Making Museums Like Nature

In Nina Simon’s session Going Analogue we worked in groups to imagine how a museum might be transformed into something else. What something else? Well, that was up to us. Finding the answer involved completing the question: Make museums like [your idea here]. We then brainstormed concrete suggestions for how we would transform the museum into this new type of thing. Other groups filled that blank in the sentence above with a church potluck, bank, credit card, wiki and even fantasy baseball. Our group chose Nature. What did we mean by Nature? We focused on the following qualities:

• Engages all the senses
• Diversity of environment, terrain, landscape
• Place of surprise and discovery
• Dynamic and changing
• Vast and awe-inspiring

In terms of concrete proposals, Nina encouraged us to look for small interventions which require little or no modification of visitors’ existing behaviors. These are usually big wins, because no one has to convince people to try them. The features are simply there, supporting and enhancing, rather than radically changing the experience. Visitors like that.

We did not have enough time to address all the qualities we identified, but we managed to cover a few. Simulating the dynamic and changing aspects of nature could be done through changing the colors of the walls in each gallery and the arrangement of artworks and vitrines. If the museum cannot ditch traditional display cases, then they could be configured in unusual ways to foster discovery or the quiet awe that landscape architecture inspires. Light plays a crucial role in how we experience nature. Styles and colors of museum lights could vary. They could rotate and move gradually throughout the day. The intensity of lights could be changed.

The diversity of the natural landscape could be echoed through different types of tactile floor materials. Accessibility permitting, the grade of the floor surface could be altered. These elements could reflect the objects being exhibited in some way. Ambient sounds emanating from different locations within the museum would engage the sense of hearing and evoke surprise and delight. The Roald Dahl Museum plays unusual sound effects like balls bouncing, whistles, and horns in the bathrooms, giving the impression that the author’s wacky stories live throughout the building, not just in the galleries.

We had a great fun with this exercise and would have loved to take it further. Many thanks to Nina and all our group members, who I am hoping will post their contact information below so we can keep in touch!