Dialogue and carnival: understanding visitors' engagement in design museums

Abstract

As the role of museums has shifted from collection-driven institutions to experience-centred environments, researchers in museology have felt a growing need to understand how visitors experience and engage in exhibitions. Defining design museums as sites of meaning-making through diverse interactions and co-creative experiences, we examine dialogue as a means of encouraging visitors' active participation and creative engagement in design exhibitions. This article presents a theoretical framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and carnival theory. Four kinds of dialogic engagement are identified to illustrate different ways of engagement and co-creation in design museums through the analysis of example exhibitions.