Exhibition 2.0

Photographer: Leonard Gren

Today´s blog is about the exhibition as a learning environment and a few thoughts I have on developing the interface towards the visitor.

The other day I heard a debate on the radio where the ”museum crisis” in Gothenburg was discussed. The debate led to a discussion about the role of museums. Executives from 2 different museums and one culture journalist was debating. They all agreed upon the great potential of museums as places for informal learning and the fact that since museums are financed through tax money, the tax payers should be in focus. I have heard that discussion over and over again for a year and a half during my time at Riksutställningar, but is it really so? Isn´t this a confession of lips?

IF THIS IS THE FACT THAT SWEDISH MUSEUMS PUT THE AUDIENCE IN THE CENTER

- Why do museum teachers find themselves at the bottom of the museum hierarchy?
- Why isn´t learning and the meeting with the audience looked upon as the museum´s most central and important process?
- Why can´t you get a doctor´s hat in museum or art pedagogy in Sweden?
- Why doesn´t the governmental investigation into future museums put questions about the visitors and learning in the centre?

If we accept the museum as a place for lifelong learning and a learning environment, we also have to understand that the view on learning has changed since we went to school, acquiring knowledge has moved from teaching to learning. The visitor (”pupil”) is the focal point of the learning process not the teacher/guide. This means that museums must open up for new practices and methods in their contact with visitors. I also want to stress that the museum isn´t a school and therefore shouldn´t work with methods used at school. But more about that in another blog.

An exhibition and a museum carry an eternal amount of information and embedded knowledge. In contact with the visitor and her experiences will some of this information, if properly communicated, turn into knowledge. That´s the process we call learning. If we in this process put the visitor in the centre, and this we have to, the visitor becomes the leader in the process of meaningmaking. We have to find methods for this. If we then, on top of everything, manage to relate to an interactive process, i.e. a two-way communication, a dialogue, the visitor becomes a producer and a consumer. We have reached Exhibition 2.0.

One such brave exhibition is ”Jag vill ju bara ha respekt” (I only want respect!) at the Police museum in Stockholm. Here youth statements and experiences are the basis for an exhibition on violence among youth. By creating a group on Facebook the museum invites, parallel to the exhibition, to a continuing discussion about the exhibition and its theme. Those who want can this way continue to work on experiences the exhibition has brought to mind and learn new thing about themselves. Through the museum and Facebook new statements are gathered which can be added to the exhibition. The exhibition develops as visitors are touched by it and feebacks personal experiences. The consumer becomes a producer and the exhibition becomes a living documentation which is altered and developed over time.

Exhibition 2.0!

I would like the end with a quotation from Bodil Jönsson and her book ”We learn as we live” about the importance of offering fora for reflection.

”When I in this way get something out of myself and puts it outside me, distribute it, beyond my inner mix of knowledge and feelings, it sort of gives me a new fixation point. In its turn, this steady point helps me to hold on to the thought and spur it further. If everything, on the other hand, had been left inside pell-mell among everything else, I probably only would have come a short way – but after that no further.” (my transl.)

Everyone out there with examples of exhibitions according to the concept of Exhibition 2.0 or have ideas about how an exhibition like that could look like, COMMENT!