1.4 Thematic Essay: The Scope of Museums and Galleries as Wellbeing Spaces

In early science communication it was often assumed that the chief goal of the communicator is to “fill in the knowledge gaps” for their intended audience. By filling in these gaps, the audience acquires sufficient tools to understand science generally and make good decisions about issues like climate change, or, important to us here, healthcare. This is what Mol calls a ‘logic of choice’ strategy (2008). For museums with a focus on the science of health and medicine, it was therefore assumed that the provision of such information was sufficient to allow visitors to leave and adopt healthier lifestyle practices, no matter that these might be. Such an implicitly educational strategy towards wellbeing has long since been recognised as inadequate and ineffective, and has freed museums to consider alternative strategies that follow a ‘logic of care’ rather than one of choice. This seeks more than to supply visitors with the knowledge necessary to make good choices, but to collaborate with visitors, to offer services, and to help support their wellbeing in amongst the complex and messy world in which they are immersed (Mol, 2008).

This shift has allowed museums to adopt a diverse array of novel strategies, all within the broader concept of “wellbeing”. Here I wish to highlight just how broad this concept truly is; touching on every aspect of a museum’s programming and outreach activities, and also adopting radically diverse approaches to the very concept of wellbeing itself.

Wellbeing initiatives in the museum are not new, but it is clear that the Covid-19 pandemic led to a rapid increase in both institutions and visitors considering museums as spaces of mental health support. In the audience agency digital audience survey, 37% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “‘I am engaging […] to reduce stress/anxiety” and 57% with “I am engaging […] to boost my mood,” and this is particularly apparent in the age range of 16-34 year olds (the audience agency, 2021). Visitors are seeing museums as places to escape from the world, and to soothe their anxieties.

There is no one singular factor, no one way in which a museum can promote this sense of wellbeing. Siobhan McConnachie from The National Galleries of Scotland lists a number of factors they recognised while developing their own programming:

We discovered it was things like bringing people together. It was giving people a focus, something new to learn. It was maybe altering their regular environment or giving them a different regular environment. It was about space to reflect, and time, and it was about generosity (McConnachie, 2021).

In fact, in some cases there is evidence that even without planning, simply being a frequent visitor to a museum or gallery is sufficient to reduce anxiety as is highlighted in a 2010 study by Jennifer Binnie (2010).

Many museums, though, have gone a step further than simply opening their doors, and they have actively sought to provision their visitors with an opportunity to engage with particular approaches, such as mindful engagement with the museum (either remotely or on site). During the pandemic, ‘mindful art’ digital pages became increasingly commonplace: with museums offering high resolution digitisations of their collections alongside mindfulness instructions (see for example the National Gallery of Ireland’s mindfulness page). On site, museums have also encouraged similar forms of engagement – with the National Museum of Scotland promoting a “wellbeing trail” and Canterbury Museums even having dedicated “Mindfulness Mondays.”

We can already see how the various dimensions of “wellbeing” might rapidly increase in number. With museums able to offer on-site and remote engagement, in the form of trails, tours, and activity workshops for children, it is clear that there is a wonderful diversity of options available.

Many of the wellbeing initiatives adopted by museums cater to the visiting public as a whole, or traditional demographic subsets thereof (such as Canterbury’s focus on children). But there is a growing evidence base pointing to the value of museums and galleries as tools for supporting persons with specific mental health concerns. A recent article highlighted the efficacy of patient-museum interactions as part of “social prescription”, a form of community support for patients that supplements more traditional healthcare treatments, helping to combat social isolation, anxiety, and stress (Thomson, 2018).

Art therapy and engagement has also increasingly been utilised to support patients suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Frye Museum’s “Creative Aging” series of programs offers everything from café companionship through to relaxing art tours throughout the museum, catered to the needs of adults with dementia.

The majority of the cases emphasised so far have taken place on the institution’s own terms: within their own digital and/or physical spaces. But I would like to end by highlighting that this need not always be the case. The National Galleries of Scotland’s “Art Support Packs”, for example, were developed in collaboration with a local hospital (McConnachie, 2021). These gave patients something to work with and so relieved their boredom, and offered the opportunity to put down their thoughts. This project is not alone, with on-site object handling in hospitals and care homes also becoming more commonplace (Thomson, 2018; Chatterjee et al, 2008).

I hope I have shown, then, that we should not think of “wellbeing” as a monolithic concept. To do so would be to overlook the complexities and possibilities that come with a focus on mental health.  Strategies can be approached in one of many different ways; through mindfulness, art therapy, through the provision of a social space, or through one of many other innovative and perhaps as yet unthought of pathways. A museum or gallery may seek to provision wellbeing services for visitors as a whole, or focus on more targeted groups: young children, older adults, patients in hospital, or those struggling with specific conditions such as anxiety or dementia (Clarke, 2022). It may provide these services internally, utilising its own resources, or it may look outside the institution, to support the wellbeing of patients in hospitals, children in schools, or persons in other spaces outside the traditional physical or digital institutional space.

 

Bibliography

Binnie, Jennifer. (2010) ‘Does Viewing Art in the Museum Reduce Anxiety and Improve Wellbeing?’ Museums & Social Issues, 5(2), pp.191-201. www.doi.org/10.1179/msi.2010.5.2.191.

Chatterjee, H. MacDonald, S., Prytherch, D., & Noble, G. (2008) Touch in museums policy and practice in object handling. Oxford, Berg.

Clarke, Ruth. (2022). ‘Age Well: supporting older people’s health and wellbeing through cultural connections’ University of Cambridge Museums & Botanic Garden. https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2022/04/01/age-well-supporting-older-peoples-health-and-wellbeing-through-cultural-connections/. (accessed 25 April 2022)

McConnachie, Siobhan. (2021) ‘Art Helps’ Museums, Health and Wellbring Summit 31 January – 2 February 2022, online. https://www.museumnext.com/events/museums-health-wellbeing-summit/schedule/.

Mol, A. (2008) The logic of care: Health and the problem of patient choice. London: Routledge.

The audience agency. (June 2021)  ‘Digital Audience Survey Findings’ The audience agency. https://www.theaudienceagency.org/evidence/digital-audience-survey-findings (accessed 25 April 2022)

Thomson, L. J. et al. (2018) ‘Effects of a museum-based social prescription intervention on quantitative measures of psychological wellbeing in older adults’, Perspectives in Public Health, 138(1), pp.28–38. www.doi.org/10.1177/1757913917737563.

 

Exhibitions & Programming

Frye Museum (n.d.) ‘Creative Aging Programs’ Frye Museum. https://fryemuseum.org/creative_aging/ (accessed 25 April 2022)

National Gallery of Ireland. (n.d.) ‘Mindfulness and Art’ National Gallery of Ireland. https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/highlights-collection/mindfulness-and-art (accessed 25 April 2022)

National Museums Scotland. (n.d.) ‘Wellbeing Audio Trail’ National Museums Scotland. https://www.nms.ac.uk/national-museum-of-scotland/things-to-see-and-do/museum-trails/wellbeing-trail/ (accessed 25 April 2022)

The Beanery House of Art & Knowledge. (n.d.) ‘Mindfulness Mondays’. Canterbury Museums. https://canterburymuseums.co.uk/participate/health-and-wellbeing/mindfulness-mondays-2/ (accessed 25 April 2022)

24th April 2022 Add Comment

1.5 Blog Post Six: Launch & Lessons Learned

After a soft launch of the website for testing on the 24th of March, our exhibition went live to the world on Monday the 28th of March as a way of kicking off our “Wellbeing Week” of outreach programming. The period leading up to the launch was one of intense activity, requiring a significant amount of logistical coordination to get the co-curators, technical staff, and project members into the same room at the same time. This was only enhanced by a series of delays beyond our control, in particular, problems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Thankfully, we had scheduled for unforeseen delays, and ensured that the project could be readily adapted to new scheduling.

We felt that the final output of the project remained true to the values we held throughout. At its core, we activated the collections by power sharing: letting the people who are most affected by the topics we were addressing do the talking. But it was also successful in another way. It allowed us to learn so many things about the process of co-curation in practice.

Lessons on… Divisions and Elitism

A screenshot of the exhibition website with an orange header reading "Through the Eyes of Mhairi, Caroline, and JP". Below the header is a large photograph of a meteorite, parts of which are shiny, others rough.

One of the student group exhibition page headers with the group of three co-curators listed.

One of our student co-curators noted that it was odd for the students to be in groups, but the staff to be individuals. Such a decision was made for purely pragmatic reasons; we received such positive feedback from the student body, with so many applications, that we wished to include as many as possible. At the same time, we struggled to get engagement from staff. Looking back, our project output does reflect the elitism and divisions that are often inherent within the university structures; something we had hoped to avoid. Spending extra resources on recruiting staff would therefore have been a valuable path to take.

Lessons on… Power-Sharing Design

The screenshot has four sections. Top left shows a close image of fern leaves. Top right has a co-curator quotation on gold background. Bottom right has a close up image of a fern stem. Bottom left has a quotation from the co-curator on black.

This shows the “zoomable image” portion of Margaret’s page, where direct quotations from the co-curators were taken. In terms of space, this takes up a significant amount of the page.

The designs of our site pages were intended to reflect the power-sharing dynamic of the project as a whole. We wanted the CRC’s voice and our own to be in the background. This was a significant departure from the other exhibitions on the platform. Hence, co-curators were introduced first, then their reasons for the artwork selections before all else. It is only at the end of the page that information is given about the artwork beyond its basic metadata, and even here, the interpretation was written with feedback from the co-curators and drafted to reflect the informal and wellbeing focus of the exhibition. We strove to ensure that information was still available (under clickable “full information” tabs) and traffic was directed to the CRC via the “additional engagement gallery” at the end of each page.

Lessons on… Wellbeing and Ill-Health

A screenshot with gold on black text listing various mental health resources.

A screenshot of the resources page. We decided to list resources for both staff and students together to avoid the issue of divisions discussed earlier, though this did mean we had to limit the diversity of resources listed (especially for students).

Our focus on wellbeing allowed us to steer clear of the tricky ethical terrain of mental ill-health and allowed us to focus on providing an active resource for supporting the visitors’ mental health as a whole. Yet we had to remain aware of the reality that we were still working on a project within the field of mental health as a whole. This motivated the inclusion of a resources page, linked directly from the home page and directing traffic away from the site towards organisations such as the Samaritans or the Wellbeing Centre on campus. This was a trade-off we felt that was worth making; it would reduce the visitor count, but ensure visitors in need of support were able to find it.

A yellow postit note tacked to a board, with cursive script in blue.

The post-it note reads “Overwhelmed by anxiety? Consumed by crippling depression? Here, have a colouring book!”.

Yet we did not always succeed, in the post-it note to the right we received a critical response at one of our wellbeing stations. A lack of clarity at those stations meant that this person saw the project as an attempt to provide treatment for mental ill-health, not as a tool for more general mental wellbeing. A clearer explanation, along with resources (perhaps leaflets or QR codes direct to the website) is needed to ensure that the aims of such engagement strategies are clear and to avoid harmful misunderstandings arising.

Key Lesson:

At its core, our project was one of balancing acts: scheduling against scale, values against practical realities,  the needs of the institution against the aims of the project. It highlighted to me that there can be no ideal co-produced project, no utopia of power sharing. Projects such as this, and those more generally, have to make hard decisions that strive to stick their core mission, while being aware of what is lost.

21st April 2022 Add Comment

1.5 Blog Post Five: Shortlisting Artworks (Rethinking the Requirements)

In the previous post, I highlighted the difficulties we face in narrowing the over 6,000 collections items into a manageable 20-30 from which our co-curators would select pieces for mindful engagement. We have since arranged a meeting with Bernadette Hall (Bern) from Science Galleries Melbourne and  Heng Yeng Tan from the National Gallery Singapore who had previous experience of using arts and heritage pieces in a mindful setting to help us to create our final shortlist. To say it was informative would be a massive understatement.

Our strategy when approaching the selection process was to focus on the piece: the colours and materials involved, its subject matter, and so forth. While we did think about various other factors (e.g. ensuring a diverse array of artists and types of item, ensuring digitisation), our panellists really drew our attention to the fact that practical considerations should be at the fore of our decision making. They asked us to consider:

  • Public access to the item (Is it easy to find in the catalogue? Can the digital visitor gain access to the physical piece?)
  • Information about the item (Is there a detailed description? Do we know who the author is? Would it require curatorial work to fill in necessary information on the catalogue?)
  • Copyright & Usage (Is the digitised item able to be used by the public? Can we use it in our advertising and outreach materials?)
A painting of two women standing in the foreground of a beach, with beach huts and people in the background

Bathers, Alexander Vivienne (1962) Bern was keen to include this artwork, but the catalogue lacks a description. If we can add this information, we might be able to include it in our shortlist. © The University of Edinburgh

Immediately, this allowed us to rapidly narrow the selection even further. Combined with our original aim of selecting a diverse array of item types and origins, we soon had a shortlist within our bounds.

The second lesson was really helpful. As mentioned in the past blog post, we had been playing it safe in our selections. Specifically, we were worried about selecting political and activist works. This was for two reasons:

  1. We feared using them in this setting would de-contextualise them; disrespecting both the message and the artwork itself.
  2. We wanted to play it safe and avoid potential triggers for our co-curators.
A black fabric banner with the words 'Every one is Equal' written down the centre with one word on each line. To either side of the words there are a number of fabric badges representing different messages about equality.

Processions Banner (front), Various makers (2018) A collections item we can now comfortably include in our shortlist, and, potentially, our final exhibition. © The University of Edinburgh

Having had a much deeper discussion with our panellists, we learned enough to feel comfortable including such artworks in our final shortlist. While not necessarily misplaced, our concerns were not insurmountable as long as we approached it in the right way. Moreover, in many cases, such works may allow a more intimate and personal connection for our viewers and co-curators who may have lived experience of the issues addressed in these works. As such, this was a really positive lesson, freeing us up to showcase a number of works that focus on important issues, including many new acquisitions at the CRC.

11th February 2022 Add Comment

1.5 Blog Post Four: Longlisting Artworks

One unexpected challenge in our exhibition development process came from what we thought would be one of the most enjoyable portions of the project: the artwork longlisting. After all, who wouldn’t relish in having the (metaphorical) doors thrown open to the entirety of the CRC’s collections?

An artwork selected by the National Gallery (London) for a “five minute meditation. Colours, benign topic, and a variety of focal points. A safe bet? Ⓒ Netherlands Institute for Art History
(digital ID 117763)

Our objective was to hone down the thousands of objects to a much shorter list of around fifty items. Of these, a specialised panel made up of mindfulness and heritage experts would cut it down even further, to give our co-curators a manageable set to work from. Their selections would then make up the displayed artworks.

Our problems arose from the nature of the exhibition. Our approach is not a traditional one in which an item was selected on the basis of (e.g.) historical, aesthetic, or social merits. No, we wanted items that encourage mindful engagement. This is a much more ephemeral and far less studied concept – one that doesn’t lend itself well to strict criteria and check-boxing. We were left puzzled. What constitutes a mindful object? Isn’t this entirely subjective?

On the one hand, we could have taken this as freeing – after all, can’t any item, observed appropriately, be suitable for mindful engagement? Yet, we felt that this was a bit of a cheat: just because it can lend itself to mindful engagement, doesn’t mean it lends itself to engagement well.

Instead, we drew upon examples from elsewhere; Prescribe Culture, the National Gallery, and other examples from across time. We noted that the imagery often fell into a goldilocks-band of complexity (complex enough to offer lots of focal points, not so complex as to overwhelm), include a range of colours, and frequently included interesting features such as textural aspects to pick up on.

Given the nature of the exhibition as a whole, we also introduced some additional conditions. We didn’t want our visitors or co-curators to be exposed to potentially trauma inducing imagery (e.g. physical violence, racism, etc.). We also had to eliminate audio-visual items for design reasons.

We wanted to include more contemporary pieces which focused on contemporary issues such as this one by Fiona Jardine. But our prioritisation of participant safety meant that, this time, we decided to play it safe. We hope future projects will learn from our experiences and be able to engage with these works in a mindful manner. © 2020 University of Edinburgh.

All of this helped us to narrow down the >6000 to a manageable 66 items to be shared with our experts. There remained a significant amount of subjectivity and, if we are honest, we frequently played it safe in our choices (skirting well clear of “riskier” items). As such, we are excited to see the outcome – in many respects this is an experiment. We’re keen to see the results.

24th January 2022 1 Comment

1.3 Thematic Essay: Participatory Practices in the Museum

Over the past two decades participatory practices have become increasingly common in museum settings. These practices involve persons and groups from outside the museum in the development of its activities who may be representatives from the general public (both visitors and non-visitors), community action groups, or charities (Bunning, 2015 p.1). The persons might be carefully selected by the museum to fulfil a particular objective, or the museum might cast a wider net.

Photograph of the science museum information galleries. In the foreground a netted cone sits, in the background a large wooden telegraph wheel.

In their permanent Information Age gallery, the Science Museum collaborated with a number of target groups as part of the development process. In many cases the choice of collaborators was clear and targeted, for example “Samaritans volunteers were the most relevant and appropriate group to work with when telling the story of the history of the Samaritans as an organisation.” (Bunning, 2015, p.8)
© Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library

While the institution may vary (examples can be found in most types of museums, large or small; science, history, or art) the reasons behind this power-sharing activity remain the same. At its root, participatory practices allow institutions to:

  • Share authority
  • Foster involvement with external communities
  • Draw on outside expertise

In this way, such practices can help to combat ingrained exclusionary practices (for instance, regarding gender, accessibility, or race (e.g. Lynch, 2010)) while also improving the museum experience (e.g. Bunning, 2015), addressing social issues (Graham 2016 pp.18-19; McSweeney, 2017) and engaging communities (McSweeney, 2017; Perla, 2019). These benefits arise both from the outputs (programming, exhibitions), but also as a result of the process of participatory engagement.

A great example of this can be found in the 2013-14 Science Museum collaboration with an independent organisation “Gendered Intelligence” as part of their work on the “Who Am I?” gallery. 17 young trans people were “given full licence to generate ideas, display themes, and avenues for research” (McSweeney, 2017, p.4). By default, the process was beneficial: it engaged a group of new people (and their networks) with the museum and in so doing potentially sowed the seeds of a new community.

At the same time, their feedback led to improvements in the gallery itself. For instance, they commented that the “Boy or Girl?” framing of a thematic question was exclusionary (“overly simplistic, binary, and problematic.” (ibid. p.3)). Their advice led to a shift in language towards a more inclusive framing, thereby making the gallery more welcoming to trans and non-binary persons.

In the Science Museum cases above, participatory practices took on a practical dimension, with limited sharing of authority (Bunning, 2015, p.2). But participatory practices can, and indeed must, sometimes involve a significant shift in the balance of power – away from the traditional “expert curator” paradigm and towards a community-led model.

When dealing with topics such as the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people in Burma, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights recognised the need to grant the Rohingya people themselves the authority to tell their own story in the exhibition “Time to Act: Rohingya Voices” (Perla, 2019).

“Meaningful participation, as required from the type of activist curatorship used in this exhibition, required that community members be asked how they would like to tell their own story.” (ibid. p.585)

This resulted in an exhibition that reflected personal narratives and stories, and that gained access to a more nuanced storytelling which would have otherwise been impossible. It allowed the community to offer their perspective, beyond the static photographs taken by Western photographers and selected by museum curators.

Participatory practices are often fruitful, and sometimes essential. But we should not think that they are always appropriate, or, even if they are, that regardless of their structure they will always be successful. Participatory practices are not easy – Lynch (2010) describes at length many of their failings during their work on the exhibition ‘Revealing Histories: Myths about Race’. Systemic and institutional problems, a lack of commitment to power sharing, and previously unnoticed systemic biases can all undermine participatory practices.

Moreover, there does not exist a simple rubric or instruction manual for successful participatory practices. It will always come down to context. The nature and goals of the institution, the collaborators being sought, and the type of project will all vary in kind. Nevertheless, there are a few general lessons we can draw from the literature (Lynch, 2010; Bunning, 2015; Rudman, 2018) that can help guide and ground successful participatory actions. Here are five guidelines (though there will of course be many more):

Early Involvement

Ideally, partners should become involved from the start of the project. Practically speaking, it might be tempting to get all your cards in place prior to engaging with collaborators, but this immediately puts them on the back foot, removes power, and may lead to issues later. Even basic questions regarding (say) timetabling and compensation may not be as basic as they appear. For instance, structured scheduling can often conflict with indigenous communities that do not adopt Western work-life or timekeeping practices (Julien, 2017).

Shared Ownership

The museum should work to ensure that participants feel an equal sense of ownership over the project. Ultimately, curators and museum representatives must be willing to divest themselves of power and ensure that decision making is truly shared.

Tools & Skills

Involved persons should be given the skills training and tools needed to deliver project outcomes. For example, in the “Who Am I?” gallery development process, the Science Museum provided team members from Gendered Intelligence with training in exhibition design skills such as oral history production and object selection (McSweeney, 2017, p.5).

Close Working Relationships

In terms of both language and practice, it might be easy to segregate external participants from internal bodies. Such practices can contribute to alienating participants, discourage participation, or make it difficult to include collaborators in the decision-making process. Lessons can be drawn from researchers working with marginalised communities who emphasise the need to engage with collaborators on their terms (e.g. see Adams, 2014, p.5).

Clearly defined and shared goals

While the goals may never entirely align, the external participant’s goals should be respected, and treated as impactful. In some cases, such as the Hansen’s Disease Museum in Japan (Hosoda, 2010), such alignment is simple due to the museum’s explicitly activist mission. More generally, though, a participatory project should, at base, be conceived of as mutually beneficial. This may mean that institutional goals will have to “take a backseat to community goals” (Simon, 2010, p.264), but this is not always the case.

Ultimately, this is not a case of “tick all these boxes in order to ensure success”. Many of the conditions listed are vague or fall on a spectrum; in some instances, a museum may not be able or willing to divest itself of sufficient power to give a true sense of ownership to collaborators. Does this make the project a failure? Well, in reality, that depends on context. And I feel that this is the most important and final lesson to be drawn from the literature. While participatory approaches should (ideally) continue, as an individual project closes it is essential to garner honest, informative discourse with participants. Following from Lynch above, a modicum of success can always be found. Participatory practices, even when they fail in their stated aims, allow museums to learn and grow.

References

Publications

Adams, M. S., J. Carpenter, J. A. Housty, D. Neasloss, P. C. Paquet, C. Service, J. Walkus, and C. T. Darimont. (2014) ‘Toward increased engagement between academic and indigenous community partners in ecological research’ Ecology and Society, 19(3) http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06569-190305

Bunning, K., Kavanagh, J., McSweeney, K., Sandell, R.  (2015) ‘Embedding plurality: exploring participatory practice in the development of a new permanent gallery’, Science Museum Group Journal, 15, http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/150305/002

Graham, H. (2016), ‘The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies’, Science Museum Group Journal, 5, http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/160502

Hosoda, M. (2010) ‘Hansen’s disease recoverers as agents of change: A case study in Japan’ Leprosy Review, 81(1), pp.5-16

Julien, M., Somerville, S. Brant, J. (2017) ‘Indigenous perspectives on work-life enrichment and conflict in Canada’, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 36(2) pp. 165-181. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-11-2015-0096

Lynch, B.T., Alberti, S.J.M.M. (2010) ‘Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 25(1), pp.13-35, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647770903529061

McSweeney, K., Stewart, J. (2017)‘Hacking into the Science Museum: young trans people disrupt the power balance of gender ‘norms’ in the museum’s ‘Who Am I?’ gallery’ in The Impact of Co-Production: From Community Engagement to Social Justice Ersoy, A. (ed), http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330288.001.0001

Perla, A., Ullah, Y. (2019) ‘Time to Act: Rohingya Voices’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 34(6), pp.577-594, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2019.1682807

Rudman, H., Bailey-Ross, C., Kendal, J., Mursic, Z., Lloyd, A., Ross, B., Kendal, R. (2018) ‘Multidisciplinary exhibit design in a Science Centre: a participatory action research approach’, Educational Action Research, 26(4), pp.567-588 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1080/09650792.2017.1360786

Simon, N. (2010) The Participatory Museum Museum 2.0

Exhibitions

“Information Age” permanent gallery, Science Museum, London: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/information-age [Accessed 14/01/2022].

“Who Am I?” permanent gallery, Science Museum, London: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/who-am-i [Accessed 24/01/2022]

“Time to Act: Rohingya Voices“, past exhibition, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, https://humanrights.ca/exhibition/time-to-act-rohingya-voices

“Revealing Histories: Myths About Race“, past exhibition, Manchester Museum: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/revealing-histories-myths-about-race/ [Accessed 14/01/2022]

24th January 2022 1 Comment

1.5 Blog Post Three: Meeting with Prescribe Culture

From the moment we decided to focus on mental health, all of us were keen to step beyond the digital platform to consider how we might use the artworks in the collections in activities to support mental health. This Monday we were lucky enough to have a very productive meeting with Ruthanne Baxter from Prescribe Culture. This initiative organises mental health and wellbeing programmes and is run by the University of Edinburgh Museums Services.

Rain Steam and Speed the Great Western Railway, W.M. Turner

Prescribe Culture is one of an increasing number of initiatives that use heritage to promote wellbeing. Many museums during lockdown utilised their digital collections for similar functions. The National Gallery, for example, encouraged “5-Minute Meditation” with Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (Pictured). [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Our project will include a number of outreach activities which closely align with the objectives of Prescribe Culture, and as such this meeting was very useful from a practical perspective. But what was perhaps even more useful was the opportunity to discuss the theme and focus of the project overall with someone who has had a significant amount of experience working in the field.

Up to this point our theme looked at mental health through quite a narrow lens. Our first thoughts were of depression, anxiety, stress, and conditions like schizophrenia. We were interested in the patient-practitioner dichotomy. In brief, we were fixating on the clinical side of mental health, and much of our attention was on mental ill-health, not mental health as a whole.

This meeting really helped to highlight this fact, and to notice a dichotomy between our outreach programming (where things like the Wellbeing Pods focused on health generally) and the digital exhibition (where we were narrowly focusing on mental ill-health). Having spent the past week reflecting on this new perspective, we have now revised our plans somewhat to have a more balanced picture of mental health. While some of the themes addressed in the digital exhibition may still concern ill-health and the clinical side of mental health, our starting point will be from the perspective of promoting wellbeing, and this will guide our approach moving forward. This will allow us to create much more coherent and balanced project in the long term.

 

Further Information

Example of Mindfulness in Museums & Galleries

Prescribe Culture

Details of the Prescribe Culture initiative, and the impact it has had can be found here:
https://www.museumsgalleriesscotland.org.uk/prescribe-culture-university-of-edinburgh-museums/

11th November 2021 Add Comment

1.5 Blog Post Two: Logistics and Timelines

An important part of our brief asked us to consider the ways in which we might step beyond the digital platform and encourage a wider community involvement with the collections. Ultimately, our work would explore ways of raising the profile of the collections and encourage their use in exhibition, teaching and research.

We are therefore keen to treat the digital platform as just one part of the exhibition, with a variety of outreach activities taking a prominent place alongside the digital exhibits. Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t help but be very ambitious – with activities ranging from satellite “wellbeing pods” displaying artwork and promoting mindfulness, through to scheduled programming like self-guided walks, art workshops, and even puppy therapy sessions.

Workflow chart representing the four parts of the project (exhibition development, social media, outreach, and wellbeing pods).

An early draft of a priority/dependency chart. As the project progresses, we follow the arrows inwards from the outermost tasks. Click to enlarge.

We soon narrowed these ideas down (sadly dropping the puppy therapy), and broke them into three branches: the digital exhibition, outreach programming, and the wellbeing pods.  But we have become aware that even if we reduce the quantity of the individual initiatives, when combined with all of the other factors (such as social media, exhibition work, and co-curatorial practices which we are keen to engage with) the project could rapidly become unfeasible.

We have therefore started to think about project management strategies, utilising tools like Gantt Charts (as advised by members of the CRC), flow diagrams, and online workspaces  in which to share our progress. We decided to split the management of the project into five areas: exhibition development, outreach & programming, social media, the wellbeing pods, and logistics. We recognise that we will likely have to frequently revisit our strategy to ensure it parallels our actual working plans, and we hope this approach will help to split the workload while also keeping us on track.

 

Early timeline chart. Columns represent the deadlines, tasks are indicated in boxes..

A first draft of a timeline for the “Exhibition Development” strand which Frankie is managing. Each column represents tasks needing to be completed before moving to the next column. Team members indicate that they are working on a task with virtual post-it notes. Click to enlarge.

8th November 2021 Add Comment

1.2 Formative Assessment | Self Appraisal

(1) Identify your key responsibilities and list the main areas of work you have been involved in. Briefly highlight the skills and competencies that are relevant to this project/work area.

Project Management
  • Working with the group to develop clear timelines and presenting these timelines using appropriate tools (spreadsheets, Miroboard, etc.).
  • Working with project members to identify realistic outcomes.
  • Coordinating the four project branches (exhibition development, social media, outreach and engagement, wellbeing stations).
  • Preparing general project materials, such as budget spreadsheets, and risk management templates.
Key Competencies Project management, team working, scheduling, collaborative technologies (Miroboard, Google sheets), finances
Ethics & Risk Management
  • Preparing and submitting the ethics approval.
  • Developing risk assessments for activities undertaken as part of each branch of the project along with a more general risk assessment for the project as a whole.
  • Identifying necessary training (such as Data Protection) and enabling team members to undertake that training.
  • Developing a “wellbeing agreement” with group members to help steer us while engaging with difficult materials.
Key Competencies Ethics, risk management, mental health training, data protection training (GDPR)
Exhibition Development
  • Working alongside the exhibition manager to provide assistance with respect to the logistical aspects arising from our co-curatorial method.
    • Co-ordinating with co-curators and attending meetings as necessary.
    • Attending meetings and working with external collaborators, such as the artwork selection panel.
    • Preparing materials for working with co-curators, such as feedback questionnaires, information sheets, art work selection sheets and slides.
  • Collaborating on the long list and short list selection of artworks.
Key Competencies Project management, scheduling, research methods (questionnaires), artwork curation 
Digital Design
  • Inputting metadata into the exhibitions platform.
  • Designing the layout and structure of exhibition pages and the exhibition as a whole.
    • Inputting images, text and embedding video/audio files into the exhibition.
  • Video and audio editing the co-curator engagement videos.
  • Editing images (such as the zoomable images and “hero” header images) to integrate neatly into the pages.
  • Drafting and copy-editing interpretational text on the pages.
Key Competencies Graphic design, web design, copy-editing, interpretation writing, meta-data and cataloguing

(2)  Looking ahead, list your key objectives for the GRP. 3-7 SMART  (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timed) objectives should be noted with realistic timescales and focused outcomes. The objectives should cover the project itself and your own role.

Key SMART Objectives as of October/November 2021

Establish a flexible and scalable work strategy [Deadline: November 4th]

  • Utilise the Miroboard to establish project components and establish a general timeline, including key markers (such as ethics submission and launch)
  • Prepare templates for necessary materials (such as risk assessments) for each component.
  • Develop a wellbeing strategy for all co-workers with associated 2-page support document outlining core responsibilities to one another.

Develop longlist of exhibition items [End of November]

  • Research art as a mindful tool and develop a set of selection criteria.
  • Collaborate as a team to identify a longlist of approximately 50-60 items in length from the digital catalogues.
  • Prepare a document with key metadata, sample images, etc. to share with shortlisting panel.

Prepare Exhibition Proposal for Ethics Review [Deadline: December 15th]

  • Co-ordinate with exhibition manager (Frankie) to prepare essential materials:
    • Consent form
    • Participant Information Sheet
    • Co-curator selection procedure
    • Risk management strategies
  • Identify essential training for team members and co-ordinate training.
  • Draft a core 2-page outline of exhibition component of the exhibition.

Prepare a project outline [Deadline: January 4th]

  • Incorporate feedback from Pitch meeting on December 3rd into any pre-existing plans.
  • Work with a panel to identify short list of artworks for the exhibition.
  • Finalise plans for each core component of the project. This will include details of the proposed activities, risk assessments, budgeting, and timelines, and a single A4 page summary.

Submit for ethics approval [Deadline: January 24th]

  • Prepare answers to questionnaire along with associated materials (consent forms, participant information sheets, risk assessments, questionnaires)

Key SMART Objectives as of late January 2022
[Please click here to view a full timeline of the project as a whole as of 24th January 2022] 

Find & Select Co-curators [Deadline: February 23rd]

  • Advertise for student co-curator positions, including using JISC to create an online questionnaire.
    • Meet with group project members to select student co-curators from responses
  • Contact members of staff (academic, security services, and professional support).
  • Establish contact with potential co-curators to explain the project, their responsibilities, and confirm willingness to participate.

Prepare Templates of Exhibition pages [Deadline: 16th March]

  • Hire graphic designer or artist to develop landing page hero/header image.
  • Develop a standard template with essential components for exhibit pages (e.g. hero image, video embed, cross-linking gallery, etc.).
  • Draft a short (2 page) guidance document for the website including sizes of images, colour scheme, minimum and maximum word count of text, etc. to guide the later use of the templates and ensure that any text or imagery input works well with the template as a whole and does not result in formatting issues.

Organise preliminary meetings and recording sessions for co-curators [Ongoing: early march, last recording deadline 11th of March]

  • Meet with co-curators for artwork selection.
  • Hire audio technician & borrow other equipment.
  • Co-ordinate schedules of co-curators, Dr Kitty Wheater, and sound technicians for recordings.

Please note that due to the complex nature of the project along with unforeseen circumstances, many of the dates and details listed above shifted significantly as part of the process.  For example, our meetings with some co-curators were rescheduled due to cases of Covid-19. 

(3) Discursive self-reflection

The project rapidly evolved from its inception in September, moving from a standard exhibition format to a co-curatorial model, and from a thematic focus on mental ill-health to mental wellbeing. This was in a large part due to the close collaboration between the project members with numerous ideas being passed around. Looking back to this stage of the project, I feel that while we were making progress, this slowed down as the project became more complex. In particular, we were held back by a lack of clarity: we were striving to do many new things, experiment with new modes of engagement, curation, and so forth. It wasn’t the ambitious nature, but the fact that we did not pin the ideas down sooner slowed our project’s development. This was especially apparent when it came to submitting for ethics approval, which I worked on with Frankie Vale, who was leading the online exhibition portion of the project.

Nevertheless, once the groundwork had been laid, the project accelerated rapidly. I moved from coordination, logistics and risk management to working alongside Frankie Vale on the exhibition and providing general support for the wellbeing stations and outreach activities. Here we faced a significant number of scheduling challenges, brought about by strike action and covid-19, along with the sheer number of different persons involved!  At this point, we divided the labour, with Frankie organising the meetings and recordings with the support of Carmen Hesketh, while I focused on the exhibition’s design and templates. We came together at the end to draw together all the materials ready for the successful exhibition launch on schedule, in tandem with the wellbeing stations and welcome week.

Throughout the project, the nature of the five key component parts (management and logistics, exhibition, wellbeing stations, outreach activities, and social media) did make team co-ordination difficult. A miroboard used as a brainstorming and planning tool was somewhat successful at the start of the project, helping us to share ideas and establish general timelines, but looking back we should have switched to a more precise scheduling tool at an earlier date. As the project progressed, it also became increasingly difficult to switch and support other branches of the project, due to the specialist nature each branch. This was particularly apparent in the case of the exhibition design. Weekly meetings with brief summaries outlining each project and sharing key updates and decisions made, would have made it easier to support one another in this way. That being said, I feel that we set ourselves a really challenging task, and responded by adapting rapidly to ever changing circumstances.

 

 

8th November 2021 Add Comment

1.5 Blog Post One: A Focus on Mental Health

Our brief is to curate an online exhibition on Health and Healthcare using artworks found in the Centre for Research Collections. By the time of our first ideas-sharing session, we had already settled upon a narrower focal point: mental health. Thematically, we felt that this focus was pertinent given the events surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, we felt that there were numerous supplemental resources outside the art collections that might be used to provide a solid foundation for the exhibition, such as those found in the NHS Lothian Archives.

Identifying a target audience, exhibition structure, ethics, and collections focus were all discussed during our meeting, but one issue that arose really struck me as an important one, and one that would be all too easy to neglect. We were asked to consider the ways in which our work on the project might come with risks not just to the visitors and the collaborators, but also to us. We are, after all, going to be interacting with objects and themes that can have a powerful impact on us and research into these collections may at times be difficult. Mental health has (statistically at least) likely impacted all of us directly or indirectly one time or another.

Taking the time at the early stages of the project to develop plans to support the mental health of all persons working on the exhibition will be an essential early step in the process. As part of the university, we are already well provisioned with resources (such as the Wellbeing Centre and Student Counselling), and we can also draw upon external resources (such as advice pages from reliable sources such as Mind).

As part of developing these plans we will need to reflect on how we can ensure that these resources are readily available to all of us, what we can do as part of our working practices, and how we can manage our team’s emotional workload alongside other aspects of project development.

Quick Resources

University of Edinburgh Student Counselling

Self-Help Resources

Mind

Citizens Advice Scotland: Mental Health Pages

9th October 2021 Add Comment

1.1 Case Study Analysis: “The Life of a Blue Whale”

The “Life of the Blue Whale” exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum takes a flagship item from their collection, one that sits in pride of place in the Museum’s Hintze Hall and embeds it into a digital setting that is freely available online, browser based, and strives to offer an immersive and visually engaging experience to the visitor. While the site appears to be custom designed for the purposes of the exhibition, as a case study it offers a fantastic insight into immersive design principles for an online exhibition such as ours. Here we can look to its structure, that is, the general way that the pages link together and we can also consider the ways the exhibition presents its information, along with its more general design strategies. While many of these might not be available to us on the university platform, the reasons behind them are insightful and interesting – and this comes down to the simple fact that all exhibitions, whether offline or online, have a shared common interest, as is described by Kim:

An exhibition is a communication medium, not only in museums but also in the commercial and public service arenas. In museums, exhibitions are used as the principal method of communication with the public and the museum’s emphasis has changed from mainly collecting and preserving objects to providing information to and communicating with visitors (Kim, 2018, p.243).

This paradigm shift is true of online museum content too, with the Covid-19 pandemic incentivising an accelerated shift away from the simple provision of data and towards a more visitor-centric focused provision of engagement beyond catalogues (Kidd et al, 2021). Our goal when designing an online exhibition centres on one of communication: allowing and encouraging the visitor to engage with the content that we feel that the institution wants to communicate. What, then, are the tricks we can utilise to achieve this end?

Structure & Content

The Life of a Blue Whale makes simple but effective structure and content choices which are careful not to overwhelm the visitor with information (with on-screen text rarely above 50 words), and it disperses its content through three layers that use an eclectic array of sub-exhibits to communicate its core messages. At the same time, the exhibition is unified by its focus on a single collection item: the whale itself.

Whether online or offline, this carefully curated limit on text is a well known balancing challenge: sufficient text to be informational and communicate the message, but not so much as to overwhelm the visitor or cause them to start skipping pages (or even leave the exhibition entirely!). The V&A notes in its own guidance that these text limits do not restrict the amount of information retained by the visitor; on the contrary – they can in fact increase it (V&A, 2013, p.9)! The CRC platform also discourages large text blocks, but it is important to plan from the start how to distribute the information: the structure of the Blue Whale exhibition is what allows such short text-snippets, with each piece of information distributed throughout the website, easy to discover should the visitor so wish it.

Playing with Perception: Neither Offline Nor Online

The exhibition feels immersive, striking a balance between mimicking (but importantly, not attempting to replicate) the physical experience of a museum and utilising the strengths of a digital platform. Hoffman highlights the many issues that arise from exhibitions that too closely strive to mimic the experience of the offline visit (2020, p.213). In general, these place unnecessary constraints on the design, limiting the power of the digital space (in a our humdrum everyday lives, we are forced to walk everywhere – in an online space we can fly. Why limit that?). Yet mimicking a physical space to some degree does come with advantages. Visitors know how to pick up on navigation cues when walking through an exhibition, and they have experience of interacting with online exhibits. Taking this experience and utilising it on the online platform is something that the Life of the Blue Whale does well; for instance, the exhibits are presented as branches off a central “chamber”, the Hintze Hall itself, where they can “move” to and explore further.

At the other end of the spectrum a similar challenge is faced when ensuring that the exhibition doesn’t come off as “just another website”. Here the Life of the Blue Whale excels, but has the advantage of its entirely customised platform which allows it to use a number of tricks to add layers of depth and an illusion of interactivity that visitors would not expect from a “normal” website. As such, our exhibition cannot utilise these tricks directly, but the principles behind those tricks will certainly be illuminating and useful.

As soon as the exhibition page is opened, the audio provides immersive sounds as a backdrop. Visual cues such as the following are also utilised to create an illusion of space and exploration, moving beyond the simple expectations of a website visit:

Parallax movements tied to the mouse cursor give an illusion of depth and interactivity. (Fig.1)

Short GIF showing parallax movements in the "Hintze Hall" page of the exhibition.

Figure 1: Parallax motion. As the cursor moves, the rearmost layers move at a slower rate creating an illusion of depth. © The Trustees of The Natural History Museum, London. Screengrab taken from https://www.nhm.ac.uk/bluewhale/hall/ on 09/10/21 

Icons that “cross out” once a “room” has been visited give a sense of achievement and exploration (fig.2)

Diagram showing four visual states of icons: pre-interaction, mouseover transition, mouseover static, and mouseover stable.

Figure 2: Diagram of mouseover transitions. © The Trustees of The Natural History Museum, London. Screengrabs of icons taken from https://www.nhm.ac.uk/bluewhale/ocean/ on 09/10/21

 

The landing page (fig.3) breaks with a user’s expectation that a standard webpage’s content is vertically organised. This also mimics entry into a physical space (in which we look left to right).

Screengrab of exhibition landing page. The page has three sections, evenly spaced. Leftmost is greyscale of the ocean. Centre is a colour photgraph of the Hintze Hall. Right is a greyscale image of collections items in storage. Text links are overlayed.

Figure 3: The landing page for the exhibition, with the three exhibition hubs arranged left to right. Colour shifts to each section on mouseover. © The Trustees of The Natural History Museum, London. Screengrab taken from https://www.nhm.ac.uk/bluewhale/ on 09/10/2021

Our project is built around a younger platform, one that is still in the process of evolving. Parallax scrolling, for instance, is not within the capacity of the platform but this does not mean that we are unable to take the lessons learned and apply them more generally. Through utilising the tools we do have available we can nudge the visitor into feeling like they are engaging with an exhibition, rather than “just another website”. As Hoffman (2020, p.211) points out – while we may be utilising different technologies, ultimately we are working from the same toolbox of text, vision, and audio resources relayed through a screen. For instance, by utilising horizontal, rather than purely vertical layouts we can break down the standard impression of a website, as has been acomplished both in the case study above and in, for example, this page by the Rijksmuseum. Through structuring the pages to distribute text into short bites, we can ensure that the communication is clear, but not overwhelming. And by integrating multimedia content into the exhibition, it will create a sense of exploration and discovery.

References

‘From Home: We bring the museum to you’ (n.d.) Rijksmuseum. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/from-home (Accessed: 25 April 2022).

‘Gallery text at the V&A: A Ten Point Guide’ (2013) V&A https://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/238077/Gallery-Text-at-the-V-and-A-Ten-Point-Guide-Aug-2013.pdf (Accessed: 25 April 2022)

Hoffman, S. K. (2020) ‘Online Exhibitions during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Museum Worlds’ 8(1), 210-215. Retrieved Apr 25, 2022, from https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/museum-worlds/8/1/armw080115.xml

Kidd, Jenny, Nieto McAvoy, Eva and Ostrowska, Ania. (2021) ‘Implications of the COVID-19 digital ‘pivot’ in museums and galleries: lessons from practitioners’ AHRC Policy and Evidence Centre, Cardiff University https://www.pec.ac.uk/discussion-papers/pivot-to-digital-how-museums-and-galleries-responded-to-covid-19

Kim, Soyeon. (2018) ‘Virtual exhibitions and communication factors’ Museum Management and Curatorship, 33(3), pp.243-260.
http://www.doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2018.1466190

‘The life of the blue whale’ (n.d) Natural History Museum. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/bluewhale/

9th October 2021 Add Comment