Creating Trustville – A museum as community centre for cultural and social development and activity

This is an article I wrote for the (recently launched) project Creating Trustville. This project is a place for ideation of new social structures and the conceptualisation of the institutions of the future, started by Vandejong.

What is a museum?

Over the course of history museums have had to reinvent themselves a couple of times. Once they housed the private collections of kings and other leaders. Their audience: the owner’s friends and enemies whom he wished to impress. Then museums became centres of research, romanticised in the late 20th century in movies such as Indiana Jones. In the meantime museums had discovered their public role, often housing elaborate educational and visitor programmes.

In the early 21st century, with the Internet and the 2.0 revolution, museums all over the world flirted with yet another meaning for themselves. Visitors became actors. The recently launched YouTube Play project of the Guggenheim museum in New York exemplifies this change. Online video artists have a change to see their work displayed in one of the most renowned museums in the world. It is my strong believe that by the year 2020 this paradigm shift in thinking about museums and their role in society will have had a lasting impact on the sector.

So, what will a museum be in 2020?

Read the rest of this entry »

How much co-creation is OK for a museum?

Historically, museums are built by individuals around a private collection. Later, in the 18th and 19th century, museums became institutions. Although they were governed by a group of people, the audience still had little say in what was put on display (and how, and where).

In the last century, museums became interactive and especially in the last decades were focused more on the audience and less on the need to exhibit. Only recently, however, museums discovered you can let the audience have a say in the contents of a museum. (I love this example on Flickr.)

You can’t build the world’s most innovative museum alone. In fact, co-creation is one of our main focuses. We want to have a structure that enables our audience to participate in everything the museum does. We want to engage them, not only in our exhibitions and projects but also in our organization itself. Read the rest of this entry »