Fellows Feature: Clare Brown on inclusive design and community narratives
Clare Brown
Creative Director, Gallagher & Associates
Clare Brown is Creative Director at Gallagher & Associates, a global exhibition and experience design firm with offices in Washington DC, Portland, OR, New York, NY, and Singapore. With over twenty years of experience in design for cultural institutions, her work focuses on applying contemporary design practices to exhibitions and pushing innovation in human-centered design of museum experiences. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Experience Design at the University of The Arts, London, where she has a strong focus on integrated and collaborative design practice—especially through collaborative facilitation.
Clare is an experienced educator and speaker, previously the Head of Program for the Masters of Design in Exhibition Design at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University. She presents nationally and internationally about exhibition design and has published several articles including a chapter in the 2019 book, The Future of Museum and Gallery Design: Purpose, Process, Perception. In her spare time you can find Clare on flying trapeze, trampoline, or roller skating around Washington DC.
As part of the newly expanded Ethics Lab Fellows Program for the 2021-2022 academic year, Brown is collaborating with the team for community building, curricular development, and pedagogical experimentation.
What drew you to Ethics Lab?
I find Ethics Lab really fascinating specifically because it takes a design approach to think through and develop exercises around ethics for the Georgetown curriculum. I also really like the trifecta of design, ethics, and research because this combination opens up different ways of approaching and thinking about research. This last part is especially helpful in my own research around collaboration, creativity, and design process.
What’s something that you’re excited to be working on?
One thing that I’m excited about in my current job is working on whole museum and exhibition projects that really dig into contemporary issues of how to develop and present narratives in an inclusive way. The work that I do to lead design teams in developing whole new museums looks at the context within which that new museum is going to live. We help museum teams to consider how to be good civic entities within their communities and to present their collection, narratives, and stories through a more equitable process. It’s not museums telling communities about their histories, but instead bringing community perspectives in and even offering community members opportunities to lead the development of these narratives. This is not always easy for big institutions to wrestle with, so they look to us to help guide the process. This equitable and inclusive approach to museum design is especially complex on the several projects we are currently working on where an existing museum is being transformed with a new building and new interpretive strategies. This is a huge opportunity for older museums to connect better with their communities and to establish new relevance in contemporary culture.
What kinds of ethical questions are important to you in your work?
I really like questioning the status quo because I think that in big institutions—whether it’s educational institutions or huge museum complexes—the status quo is so far out of date with current practice, thinking, social movements, technology, and the ways in which people are actually living in the world. Something that pushes me forward is figuring out ways to challenge and evolve the status quo in ways that connect better with the real world, and there are a ton of ethical considerations that come with that. I think the biggest challenge in ethics right now for big institutions is around equity and inclusion, and they don’t necessarily know how to respond to it. It is important to me to dig into those issues and figure out how institutions can transform in ways that align with the ethics of the world around us.
“Are we telling a story that puts a community front and center? Are we creating experiences that contribute to inclusive transfer of knowledge across generations?”
One of your areas of research is “design for social good.” What does designing for social good mean to you? What might it look like?
“Design for social good” is a whole bunch of different things all falling under this one category, but one of the considerations is that we don’t design at people, we design with people. There is a real, problematic history of designing at people, and a lot of folks still don’t know how to design with people. So, “design for social good” in my mind is taking a human-centered design approach to understanding what the challenge and opportunities are, and to develop solutions in concert with those affected by the challenge—end users, community members, museum visitors.
When I work in museums and exhibition design, I work with the curators and try to think about what our motivation for creating these experiences is: Is it for our own gratification as historians or scientists or art collectors? Is it for our ability to impress our peers? Is it a way for us to get more money for our institution? Or is it actually for the betterment of the world or community? Are we telling a story that puts a community front and center? Are we creating experiences that contribute to inclusive transfer of knowledge across generations?
“Design for social good” is about lifting up the end user or the community surrounding the design rather than lifting up the scholar or the designer or the product itself.
What’s inspiring you right now?
I roller skate—I really needed an escape from everything, and I found this whole world of roller skating that is very diverse and global and fun. There is awesome music, individual excellence, inspiration from amazing people all over the world. It’s a personal physical challenge that I totally embraced during the past two years—when I needed to get out of my head and do something physical. Although I do follow a few men who do it, the majority of the people I follow are strong, rock-star women of all backgrounds. It makes me so happy.