This collection explores ideas of audience engagement in relation to museums, drawing upon Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s idea that design speculations can promote discussion and debate, as well as proposing alternatives to the ways that things are now. Speculative design might be used to explore how museums can be reconfigured as social platforms. It can also be used to imagine forms of experiential encounter that privilege estrangement and unexpected or critical perspectives. If speculative forms can be catalysts for redefining reality, what are the implications for how concepts of audience engagement might be imagined in and around museums and other spaces of collection and display? How can interpretative tools be applied to collections? How can dialogue and discussion be stimulated? Can exploring design through problems rather than solutions encourage agency and action in museum audiences? Are there effective techniques for responding to social and environmental challenges that speculative encounters in a museum can offer? The collection offers a transdisciplinary approach, bringing together people from different fields to explore these questions. This collection is unique in bringing discussions of speculative design, science fiction and museum engagement together in a set of detailed considerations, building new relationships and possibilities. The aim is to prompt a deepening of theoretical consideration, as well as helping to model practical situations and encounters.
This issue is guest edited by Dr Dan Byrne-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL.
Special Collections
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Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University