Emerging Realities
Promoting Access in a Mexican-American Museum During the Pandemic: Online Community Events and Robots View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Veronica Ahumada-Newhart, PhD, Abelardo de la Pena Jr
During COVID-19, many museums closed their physical structures and transitioned their exhibits to online platforms for public digital access. As museums reopen, there remains a need for some visitors to attend exhibits and cultural events with minimal risk. This paper examines an innovative hybrid platform for museum digital access–personal telerobots to co-explore museums alongside community members. How it works: a community member remains at home, and remotely logs into the museum robot. A friend/family member is physically at the museum and once the robot is embodied by the remote user, they can walk around the museum together, talk with each other, interact with artifacts, and experience the exhibits together. Ultimately, the robot user and the visitor can both be immersed in the venue, separate yet together at the same time. This paper examines the use of online community events and personal robots in a Mexican-American history, art, and culture museum for cultural exhibits and how these technologies may facilitate the way community members learn, interact, and explore museum artifacts. It also explores the need for best practices on the use of online communities and personal robot technology in museums. This work contributes observations, reflections, and curatorial considerations are provided on both forms of digital media for inclusive museum practices.
Deaccessioning and Inclusivity: Accounting Is Too Important To Be Left to the Accountants View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael O Hare
New initiatives for art museum inclusivity seek better engagement of more (and more kinds of) visitors with better art. This is expensive, requiring more and better-trained staff and possibly more exhibition space, and budget constraints are tight. Major museums that typically display a small percentage of their collections are misallocating their capital assets among buildings, art holdings, and programming. They can generously fund inclusivity initiatives by recognizing the value in this underused asset, and deploying tiny percentages of it to collectors and small and regional museums that will show it, often to underserved communities. A good first step would be to recognize the collection in the balance sheet.
Co-designing Inclusive Multi-sensorial Ecologies in Museums and Galleries: A Decade of Change in Australian and Canadian Institutions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janice Rieger
Access in museums and galleries is often created through codes, audits, guidelines or visitor surveys, and considered as an add on, at the end of the exhibition planning. This additive approach to access and inclusion—addressing demands for recognition, respect, and rights within the currently dominant cultural system, not changing the fundamentals of the system—can only create surface level changes. In this paper, I draw upon 10 years of research into access in museums and galleries, to provide insights into how a co-design method can shift this additive understanding of access towards critical access as a methodology. Drawing on Canadian and Australian case studies and my research in the evolution of access across museum typologies (e.g., art galleries, human rights museums, history museums, war museums and sport museums), this presentation will provide best practice examples of co-designing inclusion and access beyond codes, manuals and guidelines. I introduce innovative haptic interventions, new inclusive technologies, and a new approach using co-design as a method, and access as a methodology, to develop a multi-sensorial visitor experience. Co-design has the ability to create a feeling of community involvement and community ownership in museums and galleries, and my use of co-design as a method focuses on abilities not disabilities, employing expertise and lived experience, to create equal access to our cultural institutions.
