Nina Simon responded yesterday to my recent post on visualising participatory processes. What she said has been rattling around in my head for the past day and certainly resonates with my own experience of working with museums and cultural institutions. You can read her kind words and insight in this link: here. But Nina’s point as I interpret it is that:

The institution maintains and always seeks to assert its didactic, aesthetic or intellectual superiority on the user, because ultimately that is its business, in the industrial era sense of the word. If it failed to do so effectively people might not return…

Musee Beaux Arts - Brussels - cc John & Mel Kots - Flickr

My own interviews and conversations with visitors to museums and exhibitions in the past year as part of my work on the Ergonomics Real Design Project seems to indicate that more often than not this isn’t a problem. In other words, it is exactly this superiority or dominance of the institution over the individual that attracts people to come and visit the museum. People come to appreciate the superior knowledge, history, ability or experience the museum celebrates.

Anecdotally, I have also observed the almost reverential manner in which many visitors approach the museum, almost as if it was a sort of pilgrimage or chance to surround oneself in higher level knowledge and understanding without any real wish, belief or ambition to participate in the creation of that knowledge or understanding. Visiting an art gallery for example, to observe and appreciate art but not with the aim of understanding how to paint, simply just to be closer to the product of ‘those that can’.

This too happens in design, people buy artefacts or “follow” design and designers with a reverential or ecclesiastical fervour – surrounding themselves and ‘enhancing’ their experience of life with the beauty, satisfaction and the enhanced function afforded by good design. One need only look as far as ‘Apple Fanboys’ or early adopters of technology to see examples of this behaviour.

Whilst this is perhaps a fundamental and arguably necessary facet of organismic human behaviour, my own recent exploration of Participatory Methods is with a view to questioning whether such an imbalance in the roles of institution and visitor, or in the case of design, designer and user are in the long term sustainable?

Are these new participatory ways of business going to have a better impact on human and environmental equality than the established industrial era way of doing business?

It strikes me that this situation of the museum being more dominant than the user breeds either a dependency or a ‘learned helplessness’ in the visitor towards the museum. How much are they internalising or questioning the value of the artefacts they are presented with? The same is true in relation to users of products, how well are their capabilities being supported? Should people not be left feeling empowered with rather than dependent on the products or services they use or consume?

Taken to it’s extreme and in relation to the museum again, this potentially results in people feeling like they can’t learn how to paint because, they aren’t good enough because of a culture where only ‘genius painters’ are celebrated or where people feel they can’t impact on the environment because they feel insignificant and unempowered. This is also something of an individual trait that I discussed recently in relation to whether or not you possess an entity or incremental world view. But it can also be argued that this ‘learned helpless’ or entity world view is simply a product of unfulfilled psychological needs.

Nina’s Museum 2.0 blog and forthcoming book ask, can increased user participation and empowerment be injected into the established service that the museum provides?

Many service designers have asked the same question of design recently. Service designers have also looked to more holistic metrics of ROI, such as Livework’s use of Triple Bottom Line in their work with Streetcar, to advocate for and validate these more user-centric methods and egalitarian metrics of business success. I believe that given how many museums already have established education and ‘community outreach and involvement’ programmes the transition to a genuinely participatory museum culture is possible.

What it might require however, is the same paradigm product to service shift (i.e. entity to incremental or iterative mindset) that is occurring in the industrial design community. From my perspective that requires designers and design methods that prioritise and campaign for the equality of stakeholders – treating both institution and visitor, and designer and user equally.

This is also something I talked about a couple of weeks ago in response to a recent post and discussion on Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) instigated by Wim Rampen.

What do you think? Can users and organisations be treated as equal stakeholders in the design process?

What methods will support such a design process?

Why do you go to museums, is it to revere or to learn?