A sensory visit to Paris’ Museum of Mankind
Taking a two-years-old to an anthropology museum
This is the first article in a series about museums and under-represented audiences and artists.
When Paris’ Museum of Mankind reopened its doors in 2015, it unveiled a sensory circuit, stations scattered through the exhibition presenting material accessible to a visually impaired public. It begins with the 3-dimensional representation of the museum building and a plan and includes for instance tactily explorable cranes and statues representing different ages. This is the work of Tactile Studio, and it offers many didactic and pedagogical opportunities for all kinds of public. It’s different being able to feel the size of a crane in your hands and to see it on display. It’s playful to tackle ageing by reconstructing inter-generational photographs with statues. It is one of the most accomplished work on content accessibility in a Parisian museum I’ve seen, especially for visually impaired children — though the City of Sciences and Industry does come close.
But this is not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about an entirely different sensory visit to this museum. One that was guided by a toddler, whom I thought would be able to appreciate this sensory circuit. I regularly visit museums with children between 6 months and 10 years-old. It brings a totally different perspective and I sometimes have to outdo myself to make the content interesting to them while not being asked to leave the museum by the staff. Which in turn fuels my own experiences of museums.
Museums are still, most of the time, spaces designed for the visitors’ gaze. In fact, they can appeal so much to sight, our ability to read and generally our so-called higher-level language skills, that we miss out on the rest of the experience. Until there’s a two-years-old to remind you of it. I imagine that to children that age, museums look like giant playgrounds in which toys are kept out of reach. But a museum is far more than its content: it has vents, tactile guides on the floor, space between columns, changes in floor material, different wall textures, visual effects when moving in front of an artefact, varied room heights, exhibits under which to sneak, bench and chairs to climb, lights and shades to play with, space to measure by moving back and forth, things one can stretch or kneel to see, statues to walk around of, windows in which to look, reflections of oneself to examine, enclosed spaces, open spaces, echoes, setting for a story to tell and so forth.
According to this two-years-old, the Museum of Mankind is best visited without shoes (the museum staff was not very happy about it, but have you ever tried getting a child who doesn’t want to wear shoes to put them on?). It’s a place where you can have fun if you don’t make to much noise. It’s a reservoir of weird words to point at and be read. The sensory itinerary however was of very limited interest to her. The full body interactive games did not attract her attention either.
For its redesign, the museum aimed at engaging under-representing audiences, notably by “using the potential of technologies […] to enable visitors to participate, choose their own way of learning,” as well as to propose “original […] apparatuses offering off-beat experiences.” Photographies of the result are available on the website of the Zendco studio. Note that I somewhat doubt two-years-old were among the audiences the museum wanted to attract. Yet the redesign does afford them a rich visit experience.
To me it opens ever new perspectives on museum and exhibition inclusive design. Interactive and tactile installations in museums (or heritage sites) are made for playfulness, embodied cognition (www.mesch-project.eu), encouraging reflexivity (Giraud et al., 2014), engaging new visitors unfamiliar with museums (Jutant, 2011), or making the content accessible (Cober et al., 2012). All in all for inclusive didactic or pedagogical purposes. If I am not advocating for transforming museums in theme parks, I do want to argue for alternative ways of thinking about museum experiences. There are great examples of using non-visual, non-auditory experiences, to contextualize artefacts (see for instance Chu et al., 2016); In my research with visually impaired children, museums are spaces in which the senses can be consciously stimulated and trained (Brulé and Bailly, 2018); In a participatory research on museum experiences, (Salgado and Salmi, 2006) highlight the importance given to the overall atmosphere of the museum by visually impaired visitors; Dialogue in the Dark proposed a non-visual exhibition visit. But the museum is always more than a visual or learning experience. There’s the conscience of the full-size of their artifacts. The pleasure off wandering in a carefully designed environment. The shared ice-cream or cake afterwards. The social event that is a museum visit — where the goals of the museum, or its usages, are redefined.
Inclusive design programs often miss these dimensions of experiences. For instance events about inclusion to marginalized groups in museums, such as hackathons and public consultations or when I did research in museum contexts, I’m often stricken by the fact the “crowds of the hall” are absent from discourses or downright framed as indesirable. The teenagers skipping school, the mothers rocking their babies to sleep, those waiting for the rain to stop, the homeless people, all those who do not even necessarily enter the exhibitions but may hang out, read the pamphlets. Many museums have gardens and terraces, hidden gems in the city. They are pretty quiet too. Museum cafés are awesome. I think I discovered when I moved to San Francisco (and got a membership at the SF MOMA) how great museums can be to hang out at — which may or may not lead to learn to appreciate the said museum. This is not the case of all museums: anti-terrorism policies and the subsequent bag checks at the entrance do not encourage aimless flânerie. Not so many museums have open spaces for those not paying for an exhibition ticket. Others are too impressive to get in. Visitors are sometimes really harsh to those who they feel do not belong there— including children and their unconventional visiting practices.
This actually ties quite nicely with one of my introducing comments: visiting with someone who has a radically different perception of the same space is an excellent way to have to reshape one’s own understanding, and even one’s sensory perception, and to re-evaluate an existing or potential exhibition design. This can be one way, as designers in the broad sense of the term, to reflect on what exactly we mean when we talk about inclusion .
Thanks to Emile Contal, Tom Giraud and Didier Laval for their comments, and to Laurène Cheilan for the discussion that started this post.
References cited
Brulé, E., & Bailly, G. (2018, April). Taking into Account Sensory Knowledge: The Case of Geo-techologies for Children with Visual Impairments. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 236). ACM.
Chu, J. H., Harley, D., Kwan, J., McBride, M., & Mazalek, A. (2016, June). Sensing History: Contextualizing Artifacts with Sensory Interactions and Narrative Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 1294–1302). ACM.
Cober, R., Au, O., & Son, J. J. (2012, February). Using a participatory approach to design a technology-enhanced museum tour for visitors who are blind. In Proceedings of the 2012 iConference (pp. 592–594). ACM.
Giraud, T., Courgeon, M., Tardieu, M., Roatis, A., & Maitre, X. (2014, April). A three-dimensional mirror augmented by medical imaging: questioning self-portraying at the limit of intimacy. In CHI’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 845–854). ACM.
Jutant, C. (2011). S’ajuster, interpréter et qualifier une pratique culturelle: Approche communicationnelle de la visite muséale (Doctoral dissertation, Université d’Avignon).
Salgado, M., & Salmi, A. (2006, January). Ideas for future museums by the visually impaired. In PDC (pp. 105–108).
