externally, cultural institutions need to be doing the same.
I don’t know the answer to your questions, however the new generation of mobile phones could be central to how this done.
Hi Ross
I read your post with interest as I was unable to be in Sydney for your talk.
For someone who, by his own admission, ‘hasn’t been significantly involved with museums in the past’, you’ve managed to cover pretty much all the topics which are raised at museum conferences around the world!
This could be for a couple of reasons:
it’s probably because you’re a leading business communications professional so you’re quite used to dissecting organisations to get to the heart of their issues; or it could be because to those outside of the museum sector, the issues are often blindingly obvious.
In museum circles, the issues you raised are often discussed as though they had only just arisen. The notion of the ‘media museum’ for instance, has been with us for a long while yet there continues to be extraodinary resistance to the idea of media technology being employed to create cultural interactive experiences.
Ironically, the history of museum ‘experience design’ includes significant examples of technological wonder, for instance:
The Great Exhibition of 1851 heralded a new era of cultural event where Universal Exhibitions would define the progress of Western civilisation. The rhetoric of progress, so much a part of the nineteenth century, translated into a call to excel and be productive. Within the doctrine of continued progress, there was an implicit societal trust in technological and material advance. Exhibitions were useful mechanisms through which to display these social and political developments.
In our quest to highlight what is valuable and specific to the museum environment, we seem to forget that the communication of content has always been at the centre of the museum program.
Even though I research the museum sector and spend a great deal of time writing about technology, I am increasingly despairing of significant change while the sector itself (apart from bright lights such as work from Powerhouse and Australian Museums, as I listen to the almost deafening silence when it comes to considering the role of technology as central to museum communication.
The museum sector would do well to move away from a sense of its own importance to demonstrating the true value it can bring to lives. As cultural networks proliferate, the museum is ideally placed to lead discussion and debate, to create participatory media and develop the role of the active cultural participant.
Just as it carved out its role as gatekeeped, the future museum can become the leader of digital cultural communication, creating opportunities for co-creation between audiences and organisations by adopting represenatative curatorial practices.
Until then, it struggles with ideologies it seems to have created despite the excellent research and development that has occured over the past 40 years!