Sensory and Democratic Experience of Heritage
Opening up interaction design possibilities within participatory planning activities of urban collectives
“A total work of art is only possible in the context of the whole of society. Everyone will be a necessary co-creator of a social architecture, and so long as anyone cannot participate, the ideal form of democracy has not been reached.”
— Joseph Beuys
Context
Museums create cultural and social capital for people with commitment to local audiences. And as it’s important to progress with the times, it’s crucial that museums pioneered new approaches to learning and engaging with the ever-evolving audiences.
As early as 1909, Theodor Volbehr, in his book The Future of German Museums, saw the function of museums as ‘popular education centres in the broadest sense’. This ideology remains, to a degree, but as both art and audiences change, so too must museums to reflect this. Museums are not simply warehouses: the narratives, objects and images deposited there are the foundations on which futures are envisioned and shaped. Eventually, the museum will become a new type of public space, one meant for social play and innovation. Intelligent uses of the relationship between artefacts, audiences and spaces can result in buildings that are stimulating to visit and encourage public to engage with the art and history of their own time as well as of a time that they have themselves not witnessed.
Advancing with Times: Quest for Relevance
It is critical that we also recognise the value that cultural organisations bring to their communities, and the expanded role of tomorrow’s institutions, and how they utilise their local and international connections while experimenting with newer, more relevant forms of interactions. This also means that they should not be judged primarily on the economic merit, but also on efficiency and functionality.
A museum, especially today, has a specific place in society, because it enables reflection through experience. It promotes the encounter of objects produced by artists and creative thinkers as heritage and cultural identity and as objects to question and shift our conventions. The museum of the future will be a community space where one can see his or her identity in the sense of cultural continuity.
Also, traditionally, the museum experience has been unidirectional: curators conceive of and execute an exhibit, which visitors then enjoy. But if we peek into recent developments in the realm of museum experiences, it’s clear that curation as an activity is set to change.
Role of Technology
Technology can alter the whole context and conversation of art and history. For example, seeing things you can’t see: the concept of using augmented reality (AR) to see something that you can’t actually see while you are visiting the museum, like Hacking the Heist — the AR exhibition of stolen works of art. Museums and architectural spaces also attempt to appeal to the ‘Instagram-friendliness’ of spaces which shows both a lack of long-term vision and throws light on modernity’s obsession with catering to what’s visible to the naked eye and excluding other senses from the experience.
Similarly, multi-sensory experience design can contribute and feed in the same way and even make the exhibits more accessible to people who, for example, might be visually impaired. It can bring in new visitors eager to experiment with the new technology; it could pique younger visitors’ interest in older works. Museums are obviously striving for relevance, because the world is increasingly splintered and competing at offerings, and a static object finds itself competing for our attention more and more.
The Proposal
It’s a typical thing for museums to focus on the building and the collection and keep the community involvement and material interactions by the sidelines. To counter that, this concept opens up interaction design possibilities within participatory planning activities of urban collectives.
The proposal concept involves the creation of interactive spaces that strive for continued community engagement. Such spaces would allow association of stories so that opens up collections to reinterpretation and recitation of multiple narratives instead of single authoritative stories that are ususally attached to museum artefacts. In this way, this concept opens avenues for people to relate themselves with the objects more and create a bond with them.
There are many ways of how these artefacts can be interpreted through multisensory encounters, so rather than the museum being the authoritative device, it opens up the floor to the people and their conversations.
“The buildings, the stuff in them, are only as important as the narratives that go with them”
— Karen Carter, Myseum of Toronto
A multi-sensory space is created within the museum premises that becomes an alternative tangible medium of learning. This provides a new realm of an intimate interactive experience that people usually do not get to experience and helps attach new meanings and importance. Hopefully, that can reinforce and promote the relationships that exist between objects and experience of heritage.
Framework
The framework (Figure 1) is built on the pillars that:
a) representation is important; b) you become an institution ‘for’ the community when you are ‘of’ the community and ‘by’ this community as well.
This framework ensures system sustainability and gives room for replaceability while inculcating a participatory practice in curation for the museum space. The four stages shown in the framework are — before, during I, II and after collaboration with a particular community group.
Blueprint
The service blueprint (Figure 2) has been developed to help make explicit how existing resources can be repurposed and what new resources will be needed. It also gives a sense of the overall impact the activities might have.
Impact
This is an unconventional way of opening up the museum and cultural spaces to get significant community support through a very tangible community project. It also opens up collections that would otherwise lie in unwieldy storages, to new interpretations and new experiences.
There is a definite need to engage more with our past to understand our present and the future and the eventual goal of the project is to humanise knowledge so as to enable better engagement with it.
This also opens up such public spaces to community custodianship and enables more participation and sustainability.
Major impact areas would include:
• Representation of social strata in places of cultural importance
• Providing a holistic identity to the city, its people and their heritage
• Collaborating with the entire entity of the museum, not just the people there
• Crafting a more inclusive museum, for both people and objects
• New ways of engaging with the materiality and experiencing heritage
• Co-creation of sustainable futures
• Igniting curiosity and intrigue
• Ultimately democratisation of museum experience
• Community cohesion and resilience
• Also, more footfall = more donations!
Such places would get transformed into experiential learning spaces and thus can have much more impact than just book or screen learning. They also accomplish to incorporate alternative or ‘minor’ stories from the community, which are usually not able to surface.
As additional positive consequences, this arrangement has tremendous potential to eventually feed into social care.
In a nutshell, it would foster a culture to establish new modes of social communication and work towards a future state of creative democracy and enhanced social cohesion.
This Medium post is a derivative of my work at Innovation School, The Glasgow School of Art as a part of the MDes studio. If you’d like to learn more about it or the references used, please reach out to me on email: abrol.chahat@gmail.com or, alternatively, visit: www.chahatabrol.com
