The Creative Museum: Analysis of Good Practices

The Creative Museum is a three-year EU-funded project which aims to help museums open to meet people, to speak with each other and become inspired by the collections in an innovative way. The project has been designed as a space for prototyping, experimenting and documenting new ways of collaboration between people with different backgrounds, between organisations from different sectors, developing new ways of engagement with audiences and new ways of learning from each other. In the context of the project, project partners in Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK have identified case studies in their respective countries, which have recently been collected as a set of best practices. The case studies presented have been grouped under 5 types, as follows:

• Workshop / project / one-off events, involving visitors in creative or educational practices.
• Dedicated spaces, including specific areas in museums that allow visitors to participate in creative processes (e.g. FabLabs, MediaLabs, Living Labs, Digital Spaces).
• Co-curated exhibitions, partnerships and collaborations, including continued engagement of visitors with museum staff, leading to co-curated exhibitions, displays or dedicated pieces of technology.
• Re:mixing the museum, including activities which allow visitors to take over spaces in the museums and reinterpret collections.
• "Permission-free", which enable visitors to "do their own thing" and respond to the collection without the involvement of the institution.

Overall more than 30 projects have been identified. The collection is expected to expand in the course of the "Creative Museum" project, with additional case studies from Europe and worldwide. Project partners include Cap Sciences (France, project coordinator), Radiona Hackerspace (Croatia), the Chester Beatty Library (Ireland), the Istituto per i beni artistici culturali e naturali (IBC, Italy), STePS (Italy), MuseoMix (France), the Finnish Museums Association (Finland), Museums of the South-Trondelag (MiST, Norway) and Heritec Limited (UK). The collection of best practices can be downloaded for free at http://creative-museum.net/c/creative-practices/. For additional information about the "Creative Museum" project, please visit http://creative-museum.net/