{CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] This month, we take a look at how to involve the public in the design of innovative museum projects.
The 8th edition of Museomix. The aim of this collaborative marathon is to open up museums to innovation, by recruiting and mobilizing a wide range of volunteers with diverse skills and expertise in design, communication, IT development and mediation. Over a short 3-day period, participants are invited to turn their ideas into temporary museographic and scenographic solutions (in the form of prototypes). Under the slogan ” People make museums”, the initiative makes a clear claim for a participatory model of museum design. The event places itself on the side of the public, using common sense and the practices and customs of museum visitors to better welcome them and accompany them on their visits.
A laudable and necessary initiative, which nevertheless raises a number of questions about the involvement of audiences in a cultural venue’s innovation strategy:
- Why involve your audience?
- Which audiences are (naturally) ready to collaborate?
- What role should audiences play in relation to professionals?
1. Why involve the public? A brief history to put things into perspective
- The collections challenge: involve the public to develop collections that are more in tune with society.
One thing is certain: involving the public in museology is not a recent phenomenon. To explain the emergence of these participatory practices, it would seem appropriate to begin by paying tribute to the museologist Georges-Henri Rivière (see this article on the Ministère de la culture website). A true pioneer, he laid the foundations for a new form of museology when, in 1937, he built up the collections of the “museum-laboratory” that was the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires (covering both rituals and the representations or folklore of our society). In this way, he has contributed to renewing museographic approaches by mobilizing and involving non-expert audiences in building collections through field surveys and collections.
Beyond this tutelary figure, a range of other issues facing museums in recent years could explain this desire to increasingly mobilize audiences in their development strategies.
- The strategic challenge: better interact with our audiences to serve them better.
From the 1970s onwards, visitor services were deployed in museum organizations, with the aim of getting to know visitors better, adapting to their uses and practices to support them, win their loyalty and involve them in decision-making (see Claude Fourteau’s article on museum loyalty policies).
- The financial challenge: delegate part of its activities to the public.
The budget cuts faced by cultural establishments over the past thirty years may also explain the increased involvement of the public in museum management. The downsizing of cultural institutions has led to the emergence of new forms of participation in the extension of certain tasks previously carried out by professionals. This type of delegation is at the heart of the activities of several Anglo-Saxon museums, through the use of volunteers. However, it is still far from being systematized in France (see Jean-Michel Tobelem’s article on volunteer management in American museums).
- The innovation challenge: innovating with the public (finally, the key topic of this article!).
In addition to the budgetary implications, the use of the public can also be explained by the rise of digital technology in museums. On the one hand, the interactivity and personalization promised by these devices would require ever greater consideration of the public and their practices. On the other hand, the rapid obsolescence of some of these devices would require agility and a finer apprehension of their users in order to experiment, test, design and evaluate projects with a digital component.
The import of these technologies from the telecoms, media and web sectors into the museum world has helped to imbue professionals in the sector with a new methodological culture derived from design, IT, marketing and, more generally, project management. Many agencies and professionals in the museum sector now draw their inspiration from innovative and creative methodologies as varied asUX Design, design thinking, AB testing and Agile methods. In the museum sector, examples of agencies applying these methods include Les Sismo, Artizest, headed by Alexia Jacques-Casanova, and Signes de sens… On the {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] side (too), we naturally draw a great deal of inspiration from these methods in the consulting and training assignments we offer.
Involving the public in museums is therefore the result of a combination of museographic, strategic (and organizational), financial and technological dynamics. More generally, participation is rooted in a particularly strong societal injunction, and museums are no exception. However, not just anyone can participate.
2. Which audiences are involved, and what contribution is at stake?
- Experimenting with close audiences to serve them better.
In collaborative design projects, audiences are often selected from among the regulars who are closest to a cultural venue (simply out of convenience): students, schoolchildren, bridge teachers, voluntary audiences and, therefore, those with a certain affinity for the cultural establishment. However, this panel will inevitably induce a selection bias (i.e. potentially non-representative).
Despite this limitation, this participatory design approach can
enable us toexperiment with ideas and initiate a fertile dialogue with some of our audiences. Recently, as part of an assignment carried out by {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] forInstitut du monde arabe and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, we initiated an approach of this type. We wanted to define the content of a digital teaching kit for secondary school teachers, offering them a cross-referenced look at the collections of the two museums and evoking the fruitful links between Jewish and Muslim cultures (see the project in our achievements).
The first step was to work with the teams at the two museums to define a guiding theme based on their collections.
Once this had been stabilized, a panel of teachers from different levels and from various secondary schools in the Paris region, working in different subjects related to the themes we wanted to propose, were invited to take part in a focus group workshop.
The ten or so teachers were then brought together in this workshop to interact on the various contents of the kit, assess its relevance and suggest adaptations and evolutions in terms of both content and form.
This approach enabled us to better understand the needs and constraints of these teachers, and to adapt the project to their teaching logic. What’s more, this first workshop was also an opportunity to begin federating a committee of users who could accompany the project through its various phases and relay it to their colleagues once it was finalized.
The question of audiences is, however, much more complex if the project is aimed at people who are more distant from museums.
- Reaching out to more remote audiences to innovate more effectively.
Indeed, it may seem artificial to consult only the most seasoned members of your cultural institution’s audience.
The solutions thus proposed would be based solely on shared convictions, and would not offer any particularly convincing innovative breakthroughs. What’s more, the projects implemented would not contribute to the mission of broadening audiences ascribed to a cultural venue.
Faced with this situation, some cultural venues have decided to seek out non-audiences in order to address them more effectively. Such is the case of the Musée Saint-Raymond which in 2017 invited visitors who didn’t like museums to better understand how to address them. To gain access to a wider panel, these visitors were recruited thanks to an article published in La Dépêche. More a communications stunt than an attempt to really convince these visitors, the approach nevertheless remains particularly interesting. This approach marks a step forward for cultural institutions which, for reasons of practicality and lack of resources, often remain in touch with particularly close audiences.
The types of audience to be involved in a co-design approach can therefore have a decisive influence on the project to be designed. The way in which the public is involved in these projects also has a particular influence on the results that can be expected from this consultation, participation or collaboration (depending on the degree and space that you wish to give to the public).
3. How can we bring these collaborative approaches to life: what role should the public and professionals play?
The role that the public can play in a collaborative project should be measured against the role that the institution’s professionals are prepared to give them.
An anecdote mentioned by Pauline Moirez, Head of Innovation at BnF, during the IESA 2019 meetings we organized in June at the Monnaie de paris is particularly illustrative here. To enhance the value of its press-related collections, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launched an experiment in its reading areas. The idea was to offer a café-press corner to enhance library users’ breaks. Various interviews were conducted to test the idea. The general satisfaction of those surveyed prompted the teams to put the café-press corner to the test in the library. Unfortunately, it remained empty. A few additional observations have enabled us to better analyze the behavior of these readers. During breaks, they preferred to stop reading, get out in the fresh air and chat with other readers.
Despite a successful initial consultation, this example shows just how much integrating the public into a project does not systematically meet their real needs, even if these needs have been declared. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance of multiplying and crossing methods (interviews, observations and experiments) to ensure the relevance of a solution. Finally, to conclude this anecdote with the words of Pauline Moirez, “users are experts in their needs, we are experts in solutions”. The role of professionals must be negotiated in close collaboration with the public.
Taking into account audiences, their obstacles and motivations, therefore, requires the mobilization of a wide range of methods and tools to refine our knowledge of them, and to think about support systems within a framework that respects the positioning of a cultural establishment and the professionals who work there. On this subject, take a look at a very interesting study carried out by students at Paris 13 on the skills mobilized during Museomix. HERE. Including the public means opening up your institution to a whole range of audiences, who can be involved in a wide variety of ways. From simple consultation to close collaboration, animation methods can be complementary and synergistic:
- Observing the public can be a way of better adapting to their needs. For example, the Carrefour numérique² at the Cité des Sciences offers visitors the chance to take part in a “living lab” to observe and experiment with them, and involve them in the establishment’s cultural and educational innovations.
- This observation can be complemented by an analytical approach to the data generated by audiences and their uses (an article on this subject will be published shortly on the Medium account of {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES]).
- Interviews and group workshops can enrich this initial research (from a simple focus group workshop to validate ideas, to a design workshop where members of the public are invited to design with professionals) to mobilize representative audiences, validate ideas and propose a prototype for validation. The methods mentioned in this article, such as design thinking, can be of great help here. Ronan Le Guern, head of the web and digital department at Le Centquatre, recently published an excellent memoir on the methodologies he used to design the 104Factory website (read it HERE).
- A range of events, such as the hackathonshackathons Design sprints, and Barcamps…
- This consultation can be structured and become a systematic process, either as part of a project or on an ongoing basis. The Palais des Beaux-arts in Lille, for example, initiated a particularly exemplary consultation process with its public as part of its project to redesign its atrium. On a permanent basis, what the Réunion des musées de Rouen has set up since 2016 is particularly interesting: a visitors’ chamber, a genuine advisory body to the museum on its cultural and development policy (to be followed closely).
Involving the public in the design of a project is a particularly valuable way of testing, experimenting, delegating, legitimizing or communicating about their participation. This mobilization needs to be anticipated and organized in order to best identify the role that members of the public and professionals are prepared to play, and what they can respectively expect from it. It also means agreeing on expectations and tangible results.
