Dossier

"""Design thinking"" to turn a museum into an experiential place | Paolo Rigamonti | TEDxMilano"

The speaker argues that the museum concept is shifting from a dusty repository of inherited objects ("Don't touch") to an immersive, interactive "Public Learning Laboratory" that competes with digital entertainment. This change necessitates that future institutions focus on facilitating user participation and helping people manage information overload rather than just displaying facts. The shift is driven by multidisciplinary practitioners acting as "Vanishing Mediators" who must guide the public through complex knowledge into a non-existent future.

## Speakers & Context
- Speaker: Unnamed, identifies as an architect.
- Context: Discussion addressing the changing nature of museums, technology, and public education.
- Current role: Leads teams of designers, artists, scenographers, and storytellers to build new experiential knowledge systems.
- Self-Perception: Belongs to the generation that grew up with books as the staple medium of knowledge, transitioning into being information seekers.

## Theses & Positions
- Traditional museums inherited the Enlightenment paradigm, operating under the restriction: *"Don't touch"*.
- Modern museums must shift to an experiential, participatory, and interactive model, embracing the concept: *"You can’t learn, if you just look without touching."*
- The purpose is shifting from merely displaying knowledge to enabling active exploration, aiming to teach people *"how to ask new questions."*
- Culture itself is no longer a standalone competition but an *add-on to an experience* competing with entertainment media like Netflix and Candy Crush.
- The key methodology is to design for the "multi-tasking generation of digital natives" who suffer from information overload, necessitating the creation of **smart filters**.
- The practitioners in this field are "Vanishing Mediators," mediating between "what was before" and "what can come after," reflecting the volatile pace of modern change.

## Concepts & Definitions
- **Enlightenment Museum:** The original model, characterized by inherited collections (*wunderkammer*) and the governing rule: *"Don't touch."*
- **Experiential Museum:** A model that is participatory, interactive, and requires direct fruition (touch).
- **Edutainment:** Content, particularly scientific content (like laws of physics), is conveyed through a playful dynamic called **Gamification**.
- **Public Learning Laboratory:** A self-definition for a modern venue, emphasizing interactive science experience rather than static display.
- **Smart Filters:** The necessary skill for the modern mind, requiring the ability to select and distill massive information streams into understandable, connective narratives.
- **Vanishing Mediators:** A term coined by Slavoj Žižek, describing people who operate at a threshold, mediating between past and future, and who themselves are temporary.
- **Multidisciplinarity:** The necessary characteristic of the new field, involving architects, musicologists, artists, and IT experts rather than specialists in one domain.

## Mechanisms & Processes
- **Historical Shift:** The Great Universal Exhibition (1851) demonstrated the spectacular power of science and technology, moving beyond mere display.
- **Early Institutional Change:** The Science Museum launched the Children's Gallery in **1934**, allowing children to touch physical exhibits, beginning the "experiential museum" model.
- **The "Please, touch" Era:** Triggered by institutions integrating interactivity, forcing structures to be built to withstand physical engagement.
- **Knowledge Visualization:** Transforming invisible concepts (like chromosomes) into physical, accessible installations (e.g., a forest of interactive chromosomes).
- **Serious Game:** A game designed not to entertain but to teach—used here to render a factory's inner workings, paralleling environmental stress and penalty for error.
- **Information Processing:** Constantly synthesizing complex data streams (e.g., news, TV, billboards) to create a cohesive, understandable narrative.

## Timeline & Sequence
- **Middle Ages to 17th Century:** Period yielding the private collections (*wunderkammer*) that became public museum exhibits.
- **1851:** The Great Universal Exhibition in London; visited by **six million people** in six months, showcasing 13,000 exhibitors from 45 countries.
- **1934:** The Science Museum launched the Children's Gallery, enabling hands-on physics experiments.
- **1986:** The Science Museum inaugurated the first Launchpad Gallery, fully interactive, kicking off the "Please, touch" era.
- **1950s:** Reference to Ansaldo machines, used in reconstruction.
- **Recent Past:** Examples include the M9 museum in Mestre (a museum of the 20th century based solely on immersive experiences).

## Named Entities
- **Koh-i-Noor:** The world's largest diamond at the time of the exhibition.
- **Victoria & Albert Museum:** One of the three museums established after the 1851 Expo.
- **Natural History Museum:** One of the three museums established after the 1851 Expo.
- **Science Museum:** One of the three museums established after the 1851 Expo.
- **Frank Oppenheimer:** American particle physicist and professor at the University of Colorado, responsible for launching the Exploratorium.
- **Exploratorium:** The specific institution launched in San Francisco, defined as a Public Learning Laboratory.
- **MoMA:** The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
- **M9 museum:** A specific museum located in Mestre, Venice, focused on the 20th century experience.
- **Slavoj Žižek:** Slovenian philosopher who coined the term "Vanishing Mediators."

## Numbers & Data
- **1851:** Year of the Great Universal Exhibition.
- **6 million people:** Number of visitors to the 1851 Expo in six months.
- **13,000 exhibitors:** Number of exhibitors at the 1851 Expo.
- **45 countries:** Number of countries represented at the 1851 Expo.
- **£350 to £3:** Price drop for entrance tickets at the 1851 Expo in just three months.
- **£18 million:** Estimated total economic success of the 1851 Expo (based on today's exchange rate).
- **1934:** Year the Science Museum launched the Children's Gallery.
- **1986:** Year the Science Museum inaugurated the first Launchpad Gallery.
- **8-year-old child:** A specific child at the Science Museum who exclaimed, *"Wow, it's toy heaven!"*
- **34 gigabytes:** Estimated daily data exposure per person (from news, TV, billboards, etc.).
- **100,000 words:** Approximate word count derived from daily data exposure.
- **544,000 words:** Word count of *War and Peace*.

## Examples & Cases
- **1851 Expo:** Featured artisanal products, textiles, exotic animal trophies, the Koh-i-Noor, and industrial machines like the Jacquard loom.
- **The Poop Museum:** Located in Tokyo; its actual name is “Toilet!? Human waste, and Earth's Future”; designed to teach environmental awareness regarding urban sewage infrastructure.
- **The M9 Museum:** A museum dedicated to the 20th century that contains no physical objects, relying solely on immersive and interactive experiences.
- **Assembly Line Simulation:** A reconstruction, using a "serious game" approach, that reproduces every aspect of the assembly line, forcing the user to judge if the work was done correctly or incorrectly.
- **The Concept of Failure:** The assembly line simulation is a "drama because you never know, because it’s an experiment and there is no path to follow."

## Trade-offs & Alternatives
- **Museum vs. Netflix/Candy Crush:** The trade-off between cultural experience and highly engaging, instantly gratifying digital entertainment.
- **Physical vs. Immersive:** Moving from physical objects in cases to entirely digital or simulated environments (e.g., the M9 museum).
- **Curator vs. Experience Designer:** Shifting the focus from the authority of the curator to the activity level of the visitor.
- **Looking vs. Touching:** The fundamental trade-off in learning methods.

## Methodology
- **Museum Evolution:** Analysis tracks the shift from Enlightenment displays to interactive engagement, citing key milestones (1934, 1986).
- **Information Theory:** Employing the metric of data load (34 GB/day) to diagnose the current cognitive challenge (information overload).
- **Hybridization:** The practice of building new knowledge systems by combining disparate skills (architecture, musicology, graphic design) rather than relying on single disciplinary expertise.
- **The Meta-Narrative:** The creation of an "installation" that doesn't represent a concrete object, but a process or an idea (e.g., environmental waste, factory stress).

## Conclusions & Recommendations
- The museum must cease competing through traditional cultural means and instead *engage* and *make the story's entire picture* understandable to compete with global entertainment media.
- The future methodology requires building **smart filters** and focusing on *deepening* the narrative experience.
- Practitioners must embrace **multidisciplinarity** and the role of "Vanishing Mediators" to guide the public into the next unknown phase of knowledge transfer.

## Open Questions
- The ideal structure or job title for the person who designs these new, hybrid, immersive knowledge systems.
- How to manage the "next door" of knowledge when the pace of societal change outpaces traditional academic or institutional pacing (citing young people changing views every 15 years).

## Verbatim Moments
- *"This is our inheritance from the Enlightenment museum."*
- *"Look, don’t touch is a thing to learn. It's a social virtue."*
- *"This is the vertigo of modernity. Look at this great promise of a better future."*
- *"You can’t learn, if you just look without touching."*
- *"we do not want young people to come here to find answers. Rather, we want them to come and learn how to ask new questions."*
- *"We compete with Netflix and Candy Crush."*
- *"What is the assembly line and video games doi have in common. Both share environmental stress, the point mechanism, and penalty in case of wrong-doing."*
- *"Vanishing Mediators", which defines those who, like us, are at a threshold, between before and after, and we are mediators because they mediate."*
- *"We are all people coming from totally different backgrounds and learned how to do this qsubsequently."*