​About the speaker

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Suzanne MacLeod is Professor of Museum Studies at the School of Museum Studies. Her research and most recent volume, Designing for Creative Lives, explore contemporary museum design, with a particular focus on design methodologies and the acknowledgement of the potential of design in creating inclusive environments which foster relationships, equality, and enable full lives. 

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​Transcript

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In this short presentation, I’m going to introduce a project that I have worked on for the last 3 years and which was published as a book called Museums and Design for Creative Lives with Routledge in September 2020. As part of the research, I looked across a large number of socially-engaged museum and exhibition projects in order to understand how they were made. As the research progressed, projects were gradually narrowed to those which could be argued to be designed for creative lives – that is, with the lived experiences of the museums’ constituencies in mind, with a concern for the collective and the social impact of the museum’s actions and experiences and where use, rather than exchange, rather than shopping and eating was prioritised.

I was interested in processes of “making space”. It’s a very broad definition of design. Sometimes these museums were made through expert-led processes, so they were designed by a designer,sometimes through user-centred approaches, using social science methods such as survey, consultation, and so on. Sometimes through participatory design processes, so involving visitors in design. And sometimes, in very few cases, they were made through genuine processes of co-production, where the space of the museum is produced actively with people in an ongoing process that’s much closer to life.

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There is a very particular theory of the production of space sitting underneath the research. It is based on a body of scholarship which reaches back to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, which was published in 1991and continues to influence research around participatory architecture and ethical design. This body of work allows us to recognise that space is social – that it not only embodies social structures and expectations and relationships, but that it is actively productive of those structures and relations. Lefebvre talks about the ‘underpinnings’ of space and asks questions about the relation of the underpinning to the relationships it supports and bears. I find this really interesting and wanted to understand more about the spatial and social underpinnings of museums and how they enable, in different ways, our creative lives – so that is life without oppression and a life in which we make choices. We have some levels of self-determination.

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Lefebvre developed a conceptual triad. You can see it here on the screen. Through a very detailed analysis of space and how it is produced, he differentiated between different aspects of our world recognising that space. We could think here about space as the Museum is at once, an idea. And as museum professional, we each play a very privileged part in thinking what space the museum should be. It was once an idea, but it is also a concrete environment. It’s a real space. And it is also an experience; it will be lived in some ways. And he separated out these three actions of space, which are happening all the time and affecting our experience. So he drew attention to what we now know, that, if we allow a few people to shape space, it will be limited and work against the majority of people’s lived experience.

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So Lefebvre is simply pointing out to us that the concrete museum will be the outcome of the ideas that feed in and it will constrain or enable experience, depending on so many complex factorsand in different ways for different people. For Lefebvre, our challenge – if we are interested in creating authentic living places where a diversity of people go and enjoy a diversity of experiences. Our challenge is to ‘allow’ people to bring their lives with them and then ‘allow’ the space to be producedthrough that occupation and use and celebration of difference.I would equate this vision of space with co-production, so a genuine production of space formed through the lived experiences and interactions of the people occupying the space and where some level of self-determination is enabled. 

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Looking across the projects and managing to visit a good number of them, the majority of which were distilled from the brains of museum professionals rather than from the literature, it became very clear that spaces designed for creative lives, share certain physical and social characteristics – that is, there are 3 main social and spatial qualities of socially-engaged museums:

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Space that is open to appropriation. These museums are open to appropriation. They take account of our right to inhabit space and make it our own - to draw it into the web of social relations that comprise our lives. And they offer up opportunities for this to happen.

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An Orientation away from exchange towards use. These spaces also actively foster use and not exchange. They make a conscious invitation to visitors to become active subjects embedded in a very specific social context rather than sending out an invitation to be a consumer or a conventional as we might say anonymous or passive museum visitor.

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An orientation towards and care for the collective. These places also care for the collective. So they illustrate a care for the collective in their larger social ambition. They aspire to be socially plentiful and exhibit a desire to nurture collective subjectivities, so a sense of ourselves as part of a human network through which we are all equally connected and towards which we each have a responsibility.

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There is way too much to talk about under these three headings. I am just going to talk about a few of the spatial and social features that comprise these three characteristics rather than religiously working through each one.

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All of the research is based on a detailed understanding of how our world is produced. Our physical and social worlds are bound up together. We form all of our relationship in space. Spaces dictate. They tell us how to behave, and even what to feel and think. And they’re shaped by inequality and by capital. The same space might make one person feel empowered and another person feel terrible. 

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Spaces that are open to appropriation do something different to the spaces of capital that surround us and seem to share certain characteristics. They are anti-monumental – purposefully challenging the pomp and great sweeps of history of the 19th century cultural spaces and purposefully challenging the paternalistic approach of much 20th century professional practice. A great example would be Louisiana in Denmark which set out to be everything the State Art Museum of Copenhagen wasn’t grand about great sweeps of historical time and so on. That Louisiana, they created a landscape where experience was slowed, architecture and art were at a human level. And other activity, such as chatting or lying in the sun were valued equally alongside the appreciation of art.

 
These spaces are porous. They enable people to move physically in and out. They find ways to break down physical barriers, so we might thank about locked gates or turnstiles and so on. Blue House in Hong Kong. You can see the image there, top right, had an area of land behind it which had been derelict and fenced off since the 1950s. It has been opened up for community use.

So a really simple way of beginning to make this site porous to enable people locally to inhabit and make use of the site. Places open to appropriation include areas of ambiguity and they come to love living with that ambiguity. At a site you’ll know well the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, which you can see at the bottom left, the central space was unexpectedly appropriated by young people. It was noticed, so this appropriation was noticed and nurtured and allowed to become a multi-functional space. So the young people use it as a meeting place and homework space.

 

A place to wait after school. Blue House includes shops and restaurants, all run as social enterprises. It is a residence so people live there, and it is a heritage site. It is a living and breathing place that feels welcoming as a result. All the places that seem to become a part of their community don’t hide from addressing economic inequality. And the best example that came out in the research for me was from Boston Children’s Museum in the 1960s where you could simply get a ticket to the museum from the local library – They’ll borrow it, take it out which like you would take out a book. But elsewhere there were great examples of differentiated entry fees and free entry for people living in particularly poor areas.

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The emphasis today on generating income in so many cultural organisations comes through loud and clear in the physical and social forms and the experiences they suggest, encourage and outlaw. An orientation towards use, in its broadest possible sense, rather than exchange characterises the places that are loved and used by a diverse range of people. It doesn’t undermine exchanges the business model, but it recognises that this often manifests negatively in the space, for example, reducing differences and so on. Interestingly, the most effective routes to use are set out here on this slide. So an orientation towards the political, the prioritization of personal felt experiences that draw us as individuals directly into the experience and the supporting of active subjectivities.

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The top image here shows Exile at Kingston Lacy – a National Trust property in the UK, and it provides a great example of a project where a historic house was oriented through an installationwhich drew attention to the persecution the owner of the house experienced as a result of his sexualitytowards the political. Such a political orientation is, for Lefebvre, the most effective way to drive use to drive a deep engagement and connection to the life.

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The bottom image shows a project at another National Trust property. This time it’s Calke Abbey in South Derbyshire, where a new layer of interpretation across the site was added to open up engagements with questions of loneliness and social isolation. Like many of the projects where deep engagements were enabled, here an emphasis was placed on personal and felt experiences, both in the selection of content and the stories that were told, and in the way the opportunities for experience at the site were shaped. So to draw us in to slow the process down. It positions us as implicators of subjects in the process, in the experience. In both of these examples, visitors are encouraged to generate more active subjectivities, so relations to self, other and environment to reflect, to talk, to explore, to engage in challenging conversations and so on.

 

Finally, spaces designed for creative lives are aware of and actively seek to produce a care for the collective in their larger social ambition, as opposed to only thinking about autonomous individuals, they aspire to be socially plentiful, as opposed to socially limited, and also they exhibit a desire to nurture collective subjectivities, again , a sense of ourselves as part of a human network, a network towards which we each have a responsibility. 

There seem to be 5 key strategies in museums that care for the collective: these spaces celebrate difference, in the sense that they purposefully seek to be socially plentiful, they work to generate and enable new relationships in the experiences they offer and, importantly, they reveal their networks;they don’t hide the process within those relationships through which spaces they produced as many museums do.

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They are also, interestingly, comfortable with happiness and frolicking and they are happy to be active, to be part of people’s lives rather than constantly trying to remain neutral or removed. The images on this slide are all from a museum in Argentina called Museo Ferrowhite. In fact, Ferrowhite utilises all of the strategies listed here, though I will concentrate on just a couple. At Ferrowhite, the celebration of difference is evident in the presence there of a diversity of people using the site in a diversity of ways. Ferrowhite works hard to enable people to bring their own representational spaces – their own lives and frames of reference – with them. Unlike many museums where the demographic if predictable, here people of all ages with very different life experiences, create a place that is interesting and refreshingly difficult to categorise. In the new relations and juxtapositions that these museum spaces construct, museums have the innate capacity to support the generation of new relationships to others. These might be imagined relationships with people and places that are geographically and temporally distant from us or they might be new relationships with people who are physically close, those who share the space with us. When approached from a position of equity, each of these new relationships expands our sense of community and has the capacity to actively redefine ‘relations of domination’.

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At Ferrowhite, this is evident in the museum’s ongoing engagements with its neighbours. Ferrowhite is a museum about workers and it concerns itself with the challenges of work today in a region dominated by the petrochemical industry. The image bottom right shows a local man who was a diver with the San Martin power company. Today, he is the patron saint of the museum and the museum is actively involving its neighbours in all sorts of projects and is similarly involving itself in actions and issues of importance to its neighbours. Sitting behind all of this, is a recognition of the museum, in the way it is conceived, is the anticipation of future social relationships.

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What all these examples show, is that the space of the museum,  that is designed as physical and social underpinnings, can support and bear opportunities for experience and certain ways of being in the world, the relations to self, others, and the environment. Far more complex than simple cause and effect, this understanding is important because it can help us to think through the role of museum design, and to work in ways that drive the vision and values of a cultural organization through the experience of a physical museum, and genuinely offer all kinds of opportunities museums often lay claim to.

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More research is clearly needed, but the ideas and categories introduced here offer a useful starting point for this work. And I very much hope that you will take a look at the book Museums and Design for Creative Lives and think through those categories some more  as we continue that research. Thank you very much for listening.