FEATURE
Inspiring Hope, Innovating Change:
Trends in Museum Interpretation Surrounding Sustainability
How can museums communicate authentically about sustainability and the dangers of climate change, while balancing a hopeful future and driving audiences to make change? As humanity faces the consequences of accelerating climate change, every museum or cultural site around the world must engage with sustainability topics. In this context, museums, galleries, parks, gardens, and heritage sites are successfully experimenting with diverse interpretive strategies to educate their visitors about our changing planet, prompt discussion, and inspire action. Three prominent trends in sustainability messaging stand out and are worthy of further exploration: interactivity, the creation of green museums, and using the concept of hope to inspire action.
As Interpretive Strategists with Haley Sharpe, a global creative consultancy specializing in exhibit design, planning, and placemaking, we are lucky to observe and contribute to the latest trends in sustainability interpretation emerging in the cultural sector. Drawing on our experience, and a variety of examples from around the world, we will explore some of these trends to better understand the strategies that cultural sites are using to educate and inspire their audiences about sustainability.
Inspiring Interactivity
Interactivity, whether through immersion and direct interaction with natural environments, or through technology-based media interaction, is an effective means of promoting learning about sustainability among visitors. Immersive natural environments present a form of interactive learning that can show visitors directly what is at stake in the fight against climate change, and provide authentic, natural experiences to foster interest in conservation. Zoos, botanic gardens, and outdoor museum experiences allow their audiences to interact with the realities of the natural world and learn through interaction with the environment.
When the environment is allowed to speak for itself, interpretation delivered through minimal labels and guided programming can lend support by drawing connections, highlighting key views, or exploring complex concepts. Education through immersion can be exemplified by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (ASDM) in Tucson, Arizona, which focuses on providing their visitors with an authentic desert experience to foster interest in conservation. Desert-bathing (allowing oneself to be surrounded by the natural life of the desert, as experienced by our Haley Sharpe team during a recent visit) is central to the ASDM’s interpretive strategy. It allows the audience to interact with the landscape with minimal direction, fully immersing them in the desert environment in a safe, enjoyable way. This immersive approach organically nurtures a love for the desert and inspires visitors to protect it in whatever ways they can.
Other museums choose to integrate creative technology-based interactives to inspire their visitors and to explore messaging around sustainability. Many of these interactives allow audiences to learn through play to metabolize interpretive messages in an enjoyable way. While it depends on the interactive approach, it is possible to tackle messaging around personal responsibility – a concept that can be difficult to emphasize in a meaningful way. Recently, we undertook a project in the United Arab Emirates, collaborating with our client to develop an exhibit focused on energy consumption. One of the exhibit interactives invited visitors to move and dance to create kinetic energy. That energy was then mapped and translated through technology into a visual art piece, highlighting visitors’ direct impact and resulting agency to make change. Through using a variety of techniques, such as deep immersion and high-tech solutions, museums can educate their audiences about sustainability in fun and engaging ways.
Interpreters at Haley Sharpe participate in the ASDM’s desert-bathing experience. Photo by Megan Mahon.
Interpretive panels at the ASDM. Along the Desert Loop Trail, which comprises the bulk of their desert bathing experience, small textual panels gently point out places of interest. Photo by Haley Sharpe Design.
Interpreting Green Architecture
While striving to provide interpretive messages that promote sustainability, many museums and cultural sites are also putting an emphasis on sustainable design: where the architecture of the museum itself becomes an exhibit. Green museums incorporate sustainability into their architecture, facilities, and operations. Their construction provides an invaluable opportunity to show audiences the applicable realities of sustainable design. When interpretive focus is placed on the choices that emphasize local materials, water-saving infrastructure, and sustainable architecture, visitors can see sustainability in action, rather than simply reading about it on a panel.
One example of this is the Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) in Michigan, designed by Munkenbeck + Marshall and wHY Architecture. It became the world’s first LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold-certified art museum complex when it was completed in 2008. The building features such sustainability-focused hallmarks as a heat recovery ventilator, CO2 sensors, and on-site grey water reuse. Through carefully planned design, the GRAM integrated its architecture with its collections and interpretive strategy, turning the whole museum into a monument to sustainability. Many other museums followed the GRAM’s lead, and now visitors can wander the halls of these environmentally responsible museums and consider what is possible when museums put preservation and conservation first.
Interpretive signage at Avondale Forest Park, made using sustainable materials. Photo by Haley Sharpe Design.
Integrating storytelling about the museum building itself into overall interpretive messaging has the potential to both reduce environmental impact and educate visitors about sustainable building choices. Using interactives and tactiles, museums can encourage the visitor to engage directly with the museum itself and learn about the many ways that local materials can be used to create a sustainable future for the museum. In Ireland, we’ve partnered with Coillte, Ireland’s largest forester and provider of outdoor recreation, to develop the visitor experience and interpretation of Avondale House and Forest Park using green perspectives and materials. The new buildings by von Dijk Architects are the first Irish structures to use the engineered wood product glulam, made from local and sustainably grown Irish timber. Using their sustainable design as a centrepiece, Coillte and Haley Sharpe have created engaging exhibits that highlight wood products as alternative building materials to concrete and steel. By combining interpretation and architecture, visitors can learn in both the real and abstract about sustainable building choices.
Hope for the Future
Interpretation that boosts visitors’ confidence in a brighter future and encourages them to work to make this future a reality can be used to combat the narratives of doom and gloom surrounding the future of our planet. Using concepts of hope and inspiration in sustainability messaging can help to both educate visitors about direct actions they can take to promote sustainability initiatives, and to fight climate anxiety—an affliction on the rise among populations across the world.
In the Middle East, the size and scope of many of the new museums and attractions lend themselves to high-impact intervention, eliciting awe and inspiration among visitors. Commissioned art installations are popular in these environments, to help appeal to visitors on a more emotional level than would be reached by a recitation of facts and statistics. Showcasing individual creativity and innovation is shown to evoke feelings of hope and wonder, akin to the experience of being in nature. Such high-impact, large-scale installations can be balanced with more intimate personal experiences. A recent project by Haley Sharpe in Abu Dhabi takes the visitor on a journey inward from global, to local, to individual. Beginning with the urgency of the global challenge of the climate crisis, visitors are galvanized by the progress happening locally, and are empowered to act on an individual level, ultimately leaving the experience with a sense of hope for the future.
The Northern Biome of the Oman Botanic Gardens showcases the habitats and practices of the Northern Mountains, including agricultural terraces. Photo by Haley Sharpe Design.
The Central Garden at OBG features Omani native plants, thriving in their natural environment. The OBG provides an example of how greenery can thrive even in arid conditions. Photo by Haley Sharpe Design.
To instill inspiration in their visitors, many museums also explore examples of human resourcefulness and ingenuity that have created sustainable ways of life. Illustrating the ways that climate-related challenges have been overcome in the past can be a source of inspiration for visitors today, and model best practices for the future. The Oman Botanic Garden (OBG) serves as a powerful example of how museums can use exhibits to inspire hope and creativity in addressing climate-related challenges.
By showcasing the resourcefulness of native Omani plants and the historical practices of the Omani people, OBG offers an immersive experience that highlights resilience in the face of environmental adversity. This approach emphasizes how people can live sustainably in harsh conditions, offering a valuable lesson for contemporary audiences concerned with climate change.
Instead of relying on overt sustainability messaging, OBG’s strategy of showing how plants have adapted to arid environments, combined with traditional water conservation techniques, gently guides visitors to reflect on sustainable practices. The inclusion of artistic installations and audiovisual elements makes the experience both educational and emotionally engaging, creating a sense of connection between visitors and the environment. By drawing on past ingenuity, institutions like OBG can help foster a sense of hope and agency in visitors, countering feelings of helplessness in the face of climate change.
In North America, exhibits that focus on innovations in climate change research and development and efforts to combat and mitigate its effects also convey messages of hope and action to their visitors. Many museums are bringing visitors face-to-face with stories of real changemakers who are already making a difference in the fight for the environment. Institutions, from history to art museums, can develop interpretive strategies that explore the ways that the environment has been harmed, in whatever way is most relevant to their mandate. After illustrating the scale of the problem, discussing today’s innovators, who are investing in sustainability to help mitigate the effects of climate change within their specific industries, lends balance to otherwise grim messaging. Introducing visitors to the real people making change, and learning their stories, gives them a face with which to identify, and allows them to imagine the ways that they might replicate these innovators’ efforts. This strategy brings home the urgency of the issue, before reminding visitors that there are many ways the climate crisis may be fought and averted. Using the concept of hope in myriad ways, cultural sites can galvanize their visitors to action.
Conclusion
The examples explored here demonstrate that, amid the dangers and warnings of the climate crisis, museums and cultural sites are taking on increased responsibility to include discussions of sustainability in their interpretive messaging. Whether through immersion in natural environments, technology-based interactives, green building, or threads of hope, cultural sites can find inspiration in these interpretive trends to consider how they might integrate sustainability messaging into their visitor experience and interpretation. With the backing of their communities, museums can create interpretive messaging that inspires their audiences, and that drives them to fight climate change and push for sustainability at individual, local, and global levels.
