What does being user-centred mean for art galleries and museums?

For my forthcoming article about how user engagement could transform art galleries and museums, I’ve been thinking about what the implications would be for how we run galleries. I’ve developed a framework – set out below – as a basis for talking about this and would be keen to hear what you think. Is it useful to talk about user engagement in these terms? What do you think about some of the issue arising? Have you come across other examples of where this is working in practice? Where do you see the pitfalls?

I suggest it is helpful to consider the implications of placing users at the centre of galleries and museums around a framework[i] based on three overarching principles:

1. Openness – we actively seek the ideas and contributions of others and open our working practices to enable this. Galleries and museums offer a platform for a full range of cultural and creative opportunities, not just their own content.
2. Equality – art and audience are equally important and it is the role of art galleries and museums to support both equally.
3. Pluralism – diversity of views and artistic approaches are essential and art galleries and museums are places where through looking, thinking and talking about art we explore, discover and express our identities, as individuals and as part of society.

Table 1 outlines of what each of these principles might look like for different part of our institutions: leadership, staffing, programme, interpretation, audiences and business model. Then below, I highlight some of the key questions they raise for art galleries and museums.

Characteristics of a user-centred art gallery or museum

	Openness	Equality	Pluralism
Leadership & Vision	Transparency: open recruitment of Trustees, publication of artistic policy etc. Actively innovating, researching impact and sharing learning with peers and public.	Confident artistic vision, coupled with strong audience focus. Public service ethos. Strong audience voice within the Board and senior management.	Distributed leadership within the organisation. Strong collaboration with peers.
Staffing	Making full use of expertise and ideas within the organisation. Skills and capacity augmented by users as volunteers and ‘super users’.	Galleries led by staff with varied backgrounds – learning, marketing etc. Art and audience championed equally throughout the organisation and reflected in structures and in HR systems.	Porous models for sharing expertise with multiple entry routes. Diversity of workforce (e.g. class, gender, ethnicity, age). New roles and skills developed around engagement.
Programme (online, offsite and in the gallery)	Collaborations with other institutions (e.g. co-produced exhibitions). User-generated content. Use of the facilities by other cultural organisations.	Programme decisions informed by artistic and audience intelligence. Activities conceived as services, not products. Strong focus on good visitor service.	Exhibitions and displays selected by non-curators given space in the gallery and wider programme. Artist-led participatory arts practice. Artists working in response to collections.
Audiences	Opportunities to engage at different levels – creative, critic, collector, spectator. Promotion of wider cultural opportunities e.g. art classes, broadcasts about art.	Mutual respect between audiences and professionals. Audience voice in planning and review. Investment in understanding audience behaviour and impact on audiences.	Users able to interact with the organisation on their own terms (personalisation). Multi-layered experiences – gallery, offsite and online.
Interpret-ation	‘Re-mixing’ and re-appropriation of content by users in other contexts – e.g. through posting images in Flickr.	Enabling users to look at and understand art for themselves, rather than telling them what to think.	User voices present in labels/ texts, talks and tours, online forums. Discussions – formal and informal, in the gallery and online – about art.
Business model	Users contributing time (volunteers, participants) and financial resources as members and donors.	Good customer service maximises income from trading (café, shop). More visitors means more income from trading.	User willing to pay for additional (‘premium’) services such as talks or classes. Additional services are self-sustaining.

1. Openness

Making better use of existing staff and volunteers, before then reaching out more widely to peers and public, could transform many organisations. Openness also means rethinking where the art gallery and museum fits in the wider creative and cultural aspirations of its users and finding ways (often through technology) to open access to these other opportunities: be those amateur, commercial or through other institutions. Transparency about how we run our organisations, and artistic decisions in particular, is essential for building legitimacy and understanding.

Changes to the role and position of the curator

The role of the curator is important to the user-centred gallery but equal with roles in interpretation and learning. In many cases these professional boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred through integrated programming teams and roles. The relationship with the public has also changed: the curator is no longer principally a gatekeeper exercising quality-control of content on our behalf (Jones, 2006; Connor, 2009). Instead we look to cultural professionals to enable us to experience art for ourselves through introducing us to things we might not otherwise encounter, helping us understand our options and articulating what we enjoy. We expect a ‘conversation’ with professionals about our interests and an explanation of their choices or recommendations.

Example: opening up curatorial thinking

The Northern Art Prize encourages audiences to make up their own mind about the work on display through exhibiting short-listed artists in the run-up to the announcement of the winner.

In 2010 members of the public could also vote and the public choice was announced before the judges’ decision. Does it matter that the experts and the public didn’t agree? No: but if the judges explained why they had chosen Pavel Büchler, what it was about his work that they valued, then this could have offered audiences new perspectives and greater understanding of artistic values.

Opening up organisations

Many learning projects involve young people finding out more about how the gallery works. For example, Van Abbemuseum is experimenting with inviting visitors ‘backstage’ during an installation period to offer insights into the roles and views of art handlers. Other galleries encourage staff, including curators and information assistants, to blog about their experiences. Galleries and museums working with living artists can open up the creative process, either through providing a platform for the artist to talk about their work (through an event, video in the gallery, online), hosting an artist during the production of their work and providing public access (e.g. through having a studio space, or opening the gallery during installation periods).

Open programming and co-creation

Artists have been finding ways to open up access to exhibiting for since the Salon des Réfusés (Connor, 2009). This continues today, Café Gallery Projects, an artist-run community gallery in Southwark Park, has long held open exhibitions and ‘hosted’ exhibitions by young people and students alongside high-quality professional artists. Openness doesn’t just mean open submission. Co-creation, where artists and public work together to create artworks and projects, is widely seen within the gallery and in offsite projects with artists such as Antony Gormley and Jeremy Deller capturing both the public imagination and critical acclaim.

In many galleries co-creation (or ‘participatory practice’) forms a significant aspect of programming but is not usually presented in the gallery (for example Ikon, Birmingham and Serpentine Gallery London). Unless this activity is scalable so that the opportunity for participation can be extended to all (and often it isn’t) levels of engagement are high, but numbers tend to be small. Alternatively, these projects are presented as displays in galleries, raising complex questions about authorship and whether the audience is interested in viewing non-professional work.

Does everyone want to be an artist, or a creative, as some suggest (Leadbeater, 2009)? Recent research into use of social technologies indicates creatives account for 24% of us, with the vast majority still enjoying spectating.[i] But most importantly, it points to a wider range of activity than simply creating or viewing – including ‘critics’ (who enjoy rating others’ content, writing reviews etc) and ‘collectors’ (who aggregate content for personal or social consumption and organise links). These roles are not fixed and people play for different roles in different contexts. The challenge, then, to art galleries and museums is to offer a range of participatory activities that appeal to all – not just those at the extremes of the spectrum (creatives or spectators). This may go some way to dispel the notion that greater participation inevitably leads to galleries filled with co-created content.

2. Equality

There’s a widespread, and mis-placed, fear among cultural professionals that being user-centred means disregarding quality and the role of expertise. It doesn’t – but it entails championing the art and the audience equally, and separating expertise from control, as Pluralism implies.

New leadership models, and leaders, that champion audiences and art

There are many professionals in the visual arts sector who are committed to art and artists equally, and we have seen the emergence of joint leadership models, for example at Tate Liverpool and St Ives, where an artistic director and executive director jointly run the gallery. However the vast majority of organisations are led by a curator and while there are those whose vision encompasses audiences, it is not surprising that curator-led galleries tend to concentrate more on art than audiences.

Audience champions – many and senior

Gerri Morris and Andrew McIntyre (n.d., p.5) underline the importance of interdisciplinary structures and a culture where ‘it is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation to understand, think about and respond to audiences’. There is also need for senior audience champions at management and Board levels and a corresponding increase in resources dedicated to market research.

3. Pluralism

Hearing others’ perspectives can open up new insights, encourage users to respond to art in their own way and allows us to engage in conversations around art, and ideas. Rather than seeing the gallery purely as a place to experience art, it becomes a place where through looking, thinking and talking about art we explore, discover and express our identities, as individuals and as part of society. Already this happens daily in learning departments in many galleries and museums, but it is time we extended this opportunity to all our visitors by integrating pluralism across all programming, including the gallery space.

Example: modelling pluralism in the gallery

Rineke Dijkstra’s The Weeping Woman, Tate Liverpool, 2009 is a video installation inspired by the ways school groups discuss art.[ii] The artist observed the children as they looked at works from the collection. Rather than being offered an art historical explanation, the children are simply asked ‘what do you see?’ They are guided, through questioning, to explore the formal aspects of the work and its subject and the context in which is was produced (art historical but also social and political). Learning curator Abigail Christenson explains the approach thus ‘each viewpoint is taken on board – it’s a layering of interpretation, multiple viewpoints, the workshops are about the children’s voices and what they see’.[iii]

The video portraits which emerged from this process show the children looking at, and talking about Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), but the viewer’s attention is channelled towards the children’s response rather than the artwork itself. Their observations and reactions reveal far more about themselves than about the picture. This work prompts two thoughts: first, we all see different meaning in artworks and quite often our response will be personal, and second, that art can provide a social opportunity to come together and share these perspectives. By displaying this work the gallery is modelling the kind of responses from audiences it would like to enable.

Collections and contemporary opportunities

Collections and contemporary practice offer different opportunities to engage users. With living artists their practice can often be participatory either in how it is presented or produced. With collections, there are many examples of engaging users in the selection or interpretation of displays. Worcester City Art Gallery’s Top 40 exhibition[iv] is one such example, or the Van Abbemuseum’s Kijkdepot below. Other museums have involved users in leading tours or creating labels and other interpretation materials.

Example: visitor selection and interpretation with collections

The Van Abbemusuem, a contemporary art museum in Eindhoven, is experimenting with different models for engaging users in programming including the Kijkdepot (‘Viewing Depot’) where anyone can request a work from the collection and every two weeks a new work is shown – alongside the request from the public which sets out why they want to see this work. Users are also engaged in interpreting the collection by ‘tagging’ individual works through which they can suggest particular meanings or approaches to navigating works which the museum hope will create ‘multiple players and multiple meanings in the museum domain.’

A place for technology

Technology plays a key role in enabling multiple perspectives to be shared. Increasingly users can engage with gallery through social media to augment the experience of physical visits. But there is a tendency to keep user engagement safely online (or offsite) and away from the ‘real’ space of the gallery, and if we focus exclusively on fostering discussion through online activity, we miss out of the social value this can bring to a gallery experience.

Personalisation

As professionals we need to find ways to develop sustainable channels to enable dialogue with users, supported by technology. For example, some online communities develop ‘super users’ (similar to the expert patient model in medicine) where keen and skilled users take on a supporting role with less experienced users. Nina Simon offers a detailed consideration of other design principles we could consider including personalisation and ‘recommendation engines’ which use intelligence gathered through a personal profile to make suggestions about content you might like (Simon, 2010, Ch.2). For example, many online retailers (such as Amazon) use these devices to suggest products and services, based on what you’ve looked at or purchased before, and the behaviour of customers with similar profiles.

Are these examples useful? Can you suggest others? What’s your experience of trying these approaches in your gallery or museum?

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[i] This framework draws on aspects of Gerri Morris and Andrew McIntyre’s seven pillars of C21st organisations (Morris & McIntyre, n.d.), John Holden’s model for a ‘democratic culture’ (Holden, 2008) and Hasan Bakshi and David Throsby’s model of ‘aspects on innovation’ within arts and cultural organisations (Bakshi & Throsby, 2009).

[i] Forrester Research, 2008. Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies, cited in Simon (2010) p.8.

[ii] The work will be displayed as part of the exhibition I See A Woman Crying at Tate Liverpool 27 April – 30 August 2010, and an extract from the video can be viewed online at http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/weepingwoman/default.shtm [ Accessed 31 March 2010].

[iii] Interview with the author, 2 March 2010.

[iv] An account of this project is available online at http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/11/guest-post-top-40-countdown-at.html [Accessed 8 April 2010].