Openness, Inclusion and Participation

in MuseumsMariana Salgado

Media Lab- University of Art and Design Helsinki (TAIK)

Hämeentie 135C (00560) Helsinki

mariana.salgado@taik.fi

ABSTRACT

One of the assumptions that some members of the museum community share is the benefit of opening the museum for new audiences and sharing roles of curatorship together with these audiences. In this essay I unravel the background of this assumption and draw points for future consideration related to the idea of open.

An open museum is an ideal that seems new and revolutionary, in the context of such traditional institutions as museums. However, researchers in museum studies have long considered their contribution as openers of new opportunities, but they used a different vocabulary. In the museum community, inclusion and accessibility are already established values that museums pursue. Inclusion focused on people and participation on practices. So, are we proposing something new while talking about open in this community, or it is only a way to update the vocabulary? Thus, the main question of this essay is what is the innovation that we refer while referring to an open museum. The answer to this question aims to clarify also the assumptions that the museum community shares related to openness.

I argue for the need to embrace inclusion and participation as pillars that support the open museum not only because these are already approved values, but because they can bring to the discussion around openness the necessary background and possibilities for sustainability. It is in tracing the path from participative and inclusive practices that an open culture within the museums will emerge.

Keywords: inclusion, open, participation, museums, interaction design, accessibility

1. INTRODUCTION

According to Thomas Kuhn (1962) “normal science, the activity in which most scientists spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the

community’s willingness to defend that assumption” [11]. I found his statement also true in the context of doing research on interaction design in museums because the designers and researchers in this group share the assumption that an open museum is an ideal. As a consequence it is much discussed how to design towards an open museum providing different strategies to measure or describe audience participation [17][3][10].

Should we question the assumption that an open museum is beneficial? Not necessarily, but a redefinition would certainly be good since the term open is blurred. I do not propose to investigate on the openness in museums, but rather on some set of characteristics related to open that can help to clarify opportunities for designers committed to a more democratic design process in the museum context.

At first sight the ideal of open appears new and revolutionary, specifically in the context of such traditional institutions as museums. Researchers in the museum field have been considering their contribution as openers of new opportunities already in the ‘70s, though they used a different vocabulary. For example in his seminal article “The museum, a Temple or the Forum” [4], Duncan Cameron (1971/2004) proposed aspects of this openness that some researchers are realizing today, while designing exhibition integrated with social media tools. He tried to demystify the museum as a temple and propose it as a forum for discussions. Cameron states it in this way:

“In my view, it is clear that there is a clear and urgent need for the re-establishment of the forum as an institution in society” [4].

He goes further by saying “I am proposing not only exhibition halls and meeting places that are open to all, but also programs and funds for them that accept without reservation the most radical innovations in art forms, the most controversial interpretations of history, of our own society, of the nature of man, or, for that matter, of the nature of our world” [4]. The issue of opening the museum as a forum for discussions is not new, but has at least 40 years.

Furthermore, other researchers in the museum field have identified a radical change in museums. For

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example, Gail Anderson (2004) affirms that there is a paradigm shift from collection-driven institution to visitor-centered museums [1]. In line with this paradigm shift, museums have appropriated the need to be accessible and inclusive to visitors with different needs. For example the museum association code of ethics states that museums should “consult and involve communities, users and supporters” [13]. The code of ethics created by ICOM (The International Council of Museums) states that “museums work in close collaboration with the communities from which their collections originate as well as those they serve” [12]. Inclusion has been used to address people, as I argue in the following section. Therefore, for building an open museum we should consider aspects of inclusion and participation.

2. ON INCLUSIVE MUSEUMS

In 2008, the first international conference of the Inclusive Museum took place. The same group of researchers and museum professionals later created the International Journal of the Inclusive Museum. During this conference, in which I participated, the largest part of the discussion was around the inclusion of regional or ethnic communities in the museum. Other visitors that were considered in the presentations were: socially disadvantaged, children/ seniors, out of reach (such as prisoners), far away, non-visitors, and people with disabilities. These categories could overlap. There were some presentations about making inclusion as a part of the museum platform (staff organization and policies). Amongst the participants there was a recognition that inclusiveness is about people’s attitudes.

Therefore it is possible to sum up that inclusion in the museum community is understood mainly to mean the attitude towards making different people participate and be part of the museum community, by, for example, visiting the exhibition. While inclusion has dealt with taking into account segregated or marginalised groups such as people with disabilities, immigrants, and others, then open goes one step further by eliminating the necessities of roles in a pre-defined hierarchical position.

The open paradigm would help us to specify under what conditions do we include people and what special process of inclusion for certain excluded people need to be taken in consideration during the design process. I would suggest that the word inclusion could be included in the definition of an open museum. This will bring the open paradigm proposed in the museum community, closer to the discussions proposed by design for all, and other groups that deal with accessibility issues.

3. ON PARTICIPATIVE MUSEUMS

On one hand, inclusion has been used to address

people, as I argue in the previous section. On the other hand participation has been used to address the practices, including actions and activities that people perform and take part in during a process.

There exist many models and frameworks for participation. In this section I refer to the ones that have been key in design discourse or in the museum community. Participatory design approaches have been in the discourse of designers from the ‘70s, onwards with the contribution of Scandinavian designers and thinkers. The Scandinavian tradition of participatory design includes the user in a series of activities such as role-playing, games, mock-ups and simulations [7]. Pelle Ehn (1992) characterizes participatory design as a learning process in which designers and users learn from one another [6]. Participation happens through a series of activities and inviting users in many stages of the design process. Up until now, only a few groups of researchers have appropriated the activities proposed by participatory design and brought them to the museum scene to make audience participate in the creation of exhibitions from the beginning of their concept creation [18][19].

Moreover, there are other modes and strategies for participation explored in museums. Nina Simon, a pioneer in the museum community bringing issues around participation into discussion, analyses several examples in which museums implemented strategies for participation. Currently, she has proposed a model of visitor participation [16]. She has been extrapolating from different contexts ideas for visitors’ active participation in museums. These ideas go from using social media in creative ways to implementing several analogical and simple strategies to motivate visitors to take part in exhibitions.

The work in museum around participation [16] and participatory design focus on the question of how to make people participate, not defining exactly who are the ones included and under which roles. The discussion related to inclusion brings to the front that there are excluded people, such as people with disabilities and others, as I have presented in the previous section, but does not stress the roles of those people in the design process or during an exhibition. This is where the concept of open brings something to the discussion. Open brings roles, in a non- hierarchical manner, proposing that everyone can have the same status.

4. DISCUSSION ON AN OPEN MUSEUM

The paradigm forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable [11].

At this point it is important to remember that the open paradigm started as a result of the collaboration of virtual communities, such as the Free and Libre Open Source community. They have used a meritocracy system wherein appointments and responsibilities are

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assigned to individuals based upon demonstrated talent and ability (merit) and not pre-defined before hand. This community were formed by people that do not know each other, placed in different geographical locations and with different aim and goals towards the general Open Source project that they contributed [2]. These facts did not affect negatively their collaboration. On the contrary it allowed many people to contribute because of the open platform for collaboration and the open and transparent way to manipulate rules. When these ways of doing are translated to the museum, by proposing that everybody, even people that do not come to the museum, can create material on the basis of the exhibited material and their creation would be shared in the museum space, a lot of disagreement takes place. This new practice, of opening the stage to other voices, goes against the traditional impersonal voice of the museum as the only one having knowledge on their collection and the only one that could transmit it. At the moment, museums are one of the most trusted media institutions in terms of the accuracy of the information that they communicate [15]. Concerning this issue, Sandell (2007) asserts that “the qualities visitors attribute to the museum as a medium – truthfulness, worthiness, reliability, the capacity to ‘tell the truth’ – and the potential for museum visiting to be an especially active mode of consumption, …make the museum a relatively efficacious and highly valued provider of resources within the mediascape” [15]. Museum community highly prized this impartial and accurate information delivered by museums [8]. This is one of the reasons why this practice of letting others create material on the exhibition and share this material, is not install and spread quickly within museums. Therefore, there is a need to communicate and perceive the benefits that openness can bring to the museum community. More and more projects are in many ways bringing audiences to comment on exhibition material using different frameworks and analysing the result of this collaboration with the audience.

Growing towards open platforms of collaboration with other museums and with other visitors is a logical path to create the open museum. The issue that arises is how to frame this openness and how to claim that this framing has been done in an open process of collaboration.

The determination of shared paradigms is not, however, the determination of shared rules [11].

One way towards the adoption of the open paradigm is to share rules for its implementation. The process of creation of these rules needs to be transparent and inclusive in order to be representative. Though the open paradigm is not install in the whole community, still it is appropriated within the interaction designers of the museum community [5] [6], which are all proclaiming that their projects propose openness. For example Susan Chun and her colleagues affirm that

one “unrealized opportunity for museums’ potential is to share not just their collections and interpretation but also their software and software development methods, by building and adopting open source software and collaborating using open source models” [5]. Another relevant example of this collaboration appears the online library of software modules for platforms that exhibit developers can use and configure, its name is Open Exhibits [14].

The rules for this openness have to be negotiated by the whole community, not only by the interaction designer or the ones that are used to collaborations in digital platforms. The open paradigm forces as to study in detail the tensions and forces that restrict and support people to collaborate and contribute in peer-to-peer frameworks.

In this paper I propose open as paradigm to better understand strategies used in the museum context. There is a need to embrace inclusive and participative practices, as a way to include other members of the museum community and not restrict the discussion to interaction designers and researchers. To develop vocabulary to talk about our work is part of designers’ agenda, though we also have to learn to relate this vocabulary to already existent one in order to not isolate us from our design context.

5. REFERENCES

[1] Anderson, G. (Ed.). (2004). Introduction: Reinventing the Museum. In G. Anderson (Ed.), Reinventing the museum. Historical and contemporary perspectives on the paradigm shift (pp.1-7). Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press.

[2] Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks. How social production transforms market and freedom. USA: Yale University Press.

[3] Dalsgaard, P., Dindler, C., & Eriksson E. (2008). Designing for Participation in Public Knowledge Institutions. Proceedings of the Nordic Computer-Human Interaction (NordCHI 2008): Using Bridges, (pp. 93-102). Lund, Sweden: Association for Computing Machinery.

[4] Cameron, D. F. (1971/2004). The museum, a temple or the forum. In G. Anderson (Ed.), Reinventing the museum. Historical and contemporary perspectives on the paradigm shift (pp. 61-73). Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press.

[5[ Chun, S., Jenkins, M., & Stein, R. (2007). Open Source, Open Access: New Models. In H. Din & P. Hecht

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(Eds.). The digital museum: A think guide (pp. 135-145). Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.

[6] Ehn, P. (1992). Scandinavian design: On participation and skill. In P. Adler & T. Winograd. (Eds.). Usability: Turning technologies into tools (pp. 96-132). New York: Oxford University Press.

[7] Hofmeester, K., & Charon de Saint Germain, E. (1999). Presence. Netherlands: Presence at the Netherlands Design Institute. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge.

[8] Keene, S. (2005). Fragments of the world. Uses of museum collections. Oxford: Elsevier. Butterworth Heinemann.

[9] Kelly, B., Ellis, M., and Gardler, R. (2008). What does openness mean to the Museum community? In D. Bearman and J. Trant (Eds.). Museums and the Web proceedings.

[10] Kelly, L., & Russo, A. (2008). From ladders of participation to networks of participation: Social media and museum audiences. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (Eds.). Proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2008. Toronto: Archives and Museum Informatics.

[11] Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, USA: The University of Chicago Press.

[12] International Council of Museums (ICOM). (2007). Code of Ethics. Retrieved on 21, September 2009, from http://icom.museum/ethics.html#intro

[13] Museums Association (2008). Code of Ethics. Retrieved on September 30, 2008 from http://museumsassociation.org/ma/10934

[14] Open exibits. (2009). Ideum and the Institute of Learning Innovation. Retrieved on 30 September, 2009 from http://www.openexhibits.org/

[15] Sandell, R. (2007). Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference. New York, USA: Routledge.

[16] Simon, N. (2007). Discourse in the Blogosphere. What Museums Can Learn from Web 2.0. Museums and Social Issues, 2, Number 2, Fall 2007, Left Coast Press, USA, pp. 257-274.

[17] Simon, N. (2009, September 22). Frameworks and Lessons on the Public Participation in Science Research Report. Message posted to http://museumtwo.blogspot.com. Retrieved on September 24, 2009

[18] Taxén, G. (2004). Introducing participatory design in museums. Proceedings Participatory Design Conference 2004 (PDC 2004) (pp. 204-213). Toronto: Association for Computing Machinery.

[19] Watkins, J. & Russo, A. (2007). Participatory Design and Co-creativity in Cultural Institutions. Museums in a Changing Climate: Sustainability, Technology and Collections. Canberra, Australia.

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