“Go Big or Go Home, Right?” A reflexive ethnography of exhibition co-creation at the Teknisk Museum

Abstract

The use of participatory projects in order to democratize museums has gained popularity. This study follows the process of a co-creation project instigated by the project team for the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology’s upcoming climate exhibition. Nine student climate activists participated in three in-house workshops over the course of a month. The researcher challenges the traditional positivist research model through using participatory action research while acting as the project’s organizer and workshop facilitator to collect data during the co-creation process. Various failures and oversights later proved to yield interesting results regarding how the project was framed, the manner in which communication occurred across cultural lines, and how decisions were made in the project. The results shed light on how and why such projects deviate from their ideal intentions while recognizing the absence of blame in this heavily social process. The author also recommends several variations to museological practice along these lines in order to further strengthen the democratizing aspect of museological co-creation.