Nancy Hechinger

If you were inventing a museum today, what would it look like? Who would be there?
What would its main purpose be? The first museums were called Cabinets of Wonder.
Usually, a viewer with a guide, often the collector, would open doors and drawers to
see what was inside–amazing things from different parts of the world, different times.
They were windows on the world to places the visitors would probably never be able to
go; to see things they would never otherwise be able to see. And now there’s
television, movies, the internet and travel. Why do people go to museums now? Will
they in the future? Today, most museums seek to educate and to include more and
more diverse visitors than they used to. How do people learn in public spaces? How do
we know that they do? How can they make use of the new interactive technologies and
not lose what’s special about them? The class is an exploration, observation and theory
class with some design mixed in. Museum and exhibit visits are your primary
assignments for the first half of the course—usually accompanied by a reading. You will
also make some record of your visit (including a sketchbook, a dioramas, reviews)
There will be guest speakers from Museums and exhibit design firms, and several field
trips. In the second half of the course, you begin to imagine how you might reinvent a
museum and develop a full-scale presentation of your own Cabinet of Wonder.