The artist-designer: Situating creative interaction and interpretation in the museum

This research builds on my extensive experience in creating interactive artefacts. Designed to enrich interpretation in museums and galleries, many of these objects are intended to provide occasions for visitor participation and learning. This thesis interrogates the background to this work, examining its origins in crafts practice and how iterative development has led to more complex programmes. I construct and articulate my role and demonstrate the value of my distinct approach to animating collections, enabling innovative forms of user interaction and supporting creative action in public settings.

A review of literature highlights relevant work on theoretical and curatorial approaches to visitor studies, the cultures of display and theories of museology, museum history, materiality and authenticity. Of particular interest have been theories of visitor motivation and contextual models of learning. A review of creative responses in this arena also surveys my own practice, alongside resonant and significant projects by others.

The design and building of a new museum interactive - The Enlightened Eye – is the focus of my research. Here I analyse its design procedures and situated use. Focusing on its construction and deployment, I consider compositional, technical and material decisions that contribute to its design. In addition, I examine the collaborative negotiations and mediating influences that shape the production and installation of it as a live interactive in a particular situated ‘ecology of action’. Critically I show how I adapt ethnographic procedures to evaluate the situated use of the main case study.

A critical framework has been structured using a flexible, naturalistic inquiry methodology. I have identified myself as an artist-designer, a role characterised by a complex set of preoccupations, concerned not only with designed use and design process, but also the aesthetic, sensory qualities of objects and structures, and the choreographed behaviour they afford. Realworld practice, combined with the subjective and the tacit, is examined reflexively to provide new insights and implications for artists, interaction designers, curators and the museum visitor.

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