Museums and Public Interiority : Contributions from Interaction and Exhibit Design

This visual essay addresses the topic of public interiority from the disciplinary perspective of “interior design as a pluralistic practice” with different dimensions of focus on construction, interior design, communication design, and interaction design. It reports the experience of two different design studios, in which students were called to adopt this approach to designing interventions for local museums situated in marginal areas in the North of Italy. The results lead to three main types of action: reinforcing a feeling of public interiority through installations in the museums’ outer public spaces, thus involving a wider audience consisting of interested visitors as well as local residents and passersby; blurring the thresholds of interior-exterior space creating a seamless programmatic transition for enriching the quality of the museum visitors’ experience; offering participatory co-creation activities using cultural content available in the museums by facilitating interactive workshops, collaborative projects, and opportunities for visitors’ contributions, so that museums can draw diverse perspectives and experiences that enrich the cultural content and strengthen community bonds.