Participatory Museum

Definition

The participatory museum is Nina Simon's conception of the museum as a site where visitors make meaning rather than receive it: "design decisions can help them successfully achieve content and experience goals … developing participatory experiences in which visitors create, share, and connect with each other around content" (The Participatory Museum, 2010, quoted in Brown). In the wiki the concept is grounded by Kirsten Brown's chapter, which supplies the design-content of participation: the museum reinterpreted "as participatory community center" while "maintaining more traditional objectives of preserving collections and providing a forum for education and entertainment" — with the designer's responsibility stated as the concept's normative horizon: "Museums, curators, and designers must consider spatial construction and their responsibility to create exhibit spaces where visitors can not only observe but also participate in meaning-making."

The concept's built forms in Brown: touch regimes that make the visitor's body an instrument of interpretation (gloved handling, living-history participation at Old Sturbridge Village — "to participate in it, rather than simply observing it via a series of independent objects on display in a formal exhibit" — tactile models); taste programmes where the visitor's palate is the interpretive organ (the Mitsitam Cafe's regional foodways; the Southern Food and Beverage Museum's community kitchens); and smell exhibits where personal association completes the work ("people form all types of personal associations and judgments about smells from… their personal experience").

The concept sits in tension with the wiki's disciplinary account of the museum: where the exhibitionary complex organizes visitors through directed routes and instructed visibility, the participatory museum relocates authority to the visitor's experience — the inversion Drobnick already diagnosed in the postmodern museum ("Authority and coherence are guaranteed not by collections and curatorial directives, but by each visitor's experience"). The open question the wiki carries: is participation the complex's dissolution or its most efficient internalization?

Key Thinkers

• Nina Simon — the concept's author (The Participatory Museum, 2010; museum experience designer, executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History at the time of writing): the participatory-experience programme quoted in Brown; not yet paged (see log).
• Kirsten Brown — the wiki's grounding source: the participatory frame applied to the sensorial registers (touch, taste, smell), with the designer's meaning-making responsibility as the concept's norm.
• Hans Hollein — the restructuring thesis the concept extends: "the role of the museum is generally in the process of being restructured as far as both tasks and content are concerned, as are its relations with the public" (1991, quoted in Brown); not yet paged (see log).
• Emily Stokes-Rees — the disciplinary counterpoint: the museum as narrative space and exhibitionary complex, whose directed route the participatory museum reconfigures.

Related Concepts

• Exhibitionary Complex — the apparatus participation reconfigures: organized walking and directed looking against experiences in which visitors "create, share, and connect"; authority relocated from layout to the visitor's body (Drobnick's inversion).
• Multisensory Museum — the sensorial mechanism of participation: touch, taste and smell as the senses through which the visitor acts on (not merely views) the exhibit.
• Symbiotic Spaces — the institutional form: the museum as community center (the Southern F&B Museum's working kitchens; the Mitsitam Cafe's cultural representation) — museum, community and program in mutual benefit.
• Narrative Space — the interpretive stake: participation means co-authoring the story the space tells, against the museum that "privileges certain readings."
• Practiced Place — de Certeau's ground beneath the concept: the visitor's practices (handling, tasting, smelling) as the tactical re-practice of a strategic place.
• Memory — the participatory organ: smell and taste recruit the visitor's personal experience ("evoking memories of people, places, and experiences") as the exhibit's meaning-making material.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the concept's wiki source: Simon's participatory frame quoted; the museum as "participatory community center"; the three sensorial registers as participatory mechanisms; Hollein's restructuring thesis; the closing meaning-making responsibility.
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the concept's prehistory in the smell register: the postmodern museum's authority-inversion ("guaranteed… by each visitor's experience") and the sensory-saturation programme participation later institutionalizes.

Open Questions

• Is participation a redistribution of curatorial authority or its internalization — the visitor "perform[ing]" (rather than consuming) the museum's meaning under a subtler discipline? (Cf. the exhibitionary complex's platform-era question and Drobnick's inversion.)
• Can participation be designed? Simon's claim is that "design decisions" enable participatory experiences — but Brown's smell-register shows interpretation escaping design (personal association). Where does the participatory museum's control end?
• Does participation scale to national museums? Stokes-Rees's Museum of Macau shows the narrative museum excluding "different versions of this history"; can the participatory museum host contested pasts, or does co-authorship require the pluralism the national narrative forecloses?