Dear Izabela, Zoi and Tom,
Thank you for your paper. I’m really interested in your methodology, of interviewing contemporary curators and designers about their innovations. I wondered how you had tackled the inevitable limits of this source material in your work? I’ve found in my own research that contemporary curators and designers sometimes either 1) overstate their innovations in a bid to emphasise their contributions to the sector, or because they are unaware of practices that were going on before their time, or 2) underplay their contributions - sometimes this is because of modesty, and other times it is because they are working within and conditioned by a discourse and practice that hasn’t yet acknowledged those historic innovations, and so through the memory process deny and forget their own innovations. It’s so complicated, and I wondered how you managed these considerations in creating your timeline. Thanks again.
Dear Claire,
Thank you for this question. Indeed, the creators don't really have an objective outlook on their work. That's why we didn't really frame those interviews around "newness" or "innovation". I think this was important, because quite a few of them had a view that every single exhibition should be immersive (on a storytelling level), so they didn't see "immersion" as anything particularly new.
Therefore, we were rather going for more "tangible" metrics - like the changes in the creative process, new roles in the team (internal and external) and team dynamics in the creative/development process. And of course comparison with some existing literature on those topics was helpful here.
Best,
Izabela
