Daniel is a designer and facilitator based in Madrid who creates and leads cultural and social innovation processes for public institutions such as museums, universities and municipalities. Since early 2023, he has led a transformation lab called La Batidora (“the Blender”) for the national Museum of Decorative Arts that explores how museum audiences can shape its future as a design museum.
When Daniel joined CA, he and his team were experimenting with different ways of engaging museum audiences, including both people already interested in the museum and new people with different backgrounds and interests. Within a few months, he was testing new methods introduced through CA, such as participatory photography. As La Batidora progressed, CA gave him peer exchange and reflection opportunities to consider key issues such as the engagement of diverse groups and the sustainability of public engagement in the museum’s development.
Daniel is a thinker who describes himself as intellectually promiscuous – interested in many different ideas, ranging from e.g. systems thinking to ethical and sustainable entrepreneurship, social impact, gamification, exploration of futures and community building. He is also a doer, part of several collaborative networks in the culture and innovation spheres of Madrid/Spain, and one of the coordinators of AIDI (“Association for Research, Design, and Innovation” in Spanish), an open community around culture, education and technology.
In his work, he creates citizen participation formats, facilitating methodologies and designing training programs for organisations which seek to bring about public (and positive) impact. Daniel says: This basically means I get paid for thinking, I’m good at transforming ideas into plans, and at making things happen.
Spain’s national Museum of Decorative Arts (MNAD) hired Daniel to make their transformation as a museum more participatory. This meant designing and leading processes to engage museum audiences in shaping the museum’s future and putting in place structures that would enable groups to continually transform the museum. The MNAD was eager to strengthen the participation of existing audiences and also to attract new audiences. Daniel’s challenge was to give these groups meaningful roles in the process and facilitate their interactions as well as their potentially divergent views. He said: This project is a chance to build a cultural community concerned about social impact, but also to make pressure as a lobby, so public administrations can speed up strategic changes in relation with museums.
Daniel calls La Batidora an experimental sandbox for different innovation methodologies, a place to test which ones fit the MNAD context best. This exploratory and action-oriented element is fundamental to the project: La Batidora will serve as a safe space for members to experiment, learn and share, and decide how they want to have agency on their environments.
Since the MNAD serves an extremely broad range of audiences – spanning all residents across Spain – Daniel and the museum team had to prioritise which groups to involve. They focused on:
Daniel explained the logic: [We want to engage] people who already know the Museum and people who don’t know it yet but will love it for sure. Sharing a common sensibility for culture and arts as a means for social transformation. They all need to dwell in public spaces, co-create, express their identity, show a strong social commitment and political activism. However, each comes from a different background: most of them from humanistic and artistic high-education, but others from lower education and non-formal studies.
A third collective emerged: people who don’t know about arts, activism or social innovation, maybe even people who don’t necessarily enjoy the museum. However, the MNAD is able to redefine their relationship to culture institutions in general, by offering the museum not as an elitist culture consumption, but as a safe space for them. Actually, this is the most interesting interaction for us to explore, in order to find how the museum can be understood as a conversation generator, as a mental health reliever, or even as a sandbox.
Daniel and his team designed a process along four thematic axes: democracy, critical thinking, identity and sustainability. Each axis consisted of live exploration, virtual sessions of reflection, co-creation workshops, ideas gathering and proposing, as well as continuous documentation of the process to be able to analyse and receive feedback on each step.
They then began experimenting with different engagement methods. Early on, he and his team organised an online virtual tour of part of the museum and facilitated two virtual sessions as well as two offline workshops at the museum. They found that the virtual sessions draw fewer people than the offline sessions in the museum.
Subsequently, inspired by CA’s session with a leading Photovoice expert, Daniel decided to implement a very hands-on session: a participatory photography workshop. The objective was to hold a guided tour within the museum’s warehouses through a different lens. His team provided five disposable cameras to participants, who took photos of the items which resonated most with their memories and feelings and then reflected over the photos. Afterward, all the photos were hung in a mural to initiate discussion.
Another exploratory method used art to establish a connection between the museum and new audiences. Daniel explained: We invited “Las Transbordadoras” (trans-knitters), a collective of queer homeless people who live in a monastery in a village close to Madrid, to one of the sessions. They, along with the classic La Batidora community, started to sew a one-hundred-meter-long blanket, while chatting, singing and having a meal. It was a very beautiful session, different from the former ones. This led to this new spin-off project from La Batidora, consisting of meeting in different significant places to sew together during one year, with the objective of completing the full blanket and then giving it to the museum.
Alongside La Batidora’s main aim – engaging audiences in the transformation process – the lab has a secondary, far-reaching aim: to put in place structures and groups for sustained public engagement in the museum’s development. To encourage this ‘roles inheritance’, as the project progressed Daniel and his team gave the engaged groups more responsibility for the process and outcomes. Our plan for 2024 (third axis: Identity) is not strictly to repeat the same structure from the two previous axes, but consulting the current community to co-create third axis activities (dates, formats, content, guests…). If this works, axis 4 (Sustainability) will be not only consulted but led by some community members. This is important because the project has to be kept alive after we (AIDI) leave at the end of 2024.
In this stage, Daniel and his team also decided to experiment with ‘loosening the reigns’ and diversifying the leadership by hiring artist Vanesa Peña to lead the axis. This made evident the different roles a facilitator may take depending on their background, their artistic approach and their previous relation to the community. We clearly turned the third axis into a brand new experimental sandbox, and other kind of outcomes emerged.
In axis 4: Sustainability, Daniel and his team divided the participants into three thematic groups and tasked them with researching linkages between sustainability and art on their own. Daniel added: We are facilitating each of the three groups with different intensities to learn about self-management and role-playing dynamics. They refocused on the “loyal” audience who came throughout all the process. This is important because, in spite of always looking for new audience, they are THE ONES who may take the lead when the project concludes.
As the 2-year process wound down, Daniel considered what he saw as the key accomplishments.
Successes:
Unexpected assets:
Daniel reflected on what he and his team had learned about engaging the 3 target audiences:
The involvement of the community of knitters, the Las Transbordadoras collective, was successful in creating a warm atmosphere at a specific workshop, but Daniel was aware that making this group a solid part of the museum community would require much more than just one interaction: The issue here is those people are not in the “cultural circuit” and are not prone to come back by themselves individually. They are an actual family, and only will come back if we invite them together and prepare a particular logistic arrangement. Daniel and his team realized that the original hope of involving other communities less connected to the MNAD in meaningful and sustainable ways would be a much more complex and long-term undertaking.
Daniel summed up: This doesn’t mean the museum will give up with the work with these audiences, just they have to have separated lines of audience mediation.
Daniel also realized a number of other lessons for future work:
For the last few months of the project, Daniel planned several final steps:
Watch a video about Daniel’s project.
