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Accepted Paper:

A proposal for museum design as a form of nonfiction media  
Robert Bolesta (Ralph Appelbaum Associates)

Paper short abstract:

Along with curators and historians, designers are responsible for determining how stories are preserved and communicated in museums. This paper examines the moral issues surrounding the representation of peoples and their experiences under the current paradigm of “experiential” museum design.

Paper long abstract:

Since the emergence of the "experiential" museum style in the early 1990s, designers have played a substantial but under-recognized role in helping museums restructure interpretive approaches and compete in tourism markets. Within this paradigm, interpretation of cultural material has come to emphasize the "stories" of the peoples associated with it—a shift that can be read as an attempt to appeal to publics increasingly desirous of entertaining and personalized experience. With experiential museums, designers achieve this by composing traversable narratives, collaging and poeticizing objects, images, and multimedia design elements throughout an exhibit's architectural space to create an opportunity to "experience" history. Thus, a particular formal technique addresses both pedagogic and entertainment-based goals of new museums.

This paper examines the moral issues surrounding the representation of peoples and their experiences under the current paradigm of "experiential" museum design. Design is becoming an integrated part of the formation and transmission of public history—negotiating stakeholders' interests and historical material, and ultimately giving form to the spaces in which publics experience information. However, the design strategies that this paper critiques tend to favor order: lucidity over messiness; good storytelling over objectivity. This blending of "objective" historical documentation with storytelling techniques favored by mass media problematizes assumptions about the authority of museum narratives. I end by proposing that this area of design be acknowledged as an act of nonfiction media creation, and that as such, today's designers are obligated to reexamine the moral principals of "nonfiction" in the creation of visual representations for museums.

Panel Ethn05
Morality and material culture studies
  Session 1