ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

The future of museum and gallery design

part I|107 pages

Purpose

chapter 1|16 pages

An ethical future for museum and gallery design

Design as a force for good in a diverse cultural sector

chapter 3|11 pages

On the importance of ‘And’

Museums and complexity

chapter 5|12 pages

Cities as exhibition spaces

Illuminated infrastructure in the smart city

chapter 6|15 pages

Representations of Chinese civilisation

Exhibiting Chinese art in Republican China

chapter 8|16 pages

A site for convergence and exchange

Designing the twenty-first-century university art museum

part II|137 pages

Process

chapter 9|11 pages

Examining process in museum exhibitions

A case for experimentation and prototyping

chapter 10|15 pages

Designing and programming in ‘baggy’ space

A case study of the Oriel Wrecsam People’s Market project

chapter 12|15 pages

Placing citizens at the heart of museum development

Derby Silk Mill – Museum of Making

chapter 14|11 pages

Experimental exhibition models

Curating, designing and managing experiments: A case study from the Humboldt Lab Dahlem

chapter 15|13 pages

From the ‘field’ to the ‘wilderness’

Translation and creation in curating socially engaged arts

chapter 16|12 pages

Unboxing history exhibitions

Experience design in museum practice

chapter 17|14 pages

Untangling exhibition narratives

Towards a bridging of design research and design practice

chapter 18|15 pages

Beyond the museum

A comparative study of narrative structures in films and museum design

part III|97 pages

Perception

chapter 19|18 pages

Yaji garden

Art under the sky

chapter 20|11 pages

Screening times

Dioramas at the Shanghai Film Museum

chapter 21|16 pages

Displaying and interpreting industrial pollution

A study of visitor comments on ‘When the South Wind Blows’

chapter 22|13 pages

Spatial meaning-making

Exhibition design and embodied experience

chapter 23|11 pages

The fear of popcorn

Drawing inspiration from Hollywood for curating suspenseful exhibitions

chapter 24|12 pages

The Yellow Box and its rhetoric of display

Exhibiting Chinese art in a museum

chapter 25|12 pages

From body to body

Architecture, movement and meaning in the museum

chapter |2 pages

Afterword