Happy Museum focuses on the wellbeing of people, place and planet, exploring what constitutes societal progress. Our work is held within the wider frame of our interlinked environmental and social crises. These, in turn, are symptoms of a global system in crisis driven by a focus on growth as its predominant economic and social goal. Check out […]
Read More →In placing our focus on the wellbeing of people, place and planet, Happy Museum has from its outset explored what we value as a society, how we measure it and the particular contribution of culture. Merely counting visitor numbers tells us nothing of the quality of their experiences and, working with the principle ‘measure what […]
Read More →The dictionary definition of evaluation is ‘a judgement about the amount, number or value of something.’ At Happy Museum we value the wellbeing of people place and planet – first and foremost. Which sounds like a no brainer. But we live in global system where our collective driver of value, our primary measurement of societal […]
Read More →In May 2020 in the middle of lockdown we held a workshop hosted by Culture Declares programme The Offer in partnership with Common Cause Foundation Watch a RECORDING of the session Covid-19 changed our world in ways that we could never have imagined, and in doing so revealed many anomalies that have challenged us. In […]
Read More →Covid-19 has changed our world in ways that we could never have imagined. The pandemic has had a seismic impact on our world, its impacts exposing questions about what really matters and what our priorities are in the face of adversity, inequality and injustice. Common Cause Foundation (CCF) works with what they call the ‘perception gap’. […]
Read More →Apocryphally former Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, noted that it was ‘too early to say’. Likewise we have no real idea of what the world will look like in the aftermath of Covid-19. All societies effected by the lockdown will be aware of the limitations placed […]
Read More →‘The past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together’ Peter C Baker In mid-March Happy Museum launched a new project Museums and the Imperative for Change, […]
Read More →Happy Museum is excited to be a Commissioning Partner in the forthcoming Season for Change 2020 – a nationwide festival of artistic work engaging with the climate and ecological crisis, co-curated with partners across the UK and internationally and timed to coincide with COP 26 in Glasgow. Our partner project will explore museums and the […]
Read More →Read how research at Derby Museums informed work into the intrinsic wellbeing of objects. It was a friend of mine that tipped me off to Happy Museum Project and the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. This was in 2016, as I was underway with my research into humans, objects and wellness that would come to […]
Read More →‘Our communities are diverse and complicated. They are muddled and made up of individuals who share, disagree, find common cause or show indifference to each other. Some neighbourhoods are diverse, some are monocultural to the point of exclusion The result is an aversion to exploring difference and conflict, and a lack of understanding that communities […]
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