Monthly Archives: February 2017

One of driving forces behind the development of the project was the need to respond to challenges presented by the economic downturn across Europe.
As a partnership, we perceived that this downtown generated a new movement of innovation and creativity, stimulated from the bottom-up by the maker and open-source technology communities. In response to the European Union 2020 Strategy² call to focus on education and training to address the some of the challenges facing Europe, The Creative Museum project was created with a focus on developing training and development opportunities for museum staff by connecting to some of these other communities.
 
The Creative Museum project has always acknowledged the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the 2020 Strategy and in the aims of Erasmus +. It has sought to provide opportunities for museum staff to look beyond their own sector for examples of good practices in developing resilience, in exploring new approaches and in creating valuable and sustainable partnerships.
 
In a recent report by the Arts Council England entitled Character Matters³, the museum workforce in the UK was identified as being particularly risk adverse; this is probably true across Europe. The Creative Museum project was developed to challenge this idea and to demonstrate the ability of museum staff to be creative in difficult and challenging circumstances. The project has allowed its participating partners to innovate and experiment and take this learning back to their respective institutions. Throughout the project to-date, the diverse range of examples of the creativity and attitudes of museum staff to embrace change and take risks has impressed us.
 
Experimentation has been a defining part of the project, whether that is through training programmes, through our meetings or through the format of our dissemination events. As a partnership we want to demonstrate, through our own approaches, what we have learnt ourselves and from others. At the dissemination event in Brighton in September 2016, one of the invited speakers, Sejul Malde from Culture24, provided a fantastic summary about ‘Being Experimental’ in our work and in project development as museum practitioners. He said that the key factor in being experimental is a focus on process, not product, and therefore very different to traditional Research & Development (R&D) approaches. He said that in order to be truly experimental in our approach, our work should:
 

• “Be question/hunch driven
• Be simple, quick and cheap
• Use what you already have
• Be action orientated
• Be user focussed
• Have feedback loops built in
Be time bound”

This type of thinking also owes much to the start-up and entrepreneurial culture articulated by Eric Ries in The Lean Start-up⁴, in which he discusses the importance of the ‘minimum viable product’ — the smallest thing you can develop and ‘take to market’, which could mean the quickest and easiest project you could deliver in your museum — and an iterative development process of ‘build-measure-learn’. Adopting these approaches to innovation for museum professionals is important. Museum staff need to adapt to changing contexts, to participatory processes, new technology and the demands of their audiences to better engage and understand them. Decreases in public funding mean museum professionals must be ever more resourceful in a challenging climate; there is an expectation to maintain and even build on existing activities in order to fulfil the museum’s core mission but with diminished resources available, both in terms of staffing and budget.
 
>We believe that sharing is also a large part of the learning process. Through our public dissemination events during the project, including varous additional workshops, events and speaking engagements partners have shared their successes and failure.
Being prepared to fail is part of this ‘new’ thinking. Museums are often seen as too big to fail, and pressure on academic and research excellences means that staff think that ‘only the best’ will do. Acknowledging making mistakes, problem-solving and learning from the experiences requires a mind-set not often associated with museum professionals. In the words of Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”.⁵

The work of The Creative Museum project reflects and acknowledges – at the Council of Europe level — the importance of participatory and engaging cultural practices. In its 2014 report, the Council of Europe emphasised the importance of a ‘people-centred and culture-based approach to foster sustainable development and the importance of transparent, participatory and informed systems of governance for culture in order to address the needs of all members of society⁵. The Creative Museum project, from its inception, seeks to make those connections with different communities for the benefit of the institutions we represent or work with.
 
The initial project proposal outlined the potential role of both digital engagement and the maker community in light of the European economic downtown mentioned previously. With reference to the Council of Europe 2014 report, the project seeks to explore “new opportunities brought by globalisation, digitisation and new technologies which are changing the way cultural heritage is created, accessed and used⁶.
As The Creative Museum project has developed and evolved we have seen digital technology as one of the tools that might be used as a means or method of interpreting collections, but the focus of the project has become to be as much about learning from and through the maker community about creative practices.
 
Through the Maker-in-Residence training programme, Museomix training, The Creative Museum partner dissemination events and independent work by museum partners, the project has sought to develop stronger ties with the maker community by learning about new approaches through shared practices. This has been well documented by a Creative Museum project partner, the Chester Beatty Library, through their succession of Museums and Makers Inspiring Each Other events on their Education Blog and YouTube channel.
 
Other trends are emerging which show the deepening links between museums and makers, yet have their origins outside of the sector. The influence of the maker culture in academic circles is increasing. Around the world, many universities are creating maker spaces to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches to innovation across different faculties: Institute of Making, UCL, UK and Maker Hub, Georgetown University, USA are two examples. By turns, museums, which often have the same types of interdisciplinary staff and missions as academic institutions, can learn from the success and indeed failure of these types of spaces.
Museums are creating ‘Spaces for Yes’ and spaces where experimentation and play are freely encouraged. These ‘Spaces for Yes’ might be places within the museum inspired by makerspaces such as ‘Fab-Labs’, or spaces for creative thinking where anything is possible: ‘127º’, at Cap Sciences, is a good example, and M-Shed in Bristol has a enticingly-named ‘Tinkering Space’. The role and influence of maker culture in cultural institutions has been recently documented in a report for Dee Halligan and Daniel Charney in The cultural role(s) of makerspaces – from maker culture to making culture: what’s going on? In this report, Halligan and Charney combine observation to changes in their own practice with trends they have observed globally with maker culture and the growing realisation that maker community is gaining influence outside of its own original sphere, particularly within the cultural sector.
 
As a result of these and other developments, museums are rethinking their approaches to collections in response to the maker movement (for example Derby Silk Mill and Jærmuseet) and are recruiting dedicated personnel who have positions such as ‘Head of Making’. They are focussed more on using human-centred design practices and accepting a sense of risk in their interpretive approaches.
 
Increasingly museums are embracing the ‘new’ ways of thinking and doing, using models such as Museomix, and connecting to ever wider communities by encouraging protoyping and open interpretations of museum collections through makeathons and hackathons. The Recommendations: building a creative museum includes examples of these approaches.

There are four key parts to The Creative Museum project: [1] written outputs for publication and dissemination (for example, the Analysis of Best Practices, these Recommendations and a final Toolkit (Summer 2017)); [2] Maker-in-Residence training programme; [3] Museomix training programme and [4] Project evaluation.
 
Each element of The Creative Museum project is an iterative process: at each stage we are evaluating, reflecting on and developing our approaches. Each partner meeting and dissemination event is an opportunity to experiment and to test new ways of engaging with target audiences of the project. Many of the partner organisations have also developed their own activities and created events inspired by the core principles of the project; going beyond the initial scope and embedding learning from the project within their own professional practice and organisation. We have been influenced in our approach through participation in Museomix training (an experience of learning-by-doing using a model of co-creation within ‘a museum without barriers’).
 
These Recommendations: building a creative museum have been drawn from the activities of the project to-date, starting with the Analysis of Best Practices. This publication gave the project the foundations on which we could build the rest of our ‘creative museum’. From the Analysis<:em> we were able to draw on the ‘Key Findings’ and started to focus our thinking four key areas: Connecting to Communities, Communicating across Cultures, ‘Spaces for Yes’ and Strategies for Success. As a result of further thinking and brainstorming, we realised the most important of these were: ‘Connecting to Communities,’ ‘Spaces for Yes’ and ‘Strategies for Success’, and decided to focus more deeply on these three themes.
 
The development of the Recommendations has been co-created and co-produced by partners and expert advisors of The Creative Museum project. Eeach participant in the project has contributed their own recommendations to the three core themes and provided Examples from the field from their own countries. The content of this publication has been developed as a direct result of team work and collective production both virtually and in-person at our partner meetings.
 
As with all good building blocks, this publication will lead to the final step of the project: the Toolkit, which will mark the end of the project and the collective learning from three years of working in partnership and training.