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 […]

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The peer learning programme builds on the particular power of museums to draw on past stories of rapid transition and transformation; and inspire museums and their communities to shape new stories and actions to address the climate and ecological emergency.  How have people adapted and innovated in the past to meet profound social and existential […]

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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 […]

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About No Going Back In this Happy Museum programme, we seek to build on the particular power of museums to draw on past stories of rapid transition and transformation; and to inspire museums and their communities to shape new stories and actions to address the climate and ecological emergency: How have people adapted and innovated […]

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In this session we explored how museums can connect with their communities to respond to the climate emergency with immediacy, reciprocity, creativity and fun – using shared and pop up spaces as places for encounter and connection. We investigated what might be gained by connecting the power of top down civic delivery with the energy […]

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“To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In this session we explored the potential of museums […]

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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 […]

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Our greatest need today is to see life as whole, to see its many sides in their proper relations; but we must have a practical as well as a philosophical interest in such an integrated view of life. Patrick Geddes In this session we were invited to explore bioregioning – defined as ‘a land and […]

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Society has changed dramatically. Lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests have blown open any sense of ‘normal’. Now, as museums, galleries and heritage organisations struggle with planning for reopening, the Happy Museum Project invites you to think about how you and your organisation might play its part in making lasting changes. As you emerge from […]

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