PRISM

This project has focused on continuing education offered to high-school science teachers in a Quebec museum of civilization. We followed this group of teachers throughout the process of immersion in the museum’s activities, to describe and attempt to understand how this experience has transformed their teaching practice, as well as their relationship to the museum. A qualitative-interpretative research emphasizing an inductive approach was put forward through a case study from the perspective of Wenger’s social theory of learning. Learning is therefore described as a four-dimensional system that is closely related and mutually determinative. The results capture these four dimensions: meaning, engagement in practice, community belonging, and changes in identity, and how participation in collective activities transforms individuals.

What is digital doing to cultural mediation, or more specifically to museum mediation? We present the conceptual foundations of PRISM, a laboratory created by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that acts as a catalyst for collaborations within the Quebec museum network, in order to explore in a concerted manner the potential of digital technology and to develop knowledge, as for its effects on the audiences reached. While mediation “supposes the idea of a distance to be reduced and a meeting ground” between the museum and its receivers (Montpetit, 2011, p. 222), there certainly is a danger that the concept of digital museum mediation only indicates the panoply of tools mobilized by the public and museum professionals, focusing more on this equipment than on the communication situation concerned (Fraysse, 2019).
Also, we propose to consider digital museum mediation as any action carried out by one or several professionals of a museum institution, to develop the relationship of various audiences with the collection, the thematic of interpretation, a real or virtual exhibition, or any other proposal of the institution for various purposes by means of digital technology, thanks to computer encoding capacities, and of networks, hardware and software applications. This mediation can take place: 1) in different time periods, for example, before, during or after the visit to an institution, or even independently of any visit to the physical place; and 2) in various spatial configurations, on site, inside the exhibition or elsewhere in the institution, and/or at a distance from the institution. In addition, the values of exchange, collaboration, co-construction and sharing of expertise activated in an increasingly connected digital world can thus lead to a redefinition of the relationships between the museum institution and their audiences, if the former has “the will to move from a ‘showcase’ logic to a ‘relational’ and co-creative logic” (Cambone, 2019, p. 11).
In order to encourage the sharing of expertise and knowledge, PRISM launched a call for projects in digital museum mediation. This article presents four digital experience design initiatives co-created by museum professionals, technological creators and university researchers, with the help of visitor-users. These initiatives emanate from institutions of various size scattered throughout Quebec and come from different disciplinary fields, some presenting themselves as museums with collections and others, as interpretation centres. A common trait unites them: imagining, designing and exploring the potential of different devices to renew the experiences suggested to visitors or users, in different contexts, locally and remotely.

This article describes a good example of a mobile application developed with and for culturally diverse audiences that do not usually visit art museums. It first introduces PRISM, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Digital Mediation Innovation Lab, by explaining its understanding of digital museum mediation and the importance it gives to the relationship that can be established between audiences and a cultural institution. It then goes on to describe its collaborative, design thinking-inspired design process, which involves the participation of members of the target audiences in the co-creation of digital experiences and devices. Finally, it offers the example of the collaborative design of a mediation device for the Arts of One World galleries at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that was intended to promote inclusion and living together.

This article is interested in the modalities of interpersonal facilitation and digital implementations within a fine arts museum for teenage audiences. A study performed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) involved an experiment with teenagers (n = 35) who participated in a visit guided by a facilitator, as well as in a visit accompanied by a route-discovery game on digital tablets. Starting from a pedagogical model and from the notion of engagement (behavioural, cognitive and emotional), the two visit contexts are observed and then compared. The results are then presented according to the two facilitation modalities. The quantitative data allows for an estimation of the total area visited, the number of works seen, and observation time, while the qualitative data illustrates the participants’ perception and appreciation of these two visit experiences. As the same teenagers experienced the two facilitation modalities, a comparative approach enables us to report on the different forms of their engagement and their visit preferences.

This article outlines the role of design thinking within collaborative innovation processes in museums through examining the activities of the PRISM digital innovation lab. In particular, it presents the ways in which the design thinking tools and activities adopted in a living lab facilitate the process of museum employees taking ownership of the practices and postures of experimentation that are essential for innovation in a rapidly changing environment. Drawing on observations and participant accounts, the article illustrates the contribution of immersion, co-creation with partners and prototyping practices, and thus learning by doing, in strengthening employee competencies, which will support the carrying out of new projects with new technologies.

Examining participatory practices and inclusion projects requires reflecting on the museum as a political space and questioning the power relationships it nourishes. A review of the literature on the idea of the sense of belonging in a wide variety of disciplinary fields led to an awareness of the different dimensions of that feeling and its integration in the political discourse. More specifically, in terms of this article, the feeling of belonging is problematic in the context of art museums, where the concept is often translated to the institution’s benevolent attitude towards racialized groups that have historically been discriminated against and are not in the habit of visiting museums. When these people are invited to collaborate with the museum institution, the co-creation process generally proceeds according to codes established by the institution.This tendency to adopt a charitable position towards the Other, avoiding any sort of tension, is what we call “an irenic museum” (from the Greek εἰρήνη [eirenê] meaning “peace”). By focusing on what unifies rather than on what divides, the irenic approach avoids conflict in order to foster coexistence with one another.
By analyzing the process of co-creating a digital mediation system for the Arts of One World galleries at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), we suggest a critical look at the design thinking approach centred on the human at PRISM, the museum’s Digital Mediation Innovation Lab. Can we move beyond the limits of the irenic museum by promoting equal interaction between those involved?