The Center for the Future of Museums Blog presents a hopeful 14 January 2014 post Too Fast to Go Slow outlining a project that overloaded museum workers might want to follow & apply results to their own working lives.
The post also suggests that museum visitors too would benefit substantially from “slow movement” experience design.
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is working on a Museum Innovation Lab Grant from MetLife to study what it would look like for a museum & its workers to slow down.
We hypothesize that a slower approach to museum practices could dramatically increase JAHHM’s intrinsic value by producing a) more meaningful visitor experiences and community partnerships and b) increased reflection and evaluation of the museum’s work, ultimately resulting in a more sustainable and effective institution.
This is to say nothing about improving the quality of working life for paid & volunteer museum staff members.
In a work environment where too many are “time poor,” “task saturated,” & stressed as a result, keeping up with the results of this work on museum innovation may be a worthwhile investment of our own scarce time resources.
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.” –Milan Kundera
Solving Task Saturation for Museum Workers 