The Future of Museum and Gallery Design explores new research and practice in museum design. Placing a specific emphasis on social responsibility, in its broadest sense, the book emphasises the need for a greater understanding of the impact of museum design in the experiences of visitors, in the manifestation of the vision and values of museums and galleries, and in the shaping of civic spaces for culture in our shared social world.
The chapters included in the book propose a number of innovative approaches to museum design and museum-design research. Collectively, contributors plead for more open and creative ways of making museums, and ask that museums recognize design as a resource to be harnessed towards a form of museum-making that is culturally located and makes a significant contribution to our personal, social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Such an approach demands new ways of conceptualizing museum and gallery design, new ways of acknowledging the potential of design, and new, experimental, and research-led approaches to the shaping of cultural institutions internationally.
The Future of Museum and Gallery Design should be of great interest to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of museum studies, gallery studies, and heritage studies, as well as architecture and design, who are interested in understanding more about design as a resource in museums. It should also be of great interest to museum and design practitioners and museum leaders.
Table of Contents:
Illustrations; Acknowledgements; About the contributors; Introduction: the future of museum and gallery design Suzanne MacLeod, Tricia Austin, Jonathan Hale and Oscar Ho Hing-Kay; PART I Purpose: social responsibility, cultural specificity and museum making; 1 An ethical future for museum and gallery design: design as a force for good in a diverse cultural sector Suzanne MacLeod; 2 Zen and the art of museum maintenance Oscar Ho Hing-Kay; 3 On the importance of ‘And’: museums and complexity Elaine Heumann Gurian; 4 The designer’s role in museums that act as agents of change Tricia Austin; 5 Cities as exhibition spaces: illuminated infrastructure in the smart city Dave Colangelo; 6 Representations of Chinese civilisation: exhibiting Chinese art in Republican China Pedith Chan; 7 The museum and multivalences of place Laura Hourston Hanks; 8 A site for convergence and exchange: designing the twenty-first century university art museum Timothy J. McNeil; PART II Process: collaboration, experimentation and participation; 9 Examining process in museum exhibitions: a case for experimentation and prototyping Kathleen McLean; 10 Designing and programming in ‘baggy’ space: a case study of the Oriel Wrecsam People’s Market project Sarah Featherstone and Jo Marsh; 11 Collective creativity in the art museum Mette Houlberg Rung; 12 Placing citizens at the heart of museum development: Derby Silk Mill – Museum of Making Tony Butler, Hannah Fox and Suzanne MacLeod; 13 New approaches to universal design at The Gateway Arch National Park Bill Haley and Oriel Wilson; 14 Experimental exhibition models: curating, designing and managing experiments Annette Loeseke; 15 From the ‘field’ to the ‘wilderness’: translation and creation in curating socially engaged arts Sipei Lu; 16 Unboxing history exhibitions: experience design in museum practice Clare Brown; 17 Untangling exhibition narratives: towards a bridging of design research and design practice Jona Piehl and David Francis; 18 Beyond the museum: a comparative study of narrative structures in films and museum design Tom Duncan; PART III Perception: embodiment, experience and narrative; 19 Yaji garden: art under the sky Tsong-Zung Chang and Shiming Gao; 20 Screening times: dioramas at the Shanghai Film Museum Linda Johnson; 21 Displaying and interpreting industrial pollution: a study of visitor comments on ‘When the South Wind Blows’ Hsu Huang and Chia-Li Chen; 22 Spatial meaning-making: exhibition design and embodied experience Maja Gro Gundersen and Christina Back; 23 The fear of popcorn: drawing inspiration from Hollywood for curating suspenseful exhibitions Ariane Karbe; 24 The Yellow Box and its rhetoric of display: exhibiting Chinese art in a museum Vivian Ting; 25 From body to body: architecture, movement and meaning in the museum Jonathan Hale and Christina Back; Top 20 principles for the future of museum and gallery design; Afterword Adrian Cheng; Index
About the Author :
Suzanne MacLeod is Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK.
Tricia Austin is a design researcher and Course Leader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, UK.
Jonathan Hale is Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Oscar Ho Hing-Kay is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Review :
“With essays that strike a careful balance between theory and praxis, the volume examines museum purpose, social responsibility, collaboration, and visitor studies through its presentation of thoughtful case studies, processual writing, and powerful critique within an international context. The book is an essential primer for emerging professionals, scholars, and practitioners interested in museums, design, community, meaning making, and the place of museums in the global cultural landscape.”
Juilee Decker, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
“Written by both practitioners and academic researchers from the US, Europe and East Asia, this book offers new insights into the contemporary international debate on multifaceted aspects of museum and gallery design. Its strength is hereby the conceptual division into three parts – Purpose, Process, Perception – which bridges a still existing division between the discussions on the physical design manifestation of museum spaces and our social experience of the exhibitions within them. This book will be invaluable for anybody interested in the future of museum design.” Florian Kossak, University of Sheffield, UK
