@phdthesis{discovery10006501,
            note = {Leaves 159-171 are appendices.},
            year = {2011},
           title = {The productive eye : conceptualising learning in the Design Museum},
          school = {Institute of Education, University of London},
        abstract = {ABSTRACT
My thesis explores accounts of learning about design enabled through visits to
exhibitions at the Design Museum, London, and drawn from purposive samples of
adult visitors and exhibition curators. The research adopts a qualitative, multiple
method case study strategy, which takes the Design Museum as its local context
and consists of a small-scale museum visitor survey, a visitor research group, and
semi-structured interviews with exhibition curators. The literature called upon is
from the fields of museum studies and museum education; design history. design
culture and design studies; visitor studies and learning theory. Through this review
I develop a framework for data analysis which sets out a threefold notion of the
museum concept as Active, Distinctive and Engaging. Framed by a critique of
generic approaches to, and generalising tendencies about, learning in the museum,
my thesis then explores the extent to which learning at the Design Museum is
revealed as distinctive to its local context. These characteristics inform a
conceptualisation of learning which I coin as the Productive Eye. The Productive
Eye has two significant features. It is grounded in the specificity of the discipline
of design and its concomitant history of exhibition design. Furthermore, it reveals a
complementarity between visitor experiences, learning and curatorial practice.
Such findings are atypical within debates concerning intel.Jectual access to the
museum and within large-scale visitor studies, which more often reveal disjunctions
between visitor and curatorial constituencies. Through providing an integrated,
holistic account of theory and practice this study contributes both to professional
practice at the Design Museum and to scholarship in the field of museum
education. In conclusion, I pose the question as to whether there might be
distinctive characteristics to visitor learning in other typologically specific
museums, with commensurate implications for traditional understandings of
museum professionalism in learning and curating.},
             url = {http://ethos.bl.uk/ProcessSearch.do?query=534804},
          author = {Charman, Helen}
}