The happy museum

A strong idea emerging from the first UN Conference on Happiness is that global thinking around wellbeing is increasingly being linked to ideas around sustainability. As attendee Dr Mark Williamson of Action for Happiness identifies, “Curbing our excess consumption is no longer driven by a moralising demand to save the planet, but by a recognition that it doesn’t actually contribute to the growth in wellbeing that everyone wants.”

The link between sustainability and wellbeing is core to the Happy Museum project. Launched in 2011, with a paper – A Tale of How it Turned Out Alright – co-written by nef (New Economics Foundation) and leading museum commentators, and arguing that cultural institutions have innate qualities which can inspire a re-imagined society; one which values co-operation and stewardship of our surroundings as much as it does economic wellbeing.

The paper concludes with a ‘Manifesto for Well Being’ – a set of eight principles which are a starting point for creative inquiry. They examine how cultural institutions might cement the linkage between wellbeing and environmental sustainability, how they might pursue more mutual relationships within civic society, and how they might better articulate the possibilities of a good life to help people in the transition low-carbon world.

In order to test the Happy Museum proposition we commissioned six museums to carry out a variety of projects. Amongst them the Lighbox, a museum and gallery in Woking which is exploring the museum as a healing environment. A group of participants with mental health problems are taking control of every aspect of a 15-month project culminating in the curation of an exhibition of major 20th Century landscapes combined with their own artistic responses to those works. Meanwhile in The Lambeth Workhouse (once home to Charlie Chaplin) the volunteer run Cinema Museum’s project is inviting local people to explore the museum’s international collection of cinema memorabilia to become ‘community curators’. The Story Museum Oxford is working with psychologists and wellbeing experts to influence designers and architects as they engineer their new capital developments.

At the core of the project is measurement and evaluation of culture and wellbeing. Dr Dave O’Brien, who has written extensively on cultural value, notes that despite an acknowledgement of the positive effects cultural activity has on wellbeing, hard evidence upon which to base policy is not robust. What is needed is evaluation that is about genuine learning and not advocacy, which values impact rather than growth. For example the work on ‘values and frames’ emerging from Common Cause, a coalition of environmental and social justice NGOs and psychologists seeking to achieve the holy grail of behavioural change through campaigns based on shared values.

The Happy Museum recognises that many cultural institutions already appreciate their position in the community and many combine this with stewardship, learning and a focus on greater participation. What the project is trying to do is show that the context is now different. Awareness of environmental change, pressures on the planet’s finite resources and understanding that a good, happy society need not set economic growth as its most meaningful measure, offers a chance to re-imagine the purpose of our institutions – as connectors, viewing people not as audiences but as collaborators, not as beneficiaries but citizens.