Constructing effective museums

I wrote this post on my trip to Washington last week….

I’m sitting in the vast atrium of the National Building Museum. Like most big buildings in Washington its classical style looks ridiculously overblown on this scale. The columns, big as giant cedars, are fakely gilded. I expect any moment a throng of lions and spear-holding soldiers to appear and play out a Ben Hur style epic. Instead around me are big men, not in togas but in the uniform of chinos and clutching takeout coffee, talking loudly about construction projects. Though Washington is not a skyscraper city it is one of monumental high-spec buildings, very many of which are museums and memorials. It’s a city in memoriam to a long past America as if it is an ancient civilisation. America borrows, buys or, you might more positively say, salvages or earns this heritage and then pays it respectful homage in its museums. The overall effect of trawling all Washington’s museums is to feel that America believes itself to represent the descendancy of the universal civilisation, as if it is an ark or a higher ground following all the bad times, the unsettling age of diaspora. The message is: At last we can settle, build and cohabit.

This belief seems to power America’s official (if not entirely widespread) acceptance of its cultural diversity. Washington’s museums act for the nation as a kind of camera obscura reflecting the world and space beyond, its realities inverted. Because the museums are so closely set together the juxtapositions, say of the Museum of the American Indian next to the Air and Space Museum, make for some uncomfortable ironies. Each museum makes its own statement, a particular mix of pride and sorrow.

This is a city besotted with the statement that you can make with buildings. One display at the Building Museum is about the utopian plan of early Washington, which aimed with its architecture to create ‘grandeur befitting greatness’, to give proof that America was leading on the world stage. Mike Edson, the Smithsonian’s Director of Web and New Media Strategy, believes that the city’s museums don’t accept that they can more effectively realise learning and social change using the web and distributed media. He says they have to get over their love affair with bricks and mortar. I agree with him in many ways. A display about sustainable communities in the Building Museum was empty of visitors whereas some of its content was distributed in panels on Metro trains, reaching thousands of commuters every day. Any space that has been taken over from the Earth needs to be used with responsibility. The question ‘what is the most responsible thing you can do with museum space?’ is a fraught one. When the British Library was scoping what it should do with some unused land in Camden I suggested it should be a community permaculture garden with an outdoor sheltered wifi workspace. Of course I didn’t mention the idea often or loudly as it seemed mad. If you can get sponsorship for a building, which gives a public monument to the sponsors, then surely that’s the only sane course? The Library decided to build a digital access centre, as it is easier to get funding for a new building than for updating existing digital infrastructure.

We might think that the old approach which simply put stuff on display is comparatively irresponsible and that we must construct ‘rides’ or immersive narrative spaces. I’ve been on some great museum ‘rides’ and I know they’re popular. But the ride approach is expensive and difficult to get right. Often there is too much noise, too many words and you are bombarded with messages. You feel you can’t rest in a space and simply look, draw, talk and reflect. The old gallery approach can at least create more space for a variety of interpretations and activities.

A final reflection on Washington: On my last day, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, only 5 years old, with interpretation that is very thought-provoking and moving. I wandered into a large research centre on the top floor, with banks of PCs, a library and some education rooms. No visitors were in there. I talked to a fascinating Guatamalan woman demonstrating weaving. Then, I met Caleb Strickland, who worked at the Museum. I asked him why the centre was so empty. He said this was a problem they were trying to fix and they would have to rethink the space. The separation in this museum’s functions between immersive narrative spaces and investigative/reflective/creative space was too extreme. They need to take some of the museum into the research centre and put the web on those PCs at the very least. But, then I went down to the restaurant and realised what the radical solution could be. The restaurant was totally packed. It offers 6 stations of food from different American Indian cultures. In contrast to standard American food, this was exciting and healthy, and leading visitors to talk to each other about what they were eating. It was buzzing. Now this is where the museum was happening. What if the restaurant could be expanded, with more interpretation here about Indian cultures, with art installations, cooking demonstrations and cultural performances? And in turn, could the development of the research centre be inspired by the restaurant?

Like this idea, I’d be interested to hear about examples of museum development projects (or outdoor heritage/public art etc) which go beyond the orthodoxy of immersive narrative space without denying meaning-making. I’m thinking of spaces that make the best use of people being together in a physical building, where people can be creative, share ideas and stories together, follow their own investigations and, most importantly, develop skills and plans to take action to make a better world.

Letter from America

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Washington DC, a few minutes from Capitol Hill, writing this post for Blog Action Day. The theme for this Action Day is calling on Obama to tackle climate change at Copenhagen and beyond. I was going to blog about the reason I’m over here in Washington, working for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose vision is ‘understanding the natural world and our place in it’.  The museum is planning a fantastic new space and programme that aims to change people to take responsibility for our planet. But before writing about this I have to get something off my chest: I am really quite shocked by the unsustainable lifestyle here. I knew the facts about America’s consumption and emissions and I’ve visited twice before. I did think though, that there must have been some change in response to the climate crisis. Nope. Everyone looks blank when you mention environmental reasons for wanting less plastic, air con or paper, as if they haven’t heard the news. They pat their mouths with another paper napkin from their personal pile of napkins, rather than licking their lips, and ask if they can get you anything else, as you seem a bit dissatisfied. Because, really they are exceptionally warm and friendly people here in Washington and I’m not being sarcastic about that. This isn’t personal at all. It’s about the norms that people accept.

The food here can be relatively tasteless or crude tasting, and is always in vast portions, so that loads is wasted or causing obesity, and if it’s not hot it’s tooth-achingly chilled. It’s a society that finds it easy to complain about poor service but there are no complaints about this waste.  If the Americans had heard the news they would surely feel sick and at least show signs of wanting to change. But I see hardly any messaging in advertising, news, retail and hospitality services to be more sustainable.

They can’t have heard the news, not understood its meaning or just won’t believe it. Maybe they really haven’t seen the news. It is true I’ve seen no single mention of environment in two thick Washington Posts, delivered unwanted to my hotel door, which doesn’t appear to have any environment coverage at all judging by its website navigation, even as Obama is today involved in climate summits with India & China. Climate protests in Washington, such as Power Shift in February, seem more fully covered by The Guardian than Washington papers.

The news on one level is pretty simple. It’s as simple as a tiger leaping into your face. If you saw a tiger coming at you, you would panic, run and/or die. Unfortunately we don’t see it. We kind of see it, but we interpret it as something all cuddly, frozen in time or not there at all like the tiger leaping out of a display in the Museum of Natural History. We are so used to seeing the natural world as if in a diorama, threatening but safely distant. Actually, the news is worse than one tiger coming at us. It’s us going at all the tigers, and going at many 1000s more species of animals and plants, including our fellow humans. It’s us having become a ‘force of nature’ and accellerated geologic time, as Alan Weisman describes in A World Without Us.

Bill McKibben helps make it clear with his 350 campaign. The planet has never before seen more than 300 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are currently at 390 parts and rising. We need to get it down to below 350 to sustain some semblance of liveability on the planet. Above 350, as McKibben says ‘you can’t have a planet’.

So, Americans, you understand the concept of choice. What do you choose? Asking for a bigger portion of steak now or a liveable planet for your own future years and your children’s? We’re not talking about your descendants, we’re talking about you. Ask everyone who has any power, whether it’s the power to stop serving individual plastic bottles of water, or the power to change the law to reduce emissions, to make the change because you demand better service.

Sustainability at MA conference

I’ve shelled out to attend the Museums Association conference because it covers three themes in relation to museums facing a difficult future: Learning, Digital, the Environment. I think these are the only three themes that really matter so I had to go. One problem though: which theme do I choose when there are three concurrent sessions (plus lots more to catch)? I think these themes not only all matter, they are all interwoven. The problem with the ‘curation’ of the conference is that when each theme is taken separately, each is delivered in too bland and mundane a manner.  In fact, the problem is with the notion of a ‘theme’. It neutralises all issues and subjects and collapses levels of abstraction. The environment, more than the other two is not a theme but an all-encompassing system, a system in crisis. Both the system and the crisis should determine everything we think and do. In this context, Learning and Digital become more than just themes, they become means of survival (or even ‘thrival’ – yes, I have seen it used). Learning is about how people use and share knowledge to develop themselves and others, and to solve problems. Digital is about how we can make Learning more efficient, open and effective for a mass audience. These three themes have not been articulated in this emergent relationship.

I welcome the fact that the Museums Association is addressing sustainability in its policy work and this conference but feel niggled by its lack of rigour in discussing sustainability. Their discussion paper provides many useful prompts and ideas. Technically, it is correct to make a distinction between economic, social and environmental sustainability, and to draw attention to the breadth of the challenge. But too much of the paper addresses the need for each museum to sustain its funding and to develop its audiences and staff. Each organisation may be sustained in the medium term, if focusing on this aspect of sustainability, but perhaps to the depletion of ecological resources overall.

One of the sessions today was about 3 major museum redevelopment projects. None of the speakers addressed the ecological context of their grand projects. As a sector, we are aesthetes. We love to play with bricks and copy each other’s shiny new edifices. We convince funders and taxpayers of the value of these new developments, but we are never asked to explain how a new building or other kind of grand project will actually mitigate and help us adapt to the global crisis we face. I realised after today that we absolutely need to address economics in our talking about sustainability, but not in terms of how each separate project can be sustained, rather in terms of how we can develop wellbeing without material growth or expense of natural resources.

A Museum of the Environment

I was very interested to read Leo Hickman (in this Guardian article) call for a museum of the environment. He says that there is no ‘major institutional place solely dedicated to the environment’. This is a little like the justification of proposals for a major modern art museum in Birmingham being that the UK’s only other one is Tate Modern. If you think on a less grand scale than Tate Modern you can find plenty of major modern art venues across the regions, many of them spanking new and all worried about how they are going to survive. If you look worldwide, you can also find plenty of dedicated environmental institutions, not natural history museums, as major visitor attractions, including the Eden Project, Klimahaus,the Green Museum in San Francisco, the Brower Centre in Berkeley and more. There are also many international touring projects, for example led by the NMSI (with the Science Museum under the direction of Chris Rapley) and others. And of course, those thousands of natural history museums, wilderness centres, zoos, parks, gardens and biospheres are dedicated to the cause of ecology. At these places, we may only see the icons of nature and the naming of fragmented parts but underpinning all of them is passionate staff thinking about how these parts fit together. They care deeply about how we can respond to communicate the destruction of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity.

It also reminds me of the call for a Museum of British History, considered by some to be needed because …there isn’t one.  These calls are worthwhile however because they raise an important question: ‘what are museums for?’ Are they research institutions or places to visit? Are they to look after lost things or change the way we are? Hickman assumes that they do function to communicate messages such as ‘let’s be nice to people and to the planet’. I hope they do, and as we have museums already we may as well use them for good as hard as we can, but before putting faith in a new museum to do this we should consider if there are more effective ways, such as the educational impact of broadcasting, public campaigns and curriculum changes.

Hickman’s article is headlined ‘We need a monument to Earth’. We have monuments to dead heroes and groups of people but, how sad that we may need a monument to our whole earth. Museums have a memorial function, they preserve and remind us of what we have lost. As we destroy our places, museums mop up the relics and attempt, inevitably feebly in comparison to reality, to recreate some authentic context or at least a narrative frame for us to glimpse that knowledge. Last weekend I met Robin Boast at a camp to discuss culture, utopia and ecology. He reminded us that museums are archetypal utopias, that utopia means ‘no place’. They are ‘no places’ where the parts of a broken environment or cultural context are transported into an artificial construct for our edification and entertainment. As such they are antithetical to natural ecology. This should not stop us envisioning museums which help to restore ecologies but it reminds us what museums fundamentally are.

Hickman goes on to say that a ‘bricks and mortar museum’ is not a very sustainable option and suggests instead a global chain or franchise like the Guggenheim, or a major online museum. This is a very familiar question to me in scoping cultural projects for many clients: do we focus online or in one place, or take some hybrid mobile outreach approach? Hickman suggests that we should create an online museum as a monument, a ‘one place’, to the environment, but we’re learning that this isn’t how the web works. It works instead in tentacles and flows of information. There are already many places online that tell stories about ecology and environmentalism, and initiatives that attempt seriously to synthesise environmental information. Perhaps it is the case that we need better awareness of these resources and better online networking and crowd wisdom to improve them and use them. I do think that the cultural heritage sector has been very slow to embrace the significance of environmental destruction and to make the best use of their resources to halt it, hence this blog and the Framework for Climate Action. I think there is something in Hickman’s suggestion of a global franchise or network of like-minded institutions. We have seen this kind of cross-museum collaboration working with the End of the Transatlantic Slave Trade programme in 2007, with the National Museums Online Learning Project and, coming soon, the Stories of the World projects for the Cultural Olympiad. Can such an approach work on an international scale using online media to galvanise the sector towards public education about the environment? I had been thinking there is a need for an international network of individuals doing environmental work in cultural heritage but maybe we need this to be much grander and more ‘branded’ or public-facing. Maybe the kind of initiative that Hickman is proposing is already happening? It would be great to hear news or ideas.

Climate change begins at home: the world is our home

Yesterday I was at a meeting at DCMS about how the cultural, tourism, heritage & sport sectors can adapt to climate change. Roger Street of the UKCP09 was there with a great set of maps showing flood risk across the regions. Heritage sites such as listed buildings, churches and museums were marked, many swamped by blue (flood water). Central London has thousands of these sites. The bluest region is East Anglia, and this region doesn’t have a flood barrier. I went up close to this map and saw the place I grew up in, my home, a tiny Broads village called Dilham, covered in blue. My mind lurched back to childhood, remembering the expanses of those Norfolk fields and broads, the dense wet woods that nobody walked in, exploring for miles on our bikes. My home was a vast space but on this map it was insignificant. If ‘managed retreat’ is applied in this area, it will also be gone for good not just damaged.

I was thinking about the concept of home throughout this meeting because the discussion was dominated by talk of tourists – visitors not being at home. Culture and heritage were seen within the paradigm of ‘pleasure and leisure’ (escape, fun, culture as commodity and so on) rather than ‘knowledge and learning’ (including ethics, science, community ownership of its heritage, media as educator and so on).  Tourism was probably the focus because it contributes so much to the UK economy (the sector is worth £114.4bn).

Much of the talk was about how a visitor attraction might cope with and make an opportunity from an extreme event such as drought or flood, with positive suggestions including ’selling more ice cream’. Because we weren’t exploring specific situations we couldn’t articulate the risks and impacts with great clarity. It was stated that if UK has heatwaves and drought, it will be a less enticing place to visit, not taking into account that the UK will be less hot than other places. A key risk was noted to be that our organisations’ reputations will suffer if affected by extreme events, which doesn’t account for public equanimity when a crisis affects us all.

Like most Government departments, the DCMS doesn’t have an international remit, so its sustainability strategy focuses on ‘home’ and therefore only looks at the UK Climate Projections and focuses on regional or local effects. This is an echo of the problem with the DECC assessment of its GHG emissions, because it neglects to account for outsourced industry and so it puts a positive gloss on its own ratings. It is part of the same closed logic which obsesses about carbon trading rather than collaborating internationally to support alternatives and geoengineering solutions. The UK is amongst the countries likely to be least affected in physical geography terms by climate change. However, we are an exceptionally globalised country – our home is the world in more ways than one. We rely on non-domestic sources for our food supply and many of our raw materials and manufactured goods. As more countries suffer severe consequences of climate change, there will be pressures on our aid commitments, our investment in preventing terrorism and war and our management of mass migration. In assessing how climate change will affect the DCMS family, and what we can do about it, we have to take these global impacts into account first and foremost.

These (rather big) quibbles aside, I was really pleased that DCMS is doing this work and talking about adaption strategies (not just mitigation) and I did learn a lot.  I was also very thankful to be invited and hope my quibbling won’t prevent involvement in future. I think that my quibbling may be more effective if my insight can be sharpened by challenge and support from others so do please comment on this and on the Framework for Climate Action for the sector.  I need to know if I’m begging big questions because narrow logic is one of the biggest obstacles to effective action.

Time to get serious

I just heard a BBC presenter stating that it is too late to reduce emissions to avoid dangerous effects of climate change. We’ve known this some years but the trusted voice of the BBC now confirms it. The topic was the Royal Society report on Geoengineering Climate, launched today with James Lovelock and others. Their point is that although we should continue to reduce emissions through industry and lifestyle, on a nation by nation basis using carbon trading as the basic mechanism, we also urgently need more radical and imaginative global solutions such as carbon scrubbing, carbon sinks and algal blooms in the sea.

The carbon emissions approach, termed ‘mitigation’ or ‘amelioration’ is vital but it needs to move into a new phase where we adapt to the effects of global climate disruption, which includes continuing to mitigate it. This balance of the terms ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’ is quite complex, as you can see from this report on Scotland’s Climate Change adaptation framework. Can you separate the two terms? What do they both mean?

For me, what matters is accepting that change is happening. Polar ice is melting. Wildfires are raging. It also means accepting that climate change is unpredictable, so we must not argue over the precise predictions for the future but plan for wide ranges of possibility. It means keeping a ‘both/and’ approach, that you must both hope and act for a better future and see the worst of what could happen if we don’t hope and act.

On Sunday, I went over to the Climate Camp at Blackheath. It was fascinating: quiet, focused and thoughtful, like a climate university (although perhaps missing some expert lecturers). The focus was ‘what are we going to ask for at Copenhagen? How do we get world leaders to aim for more ambitious emissions targets and look at alternatives to carbon trading?’ I discovered the tent of EcoLabs – with a display of artwork commissioned to illustrate the Future Scenarios in Mark Lynas’ book Six Degrees. MIT now believes that the likely temperature increase will be in the range of 3.5-7.4 degrees hotter by 2100 so it potentially exceeds the book’s 6th degree. It was hard to even face looking at the effects of the third degree increase. As I went out of the tent, a smiling dad with a little toddler on his shoulders came in.

I decided whatever I was doing wasn’t enough. So, what am I doing?

This afternoon I’m volunteering at the launch of 1010 at Tate Modern, a huge campaign to galvanise the UK’s businesses, schools, museums, households, councils etc to reduce emissions by 10% by the end of 2010. It is set up by Franny Armstrong, director of The Age of Studid, and is looking like it has the potential to captivate people’s imaginations. After today I want to focus on getting cultural and heritage organisations to sign up to the 1010 pledge.

This weekend I’m going to an event called Moot, to camp with a small group of people who work in museum, gallery and arts education who are concerned about ecology and climate change.

Next week I’m going to a small conference led by DCMS, who have commissioned Arup to develop an adaptation strategy for the cultural & heritage sector.

I’m continuing to work on a project, now called The Tide Clock, about the role of cultural heritage & creative activism in areas of coastal and fluvial flood risk.

I’m developing a framework for cultural heritage organisations to think about both mitigating and adapting to global climate disruption, looking at both their operations and their public engagement mission. I’m considering creating a network called ClimB for climate brokers in the cultural and heritage sectors, who work with clients or within their organisations to implement and improve this framework. I’d be very grateful for any feedback on this draft framework and from anyone keen to support a network of this sort. Leave comments here and/or email me on bridget.mckenzie@flowassociates.com

Climate change and the visual arts event

Climate Change and the Visual Arts

engage Scotland and VAGA

27 August 2009

Scottish Book Trust, Edinburgh

10.30-17.00 followed by a public lecture 18.15-19.45 at the National Library of Scotland.

A curatorial development and networking event for professionals working across visual arts practice and disciplines, Climate Change and the Visual Arts will offer a range of perspectives on the environmental impact of presenting contemporary visual art – including the rise of festivals, biennials and cultural travel, institutional approaches, engaging the public and artists’ practice – and discuss whether concerns over climate change affect the sector’s working practices.

Speakers include: John Hartley, Ecology Officer, Arts Council England (Convenor) Alison Tickell, Director, Julie’s Bicycle Judith Nesbitt, Chief Curator, Tate Britain James Wallbank, Access Space, Sheffield Justin Carter, artist Laura Sillars, Director of Programme, FACT, Liverpool

Targeted at artist-curators, gallery and museum curators, gallery educators, temporary exhibition makers, administrators and project managers.

Places are strictly limited so early booking is recommended. An event organised as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, by VAGA, Visual Arts and Galleries Association and engage Scotland, National Association for Gallery Education, with support from the Scottish Arts Council. To book, go to http://www.engagescotland.org.uk Fees: £15 students/artists bursary £30 individual VAGA/engage members £50 organisational VAGA/engage members £80 non members of VAGA/engage

Tipping Point commissions

A few weeks ago I went to the awards of four new TippingPoint Commissions, aiming to develop a critical mass of performance-based work conceived in the context of climate change. I’m sharing info about it because it could be of inspiration to the cultural heritage sector.  This post is extracted from the Tipping Point press release:

Launched in February TippingPoint received 178 proposals proving the hunger of UK artists wishing to introduce audiences to the radical and imaginative thinking necessary to contemplate and inhabit a world dominated by climate change.

The Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, Ed Miliband, announced 4 awards:

Manchester International Festival (MIF) (£30,000)

This new co-commission will enable a chosen artist to draw from scientific expertise and the reach of TippingPoint and, working in dialogue with Manchester communities, evolve a new work which would hopefully premiere at the Manchester International Festival in 2011.

The LightSwitch Project by the LightSwitch Collective (£15,000)

“What happens when you switch on a light”.  This simple question provokes a myriad of answers and sparks a million more questions. It generates excitement. The LightSwitch project will seize this microscopic moment and create a performance that connects the individual to the implications of their actions and their place in the world. The LightSwitch Collective includes award winning film, TV and stage actor Toby Jones.

Trashcatchers’ Carnival by Project Phakama UK (£20,000)
Working ‘from the ground up’ the Trashcatcher’s Carnival will unite 60 artists and over 500 Tooting residents in a year long process looking at transition from a high energy to a low energy community. Working in partnership with Emergency Exit Arts and using art, carnival, celebration and the collective ingenuity of Transition Town Tooting, Trashcatchers’ Carnival will provide a large scale promenade on the 2010 summer solstice and a model of engagement and celebration for the Transition Town Network.

Third Ring Out by Metis Arts (£15,000)

At once a performance, a game, a simulation and a radical artistic event THIRD RING OUT uses the disaster movie genre to scenario plan our future. Shipping containers become emergency planning centres where audiences are invited to immerse themselves in a multi sensory, simulated climate changed world rooted in scientific fact. Coming to an urban space, a village green or a festival near you…in summer 2010

Philip Pullman, Patron of the TippingPoint Commissions says:

“Artists of every kind have one overriding moral duty, which is to do their work as well as possible. But since that work partly consists of responding to what the world itself is up to, it would be strange if the best work being produced didn’t take some account, in some way, of what’s happening to our climate. Art is not only about beauty: sometimes it has to warn.”

The awards are made possible through a generous award from Major Road. The company was an influential force in British theatre for 20 years and created national productions up until the mid 1990’s.

Organised by TippingPoint, a company dedicated to bringing the creativity of artists to bear on the challenges of climate change, the TippingPoint Commissions will offer profound reflections on a world that is rapidly changing and on humanity’s role and responsibilities within it.

Cultural innovation vs climate change

At a conference called Reboot Britain, I went along to a session called Creativity versus Climate Change. It was presented by Naresh Ramchandani and others from Do the Green Thing. This is a public service that inspires people to lead a greener life inspired by videos and artworks by creative people. I really like this concept and the quirky humour. I think they promote themselves very well, helped by being from advertising & PR backgrounds, so hopefully it does have some reach and impact. I get what Naresh meant when he said ‘we need marketing to fight the marketing’ i.e. green marketing to counterbalance the mainstream non-green marketing. However, the session raised a few questions for me.

One of the speakers Luke Wilkinson began to talk encouragingly about the contribution of the Creative & Cultural Industries. He stated that there is not enough investment in cultural innovation compared to technological innovation to fight climate change. He then cited a few examples that were to do with marketing & advertising to change lifestyles, suggesting that it is good work but that there was only a handful of people doing it and that it is underfunded. I was thinking the discussion needed to go much further. Is marketing all we can mean by cultural innovation? And is marketing to change lifestyles really all that effective anyway?

There are many other contexts where environmentally-aware cultural innovation is taking place and also many other contexts which are ripe for its introduction. If we can describe cultural innovation in much broader and more serious terms it may get more credence. Funders and taxpayers are probably a little reluctant to pay marketing & advertising companies to innovate, whereas they might be willing to support the work of research institutes, museums, heritage societies, galleries, community projects, charities, conservation bodies and so on.

Changing lifestyles is only one part of fighting climate change. We need to change the views of decision-makers at Governmental, NGO and corporate levels. We also need to educate and empower communities to contribute to decision-making (for example about Sustainable Communities policies, about Coastal Management plans or about planning decisions). We also need to help people keep hold of their cultural heritage and cope with the loss of it in the future. I’m very motivated to see artists and creative activists involved in these processes, helping to mediate knowledge between experts and others, and to envisage new solutions. For example, I’ve bee very inspired by the work of artist, Simon Read, who has immersed himself in coastal & river management issues for many years and uses his art to help mediate the knowledge of engineers, conservationists and planners.

I think we do Creativity vs Climate Change a disservice by describing it only in terms of promoting green lifestyles, although in saying that I don’t mean any disrespect to the great work of Do the Green Thing. I’m excited by this notion of Cultural Innovation and will continue to explore what it can mean. I think that we fail to acknowledge the importance of cultural innovation because culture in general is interpreted in terms of the pleasure principle. We assume that culture is only about entertainment and fun, only about access to luxury commodities or experiences, and therefore irrelevant to serious work to conserve and develop our natural and built environment. Culture is about how people can connect with one another, and connect with knowledge from the past, in order to make meaning and solve problems. The cultural sector (beyond the creative & cultural industries) has a really important role to play.

Museums in the Winds of Change, from Douglas Worts

A post from Douglas Worts
Culture and Sustainability Specialist – WorldViews Consulting
LEAD Fellow (Leadership for Environment and Development), Toronto, Canada

I have been working recently on identifying museums that are actively engaged in responding to the ‘winds of change’ that continue to blow across our communities, and around the world. For more than a decade, I have been shifting my view of what opportunities are open to museums if they want to serve the cultural needs of individuals and communities. Raising the question of what is meant by ‘culture’ is a tricky proposition, however, I have come to believe that culture is far more than discipline-based collecting by institutions and the leisure time-oriented public programs that are the mainstream public offerings of museums. Culture is not simply a niche of the entertainment and tourism industries based on activities designed for consumption in leisure time. Rather, it is a complex dynamic between elements that ultimately manifest in how we live our lives.

Many museums these days are attempting to become more relevant to citizens and to construct public programs that deal with the important issues of our day. I am looking to learn about museum and/or artistic initiatives that have been created to engage citizens in such issues. And I am especially interested in how these issues were identified by museums as focal points for treatment in public programs (including exhibits).

The last element in my inquiry pertains to how these museums are measuring their successes (and failures). For example, what metrics of success are being developed? Are these targeted at the level of individual participant? …at a community level? …at an organizational level? Do these include shifts in behaviour, attitudes, or knowledge of individuals? Are there desired social outcomes; environmental impacts; economic effects? Perhaps there are other focuses not mentioned here.

The work I have been engaged in for more than a decade, specifically on the relationship between culture and sustainability, has lead me to understand culture as an adaptive function that links humanity to the many ways that the world around us is changing. This function is also essential in determining the degree to which individuals and collectives are able to adapt, so that humanity remains a species that is sustainable on the planet. As many authors have pointed out along the way (eg. Jane Jacobs’ “Dark Age Ahead”, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “The Upside of Down”, Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, etc) human beings have proven their ability to be maladaptive and have in fact brought about the demise of societies that once were strong.

My question to you is, to what extent, and in what ways, are museums functioning as catalysts and facilitators of the kind of human mindfulness that is required to deal with the current set of crises that are expanding around the world. This list is long, but could include such items as:

- climate change
- unemployment
- urban sprawl
- loss of biodiversity
- increased ethno-cultural diversity in cities
- desertification
- globalized economics
- use of energy (renewable and non-renewable)
- equity/inequity (economic, education, employment, social, etc)
- immigration (as an essential component of economic growth)
- an economic system based on continuous growth
- any social, environmental, cultural or economic issue that is rooted in a given community
- … and lots more.

If you know of projects or museums that are grappling with these issues, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. I am setting up a website in which such projects will be described and which will encourage conversations about the complexity of ‘cultural indicators.

Many thanks!

email: douglas_worts@rogers.com
personal website: www.douglasworts.org
WorldViews website: www.worldviewsconsulting.org