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 administration, research and communication?

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 administration, research and communication? That is the question that Tingene's method will help to answer. As the title suggests, the hypothesis for the project is that the things, the museum objects, play a key role in making this happen. The hypothesis is that by taking the things as a starting point, and letting the things control who you involve and how you involve them, it is possible to work with the museum's core tasks while at the same time opening up for the inclusion of other groups in the work.

The method of things has a main focus on the role of museums in society, and is based on Bruno Latour's theories which 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 they can gather from arguments and actors 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 background - then political participation and the way in which political matters are established can change radically.

The main insights that the Things Method is based on are that things are relational and can be understood as both object and assembly. A thing can be a very concrete object, a physical object that is on the magazine. 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 the museums take their objects and collections as a starting point, and ask who can be involved in the conversation about which stories to tell, other stories and people who would otherwise not have been heard can emerge. The method thus facilitates a different representation of objects and is an alternative to the museums alone choosing which stories to tell.

The aim of the project is to contribute to developing new working methods which, based on the museum's objects and collections, can respond to the real challenges museum staff face in their everyday work when they have to combine user participation, research, management and communication.

The three specific issues the project examines 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 at museums?

The method of things 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 Tingene's method in Museumsnytt.

The project is supported by the Norwegian Cultural Council's social role program (2015-2017) and the result of the project must have relevance for 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. )