If we are not satisfied with the way museums work, why not make the museum we would love to visit and work for? Why not make it a creative platform? This is the question we asked when setting up Museomix.

We love museums, but sometimes it feels like museums don’t really love us back. They are filled with rules, shushing guards, admonitions against photography. They can give us a sense that we’re somewhere we don’t belong, where our rights and agency are diminished, where we are more limited than usual to do, or play, as we please.

Museum professionals – especially those working in digital and the web – are frequently frustrated: there are many new possibilities for mediation and the museum experience. They are discussed in conferences and prototyped in workshops. But when museum professionals try to bring these ideas back to their own museums, innovation can seem out of reach.

Museomix was born out of this frustration. It’s a way to bridge the gap between participatory web culture and institutional museum culture, between peer-to-peer logic and pyramidal organisation. Museomix wants to demonstrate that museums can work differently, and that a disruptive experience can initiate change throughout an organisation.