Centers of Experience: Bodies and Objects in Today's Museums (original) (raw)

How can we design better experiences? Experience Design brings together leading international scholars to provide a cross-section of critical thinking and professional practice within this emerging field. Contributors writing from theoretical, empirical and applied design perspectives address the meaning of 'experience'; draw on case studies to explore ways in which specific 'experiences' can be designed; examine which methodologies and practices are employed in this process; and consider how experience design interrelates with other academic and professional disciplines. In this essay we observe practices realized inside the museum in their efforts to include projects that are participatory, community-based, and socially engaged. Starting with the origins of the museum, this essay traces how the museum has evolved into a spectacular repository for today’s social consciousness and the potential for creative practitioners to use and design the space of the museum to generate meaningful experience on the levels of the corporeal and social body. This effort is haunted by the ever-increasing commodification of experience that contributes to the museum’s struggle for relevance and viability in terms of the pedagogical, the political and the ludic.