Remaking the Museums
Course Description
Class Run on 2022 Sping, Fall & 2023 Fall
What’s a museum? We think we know, but the museum experience has evolved dramatically over the last century, and especially over the last ten years, in large part due to how technological innovations have changed the ways that we consume and engage with information. This course will explore many different types of museum, from curated to crowd-sourced, from physical to virtual to mobile, from passive to active and even performative. We’ll discuss how audience expectations and experiences have changed, how recent strategies are challenging and transforming representation and interpretation, and how museums have adapted to and been changed by technology. Students will visit iconic and unorthodox museums, take official tours and invent their own, go behind-the-scenes and learn the hidden histories of institutions you thought you knew. And do it all in New York City, home of over 100 official museums (and many more unofficial ones).
Each class will hack the idea of what a museum is from small to large, in physical or even virtual space – using a balance of discussion, hands-on skills workshops, collaborative projects, and field trips. Students will learn how to use traditional and innovative tools for storytelling and interactive engagement, how to integrate physical and digital for more immersive experiences -- and how to create a museum anywhere, about anything. As their main project for the course, students will go out in the world and find a public space that is not a traditional museum, but that could be conceived as a museum, like a park or bodega. They will create interpretation and experiences for it and use technology to bridge the facility or enhance the experience. At the end of the course, students need to work as a team and assemble a pop-up museum in their chosen space.
Class Site Visit