Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Over the past decade, museums all over the world have faced increasing pressures to transform as a result of visitor changes and technological advancement. Nina Simon describes that the museum has become an intermediary and public education center for social inclusion. It is no longer collections that drive the priorities of museums but rather the needs of communities. At the same time, museums increasingly rely on interpretation of their resources to provide distinctive experiences that attract and engage visitors. Through case studies and analysis with multiple design methods in innovative design and user participatory design, the research explores the role of “co-design” or “design by the user” in interpretation projects in a modern, community-oriented, museum perspective, and the role of innovative design methods in the transforming complicated context of modern, community-oriented museums to help reach out with the most practical strategy. In this paper, the research concludes with an innovative, community-oriented, interpretation platform where visitors could learn, engage, and create. With this interpretation platform, visitors walk into museums, exchange their minds and promote the generation of knowledge. This paper also argues that interpretation design is a field of specialized interdisciplinary practice that exemplifies the highly collaborative and strategic nature of contemporary design practice. The designer’s role in this transforming context should be as the leader, the facilitator, the generalist, the user advocate, and the analyst. This paper is an early step in the challenges of museum interpretation design.