Museums and Design Practices

Marco Mason, Vince Dziekan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040414996
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science

Museums and Design Practices explores the increasingly critical role that design is playing in museums by focusing on how human-centred design approaches are being embraced and incorporated into their work practices.

This book advances "design-as-practice" as a way to acknowledge the technosocial dimension of the working culture of cultural organisations. It reveals how designing is a situated phenomenon that enables museums and galleries to respond in a digitally mature way to emerging contexts and challenges of digital transformation. The original thesis forwarded by the authors is reinforced by reflections shared by leading museum practitioners and designers on the complex and multifaceted nature of human-centred practices found in museums and the various ways they function within their organisational working cultures. The infusion of design into all levels of museum practice demonstrates the capacity to transform how museums approach visitor experience, inclusive collaboration, and knowledge sharing in order to build resilience in the face of change and respond to the 'wicked problems' confronting cultural organisations today.

Museums and Design Practices is for students and researchers as well as museum practitioners – especially those keen to understand emerging relationships that are forming between digital technology, design and the cultural work of museums. It will also be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of design, digital culture, and museum studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Section I Museums and design practices
• 1 Design-as-practice and museums
• 2 Human-centred design practices in the digital museum
• 3 Challenges for the digitally mature museum
• Section II Reflective museum design practices
• 4 Curating complexity
• 5 A design-led approach to delivering digital transformation and strategy
• 6 Human-centred values and organisational culture
• 7 Designerly learning at the V&A Museum
• 8 Questions for museum-compatible design
• Section III Emerging design practices in the digital museum and beyond
• Inconclusion | An iterative approach to digitally mature museum practices
• Index