ABSTRACT

Chapter 1 argues that museums have yet to effectively draw design into their strategies to reposition museums as socially purposeful institutions. As a route towards this, the chapter argues for an ethics of museum design and suggests that museums need to wrest control of design from the political and economic drivers that often shape it. Such an approach recognises the ways in which the processes and built forms of museums are implicated in an unequal and divided social world. Developed through a detailed case study from the Tower of London, the chapter also poses a larger question. Could we, it asks, if led by the values and visions of cultural organisations and their desire to impact our creative lives in diverse ways, shape a more explicitly differentiated cultural landscape of wider relevance to peoples’ everyday experience?