Community Co-Creation of Museum Exhibitions

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the process of community co-created science communication in the form of a museum exhibition. It includes a brief review of the theory of co-creation and its application from a variety of disciplines and then describes my experiential implementation of two different co-creation projects. These projects are linked in that one preceded and informed the other, but they also exist with separate aims to investigate a number of aspects of the practice of co-creation. My evaluation of these experimental projects comprises a large part of two separate chapters in this thesis. I also describe the process of implementing the exhibitions in the methods section of these chapters and document the final works with image collections (both as figures within the chapters and within appendices). These descriptions of the process, as well as the image collections, collectively document the creative component of my masters in science communication. Overall, my thesis demonstrated how much the process and outcome of co-creation can vary between projects, and highlighted both the positive (e.g. encouragement of critical thinking in participants) and persisting challenges (e.g. definition of co-creation itself, and the expected roles of participants) of co-creation in the production of museum exhibitions.