Digital Media Challenging Museums

A short input for a roundtable discussion

Uses Across Media, UoC November 1st 2013Kjetil Sandvik, associate professor, Department of

Media, Cognition and Communication, UoC

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Changing museums

Museum 2.0:• Audiences are not just participants but co-

creators through collective learning processes (uses of creative potential, focus on the experience dimension)

• Media do not just serve as means for communicating knowledge, but as creative tools for knowledge creation and learning processes.

• Based on a experience-focused and constructivist approach to learning and knowledge communication

Challenges of digital media

Participatory (social) media/web 2.0:• radical possibilities for dialogic processes, for

collaboration and co-creation• Communication as dynamic processes• Fixed solutions changeable, adaptive and

user-centered solutions• Uses of web 2.0 apps mashups: combinations of

cheap, effective and constantly updated and improved media technology

• perpetual beta way of communication

Format not just for the design process, but for ’the exhi-bitions’ itself

Challenging museums

• Intervening research processes and exhibition design experiments

• Displaying questions not (only) answeres• Displaying the researcher at work knowledge in

the making• Displaying mistakes, flawed hypothesis,

disagreements, controversies• It is all about engaging the audience in dialogues

about what is being exhibited

Challenges: a dynamic field

• Product process• Fixed continuing• Final under construction • Authority collectivity• Answers questions