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 chance 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?

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Erik Schilp on the Canon of Dutch history and the museum of 21st century

March 23rd Erik Schilp, CEO of the Dutch Museum of National History (the institution I work for) gave a compelling speech on the Canon of Dutch history and the museum of the 21st century. He gave his speech “The Dutch Canon as guiding principle for the new National Museum of History of the Netherlands?” at the Euroclio Conference in Nijmegen. And, fortunately for non-Dutch speaking readers of this blog, his speech was in English. You can read the full text of his speech as a PDF.

I full-heartedly agree with Erik’s thoughts and ideas about the role of museums in society and the changes they have to make to meet the new demands of visitors. Some excerpts:

On new media and technology:

(…) the influence of new media and technology has changed the concepts of museums even more rapidly and radically. With the whole world at their feet, at least digitally, people are making other demands on public institutions. They are better informed of the possibilities, are more emancipated and demanding and, on the whole, are also more inquisitive and have a greater appetite for information. The focus of attention is no longer the collection, but the visitor. It is not the collection that is important, but the story behind it. The collection serves as an illustration of the story to be told, and sometimes of what a visitor may wish to convey to other visitors.

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The Ruhrmuseum in Zollverein; a full sensory experience aimed at discovery

The most important lesson I learnt when I tested Amsterdam museums with Seb Chan is ‘deliver what your visitors expect’. Last Friday I visited the Ruhrmuseum in Zollverein, near Essen. It’s one of the best museum I’ve ever visited in my life. Most of its success, I think, is due to them delivering what people expect to find in this museum: a full sensory experience that makes you discover the Ruhr area as it really was (and is).

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What will you do with your new followers?

Next Monday, February 1^st, is “follow a museum” day. As there are a lot of museum with quite extraordinary collections, I think it’s worth following one or two for inspiration, information and entertainment. Therefore, I applaud the idea of follow a museum day.

However, I also have my doubts.

Followers seem to be the new currency. The more followers, the better. I strongly disagree. It’s involvement that matters. It’s not about the number of followers a museum has, but about the communication with its audience a museum has.

Jim hinted using Ad.ly Analytics to measure the involvement of your followers. I say 100 involved followers beats 100.000 uninvolved ones. (Read about the “benefits” of being on Twitter’s Suggested Users List by Anil Dash.) Read the rest of this entry »

Intimate Strangers – A special exhibition experience in FOAM

Yesterday during the MuseumNacht (Museum Night) in Amsterdam, I had the chance to visit ‘Intimate Strangers‘, a temporary exhibition in the FOAM Photography Museum on the work of the Dutch photographer Sanne Sannes.

The MuseumNacht is an annual event in which 26,000 people visit the museums of Amsterdam at night, often for the first time in their lives. Sanne’s work is slightly erotic and intimate in its nature. On top of that, although photography is a very popular form of art, I think it’s one of the more difficult ones to engage your audience with. It’s easily accessible, but difficult to have people take their time to really discover the layered experience good photography can give you.

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