Introducing participatory design in museums

This paper describes how a set of participatory design methodologies have been introduced to and adopted for museum exhibition design. It provides a brief historical account of museums and reviews some current trends in museum exhibition design. Furthermore, the paper outlines a number of reasons why participatory methods may be appropriate for museums, and two such methods are described: one for evaluation of exhibits, and one for exhibition concept development. Evaluation of the methodologies suggests that they are efficient; both in terms of resources and in the richness of the data they produce. In addition, it appears that they are capable of both supporting and extending established museum design practices.