Ten Paths toward a Flourishing Museum

How can we move towards the flourishing museum, to enable museums as places of joy, hope, empathy and abundance? This is constantly at the top of my mind lately. And I know we can do this, we just need direction, guidance, and maybe a smoothed path to help us go forward—something to point to that says, here, this is a way. This is what I’ve been working on for about two years. I’ve had ups and downs, some acceptances, some rejections. It’s all good.

This week I had a breakthrough of sorts with my positive museology framework development process. I am continually working out how the framework can function but it has, honestly, given me the most trouble. I think it might be that I’m working it backwards. I need to look at all the parts before deciding what the parts are. Make sense? Clear as mud? At the same time, I am working on a journal article, temporarily titled, the Infecting Museums with Joy: 10 Ways, due this summer. The contents of this article have sort of paralleled some of the larger pieces I am trying write outlining the Positive Museology framework. For about two months now I have grappled with how to sort out the Ways. Drawing from the immense pool of sources found in both the positive disciplines and in contemplative studies--not to mention the work from museum studies--distilling them down into bite-sized, useful, and appropriate pieces is not easy, especially because, a) I am impatient and excited, and b) I have less time to write now that I am a director of a program. But after grappling specifically with the Ways article and also trying to write the PM chapter, I finally made a preliminary decision to move forward with these topics as the "ways"  or the "paths" (this is the breakthrough):

1. Start with optimism (positivity, heliotropic effect, growth mindset, energy sources, positive contagion)
2. Facilitate physiological effects (body, well-being, physical health)
3. Create high-quality connections (HQC, prosocial behavior)
4. Focus on character strengths and virtues (VIA, Clifton Strengths-finder, virtuousness)
5. Cultivate compassion (empathy, kindness, love)
6. Give thanks (gratitude)
7. Be open (curiosity, fluidity, open work, experimentation)
8. Be playful (fun, joy, humor, delight)
9. Facilitate transformation (flow, numinous, inspiration, motivation)
10. Provide hope (forgiveness, resilience)

Each of these are packed with so much research and writing, such good things, all out there and ready for us to stitch together in a way that can help us work intentionally toward them in our museums. I'm tackling each one in turn, trying to write up a nice synthesis that will be easy to digest and hopefully become a kind of toolbox for the field. That's my hope at least. Let's see if we can get there. I'll be optimistic about it, I promise.