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A thinking excercise, following the fieldguide "Mind The Gap", about the Design Museum Gent, an institution falling behind in this ever evolving society. Digital media have become more popular over the years as they keep on growing rapidly. How can a museum, a physical platform, learn from digital ones? Open Source Museum is a conceptual design which thinks about a possible solution for the Design Musuem to stay relevant and accessible in our digital era.
Towards an open sourced Design Museum
Online platforms have become more popular and a success in the last decade as they keep growing much more. I took an interest in this phenomenon as the Design Museum Gent has the ambition to become the Museum of the future. What occourred to me from looking at the most popular online platforms is that visitors "look" at content made by creators and that online platforms provide surfaces for interaction between these two parties. On the other hand exists the "overlooking" task of the platform to let activities develop in a controlled environment while also bringing interesting topics to the spotlight.
The Design Museum Gent could learn from the strategy of online platforms to become a physical platform which allows for interaction between new designers/artists and users of design to interact with each other as a means to make design more accessible to everyone. The museum itself could still provide frequent curated expositions for more developed designs and topics.
Visitors - The square as the new entrance
Aiming towards becoming a more open sourced museum, it is necessary that access should remain easy for "users", both visitors and makers. The new plot is therefore the ideal place. I chose to not build on the open site, in fact would open it up and make it almost a public square which lets passing-by people get to know the museum spontaneously. The main idea of this square is to announce what is going on inside the museum through exhibiting small prototypes or objects on the square.
Makers - Open atelier in Hotel Deconinck
After taking an interest in what we saw on the square, we enter the musuem and find ourselves in the part which was initially Hotel Deconinck. This part of the museum consists of a lot of small rooms. What if those small rooms could be used as the "prototyping spaces" for the makers of design? As part of the visit of the design museum and instead of seeing passive showrooms, visitors could now "participate" in ideas designed by "makers". These smaller spaces serve as an environment to let people come in contact with design first hand and to let both makers and users engage in a dialogue perhaps.
Curator - Curated expositions in the second wing
We move on to the newer building (aka the second wing) and find ourselves in a larger open space with even a vertically movable platform in the center. This is the ideal environment to organise a large or multiple smaller curated expositions of ideas and designs that were once prototyped, developed in Hotel Deconinck for instance.
Studio: Field Station
Year: 2018
Mentors: Michiel Helbig & Corneel Canaerts