How social media thinking could help museums to turn out all right

Photo by Camdiluv on Flickr.

Last year – best wishes for 2012! – I got my hands on a copy of The Happy Museum: A tale of how it could turn out all right. It’s a happy little publication (PDF) I hadn’t heard of before about the role museums play in our changing world, and should play to remain relevant and add to a more sustainable future. And, hidden between the lines, there’s a twist in the story that takes is from society straight to social media…

In 2010, when asked to imagine museums in 2020, I wrote about how I believe a museum has and should have a responsible position in culture, art and heritage and also in society in general. The Happy Museum takes this further and focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.

The Happy Museum has two USPs when it comes to playing an active part in these areas, and I’ve added a third which I believe is equally important:

1. Apart from the gift shop, museum don’t try to sell anything but understanding and enjoyment. Therefore they are a sanctuary from the advertising and commercialisation of the public space.
2. As public (social) spaces, museums offer a counterpart to the ever more privatised public realm, where hardly anything is freely accessible anymore (especially when they are truly “free”, as in “gratis”).
3. In the world of StarBucks and Apple stores, museums provide an opportunity to experience something ‘unique’ in the original meaning of the word: one of a kind (not unique as in: venti triple half-caf organic caramel macchiato).

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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