Challenges of practicing digital imaginaires in collaborative museum design

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this article is to reflect upon the integration of digital media in museums by analysing how the digital is imagined and practised in co-design processes at three Danish art museums. With conceptual reference to Flichy’s ‘imaginaire’, we analyse project descriptions written by project participants to obtain funding. The project descriptions represent initial collective visions and reveal imaginations about the capabilities of digital technology. We find that two categories of imaginaires are similar across the cases and we analyse ethnographic data to identify challenges of practicing these. Our findings suggest that challenges mostly emerge in co-design activities or when such activities are not prioritised. The article concludes with reflections on the integration of digital media in museums and the paradoxical nature of the collective project vision as both a necessary driver and constrainer of collaborative museum design.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative design
• museum exhibition
• collective vision
• digital imaginaires

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All data are originally in Danish and translated by the authors.

2. In Case 1, the project description is quite extensive since the aim is to develop the museums’ entire digital museum practice. In our analysis, we focus on two parts of the description: An introductory part describing the overall objectives of the project and a part describing one of the concrete initiatives, namely the development of a new web platform, in relation to which the other data from the project were primarily derived.

3. For more details, see Olesen (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 Societal Challenges [727040]; New Carlsberg Foundation; Strategiske Forskningsråd [09-063275].