Museum Exhibitions - a new approach to audience interaction

Over the last six months or so the Powerhouse Museum has been going through a major revitalisation project. One result of all this activity has been the opening up of some large exhibition spaces. Given International Museums Day is just around the corner and the current level of interest within the museum surrounding exhibition development I thought it could be an opportune time to blog about this vital area of museum work and see how museums in general have been approaching the issue.


One of the most noticeable changes is the number of new, and affordable, technologies now available for the exhibition tool-box. While essentially a good thing trying to grapple with their integration into existing museum exhibition development processes is not always easy. But over the last year the Powerhouse has conducted a few of its own experiments such as the Minecraft Trial Program which ran at Thinkspace over the 2011-2012 Christmas Holidays.

Developed to inspire the younger audiences and to provide experiences that will make them want to return to the Museum this program was a great initiative. The museum felt the basic principles of the link into a lot of the themes and processes explored in our exhibitions. This included architecture, design, construction, materials, engineering, community engagement and sharing.

Another was the Lovelace Exhibition which integrated wonderful physical design and lighting with the Museum’s first extensive foray into handheld content delivery in conjunction with the exhibition development.

But across the Museum sector exhibitions development has tended firstly to focus on, what are our exhibitions going to be about and how do we get them on the floor? While both are valid and necessary questions when it comes to upgrading the museum’s exhibition space, changing audiences, competition from other leisure activities, and new technologies have expanded how museums can approach interactions with their audience.

This is not to say museums are rejecting exhibitions, but rather, these tools are changing some well established notions about how museum objects are interpreted and interacted with. Personally I think this is a think a really positive development and one which has the potential to bring more museum collections into spaces which can accessed by the broader public. I’m sure the display of objects on the museum’s floor will continue to be the primary focus of audience interaction. But I’m equally sure these displays will increasingly incorporate digital tools and new methodologies before, during, and after the objects are displayed on the floor.

What follows are some samples of museums and galleries who have started to have a bit of a rethink about the models they use to take objects out of museum store-rooms and place them in locations where visitors to the museum can then get access to them.

First up is an exhibition titled Public Property by the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore. Created over December 2011 and January 2012 the museum used its ‘works of art’ site to ask the public to arrange and tag collections of artworks. The Walters’ exhibition team determined the popular themes (adornment, military, creatures and death) from these tags. They then held an online vote to decide on the exhibition theme ‘Creatures’. The museums then selected creature themed artworks for the public to vote on and 106 were selected to be part of the exhibition. The exhibition will be on from June 17–Aug. 19, 2012.

“Once the exhibition is open, there will be a variety of interactive elements to complement the chosen artworks,” said Walters Manager of Web and Social Media and exhibition team leader, Dylan Kinnett. “The exhibition vision, process and design are critical to changing perceptions and attitudes regarding museums by inviting civic participation in an intentional manner,” stated Manager of Family Programs and exhibition team leader, Emily Blumenthal. “We will also have a series of programs and events associated with the exhibition to invite visitors to become further involved with their community, their museum and their exhibition.”

Between Science Art and Design – Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver whose digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. Jorp’s focus is on the humanising data to encourage people to think about how the data they generate everyday carries weight in reality. Currently data is still seen as boring and opaque for those outside the domain of geeks and economists. But Jorp’s believes this should be broadened out to link Science, Design, and Art to create affirmative and lasting narratives. This has a resonance with the sessions on exhibitions development which were held here at the Powerhouse Museums which also focussed on our collections (another big data set) and the way we need to develop stories about the collections which include a combination of science art and design rather than only one of these elements.

One example of how this use of data is incorporated into displays can be seen in the design of the September 11 memorial at ground zero in New York. Here the names of the victims are not arranged alphabetically but by relationships such as partners or co-workers. The names are arranged according to a process and algorithm which was used to created “meaningful adjacencies,” based on “relationship” details which include proximity at the time of the attacks, company or organization affiliations for those who worked at the World Trade Center or Pentagon, and approximately 1,200 requests from family members. Software developed by Local Projects was used to implement this arrangement.



Wiki Loves Art Nouveau is Europeana’s first user-generated exhibition to explore some of the finest examples of Art Nouveau architecture from across Europe. For those haven’t already heard of it Europeana represents a cross sector and country solution to accessing cultural heritage in a digital form. Currently it provides s a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. The content is sourced from broad array European cultural and scientific institutions who have signed into Europeana as partners and this big picture approach is seen by some as the next step in opening up the discovery of the world’s knowledge and cultural heritage.

The International Council of Communication Design’s SEGD conference was held in March of this year in partnership with the V&A Museum. Keynotes for this symposium were David Adjaye (architect) and Kenneth Grange (industrial designer). The main theme for this year was how innovation and collaboration are radically changing design across many disciplines.

London was a bit of a stretch for my budget and so while I didn’t get to go to I do agree with their sentiment which suggests collaboration is a powerful influence in design today. Cybelle Jones, principal with exhibition design firm Gallagher & Associates and co-chair of SEGD’s International Symposium believes that while design teams are working across continents, cultures, languages, and disciplines they are also finding collaboration can lead to: unwieldy project teams, communication challenges, and dilution of design intent. While her thoughts are more focussed on product design the partnership with the V&A is clearly no accident as these changes to design processes also affect museum exhibition design.

Jones asks a question which could also resonate within the museum sector. Is design better and stronger created with one singular vision, or should it be democratic—bringing together diverse talents, expertise, and perspectives in a combined vision?

The winner of the 2012 TED prize “The City 2.0” reveals another interesting approach which could be applied to exhibition development. The suggestion here is that perhaps content could be developed and integrated across a city rather than just within the museum walls. This year the TED prize was not awarded to an individual, but to an idea, ‘City 2.0”. This is an envisaged city of the future … a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom promoting innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity. Reducing the carbon footprint of its occupants and creating a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.

Museums like the Powerhouse are an integrated part of the city’s infrastructure and as stewards of cultural heritage and promoters of learning are perfectly placed to collaborate to be a part of projects like this. City 2.0 gives grants to people around the world who are advocating on its behalf with the opportunity to collectively craft a wish which will make use of the $100,000 prize: a wish capable of igniting a massive collaborative project. Individuals or organizations who wish to contribute their ideas can submit a TED Prize wish on behalf of The City 2.0 or write to tedprize@ted.com

Many museum professionals believe the exhibition is the primary mechanism though which they broker their relationship with the broader public and visitors to the museum have traditionally been the focus group of the exhibition process. The question now is how much this relationship has changed and if so how are the digital and on-line experience constituting current visitor interaction with museum collections.

Finally there is another trend that will no doubt propel more and more collaboration across museums and communities. This is the loading of museum content being into third party sites which are not owned, or even managed by the museum. Examples of this include HistoryPin, Flickr, and Pintrest alongside making collection API’s available for third party development and integration into other platforms.

Geoff Barker, 2012

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Is the Museum Exhibition Model Broken?

Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities, from ''Museum Wormianum'', 1655. Original source Smithsonian Museum

Over the last fortnight I've been in the midst of a lot of discussion about exhibition development for museums. Primarily the question has been approached from ... what are our exhibitions going to be about and how do we get them on the floor?

Both valid and necessary questions when it comes to upgrading the museum's exhibition space and it's certainly seen as core function of most museums - if not the primary function. Indeed for many the exhibition provides the main mechanism by which museum professionals believe they broker their mandate with the community at large.

But in the middle of a conversation about how an exhibition's design and content was to be fed into the 'Ford-like' production line to create the labels, design it, and then fabricate and advertise it I had this thought ...

PERHAPS THE EXHIBITION MODEL FOR MUSEUM'S ACTUALLY MINIMISED AUDIENCE INTERACTION WITH MUSEUM COLLECTIONS & THE PROBLEM WASN'T THE THEME OR THE DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITION - IS IT POSSIBLE THE ENTIRE MODEL IS OUTDATED?

This sounds a bit of a radical thought but perhaps not as much as one would at first think. Museum's haven't always adopted the model of using themed exhibitions to broker audience contact. In fact the earliest museums, the cabinets of curiosities and the history museums that followed them, were actually incredibly open experiences in relation to the display of their collections.

In the 1560s the Belgian scholar Samuel Quiccheberg made the modest claim that the museum (read .. Cabinet of curiusities) was,

"A theatre of the broadest scope, containing authentic materials and precise reproductions of the whole of the universe'

These private collectors could of course never attain such a universal collection but the objects they had were all on show for their public, albeit a very limited one. It's clear when looking at images of these phantasmagorical collections like those of Ferrante Imperato, Septimus Jorger,and Francesco Calzolari that the museum was a kind of scholarly open book, a visual microcosm of the worlds objects collected, and arranged, to inspire, amaze and encourage serious research.

The civic museum in the 19th century was also in many ways a much more open book when it came to brokering the interactions between audience and museum collections. And some of those great institutions like the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Louvre, and many others around the have carried that legacy right through to the present. Its embedded in their very DNA; the architecture that houses them, and the desire to be a three-dimensional archive of the culture that surrounds them.

But of course the scale of these collections ensure well over 90% of the collections are stored away from the public. And increasingly the museum as a site from which to glimpse the narrative of culture across time has shifted toward emphasising the culture of the present. Not really unexpected given change and culture appear to have sped up. It is now more global in nature, but change is also increasingly found in digital containers hard for museum exhibitions to grapple with, and produced on a scale that makes many ownable by people who once might have visited the museum to engage with these technologies.

But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the exhibition was a solution for addressing problems relating to access to collections and contemporary culture. And its almost universal adoption has, for many years, made real sense of some of the museums activities. In the earliest years exhibitions provided a mechanism by which the curator,(and in those days it was a curator with a few assistants), could rearrange the displays in a designated area by changing over objects. Design was in fact quite modular as the existing cabinets and collection area designated how and where they were displayed. But it wasn't a very dynamic environment for other museum professionals and as museums expanded to include a broader range of staff: non-curatorial managers, registrars, educators, marketers, conservator, loans officers, etc., this curator controlled mode began to show signs of redundancy - and not just in the area of exhibitions.

The most prevalent exhibition model adopted seems to have been inherited from Art Museums. And this still shows in the way exhibitions are implemented and thought about. Even now discussions about exhibition are contingent on style, design, often white boxes, certainly white labels, and developed around a person, a single theme, a particular manufacturer. By the end of the C20th they had turned into the primary focus for resources in most large scale museums. They had also generated a massive infrastructure for developing and marketing exhibitions all justified because people coming though the doors of the museum were believed to be the primary way in which the museum brokered its madate and relationship with the communities that surrounded them.

All well and good. But what about now? Museums have their collections online, wireless devices mean people can experience these collections in spaces outside the museum, and its staff are interacting over multiple platforms in the social media space,publishing e-books, and talking live with students online: the list is an ever expanding one.

As Seb Chan points out in his blog post, mobile tech impacts in museums blog post, the new museum has to acknowledge the experience starts well before, and continues long after, the visit. In fact the notions constructed around building permanent or temporary, large or small, exhibitions and then tearing them down and replacing them with a new crop may also be open to question. I certainly believe the way people interact with museum collections and their interests are changing and broadening. These collections can now service a wider group than the cliched bespectacled enthusiast or academic.

In many ways museum business has already changed, its just we have spent such a long time developing a particular way of doing things its hard to change direction, and like ships it sometimes feels like the bigger the institution the bigger the curve it takes to change direction. Ironically I think we can actually learn some lessons from re-visiting some of the methodology adopted by the earliest museums. The open display style of the Cabinet of Curiosities with its multitude of objects when combined with new wireless technologies and interactive databases could provide engaging and ever-changing museum experiences. Ones tailored to the visitors needs not dictated by museum audience research. Scalable experiences where objects could be requested for display, stories are developed through broader community interaction and narratives are expanded to merge the past, present and the future.