Co-designing health promotion at a science centre: distributing expertise and granting modes of participation

Abstract

Museums and science centres are increasingly employing participatory approaches to exhibition design. Despite the increasing interest, the dynamics, challenges and benefits of employing participatory methods in museum design remain under-researched. Ensuring that audiences are involved requires reflections on the aim of the participation, and on the implications of its practical and institutional embeddedness. We analyse how co-design frames the meeting between disciplinary fields, as well as achieving audience involvement, through the case of the PULSE project. Here, designers, researchers, and families co-designed a health-promoting exhibition at a Danish science centre. We investigate how the co-design process was shaped between the fields of health promotion research and exhibition design practice. We describe how audiences and professionals were redefined and repositioned, and how tensions arose and necessitated negotiations of expertise, authority and modes of participation. The ideal of visitor involvement created tensions with existing design and development practices complicating the translation of user experience into exhibition design.

Keywords:

• Co-design
• ethnography
• expertise
• health promotion
• participation
• science centre

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Erratum

Notes

1. Here, while acknowledging the differences between the institutions, we use the terms ‘museum’ and ‘science centre’ interchangeably about exhibition-based, informal learning contexts that include science centres, science museums and children’s museums.

2. PULSE is not an acronym, but is spelled this way in the project documents and project descriptions: ‘Pulse is rhythmical, a beat of the heart, a movement. (…) The name PULSE reflects the exhibition’s goals of learning, fun and improving health’ (Stentoft et al. 2012, 1).

3. http://www.pickapicture.dk/da/.