Empathy is not just a museum’s means to generate an emotional response in our visitors, but an ethical basis on which we can build our institutions. If the mission of the museum is to represent, exhibit, and convey meaningful and relevant objects and narratives from and to the community, then it needs to develop its capability for empathy.
I have worked for private and public cultural institutions in Mexico for more than ten years. While developing educational material content for a couple of museums, I realized that even before planning and designing, we have to figure out: where we are standing, what we are aiming to do, and the fact that it is not only about visitor studies but about self-assessment. This realization has inspired me to study human centered design for museums, an approach that isn’t just about creating solutions but also entails the awareness of the visitors’/users’ desires, needs, and notions about the museum itself.
Empathetic practices require the understanding of how and why others are feeling and thinking what they do. There’s also another component which I think is crucial for museum advancement; Jamil Zaki and Kevin Ochsner, in the paper “The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise” (2012), suggest that this human ability has a social component that moves the emotional and cognitive empathy towards action.
But before acting on our research findings or even getting to know our visitors, the first step to make empathy a habit in museum practice is to know ourselves, to define our mission, passion, and purpose as well as our institutions’. This is the standpoint from where The Empathetic Museum works, adding up to the ethics of the social and political role of the museum on issues such as inclusion, representation, privilege, discrimination, among others; coming from what most people consider a minority–a Latina in the US–they are all too familiar to me.
The Empathetic Museum Maturity Model can help us define what we are doing and what we need to embrace to connect more with our community while supporting our staff.
Museum practice is in strong need of a mindful transformation. For museums to continue being useful and valuable to their users–staff and visitors–and communities, they need to work from that civic and social stance that acts on it. Instead of doing isolated and temporary exercises, we have to proceed from a more systemic perspective in which the use of the museum means something lasting. To achieve this, empathy is key, and the Maturity Model is a straightforward tool to assess how far we are from that goal.
When I moved to Seattle a few years ago, I found so many useful resources from the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, amazing readings, papers and tools, but none of them were available in Spanish. I made one of my duties to track those materials and report them to my colleagues in Mexico and other Latin countries; then we started so many conversations about concerns about how we display our work: How to socialize our knowledge and experience? How to grow the network of people working towards the same goal? Is there someone who has been working on the same issues we’ve been working on?
It is essential to have a Spanish version of the Maturity Model, so we can reach out to our Spanish speaking colleagues who deal with issues regarding exclusion, racism, bureaucracy, in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Spain, the Latin community in US, and the museum professionals who are in the quest to build more responsive, timely and empathetic museums.
*To request a copy of The Empathetic Museum in English or Spanish please contact us using our webform or via email.