Brown, Kirsten
Brown, Kirsten
Bio Sketch
Kirsten Brown is a designer-researcher writing on museum exhibit design and multisensory visitor engagement, known to this wiki as the author of "Touch, Taste, Smell: Fostering Museum Visitor Engagement with Multisensory Spaces," Chapter 25 of Gregory Marinic's The Interior Architecture Theory Reader (Routledge, 2018). The chapter's argument — that museums began multisensory (Wunderkammern), were de-sensorialized by preservation policy, electric lighting and modernist ocularcentrism, and are now re-sensorialized through designed touch, taste, and smell encounters — makes her the wiki's founding voice for the multisensory museum register. Her practice-research footing is visible in the chapter itself: the Old Sturbridge Village photographs are credited "Image credit: Kirsten Brown," indicating fieldwork at the sites she analyzes. Broader biographical identification remains unconfirmed: a Dr Kirsten Brown active in Australian commercial-interiors and workplace-design research (Design Innovation Manager, CSR Saint-Gobain; PhD on workplace environments) is a plausible but unverified match — see Open Questions.
Key Works
- *Touch, Taste, Smell: Fostering Museum Visitor Engagement with Multisensory Spaces* (2018) — Chapter 25 of The Interior Architecture Theory Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge): the historical arc from multisensory Wunderkammern to "almost universal sensorial neglect" to the designed re-opening of touch, taste and smell in the museum interior.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- multisensory-museum — her chapter's master concept: the museum that designs touch, taste and smell as interpretive media
- smellscape — the olfactory-environment register her smell cases (Tolaas's Central Park; the scented museum) build
- participatory-museum — the Simon frame her chapter grounds: visitors "not only observe but also participate in meaning-making"
- taste-full-museum — the gustatory register (Mihalache via Brown): the museum cafe and community kitchen as museological space
- white-cube — the paradigm her Prado case repurposes from within
- memory — the cognitive engine of the multisensory programme (smell's recollection; the "internal museum of the mind")
Relevance to the Core Research
Brown's chapter completes the wiki's museum-interior cluster (exhibitionary complex, white cube, narrative space, symbiotic spaces, museum as destination) with its missing sensory dimension: the museum interior as a designed field of bodily encounter. For the interior-architecture cluster it contributes the Reader's twenty-fifth register — exhibit design as the discipline's public, participatory, sensorial domain. For the wiki's debates it supplies: the no-touch policy and its relaxation as a power-and-space register; the stripped gallery's engineered unmediation as a truth-and-illusion register; smell's involuntary recollection as the phenomenology/psychoanalysis hinge; and the participatory criterion in interior-design-vs-architecture.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
Open Questions
- Is the chapter's author the Australian design researcher Dr Kirsten Brown (CSR Saint-Gobain; workplace-wellbeing PhD)? The chapter's subject (museum exhibit design, multisensory interiors) is consistent with a commercial-interiors researcher, but the wiki cannot confirm identity — a matter to resolve before citing her biography further.
- Are there other publications by Brown on museum experience or exhibit design — and does the chapter precede, accompany, or condense a larger research programme on multisensory engagement?
