The Method of Things is a three-year research project to develop a method for museum work. How can museums combine the desire for openness and inclusion with their core activities of management, research and dissemination?

The Things Method is a three-year research project to develop a method for museum work. How can museums combine the desire for openness and inclusion with their core activities of management, research and dissemination? That is the question that The Things Method aims to help answer. As the title suggests, the hypothesis for the project is that things, museum objects, play a key role in achieving this. The hypothesis is that by taking things as a starting point, and letting things control who you involve and how you involve them, it is possible to work with the museum's core tasks while also allowing for the inclusion of other groups in the work.

The method of things focuses mainly on the role of museums in society, and is based on Bruno Latour's theories that he explored in the exhibition Making things public. Latour wanted to explore how the exercise of democracy could be done completely differently by insisting on starting from things and materiality – as a contrast to limited political matters. Through the focus on things and on what arguments and actors they can gather around them, the exhibition demonstrated a radically different way of thinking about assembly and representation. The exhibition showed that if we start from things, examine who and what the things represent and create assemblies on that basis – then political participation and the way political matters are established can be radically changed.

The main insights on which the Things method is based are that things are relational and can be understood as both objects and assemblages. A thing can be a very concrete object, a physical object that is on display. At the same time, every object is related to a number of other actors who, throughout history or in the present, have helped to give meaning to the object. If museums take their objects and collections as a starting point and ask who can be involved in the conversation about which stories should be told, other stories and people that would not otherwise be heard can emerge. The method thus facilitates a different representation of objects and is an alternative to museums alone choosing which stories should be told.

The project aims to contribute to developing new working methods that, based on the museums' objects and collections, can respond to the real challenges that museum employees encounter in their everyday work when they have to combine user participation, research, management and dissemination.

The three specific issues the project investigates are therefore:

1. What does it mean to think that things are relational?
2. How can taking things as a starting point make the museum open up to new people and new perspectives?
3. How can taking things as a starting point contribute to the development of new methods for interdisciplinary collaboration in museums?

The Thing Method is a collaborative project between the Oslo Museum , the Museum of Cultural History and The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology . The issues are explored through various sub-projects at these institutions.
The project will be continuously disseminated on this website www.tingenesmetode.no and the results will be presented in various publications and at conferences.

Read more about the Thingenes method in Museumsnytt.

The project is supported by the Arts Council of Norway's Social Role Program (2015-2017) and the results of the project will be relevant to the entire museum sector.

Project manager Henrik Treimo (This email address is protected from programs that collect email addresses. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Project coordinator Hege Huseby (This email address is protected from programs that collect email addresses. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )