Experimental Museology: Institutions, Representations, Users

Experimental Museology scrutinizes innovative endeavours to transform museum interactions with the world. Analysing cutting-edge cases from around the globe, the volume demonstrates how museums can design, apply and assess new modes of audience engagement and participation.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and research-led professionals, the book argues that museum transformations must be focused on conceptualizing and documenting the everyday challenges and choices facing museums, especially in relation to wider social, political and economic ramifications. In order to illuminate the complexity of these challenges, the volume is structured into three related key dimensions of museum practice - namely institutions, representations and users. Each chapter is based on a curatorial design proposed and performed in collaboration between university-based academics and a museum. Taken together, the chapters provide insights into a diversity of geographical contexts, fields and museums, thus building a comprehensive and reflexive repository of design practices and formative experiments that can help strengthen future museum research and design.

Experimental Museology will be of great value to academics and students in the fields of museum, gallery and heritage studies, as well as architecture, design, communication and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to museum professionals and anyone else who is interested in learning more about experimentation and design as resources in museums.

“The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

Marianne Achiam has a PhD in science education, and is Associate Professor at the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research is concerned with how the science of scientists becomes embodied in science education and communication contexts (e.g. museums) to eventually become the science of the public.

Michael Haldrup is Professor (wsr) in visual culture and performance design at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has written extensively about the performance turn in cultural/social theory, especially with regard to heritage and leisure/tourism studies, including Performing tourist places (Ashgate, 2004) and Tourism, performance and the everyday (Routledge, 2009) and about design and experience-based communication.

Kirsten Drotner is Professor of media studies at the University of Southern Denmark and director of two national R&D programmes DREAM and Our Museum. Her research interests include children’s media and information literacies, digital co-creation and creative learning, and digital museum communication.