When one asks, “What is a museum?”, a natural next question is, “What isn’t a museum?” This chapter started with a quote from Richard Grove to highlight how varied museums can be: “A hospital is a hospital. A library is a library. A rose is a rose. But a museum is Colonial Williamsburg, Mrs. Wilkerson’s Figure Bottle Museum,…” The chapter finished with a direct contradiction to that by Elaine Heumann Gurian: “The distinct edges of different function among libraries, memorials, social service centers, schools, shopping malls, zoos, …, and museums will (and in many cases have already begun to) blur.”

I lean more towards Guian’s interpretation. In my post last week, I mentioned how libraries and schools are in the process of reinventing themselves just as museums are. So are hospitals shopping malls, and all the institutions that Guian mentions. Why can’t they share functions? Should they be combined into the same institutions in some cases?

This reminds me of a relatively new venture for Apple stores. Apple stores might be the last place one things of when comparing to museums, but take their location at Carnegie Library in DC for example. They have resorted this historic building to yes, sell phones and computers, but also to do more for the local community. When I was an intern at Apple in 2017, the Senior VP of Retial gave a talk to the interns. She said their goal was for Apples store to become community gathering spaces. They would host workshops where people could learn photography. The intention wasn’t to learn how to use an iPhone, but rather to learn how to compose and light photographs. They wanted people to “just meet up” at their retail locations. They wanted to provide what a cafe or museum might provide to some people. (Yes, of course, Apple projected this would lead to increased sales of their products, so it differs from a museum in that way). This example reminds me of the participatory museum from last week. If there are so many overlaps between a museum and a retail store, where do we draw the line?

I work with a class in the mechanical engineering department called Toy Product Design. In the first lecture, we introduce what “toy product design” is, and there is one line that stands out to me. A toy is in the eye of the user while a toy product is in the eye of a designer. For example, a cardboard refrigerator box can be a toy if a child creates a house out of it, but it isn’t a toy product becuase the designer of the cardboard box didn’t design it to be played with. A Nerf gun is a toy product because it was designed for someone to play with. I thought there must be a similar analogy for museums. I came up with, “The museum experience is in the eye of the guest while the museum is in the eye of the curator.” Can someone have a “museum experience” if they walk into a grocery store and study the shoppers? Or can they have have the museum experience by visiting a National Park? Similarly, can someone walk through a curated collection aimlessly and not really have the museum experience that the curator intended? If so, it takes two invested stakeholders (the designers and the guests) to have a successful museum + experience.

This symbiotic relationship was very strong in Simon’s video and text from last week. Her museum couldn’t work without the participation of the guests. The curiosity cabinets in Stephanie Bowry’s article show a different perspective. In a lot of cases, it seems that the cabinets were curated for the curator. Maybe he showed it to friends, but there was a lot of personal satisfaction from revisiting the objects and their connections. Certainly the curation goals change for a privately-viewed collection versus a publicly-owned one.