How to Do Museum

Luise Reitstätter

Habilitation project

“How to Do Museum” is a habilitation project exploring experimental methods in museum research and exemplary museum work. With a passion for collaborative research and a curiosity for different methodological approaches, it unites various studies and joint projects. The major studies “Belvedere Before and After” use mobile eye tracking, subjective mapping and survey in order to investigate the effect of the rearrangement of the collection at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere. “Belvedere Visitracker” a micro-sociological study, examines the visiting behaviour of groups in the Secession room with standardized observation, short survey and social meaning mapping embedded in the Visitracker tool. Within the research project “Commons as a Way of Thinking and Innovation Strategy in Design” the experimental method of the exhibition interview walk was developed to make complex topics concretely discussable via a situative combination of expert interview, thinking aloud and object elicitation. The project “Stadt-Land-Kind” explores rural images of longing and the myth of a better life at the countryside working with the core method of intergenerational picture talks. The community-based research approach is also embedded in its extension “Stadt-Land-Bild” that establishes the exhibition as a collective site of research through Social Image Tagging and Analysis. Alongside all projects, the habilitation wishes to challenge institutional frameworks and to contribute to an inspiring museum practice with empirical work.