Matters of becoming, experimental zones for making museums public with social media

Abstract

Making things public challenges existing matters of concern and, in design, may also be about changing them. This paper advances the concept of translation from early ANT literature and explores it in order to support co-designing for making things public. We elaborate on how translations may be understood as moves and transformations of practices and objects that require both time and learning. We discuss how translations may include the emerging, situated, fluid, enacted, experiential and the material, and suggest co-design to rethink translation as a temporal process of learning and ‘becoming’. Our aim is to demonstrate a mutual theoretical influence between ANT and co-design. Our conceptual reflection is based on a museum design case where museum staff and the authors explore new communicational modes of social media. The project established a longitudinal ‘experimental zone’ as space and time for design in the everyday practice of the museum. The paper reflects upon the value of ANT as a framework for rethinking the design–use divide using concepts of learning and translations to bring awareness of co-design as temporal, fluid and emerging processes of becoming.

Keywords:

• translations
• enactments
• time
• museums
• collaborative learning
• becoming
• co-design

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of the project CONTACT at InterMedia, University of Oslo 2009–2013. We would like to thank the Norwegian Maritime Museum, our respective institutions and the Norwegian Research Council for Grant VERDIKT 193011/ S10, for supporting this research collaboration.