Towards a Label “Museum Good for Humankind”?
Following-up on my last article about the Happiness Museum, the question of well-being in museums came naturally and even more when we remember that this is part of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals to transform our world.
The topic is far away from being new and the effects of museums on the health of people has been already experienced by most of museum visitors whether they started their visit to find some calm, get inspired or experience a wide range of emotions. But I believe the need of museums as actor of wellness is getting bigger in this society where even the youth is stressed and under pressure.
What are the effects of a museum visit on your body?
The solely fact of making the choice to go to the museum is already allowing yourself to change your mind or body state.
Museums are powerful creativity and empathy accelerators, they invite self-awareness, self-care and resilience, increase new ideas and debates and problem-solving skills and even lower the level of stress considerably. Museums and Art can also be medicine like at the M Shed Museum and even improve the productivity of employees.
Since few years, museums start to see the healing potential of their galleries and develop a wide range of free or paid activities for small or bigger groups of different audiences. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts even hired a full-time art therapist! Mindfulness, serenity, oneness and inner peace are now tools to expand the visitors awareness, spiritual and mental health. Yoga, meditation, still looking or art observation sessions, workouts in the museum, quiet mornings are part of museum programmes. Visitors can even find here 12 steps to turn their visit at the art museum into mindfulness meditation.
The impacts of wellness programmes created by museums are always similar: visitors feel more positive, energetic and connected to something else or to each other. And what is even more amazing is that this effect lasts!
The Mindful Museum.
One of the most advanced wellness programme so far is the Mindful Museum at the Manchester Art Gallery led by Louise Thompson, Health and Wellbeing Manager, for 4 years. The museum becomes a testing ground for the expansion of oneself through free workshops for adults and children in the exhibition halls, therapeutic late evenings, 30 minutes stand still in front of a painting, drawing or drop-in lunchtime sessions. It offers a journey towards inner peace and good mental health giving a new role to museums, museums as actor of the human transformation and evolution. Among the feedbacks from participants, we can read that these sessions gave a feeling of self-confidence, inner peace, being able to switch off and slow down.
The culmination of this project is the creation of a one-year exhibition about mindfulness and art “And Breathe” developed with mental health organisations and kids from primary school gathering the learnings from four yours of activities within the galleries.
(thanks to @elisagravil pointing me this initiative)
Spend your time well.
We are currently re-evaluating our trust system by questioning those who manage our countries starting in 2016 with the fake news during the Trump election campaign, those with whom work with the #metoo movement and today reassessing the power of the world’s biggest technology companies. Questioning Mark Zuckerberg at the US Senate was the greatest example of this tech-trust crisis along the European GDPR law which affects most of companies internationally. It’s the right time to gain trust back from the users by providing life-ethical services or products that are truly good for the evolution of people, pushing the Mindful Museum concept to the next steps and going further wellness issues.
If we consider museums and art as services, the question of the quality and the impact of what we offer is fundamental.
“Time Well Spent”, a non-profit consumer movement initiated by Tristan Harris (watch his inspiring Ted Talk), former Google’s Design Ethicist, aims to shift the mindset of technology designers from doing good business to doing business that is good the society. Nowadays, technology has this immense attention power that could be used for the good or the bad of people, “Time Well Spent” could be considered like a label for ethical technologies.
Inspired by his vision, I started to research examples of museums wanting to be good for their visitors instead of focusing on their collections and their objects and then dreamed about a label for “ethical museums” or for “museums good for humanity”. The question of how to measure the impact of such museums on our society naturally came up and the fact that maybe a new museum metric should be invented for this purpose.
Our museum success measurement system is outdated.
Here is a list of metrics used by museums to measure success: number of tickets sold or foot traffic, number of members, number of loans, number of press reviews, number of hours spent in the galleries, number of likes or comments or pictures shared, percentage of visitors coming back, the average basket at the shop (find here the annual performance indicators of UK sponsored museums). This is totally outdated and won’t bring the datas institutions need to understand their users and create meaningful relationships with them.
Why most of the blockbuster exhibitions make the media headlines and not often enough the small-budget ones? Is it really just a question of getting the best visibility for the sponsors’ Return On Investment? Does it make any sense to produce such expensive exhibitions and then have to afflict hours of queue to visitors to find a financial balance?
We are living in the age of the metrics anyway so what about measuring things that are really good for the visitors? We have seen a shift in performance measurement since museums adopt a visitor-centered mindset integrating visitor engagement and tourism impact within their calculations but is still far away from the audience itself.
If we push it a bit further and consider what visitors really get from their visit as a metric of success, I will suggest to measure the impact that an artwork has on people’s day or life, the social bond a visit creates between two people, the emotional deepness of conversation that two visitors would never have got if they were not surrounded by art, the desire to change job pushed by the discovery of an artwork, the confidence-passion-dream-power an artwork can bring to one visitor, the will to fight for his identity or culture or for one cause he believes in, etc…
When we know that 81% of museum visitors enter a museum to have fun and 76% of them to feel less stressed, let’s start to measure the potential or the success of an exhibition with the positive contribution that it has on human life, its health, its well-being, its happiness, its personal challenges, its social interaction and commitment.
Is IMPACT the new museum performance metric of today?
We live in a time where personal tracking becomes ubiquious. We let our GPS guide us through cities, check how long we slept, measure our heartbeats, count our steps, try to find the right belance between family, social, sport and work but all these metrics are not specially relevant to everyone of us and even more, not efficient when we want to measure happiness or well-being.
Art and culture are good for our society, we know that. But this concept is still quite hazy, we can’t measure it, list it or apply it to other institutions easily.
Since 2010, the Happy Museum project aims to give a framework to museums to work towards a future-proofed model of museums placing well-being and sustainability in its heart (thanks bridgetmck for the poke), with a 5-years study, 22 museum projects funded and their annual symposium (you can read here the report of the 2018 edition).
The National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing (now Cultural Health and Wellbeing Alliance) led by University College London Public and Cultural Engagement also offers on its website a great range of toolkits and articles about well-being in museums but also a great serie of online courses to learn how to define, produce, analyse and measure well-being-focused projects in museums. “Museums on Prescription” is one of the best example of successful project that was run during three years with 115 socially isolated and lonely older people (thanks Dean Veall for your workshop at We Are Museums 2018). In this course, Prof. Helen Chatterjee and Dr. Nuala Morse give different qualitative and quantitative tools to measure scale of well-being while visiting a museum but also the positive effect that the visit could have on negative mood like being afraid, hostile, nervous, ashamed, etc.
You can find all their measurement tools on the website including their famous “Wellbeing Measures Umbrella” made especially to measure the wellbeing mood bring by museums.
Also, a long-term campaign has been launched by the UK Museums Association to remind that “Museum Change Lives”. David Fleming, Director of the National Museums Liverpool and President of the UK Museums Association said:
“Museums can increase our sense of well-being, help us feel proud of where we have come from, can inspire, challenge and stimulate us, and make us feel healthier.”
The campaign promotes the social impact of museums which work together with their communities and aim to change the core role of museums. Among the impact museums have on our lives, the Museums Association lists the creation of better places, spaces for inspiration and reflection but also for debate and engagement.
By making them socially engaged and relevant, connected to their audiences and not to the metrics behind, the campaign “Museum Change Lives” helps to shape a new vision of museums for the public, politicians, funders and stakeholders.
Europeana, key player in the dissemination of cultural heritage content to a global audience, also questioned the impact they have on our society and how they can contribute to create “an open, knowledgeable and creative society”.
“We believe the cultural heritage sector can increase the change it brings about in people’s lives by learning how to manage its impact.”
Therefore, Europeana launched the “Impact Playbook” in October 2017 after assessing that their projects could enhanced a feeling of community and shared identity, but give a sense of purpose and awareness of one’s individuality and culture to the participants. With very practical guidelines, the Impact Playbook gives a common language and a framework for the cultural heritage sector to prove its role in the well-being of the society.
By replying to the question “what is your critical contribution to society” and following various team exercises, Europeana expects cultural institutions to start to reassess their actions and goals to increase their relevance for the society and I hope this article gave you a sense of what you could do to get the label “Museum Good For Humanity”.
Want to push it a bit further? Here is a question that you could think about to make the future of museums brighter:
What if the next museum performance metrics would be the amount of water distributed to the local community, the energy shared with the neighbour, the ecological footprint or number of species saved?
This is a discussion paper prepared for a panel to be held during Museum Connections 2019 next 16/17 January in Paris.
EDIT [05.09.18]
The UK Museums Association just launched the Museum Change Lives Award
Read more
(thanks @elisagravil for the link)
