What if museums became centres for community-led climate research and action?

Museums today are much more than simply storehouses for treasured artefacts. They are places of research, entertainment and debate, and their work often extends far beyond their own walls.

The Museum of Open Windows expands on this idea by placing citizens and communities in the role of curators and researchers, with the Earth itself seen as a precious artefact in need of protection. Museums are reimagined as a networked infrastructure in this scenario – a global set of tools and resources enabling citizen science that is attuned to local cultures and environments.

Rather than document faraway places, the Museum of Open Windows focuses attention on the nearby and the particular. A Field Guide directs people on a guided walk of their local environment, encouraging the listener to engage directly with the ecosystem they inhabit and identify signs of a warming climate.

Museums help us to look at things differently – to see the beauty in the mundane, and the significance of the overlooked. The Field Guide aims to provide a set of tools to help people read their surroundings as part of a broader ecology, to see landscapes and organisms as part of a wider whole, and to understand their own position within these systems. The guide reminds us that action at a local level can help to bring about change in governments and big organisations.

You can download the Field Guide via most major audio platforms:

You can also watch a short series of videos showing how the Field Guide works below.

Project Team

Livia Wang; Nico Alexandroff; RESOLVE Collective: Akil Scafe-smith, Seth Scafe-smith, Melissa Haniff; Studio Mash: Max Martin, Angus Smith, Conor Sheehan

Project Name

Museum of Open Windows

Team Location

UK

Category

Community, activism and engagement