The Responsive Museum

Consciously designed as a 10-year model, the Responsive Museum is an attempt to leverage the inherent influence and the existing plethora of resources accessible to museums, towards the climate movement, without creating more. The experience assesses each visitor’s ‘weight of climate injustice’, localising it on a map, and denying visitors access to any content related to areas that they might have negatively impacted with their choices. In order to unlock that content, visitors are prompted - and supported by - the museum in taking action towards climate justice.

By acknowledging that they don’t have all the answers, but pledging to support those willing to engage in that search for them, museums move from being temples of knowledge and finality, towards becoming places for questions and action by adopting our retrofitted “symbiotic” model of Tinker Labs. Housed within the most publicly visible spaces and resourced by the museum, these Labs would empower visitors to experiment, and to rally the public towards collective localised action, hopefully creating cascading movements.

Each Tinker Lab becomes part of a global network, converting museums from static spaces to climate-responsive organisms. A data visualisation in each Lab, enables visitors to track action across the world, gauging our collective position in relation to the zero hour.

In the ambiguity of ‘how’ and the state of inaction which plagues many in the climate conversation, the Tinker Labs catalyse new knowledge and responses of varying scale as an antidote to this sense of paralysis due to misperceived futility in action.

Project Team

Yasmeen Ayyashi, Prachi Joshi, Ekta Raheja

Project Name

The Responsive Museum

Team Location

Amman, Jordan; India; London

Category

Community, activism and engagement