Designing for Meaningful Disciplinary Participation in Museums

• In Event: Digital Media Arts: Learning, Assessment, and Design

Abstract

How do museums design for meaningful disciplinary participation? This presentation will look deeply at one Museum’s process of designing experiences that enable meaningful participation—production and interactivity—with visual art for its many constituents.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is committed to providing families a comfortable and safe space to experience creativity and curiosity through play, as well as to inspiring their community to “think differently” and innovatively about their world. This is done through the Museum’s in-house exhibit design philosophy, “play with real stuff,” which promotes an organizational dedication to original contemporary design, material familiarity and authentic experiences for visitors; and through commissioning, exhibiting and cultivating established and emerging contemporary interactive artwork.

For the Museum, successful exhibits and site-specific design include a consideration of visitor perspective, simple intuitive visitor use, length of time visitors spend with a piece, diverse methods of engagement, the iterative process of design, and the robustness and reliability of an exhibit piece.

In this session, we will present three examples, or case studies, of the ways in which the Museum works to translate their process of design. The first case will describe the re-development of a permanent exhibit area that highlights the work of two contemporary artists who are employed by the Museum as full-time exhibit designers and fabricators. This will provide a clear depiction of the Museum’s internal design process and practice, as well as establish the Museum’s relationship to the art it exhibits. The second case will chronicle an annual artist residency offered by the Museum which invites emerging artists to work with the Museum to develop works of art that preserve artists’ intention, while becoming responsive to, and able to withstand the hands-on environment and audience. This is achieved through balancing aspects of the Museum’s design process with those of the artists’ practice. Finally, we will consider the current evolution of an open-ended “maker-space” in the Museum created for older children (8-12 year) and their families, wherein families make at the intersection of the digital and the physical. In this case, we explore prototyped visitor experiences from which the Museum is currently learning how to translate the creative process of collaborative iterative design for family audiences.

Here, learning is conceived as change in participation—meaningful, coherent and purposeful knowing and doing—within the shared context of a culturally designed setting (Lave, 1993; Barab, et al, 2010). Every participant—museum staff, artist and visitor—is viewed as learner, with a tendency towards change in participation-in-context. Qualitative data, gathered through participant observation (Emerson, et al, 1995) includes naturalistic observations, transcribed interviews, field notes of participants’ activities, and collected artifacts.

These cases reflect a Museum’s dedication to a process of design, and its translation into meaningful participation for itself as an organization, and for its partners in production—artists and visitors. As moments of learning, they provide examples of the triumphs and challenges in the creation of spaces for meaningful disciplinary participation, and thus, inform the study and design of powerful learning in informal contexts.

Author

• Lisa Brahms, University of Pittsburgh