ABSTRACT
Collaboration between partners in universities and museums is increasingly viewed as important for demonstrating how research can make real contributions to innovation in the public sector. Frequently, as in the case presented in this chapter, university-museum collaborations center on experimentation with exhibition-making. A particular challenge in this kind of ‘experimental museology’ is identifying and supporting partners’ different aims and motivations during various phases of collaboration. In this chapter, we use three decision events from an ‘immersive exhibition’ experiment at a national architecture museum to illustrate how trade-offs and benefits were negotiated and viewed by the respective partners, namely, two researchers at a university (first and third authors) and a curator in an architecture museum (second author). We present an analysis of three key design decisions and their implications for the research project from both museum and university perspectives. Based on the analysis, we describe how the decisions formed a collaborative research space that was owned by neither university nor museum but required a dynamic researcher positionality to shift between partners’ respective interests. Experimental museology, we propose, is a critical-reflexive practice that shows how different interests – in this case, in exhibition practices, museum media and meaning making – impact innovation in museums.
