The empty meeting-place – Museum metaphors and their implication for learning

Abstract

This article argues for a need to scrutinize the meeting-place metaphor that is commonly used by museum practitioners, when describing the museum role in society as an informal learning environment. The metaphor indicates that there is an ambition that people should use the museum locality for meetings with others. However, there is no clear direction for what the meetings are for, who is setting up the meetings and around what and based on who’s agenda the desired meetings should be formed. As a means to push this discussion further, i. e what the meeting-place metaphor means, how it is perceived and what it does to how learning environments are designed, the article will re-visit empirical data from a study of how Swedish museum workers verbally give form to what newness in museums may consist of in their museum. The examples from the empirical data is discussed from a theoretical perspective on place as socially produced and occurring as people move through. My contribution question if the meeting-place metaphor as it is conceived by museum practioners is contra-productive to the one single purpose that all museums strive for, to attract a lot of visitors. The central question I am pursuing is if this way of using the meeting-place metaphor is obsolete and if so, what new routes may be taken in finding other metaphors more in line with how the museum can fit into contemporary mediatise society.