Testing a Mobile Platform for Community Co‐Created Exhibitions

Abstract

The benefits of co-creation between museums and their communities are increasingly acknowledged but challenges remain in creating opportunities for and facilitating enactments of cocreation. Time, funding and supporting infrastructure are significant hurdles. This study addresses the latter in describing a mobile platform designed for hosting community co-created exhibitions. It assesses its functionality in two case studies where installations of the platform were hosted by major public museums in New Zealand. Both exhibitions had marine themes, but the co-creation partners varied from a science education centre and their citizen science collaborators, to an informal group of adults and students engaged in water quality monitoring. Reflective evaluation of the co-creative process using the platform revealed one of its major benefits to be its professional aesthetic, which allowed work to be presented to a high standard of display, and empowered co-creators to feel confident in the quality of their work. Further success arose from its physical constraints; a practical scope for exhibitions was demarcated by certain structural limitations and offered relief from what was initially experienced by novice cocreators as an intimidating amount of freedom within undefined space. Successful elements combined to facilitate key criteria for co-creation including early and continuous empowerment and co-ownership between co-creating parties.Alexandra Rogers earned her masters in Science Communication from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; part of her thesis work on museum exhibition through community co-creation is described here. Jenny Rock (jenny.rock@otago.ac.nz) is Sr.

Co-creating Social Change through Citizen Science: Systematic Literature Analysis

“…Pant (2019) 2018) describes GIS-based CS activities allowing the community to decide whether to avoid, mitigate, transfer or accept different risks related to mining. Other stakeholder groups were mentioned less frequently -public institutions like museums (Rogers, Rock 2017), governmental bodies (Onencan et al 2018) and regional organizations (Pecl et al 2019). This points to a clear need to increase the participation and awareness of all stakeholders.…”

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Co-creation

“…More rarely it includes consulting the public for guidance at the early stages of exhibition development and working together during the entire creative process. Although examples of co-creation according to Simon’s definition exist (e.g., Bryant, 2011; Gibson & Kindon, 2013; Rogers & Rock, 2017), in practice, it appears to be far more common to find the term co-creation used interchangeably with “user-generated content” enabled by social media engaging with the museum’s online presence (Grabill, Pigg, & Wittenauer, 2009), and involving little two-way interaction.…”

La Musealización del Arte y la Historia: estrategias discursivas y de comunicación, inclusión, transformación digital y participación en museos

“…se refiere a un concepto de "comisariado dialógico" ("dialogical curating"), según se refiere a comisariar de manera colectiva y plural junto con el resto de agentes sociales y culturales en torno al tema u artefactos de exposición(Edmundson, 2017). En este mismo sentido, se han podido identificar varias estrategias concretas: utilizar acciones performáticas en el museo con comunidades sociales(Barnes y McPherson, 2019), investigar con técnicas etnográficas en las sociedades tradicionales y aborígenes los usos y significados de las cosas(Chipangura, 2020), utilizar una plataforma de diseño online para una co-creación de exposición con comunidades(Rogers y Rock, 2017), entre otras. Por otro lado, reconociendo los beneficios de este nuevo comisariado, Viau-Courville (2016) advierte de que también está desplazando la profesionalización del comisariado de las exposiciones.…”