Bridging gaps between intentions and realities: a review of participatory exhibition development in museums

Abstract

During the past decade, museum professionals have increasingly involved external participants in exhibition development. In this paper, we review empirical studies of this popular approach to participatory exhibition development practice, with regard to methods, degrees of participation, rationales, obstacles and facilitating factors. These influences include cultural differences between external participants and museum professionals; level and form of museum control; participant characteristics and motivations; and management of disagreements. Based on our findings, we formulate implications for practice, policy and research, which are also relevant across a wide spectrum of professions that apply participatory design, e.g. city planning, health promotion, landscape architecture and product development.

Keywords:

• curatorship
• cultural institution
• empowerment
• science centre
• third space

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to a number of people for their contributions to the present article. Mai Murmann has contributed to the methodological development of the study. Furthermore, the PULSE Research Unit has provided inputs, for which we are hugely grateful. We would like to thank the Novo Nordisk Foundation for funding the PULSE project and this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lærke Mygind: Student Research Assistant, Steno Health Promotion Center, Steno Diabetes Center A/S and BA Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Lærke is currently involved with the PULSE project, a collaborative project between a Danish science center, Experimentarium, and Steno Health Promotion Center. The project aims at developing an exhibition that alongside associated community-based activities inspire families to be physically active together.

Anne Kahr Hällman: Director of Research at the Danish science center Experimentarium, MA, PhD, in science communication and museum learning. Anne is specialised in Design-Based Research and evaluation of educational designs in informal settings. Her research focuses primarily on the topics of scientific literacy, learning and evaluation within museums. As part of her work at Experimentarium, Anne is developing new methods for exhibit assessment in relation to the PULSE project.

Peter Bentsen: Senior Researcher, MSc, PhD, Steno Health Promotion Center, Steno Diabetes Center A/S. Peter's research has generally focused on ‘people, places and pedagogies’ in relation to health promotion, physical activity and learning in the interface between the health, social and human sciences. At his employment at Steno Diabetes Center, he has primarily focused on research and development projects with links between health promotion and education, and is currently involved with the PULSE project.

Notes

1. Search string: (dialogue OR sharing OR ‘co-development’ OR ‘co-design’ OR ‘user-participation’ OR ‘user-centered’ OR ‘user-driven’ OR ‘user-generated’ OR collabor* OR ‘co-production’ OR participat* OR involvement OR ‘co-creation’ OR ‘co-design’ OR engagement OR contribution OR outreach) AND (museum OR ‘science cent*’) AND (visitor OR local OR native OR communit* OR external OR staff OR collaborator OR partner OR ‘multi-disciplin*’) AND (creation OR curation OR design OR exhibit* OR artifact OR object OR invention OR theme) AND PUBYEAR > 2001.

2. In the following we refer to the studies according to the numbers assigned in Table 2. The paper presenting ‘The Underground Railroad’ (Ashley 2011) will for example be referred to as case I or Iversen and Smith (2012) as study III.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.