//da internettet kom til dig

Udstillingen //da internettet kom til dig præsenterer en række nedslag i internettets historie, med fokus på hverdagslivet og den personlige erindring. Samtidig er udstillingen et resultat af mit forskningssamarbejde med ENIGMA Museum, hvor jeg har fungeret som projektleder for udstillingen samt en række tilhørende arrangementer og værktøjer.

Udstillingen blev til i en eksperimenterende udviklingsproces, ligesom den gradvise åbning af udstillingen var et eksperiment i at arbejde med dynamiske udstillingsformater. Ved åbningen stod alle rum i udstillingsvæggen tomme, som illustration af de huller i hukommelsen, vi nu havde brug for publikums hjælp til at udfylde. Hver dag i december åbnede vi herefter et nyt tema i udstillingen, som på den måde gradvist blev fyldt ud. Samtidig kørte udstillingen som kampagne på Facebook og Instagram, hvor dagens tema blev udfoldet i dialog med museets følgere.

Udstillingen kan ses på ENIGMA frem til efteråret 2019.

Co-creating Knowledge: Participatory Practices and Museum/University partnerships

In April, I presented this paper at MW2019 in Boston. The paper was co-written with Martin Gerster Johansen from ENIGMA Museum of Communication, and presents our experience of teaming up in a museum/university partnership.

Abstract
Increasingly, museums are looking to other fields of practice in order to spark innovation, incorporating digital mindsets and design-thinking methods in their practices, and engaging in collaborations with communities, private enterprises, and university partners to develop new experiences. So what is to be gained from cross-institutional collaborations, and what lessons can be learned from an exemplary partnership project? This paper will share methods and insights from //getting online, a design-led exhibition experiment at ENIGMA Museum of Communication in Copenhagen. //getting online explores strategies for engaging users in the creation of a polyphonic narrative of Internet history, following the museum’s mission to foster dialogue. Moreover, the project is part of the transdisciplinary research programme ‘Our Museum,’ focused on museum development and advancing academic understandings of the museum experience. In the framework of the research programme, the exhibition experiments are thus also an experiment in museum practice, applying design research methodology and museological knowledge to the curatorial process. By addressing objectives, approaches, reflections, and results from the perspectives of both embedded researcher and museum host, the paper will provide an inside view of the prospects and potentials of university/museum collaborations.

Keywords: research, university, collaboration, participation, design methods

The paper is available for download from the MW archive: https://mw19.mwconf.org/paper/co-creating-knowledge-participatory-practices-and-museum-university-partnerships/

(which, if you don’t already know it, is a great source for knowledge on museums+digital, experience design, case presentations etc. with papers from every Museums and the Web conference since 1997)

Mobile media, mobility and mobilisation in the current museum field

This year, I had the privilege of contributing a chapter to this great volume, The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication

Resumé
Introducing the concept of a ‘mobile museology’ to describe how museums are currently set in motion by a confluence of cultural, technological and museological developments, this chapter traces the connections between mobile media and notions of mobility and mobilisation in the museum field. As illustrated by current examples in the chapter, mobile phones have thus provided an opportunity for both augmenting and transcending the museum space, blurring former boundaries between institutions and their environments. At the same time, technological advances and digitial culture developments have also required and inspired museums to become organisationally mobile, and to mobilise collections, audiences and institutions in order to fulfill museum missions. In this perspective, mobile media are thus seen as both catalysts and instruments for current museum developments.

Baggesen, R. H. (2019). Mobile media, mobility and mobilisation in the current museum field. In K. Drotner, V. Dziekan, R. Parry, & K. Schrøder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication (p. 115-127). Oxon & New York: Routledge. Routledge International Handbooks

Peer review version: Mobile media, mobility and mobilisation in the current museum field_peer review version_Baggesen 2019

Trans-museal experiences: inspiring a musealising gaze on the everyday

Paper presented at the 2017 international Art and Presence conference at University of Southern Denmark

Abstract
Like their musealised counterparts, everyday objects are both material, aesthetic entities and also cultural signifiers, ‘nodes at which matter and meaning intersect’ (Daston 2004:16). Hence, the potential pleasures in experiencing and reflecting on cultural objects in the everyday could be harnessed as a matter of curatorial interest. This presentation traces a current trend for transcending the museum setting to engage with everyday culture, and suggests that the notion of the ‘museum gaze’ could be reconceptualised as a musealising gaze on the everyday. Discussing illustrative examples, the paper will explore how museums may work strategically to augment this experience.

Manuscript: Trans-museology Baggesen

Initial explorations

3 months in, it’s time for taking stock of the activities that have marked the beginning of our collective explorations of ‘the explorative exhibition’.

Workshop 1: User perspectives and design thinking

In late May, the 7 person project team – i.e. the people managing exhibitions, collections, research and education at Enigma Museum + me – went on tour to my old project-partner museum, Ragnarock.

Curator (and previous collaboration partner) Rasmus Rosenørn presents Ragnarock to the Enigma team: educator Mads Danker Danielsen, curator Eva Wistoft Andersen, curating assistant Arne Noack, exhibition lead Martin Johansen, exhibition editor Tine Stevnhoved and lead researcher Andreas Marklund

The idea behind the excursion was to give the user perspective a central role in our project by making that our starting point: being users and potential contributors in another institution. Hence, despite the obvious differences between the two museums, Ragnarock is also an interesting parallel to Enigma in that both relate to contemporary, everyday culture, and both seek to engage the public in collating their history as a polyphonic narrative. Moreover, Ragnarock’s take on interactive exhibition design could serve as a common reference in future discussions, whilst the problematics of the ‘rockspor’ site would remind us of the challenges of designing for participation.

Rethinking ways in which to engage with our own musical history was therefore the challenge in the afternoon workshop. In preparation, I had asked to team to respond to a ‘proto’ probe on this theme – originally designed for the Ragnarock project – as a means to tune in and reminisce, but also as an introduction to this particular method as a potential tool in our continued process.

Rockspor proto probe

The workshop itself, however, was structured around the Stanford d.school crash course in design thinking. This format takes you through the stages of a design thinking process in just a couple of hours: building empathy through interviews, defining a problem statement, ideating and iterating solutions and finally building and testing prototypes. The point of the exercise is thus not to come up with solid solutions, but rather to get acquainted with the basic ideas of design thinking (as formulated by the d.school; there is a wider spectrum of methodologies related to design thinking, which again relates to human centred design, and to the Scandinavian traditions of CoDesign and Participatory Design, as argued by Björgvinsson et al. . For an extended presentation of how design thinking may be applied to a museum context, see Dana Mitroff Silver’s MW2013 paper).

Team members ‘testing’ ideas in the design thinking crash course

The purpose of the workshop was mainly to work as a warm-up exercise for the design work ahead, and therefore, more than the team’s innovative idea sketches, the most interesting thing for me to observe was the power of prototyping, as I sensed a palpable rise of energy and buzz of productive playfulness when we shifted from pen and paper to making mode, even if the prototyping materials were pretty basic.

Prototyping in progress

So even though the ensuing discussion (along with bringing up points about the craft of interviewing; the pros and cons of time pressure; and an interesting observation about memory as a social construct) also stressed the need for building more knowledge and clarifying our design intentions before launching into production mode and engaging users, to me the workshop also illustrated how ideas and understandings are also constructed in the making process. In my thesis, I built on Hastrup’s idea about research as a process of ‘ontological dumping’, in which relational understandings of the world are transformed into objects of knowledge, to describe how the design process similarly lets understandings of the problem field become substantialised in the form of suggested solutions (Hastrup 2006:3; Baggesen 2015:55). This notion could be a heuristic for the continued process in this project, which also aims to explore how design methodology affects museum development processes.

Design T/things

Following on from this, workshop 2 focused on clarifying the museum’s intentions. But, to stick with the methodology angle, let me first make a note about the workshop space. As noted earlier, Enigma Museum is still in-the-making, raising money and making plans for future exhibitions while experimenting with other ways of being a museum, e.g. through events, external collaborations, pop-up exhibitions and media presence. From a museological point of view, this process and these experiments are fascinating to follow. But another upshot of this limbo state is that the museum still has space to spare, meaning that I could clear a corner of the provisional storage floor to set up a workspace for the project.

(Pristine) project workspace at Enigma Museum

Being able to furnish it with an old mahogany table set once used by the museum board was a scoop, adding a symbolic meaning of having a mandate to make decisions, whilst also lending some definition or solidity to the makeshift space. In practical terms, the space also gives us walls to mount our work-in-progress ideas and inspirations on, and, most importantly, gives the project a (temporary) permanence and physical presence, a place to go to go into project mode and pick up from where we left off, rather than having to re-establish the project arena, conceptually and materially, every time.

In a sense, therefore, establishing this workspace is a very literal, spatial response to the argument made by Björgvinsson et al., that “a fundamental challenge for designers and the design community is to move from designing ‘things’ (objects) to designing Things (socio-material assemblies)” (2012:102; insert brackets in the original). This Latourian idea (playing on the shared etymology of the word ‘thing’ and the old Nordic democratic institution the Ting/Thing) of the design (research) process as an assembly of people, artefacts and ideas gathered to address pertinent matters of concern, is one I also pursued in my PhD project, and a fundament for my continued research. The current project is thus also a gathering together of people and interests with the dual objective of creating both museum development – designing a new format for collection and mediation – and museological research – exploring matters of concern. To this end, moreover, I will also be designing a collection of methodological tools or design things, such as probes, personas and concept/dialogue cards to assist the process.

Concept cards for ‘the explorative exhibition’ (see Baggesen 2015:81ff for method description)

In many ways, I would like to expand on the methodological considerations I explored in my dissertation, and pursue this design theoretical track also in this project, but  do I really have the time to go out on a theoretical/methodological limb about design things/Things? Is it relevant enough, in this context, and is the project strong enough to sustain a valuable contribution in this field? Of course, if I focused my energy here, I could make it so, but then my primary interest in this project is to provide a real, useful contribution to the museum’s ongoing development process. Still, the project needs to encompass both the academic and the practical. So, should the continued project process focus on efficient design of realisable prototypes ready for testing in the foreseeable future, allowing me to complete an empirical study of user responses, as suggested by one senior researcher in the programme? Should the process focus on staging discussions in the project team, allowing me to elicit and explore more nuances in the museological matters of concern, or even testing and challenging the convictions and rhetorics of the museum, as suggested by another? Is my main contribution to the museum the development of a ready-for-production mediation concept, or an experiment in methodology to fuel future work processes? Am I a catalyst, a facilitator, an evaluator, a critic or a team member; an insider or an outsider? All of the above, perhaps? So, it’s a balancing act, pursuing academic objectives and development objectives at once, while also juggling museum realities and pragmatic project constraints as I plan for the next stages of the project.

 

Workshop 2: Design intentions

Negotiating different or even conflicting objectives, ambitions, constraints and concerns was also a theme in our second workshop, focusing on our design intentions. To begin my research, I had earlier conducted a series of short, individual interviews with the project team members in order to establish some kind of baseline of the project before setting off on our joint expedition. As expected, their ideas and concerns were overlapping but also quite diverse in terms of what they saw as the primary aims of the project and of the exhibition ‘mechanism’ projected as the intended result. It was therefore necessary to stage a discussion of these different perspectives to get a joint idea of the scope and discuss conflicts and commonalities, and to see if we could reach an agreement on our design intentions.

The discussion was both constructive and inspiring, and provided relevant material for analysis in relation to the Our Museum dimensions, even though we didn’t succeed in arriving at a singular objective. Still, from a rough analysis of the video documentation and post-it notes from the session, I could distill a provisional ‘wishlist’ of intentions, including the wish to co-create a polyphonic history of communication with our users; to create identification and foster ownership and empowerment; to engage users in our research; and to create inspiring, iconic, and innovative exhibition experiences.

Of course, this still reads more like an idealistic mission statement than a concrete design brief, but these grand objectives are also relevant as guidelines in our continued process. And of course, the discussion also pointed to many aspects that were still unresolved: whether user contributions should feed into research, or exhibitions, or both; whether participation should function as a means for collecting or as a didactic strategy, or both; how to handle incoming data and materials; how many ressources this kind of strategy would require, and how many the museum is able or willing to spare; and, of course, whether and how our users would want to participate.

Museological study group

In the continued process, we will try to find answers to these questions through exhibition experiments and user engagement. In parallel, however, we will also try to understand these issues through discussions of museological theory. So far, we’ve had two study group sessions; one focusing on participation, with texts by Nina Simon, Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & Pille Runnel, and Bernadette Lynch; and another on museum missions with readings of Duncan Cameron and David Anderson, along with the (re-published) Musetrain Manifesto, Orhan Pamuks Modest Museum Manifesto and ICOM’s Cultural Diversity Charter.

Now, I’ve had to realise that I have been a bit over ambitious with the quantity of reading, but apart from that, this experiment in bringing museological theory into museum practice has proven to be very inspiring. Realising (with initial disbelief and then som disappointment) in the first year of my postdoc how little academic museum research is used in museum practice (I know, practitioners are very busy, and academia can be a bit too cerebral, still it seems such a waste of effort and potential), I am quite excited to have met such a positive attitude to the idea in Enigma, and to see that it does seem to make sense to infuse practice with theory, to provoke discussion and build up a shared set of references and ideas.

 

Next steps

On the basis of these initial explorations, and after finally getting clarification on the continued framework for the project (i.e. that museum did not get funding for a large scale project that this project could have fed into), we have now been able to adjust the project scope to focus more on exhibitions and less on research, and have also deviced a new project design comprising three joint experiments in how to collect and exhibit userdriven narratives. I’m looking forward to tucking into the project proper, but first up, it’s time for a summer break. Starting…now! [press publish]

 

 

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References:

Baggesen, R. (2015). Mobile Museology: An exploration of fashionable museums, mobilisation, and trans-museal mediation. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen

Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P. & Hillgren, P. (2012). ‘Design things and design thinking: contemporary participatory design challenges’. Design Issues, Vol.28(3), pp.101-116

Hastrup, K. (2006). ‘Designforskning: mellem materialitet og socialitet’ [’Design research: between materiality and sociality’]. Copenhagen Working Papers on Design. Copenhagen: Danmarks Designskole.

Silvers, D.M. et al (2013). ‘Design Thinking for Visitor Engagement: Tackling One Museum’s Big Challenge through Human-centered Design’. Museums and the Web 2013, online proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics.

Skriv din historie her…

[Cross post from Enigma.dk, hence in Danish, for once!] 

I forbindelse med Enigma Museums nye udstilling ‘Telefonbokshistorier’ bliver de besøgende opfordret til at bidrage med egne erindringer om de telefonbokse, som nu er forsvundet fra gadebilledet. Og jo, jeg husker dem tydeligt; i flere år var de min eneste telefon. Men er det en telefonbokshistorie? Har jeg en historie som er værd at fortælle, en historie som kan være med til at fortælle en større historie, eller måske sætte nye erindringer i gang hos den næste besøgende? Hvornår og hvordan bliver det almindelige levede liv til fortælling, til historie? Og hvad betyder det når museerne skubber til erindringen?

Indsamlingen af borgernes genstande og historier er en tilgang som gennem de senere år har dannet grundlag for flere nye udstillingsoplevelser både herhjemme og i udlandet. Allerede for ti år siden begyndte Struer Museum således sin indsamling af lokale erindringer gennem det digitale projekt ‘Byskriveren’, som stadig kan opleves på museet. Københavns Museum har ligeledes gennem flere projekter arbejdet med brugerindsamling, både i den omrejsende fotoinstallation VÆGGEN og i udstillingen ‘Søren Kierkegaard – kærlighedens genstande og gerninger’, som kombinerede genstande fra samlingen med genstande og kærlighedshistorier doneret til udstillingen af museets brugere. Kærligheden var ligeledes temaet for ‘The museum of broken relationships’ som i 2016 gæstede Rundetårn, hvor danske historier om forliste forhold blev føjet til det internationale kunstprojekt. Den Gamle By i Århus har eksperimenteret med Instagram som indsamlingsredskab både i forbindelse med udstillingen ‘Aarhus Rocks!’ og som forberedelse til en kommende bydel om 2014 under hashtagget #deldit2014. Og Nationalmuseet åbnede i november sidste år udstillingen ‘Din ting – vores historie’ med lige dele genstande udvalgt fra samlingen som repræsentationer af nyere samfundsbegivenheder, og hverdagsgenstande foreslået af befolkningen gennem en kampagne på Facebook.

Selvom det ikke er alle donationer som er egnet til samlingerne, har brugernes bidrag stor værdi for forståelsen af vores samtid, som de kulturhistoriske museer jo også både formidler i dag og skal bevare for fremtiden. Inspektørerne fra Den gamle By beskriver således i en artikel om erfaringerne fra de ovennævnte projekter, at

det brugerskabte materiale er meget velegnet til samtidsdokumentation af såvel materiel som immateriel kulturarv, materielt ved at vise et konkret motiv, og immaterielt som udtryk for brugerens kommunikative udsagn om sig selv og det valgte motiv. (Martin Djupdræt m.fl. (2015:88))

Kun med borgernes hjælp kan museerne altså forstå og forske i nutidens hverdagskultur. Og i udstillingerne kan mødet med vores egen hverdag gennem brugerindsamlede genstande og fortællinger måske også gøre historien mere nærværende for os som besøgende.

Når museerne udstiller dagligdags genstande og hverdagshistorier fra vores egen samtid, kan de på den måde få os til at reflektere over hvordan vi selv er del af historien, og hjælpe os til at få øje på det betydningsfulde i det almindelige. Kunsthistorikeren Svetlana Alpers taler ligefrem om museet som ‘a way of seeing’, et særligt opmærksomt blik som vi lærer når vi får lov til at granske udvalgte genstande i udstillingerne. Det blik kan vi tage med os ud i verden og hjem i hverdagen, som beskrevet af kulturteoretikeren Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett:

Once the seal of the quotidian is pierced, life is experienced as if represented: the metaphors of life as a book, stage, and museum capture this effect with nuances particular to each metaphor. Like the picturesque, in which paintings set the standard for experience, museum exhibitions transform how people look at their own immediate environs. The museum effect works both ways. Not only do ordinary things become special when placed in museum settings, but also the museum experience becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls. (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1991:410))

I forlængelse af dette er invitationen til at bidrage et formidlingsmæssigt greb, som søger at inspirere deltagerne til yderligere at reflektere over deres egen historie i et historisk perspektiv. Ifølge museologen David Anderson handler samskabelse af kulturarven således ikke bare om flerstemmighed og kulturelt demokrati, men også om at vi derigennem udvikler vores historiske bevidsthed.

Hvis min egen erfaring er repræsentativ, er der måske noget om snakken. Når jeg selv har deltaget i museernes indsamlingsprojekter, har jeg måske nok været farvet og tildels drevet af faglig nysgerrighed. Men også på et personligt plan har jeg oplevet det som berigende at byde ind på historien.

Da jeg i sin tid tog billeder af mit eget hjem, mine indkøb og mit lokale supermarked til #deldit2014, fik jeg øje på hvordan det på en gang var personligt og særegent, og samtidig et tidstypisk udtryk for mit sociale og geografiske tilhørsforhold. Det kan godt være at indretningen var udtryk for min smag, men der var også noget umiskendeligt københavnerlejlighed anno 2014 over kombinationen af hvidmalede gulve, at-bo reoler og genbrugsmøbler.

Og da jeg deltog i Nationalmuseets dagbogsindsamling ‘Del din dag’ gav morgenens udfordringer med at købe en mobilbillet til toget mig anledning til at tænke over hvor meget digitale tjenester nu fylder i hverdagen, og hvor forskelligt mit liv i 2017 derfor var fra det liv jeg levede i 1992, hvor Nationalmuseet sidst samlede dagbogsfortællinger ind.

Måske de tanker var inspirationen til mit bidrag til ‘Din ting – vores historie’, hvor mit Nem-ID kort faktisk blev udvalgt og nu er udstillet på Nationalmuseet! Men selvom det selvfølgelig er en sjov krølle på dén historie, var det ligeså meget overvejelserne over hvad der kendetegner dagens Danmark som gjorde det interessant at deltage. Og selv de gange hvor jeg ender med ikke at bidrage, har opfordringen sat tankerne i gang.

Men hvordan inspirerer vi folk til at dele tankerne med museet? Hvordan bliver en erindring en historie som kan fortælles? Hvilke historier har I lyst til at fortælle os?

Det er spørgsmål vi tumler med i forhold til projektet ‘den eksplorative udstilling’, hvor vi også vil indsamle og formidle kommunikationshistorien som de mange stemmers historie. Måske vi kommer tættere på et svar gennem de bidrag som snart finder vej til ‘Telefonbokshistorier’. I hvert fald glæder vi os til høre jeres historier om telefonfis og tokroner  – og til at inspirere jer til at genbesøge telefonboksen i erindringen.

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Referencer:

Alpers, S. (1991). ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’. In Karp, I & Lavine, S. (eds.) Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Anderson, D. (1997). ’Time, dreams and museology: We are all museologists now’. Nordisk museologi, 2.

Djupdræt, M. m.fl. (2015): Instagram som dokumentations- og indsamlingsmetode’. Nordisk Museologi 2015,1, s. 73-90

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1991). ‘Objects of ethnography’. In Karp, I & Lavine, S. (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

 

 

 

Designing ‘The explorative exhibition’

So, to cut a long story short, I’ve switched to a new project, however still within the framework of the Our Museum research programme.

(I should do a post on the long story of the project that failed at a later date –  even though it’s a tale of woe (one of the reasons why there’s been no updates on the project, although I have a few lengthy, but unfinished posts tucked away) I believe there could also be some useful points to be drawn from the experience, even if that’s a frustratingly meagre outcome from one and a half years of project time.  But this post is about the new project, which fortunately is looking a lot healthier than the last one.)

For the remainder of my postdoc, I will now be collaborating with Enigma Museum of Communication, a museum currently undergoing a major process of transformation. Previously known as the Museum of Post and Telecommunications and renowned as a popular destination for families, the museum was uprooted from it’s location in central Copenhagen in 2015, while simultaneously facing a reduction in funds from the founding institutions, Post Danmark and Tele Denmark Communications. As a result, a new director was called in to rethink the entire museum and lead the metamorphosis. In 2017, the museum reopened in a former post office in Østerbro, changed it’s name to Enigma (in reference to the unique encryption machine that is a jewel of its collection) and widened its scope to include a broader concept and context of communications. And the process is still ongoing. In fact, the museum is currently a museum without exhibitions; a status that challenges our concept of what makes a museum. Hence, while the exhibition plans are in place and funding being sought, the museum is using the current situation as an opportunity to experiment with other ways of ‘being a museum’: opening daily as a café and post office, thus cultivating a presence in the local community; hosting an extensive series of events including debates, conversation dinners, hackathons, letter writing evenings etc. as well as being active participants in external events; arranging pop-up exhibitions around town; and finding alternative channels for communicating the museum’s knowledge in the media, political debates, museum fora and more. Thus, while their webpage may cheekily claim that ‘We are not a museum’, it could also be argued that it’s more than a museum; a true Hooper-Greenhill’ian ‘post museum’ (2000), if you’ll pardon the pun.

Needless to say, it’s a pretty exciting process to be part of, and a truly dynamic and welcoming environment to work in, too.

The project that I will be working on focuses on the design development of what the museum has so far conceptualised as ‘The explorative exhibition’. The concept refers to an intended future practice or ‘mechanism’ that creates a synergy between participatory collection practices, research processes and museum communication.

As a museum of communication, Enigma is not only interested in presenting the historical progress of communication technologies, but also wants to show how these technologies play into and shape our everyday lives. Apparently, however, this everyday perspective on the uses and experiences of interpersonal communication media – how we used to use our landline phones, what we made of our first modem, how we now (mis)manage mobile communication and battles over screen time – is underrepresented in the existing research field. Therefore, the desire to involve the public in the co-creation of this immaterial cultural heritage narrative, by inspiring reflection and eliciting visitors’ stories through exhibits and events, is not only a strategic device for creating an interactive museum experience. It is also an important means for building knowledge in the museum and in the wider communication research community.

The ambition – and the challenge – is therefore to create a system/ an instrument/ a coordinated practice, that supports these joint objectives and creates value for the user participants, for non-participating visitors, and for museum researchers, curators and communicators.

But one thing is concepts and ambitions – another is how to turn them into a concrete museum design. This process is the focus of my project, in which I as researcher/designer will work as a catalyst for the collaborative ideation, design development, and evaluation of principles and prototypes for ‘the explorative exhibition’. I will thus be working closely together with the museum team to define our own design intentions, but also, as importantly, to build an understanding of how co-creation of heritage becomes relevant and interesting from a citizen/user perspective, and from this, begin to explore the design possibilities in this field.

At this point, I cannot say whether we’ll end up with a service design, an interactive installation, a digital interface, a workshop format, a work process or something else entirely, only that my hope is that we will experiment with some very different options along the way, and use the design process as a lab for examining ideas and incentives and reflecting on outcomes. And then, in time, narrow it down enough to develop a functioning prototype which we can test, redesign and refine in order to suggest a final design that could feed into the future museum practice.

This objective, and the anchoring in the museum institution, means of course that the project has a strong orientation towards practice. While the process may be experimental and allow for exploration of wild ideas and alternative methods, the aim is to produce a result that has real value for the museum. But of course, the project also serves a research purpose, and similarly aims to contribute to the fields of design research and museum studies with new knowledge about how design methods and research collaborations may help to advance museum development.

 

New project: Participatory and professional interchange in digital museum practice

As of August 1st, I started in a new position as assistant professor at Roskilde University, working on a new research and co-development project with RAGNAROCK – the museum for pop, rock and youth culture (pictured below (pretty neat, huh?), and part of the museum group ROMU).

The short form project description runs like this:

Digital technologies not only contribute to changes in museums’ physical and virtual communication, they also inspire new types of exchanges between museums and their public, for example when users are invited to participate as co-collectors. In this process, practices of collection and mediation become merged, while conventional museum practices and professional divides are renegotiated.

The project focuses on this development by examining the interplay between collection and communication, experience and education, and user participation and professional practice in a digital museum context. Furthermore, the project will consider how digital collection practices affect professional museum roles and also reflect on the possibilities and potential dilemmas in practice-based museum research.

Empirically, the project will analyse, co-develop and evaluate the co-collection platform Rockspor ([Rock traces] Ragnarock Museum/ROMU) on the basis of observations, interviews and interventions with adult online users. The iterative co-development process will focus on the creation of both user experiences and relevant content.

Really, this is a very cool gig. (And probably I should play it cooler too, assuming a more professional tone (which I will in time, promise), but I’m just genuinely very excited about this project, the focus, the framework and the whole setup, so please bear with the vernacular).

The project is affiliated to the national research and development programme Our Museum. Comprising 13 individual research project as well as 4 associated projects, and bringing together 26 PhD-to-professor level researchers from five universities with eight partnering museums, the programme is unique in its ambition and scale in a Danish (and, I believe, international) museum research context. It has been made possible thanks to generous support from the Velux Foundation and the Nordea Foundation (and some pretty impressive project leadership. If only more research in the humanities dared to be this bold in visions and demands.)

As a collective, the programme will examine, from various perspectives, the juxtaposition or reciprocity of educational and experiential dimensions in the museum, historically and through a series of future-oriented co-development projects. Being part of this network is for me a welcome change from the often solitary condition of academic labour, and I look forward to our tri-annual seminars and ongoing knowledge exchange.

At the university, I am anchored in the research group Visual Culture and Performance Design, and also here I’ll be surrounded by colleagues working on interesting projects, many of which involve design approaches and considerations of design research methodology. There’s even creative workshops, maker spaces and innovation labs! Whereas in my former department I would sometimes feel like the odd one out for using creative methods in my research, here I feel right at home, and I look forward to being part of this vibrant research community. Similarly, I look forward to supervising design-based student projects and running workshops as part of my lecturing role.

Most of all, however, I am excited that this research project means working in the museum, rather than merely having museums as my object of study. Hence, I will be working a couple of days a week at RAGNAROCK (and sometimes at ROMU), as part of the development team for the project Rockspor. Anchoring my research in practice, and getting involved in the creativity and pragmatism of museum mediation and development  is an ideal next step for me and a perfect fit for my profile. Even though having this many stakeholders in the project – hence having to juggle multiple activities and manage diverse expectations – will potentially prove a challenge at times, quite frankly, at this point, I’m happy as a pig in shit.

Rockspor is a website, planned for launch this autumn, and a co-collection/curatorial/communication project focusing on ‘music’s meeting places’. Collating expert knowledge and digitised collection material with user stories, concert reviews and content aggregated from social media, the website will offer a kaleidoscopic view of concert venues, youth clubs and other arenas around the country where young people have met to experience popular music from the 50’s to the present. Allowing you to follow multiple trajectories, or to trace and share your own experiences of particular bands, venues, cultures and eras, the website’s aim is to both offer engaging experiences and also inspire users to add their own contributions to the site.

The objective for the Rockspor project team is therefore to make this happen. Because we don’t believe in a ‘build in a they will come‘ philosophy of digital participation (having seen too many well-intended projects grind to a halt instead of taking off), the launch of the website marks the beginning of a new work process, an important milestone rather than the finishing line. Similarly, the project and the website – originally going by the title Rockens Danmarkskort – has been developed in a research-led participatory design process involving a group of users representing various target/interest groups and the museum team of curators, communicators and developers, as described in Line V. Knudsens dissertation ‘ROCKENS DANMARKSKORT: Deltagelse praktiseret som forskellighed [THE MAP OF DANISH ROCK HISTORY: Participation enacted as difference]’ as well as the article ‘Participation at work in the museum’ (Knudsen 2016, in Museum Management and Curatorship 31(2):193-211). Continuing from this, the current version of the project will focus on getting users involved as contributors rather than co-designers, aiming to develop a sustainable practice through an iterative process of experimentation and interventions.

This process is the empirical focus of my research project, which is designed to explore three interrelated areas of interest. The first, as stated above, will analyse the users and their engagement with and experience of the platform, contribute to its continued development, and evaluate the results, with an aim to draw out some best practice guidelines as well as contributing to the programme’s overall examination of the balance between education and experience. Secondly, and using observations from my engagement as co-developer as my source material, I will look at how both the internal professional collaboration and exchanges with users in a digital co-collection project relates to and potentially affects traditional museum roles and competences. And finally, employing design game methodology to explore a meta-museological perspective, I wish to reflect on potentials in and implications of post-critical museum research-in-practice.

Hey ho, let’s go!

 

On blogging (or, a note of encouragement to my students)

So, time to ramp up the blog again. Following the completion of my PhD research and dissertation last year, I was all out of words, and it was a relief to let the whole musing on museums thing lie for a while. Trouble is, the longer it’s left, the harder it feels to pick it up again. Where to start and why even bother? What could I possibly add to the already flourishing online debate? What’s the benefit? As of next week, however, I will be teaching digital museum mediation and museology to two classes here at Uni. of Copenhagen (again, but this time one class will be in Danish and one in English), and given that I am asking my students to blog, I should at least give it a go myself. Also, despite my hesitation (put it down to reservation, laziness, self-consciousness or lack of inspiration) I actually do miss the outlet, and simply need to get back into the swing of it again.

As a sort of warm up exercise, then, for blogging and for teaching, and with particular address to those of my students who find their way to my blog, let me begin by musing on blogging as a tool for research and reflection instead. Hence, as stated by Mortensen & Walker,

To blog is an activity similar in many ways to the work of the researcher. A weblogger filters a mass of information, choosing the items that interest her or that are relevant to her chosen topic, commenting upon them, demonstrating connections between them and analysing them. (2002:250)

Considering blogging a part of my research method, and including a selection of blog posts in my dissertation, I wrote about the topic in my methodology chapter:

In Thoughtful Interaction Design, Löwgren & Stolterman (2004) describe the sketch as a ‘conversation partner’ for the designer […], talking back and leading to new questions and considerations. In a similar fashion, my blog has allowed me to sketch thoughts and ideas in the process, communicating them not only to the world, but especially to myself. Moreover, the blog has supported my divergent research strategy. The relative swiftness – and relatively lax self-censorship – of the blogging process has thus given me an opportunity to consider a much wider spectrum of ideas than a rigorous study would normally permit.

Compared to the conventions of scholarly argumentation, the processual nature of the blog format inspires a freer form of expression. It thereby allows for the articulation of unfinished thoughts and open questions, as well as for expressing personal opinions or concerns. However, in contrast to a visual sketch, written language demands a particular structure, stringing concepts together to formulate a linear argument or coherent question. A scribbled short hand note-to-self can thus be deceptive, letting you think that you have captured an essence of thought. By contrast, making (parts of) my thought process public online has forced me to make more sense of the makings of this ‘essence’, to engage more deeply with the questions, the matters of concern I have grabbled with. Trying to explain – to myself, as well as to an invisible audience (boyd 2007) – why certain observations warrant attention, why certain concepts inspire or provoke me, taking guesses at their implication even if not always subjecting them to thorough analysis, has helped me to discover new facets and new dilemmas pertaining to each issue. (Baggesen 2015: 77) [references below]

The benefit of blogging for me, then, is that it helps me notice what I notice or find noticable about a text, an exhibition or an idea. It helps me reflect on and remember my observations, even if the analysis may not go as deep as that of an academic paper. Hence, for me it’s more of a personal notebook and less of a public platform, and my blog has been a very useful record of issues and examples, that I did not necessarily have any particular use for at the time, but which turned out to be valuable later on. Often, I don’t come to any conclusions about these issues on the blog, so in terms of using it to enter into the ongoing debate, my blog is not very strong. It even makes me feel a little vulnerable, putting all these half-baked thoughts into the open. Perhaps I should work on that, be more clear about having a particular message for a particular audience. And yet again, that could kind of defeat the object, or at least imply a taking a different approach, as the purpose of the blog thus far has not been to have a voice, but to hear myself think. The reason for doing this in public is simply that it enforces an aspect of discipline, sticking with a topic until at least it makes sense to me rather than dropping it when it gets tricky. Still, maybe I should start experimenting a bit more with what the blog could be used for, at least keep the option open.

 

Nevertheless, what I ask of my students is not that they find a public voice or provide definite insights into current museum issues, but that they try to use their blogs as tools for reflection, and see how it works for them. It’s meant to be a tool for learning and hopefully discovering what it is about museums and museology that makes them tick.

And hey, I know it’s tricky to get started, to find something to write about, and that you may feel sheepish about the result. It’s OK. A short post will do. If nothing else springs to mind, simply start by telling about a recent or memorable museum visit and zoom in on a detail that stood out for you. Share a photo, quote the program. See where it takes you, if description leads to reflection. If not this time, maybe next. You’ll be fine.

 

References

Baggesen, R. (2015). Mobile museology. An exploration of fashionable museums, mobilisation, and trans-museal mediation. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.

boyd, d. (2007). ‘Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life’. In Buckinham, D. (ed.), MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Löwgren, J. & Stolterman, E. (2004). Thoughtful Interaction Design: A design perspective on information technology. London & Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Mortensen, T. & Walker, J. (2002). ‘Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool’. In Morrison, A. (ed.), Researching ICTs in Context, Oslo: InterMedia Report, 3/2002.

Dissertation

My dissertation, Mobile museology: An exploration of fashionable museums, mobilisation and trans-museal mediation was succesfully defended  on September 18th 2015

Summary | Download dissertation | Final assessment