Slow Museum Movement
By: Dan Hartman
Tags: Museums, Historic House Museums, Slow Food, Glensheen

Museums and you are better at a slower pace.

Let’s start a new movement.

Background

In recent years there seem to be countless studies, books, documentaries and journal articles pointing to the importance of slowing down life. Following in that wave a new resurgence had developed in the health & wellness world especially activities like meditation and yoga.

In that same spirit in the food community, the slow food movement became a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Food

It promotes local food and traditional cooking. In a lot of ways it is a return to how we cooked a hundred years ago — local and slow.

Personal History

As a father of 4 children under 8 and who most describe as an early adopter of tech and extreme extrovert. I am now at 37 the epitome of someone who is looking to slow down.

The point of this article.

I have now been working in the museum field for over 15 years and honestly have been to some of the best in the world such as the Natural History Museum in New York to San Francisco MOMA. Today, I find myself avoiding any interactive exhibits (boring), any tech friendly exhibit like an Ipad display or kiosk (boring), and I find the standard short text labels not inspiring or interesting. The exhibits I find myself drawn to and inspired by are the classic displays. The diorama with a bench in front of it with a decent amount of exhibit text.

Now.. I know I am the exception. The majority of museum visitors don’t have time for this experience or desire it. And, we as museum leaders need to continue to try and hook the average visitor to pay attention more and frankly… just show up. For example, we hide stuffed leprechauns in the mansion… cough, cough. To be fair it is kinda of fun to look for them and Museums should NOT be boring or elitist places.

That said.

We can be again a place for higher learning.

We can be a place of grand curiosity and wonder.

We can do better at creating a lifelong love for the museum experience.

What are we doing?

Just like the food movement, we are slowing down now. By asking the visitor to sit down in a room and study all the greatness that is in our museum. Have the visitor see what we see as staff. All those amazing details, that you easily miss in a 1 minute look.

To help accompany that experience we have put chairs in every room and we have new museum chairs which you can carry with you to whatever place where you would like to stop and enjoy

Plus… we are creating a new book we call the “Field manual”. It will include a large percentage of what know about every room. And.. every year as we learn more, we will update the field manual. So every year there will be new ifo. Trust me… we have learned a lot lately. Also, we will sell the manual for about what it costs us to print — our guess is $1 to $3.

Lastly.. because we are a house museum on an estate.. we have some advantages over the Art Museums who are already practitioners of the slow museum movement. What is that advantage? The estate. Part of the experience is more than just learning, it is also seeing how it felt to live in this amazing built environment. This is why we have hammocks tied up all over the estate in the summer, this is why we have free snowshoe rentals in the winter and why we have relaxing Loll furniture placed throughout the estate.

Yes… most visitors will not go through Glensheen slowly.

That is fine.

We bet many do though. The ones that do will have a drastically different experience — we promise that.

So.

Come slow down with us and join the movement.