Interactive Museum Projects for All Ages Help Attract More Visitors and Recruit Volunteers

Museum is a passive experience for most visitors. But it’s not the best way to enjoy art. Any museum can be an interactive space where visitors are active participants, not just observers. With that in mind, I started making interactive museum projects over 20 years ago. Closely working with hundreds of groups for many years I’ve created more than 40 interactive museum projects and wrote 25 scientific articles about them. To this end I’ve been collaborating with top museum specialists from Russia, Poland and America. Projects’s themes span several museum types, time periods, cultures, and life events. Here are some of them: 

1. Tempus DiscendiEst - It Is Time to Learn. 

2. The Heritage We Are Proud of - Slutsk Sashes. 

3. I am Alexander – The Son of Lebanon God. 

4. Celebrating Birthday and Wedding. 

5. Feast for Eyes, Ears and Feeling. 

6. Smart Splendor of a Gala Portrait. 

Target Audience 

The perfect group size is 8-10 people. It allows for perfect group dynamic. Fewer participants, puts more pressure on each person. Having more people you risk to leave someone out. Initially I focused on elementary and middle school students, but now we have groups of all ages, including whole families. 

Benefits for Visitors 

Art is all about emotions and feelings. Facts can enhance our experience of art, but museum are too heavy on facts and too light on emotions. My projects let visitors deeply experience art through expressing their emotions and opinions without judgement. My role is to guide them through the process. Each project has a unique structure, but they all share some core elements. The above mentioned sharing of emotions and opinions, role play, immersion, reading literature of the corresponding period. Also each project has its own goal: 

• realize the value of slutsk sashes

• learn 19th century culture from inside

• enrich anniversary celebration (moving away from eating and drinking)

• unite family generations / members through a shared experience

• make archeology fun

• discover artist’s life and personality through his painting

New Loyal Visitors 

I’ve worked with thousand of groups. And many visitors start coming to the museum regularly for other projects and exhibitions. A university student took part in one of my projects. Several yearslaters she saw a TV spot for my new Wedding Day Project and came to the museum again. Last year we met again at the project about Korea. She came over and said “Remember you did the Wedding Day Project for us? Now I have two kids and we will be coming to you all together!” Such stories happen all the time. Another lady first came to a project with her coworkers. Then she organized a visit for her son and his classmates. Later the students came together with their parents to celebrate the end of school. 

More Volunteers 

Some of the visitors become my volunteers, because the projects get them excited about museums and art. They finally start getting it. I successfully recruit students, foreigners living in Belarus, professional designers, linguists. Just last week, even my sister-in-law volunteered to help with my new project. Volunteers are vital for many museums, but recruiting them is notoriously hard. Getting visitors to see art through the new lens of emotions has proven to an effective way to also get more volunteers. 

Learn More and Work Together

I would be excited to share more information about my interactive museum projects, learn about on your projects and even collaborate. Email me at nadezhdakrasutskaya@gmail.com or visit my blogs
 http://museumimpression.blogspot.com.by/
http://minskseoultrip.blogspot.com.by/

A few words about our museum: the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus has the largest collection of national and foreign art in Belarus. More than twenty seven thousand works of art and a great collection of icons could be found on exposition and in the depositories. Learn more on http://www.artmuseum.by

Thank you for your kind consideration.

Nadin Krasutskaya

Photos from my Interactive Museum Projects

1. At «I am Alexander – The Son of Lebanon God» project participants had to wrap man from the audience in the same manner as on the painting of Alexander the Great in the backgound.

2. Celebrating birthday in a 19th century noble house. Each guest tells their favorite memory about the birthday person.

3. School students learn to drill stone the way it was done in Bronze Age (the archaeology project).

4. Participants of the Korean New Year project color the pictures of a tiger – a symbol of the first month of the year. Volunteers write «Happy New Year» in Korean for them.

О интерактивном проекте января 2017 года вы сможете прочитать здесь: http://minskseoultrip.blogspot.com.by/

О Детском музее в Государственном музее Кореи вы найдете здесь - http://minskseoultrip.blogspot.com.by/2016_05_01_archive.html

О Детском музее в Национальном этнографическом музее Кореи вы найдете здесь - http://minskseoultrip.blogspot.com.by/2016/07/the-childrens-museum-of-national-folk.html

О других музеях Сеула я написала здесь - http://minskseoultrip.blogspot.com.by/2013/10/blog-post_26.html