gemeinsam mit den Bürger*innen
“Together with the citizens”—so begins the mission statement of Berlin’s Tempelhof Field managing company.
This project explores, together with the citizens of Berlin, the uses, community connections, and personal meanings of Berlin, Germany’s largest open space: Tempelhof Field.
Designed and created as the bilingual Honors Thesis project of undergraduate Clara Feldman, this exhibit combines original research and multimedia interpretive strategies to bring the project to life.
On display April 26, 2024, and open to the general public, the exhibit invites visitors to contemplate the way they make meaning in their own spaces while exploring the unique community connections of Tempelhof Field.
Why a Museum Exhibit?
The decision to construct the dissemination product of this thesis as a small museum exhibit was derived from its inspiration and personal prioritization of creative research communication. Beyond personal inclination, multimedia learning environments are well supported methods of research communication.
Interpretive activism: “the process of advocating for and incorporating research based, visitor-centered exhibit design principles and strategies that facilitate active visitor participation in the interpretive process.”1
Departing from traditional knowledge transfer models, multisensory exhibits make use of physiological responses to audio, visual, and other sensory effects to arouse perceptual curiosity and create meaningful social interaction among visitors.2 Increasingly, these spaces prompt individual meaning-making through active engagement with the museum material.3
“Enhancers” of the exhibit, the components that make it multi-sensory and engaging, steer visitors towards successful learning experiences by fostering conversation and narrative creation.4 This creation of a narrative and telling of a story is crucial to visitors learning about others’ realities in context, and can prompt both empathetic and firsthand learning experiences.5
This exhibit is particularly designed for a university-level audience, but welcomes visitors of all ages and backgrounds. The language is crafted with the Thesis committee, university peers, and a general adult audience in mind, but meant to foster conversation and meaning-making among all who attend.6
Serving as a form of research translation, the exhibit’s goal is to increase the accessibility of information gathered in the research process by improving engagement with its findings. Through mixed media and physical interaction, we hope to engage the visitor no matter how they learn, providing an experience that’s as stimulating, as personal, and as unique as Tempelhof Field is.7
Translation
This project was carried out across cultures, with contributors of different languages and backgrounds. Research combined content and interviews in both English and German, making a bilingual exhibit that represents findings in both languages.
While the content is accessible to German and English speaking audiences, there are always limits to translation. Cultural specificity and words with no direct equivalent can be hard to translate.
Using my own contextual knowledge and experience in both languages, this exhibit aims to best represent meaning in both languages.
The German language has gendered nouns. For inclusivity, German speakers commonly use a technique of combining the two forms of words with an (*) or (:). To refer all citizens regardless of identity, this exhibit uses the gender inclusive form Bürger*innen.
A Note on Inspiration and Accessibility
After living in Berlin for 1 year, Tempelhof Field had become my favorite place in the city and a topic of great personal curiosity. This thesis project is an extension of that curiosity—using my knowledge of the German and English languages to expand on the cultural, political, and spatial conversations of the city.
Inspiration for this project’s form was derived from a museum exhibit I attended at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum in 2022. The exhibit, Berlin Global, contained an open call for proposals to supply a museum exhibit proposal to their Freiflächen (German for “open spaces”) prompt. “Open Spaces” immediately brought one thing to my mind: Berlin’s largest open space. Thus, the idea for a small museum exhibit about Tempelhof Field was born. Originally, the idea was to create a museum exhibit proposal fulfilling the requirements of the Freiflächen prompt; eventually, I decided to go further–creating an exhibit rather than just proposing it.
Accessibility of findings and research has remained at the forefront of this project’s development and creation. Both the museum form and the decision to create a bilingual end product reflect central priorities for accessibility of research communication.
The bilingual output of this project was imperative for multiple reasons. Firstly, exhibit components created in both German and English reflect the source material and the research process in both languages of origin. Secondly, this exhibit is intended to represent, and be accessible to, both German and English speaking audiences. By creating an exhibit that both German and English speakers can relate to, learn in, and experience on equal levels, research findings can not only reach more people, but reach the people involved in the project in their preferred language.
The form of the museum exhibit aims to provide a learning experience that people of many learning styles and age levels can interact with on their own terms. Not only is the museum format engaging, but more accessible to a wide variety of learners. Challenging typical barriers to research access, the exhibit form forgoes the traditional written format of a thesis in favor a product that reflects the makers’ own creative instincts for communication, and the viewers’ needs for an engaging experience.
At its center, the thesis project is self-referential. Fulfilling the “open spaces” prompt with Berlin’s largest open space as the subject matter, the circularity is a recurring theme. As the principal investigator, I wanted to emulate, or at least reference, the encompassing experience of stepping out onto the Tempelhof Field by creating an experience that allows one to feel the research through multiple sensory channels rather than strictly reading. The aim is that an exhibit allows visitors to connect with the field and with the findings through sight, sounds, touch, and space—nodding to the wide breadth of sensations available on the field.
Throughout the exhibit, I invite you to experience and engage with the material in whatever way suits your curiosity, and hope that the research inspires you to think about the spaces in your life that connect you to your community and to yourself.
With thanks,
Clara Feldman
- Deborah L. Perry, What Makes Learning Fun?: Principles for the Design of Intrinsically Motivating Museum Exhibits (Lanham: Altamira, 2012), 27 ↩︎
- Perry, What Makes Learning Fun?, 18, 98. ↩︎
- Perry, What Makes Learning Fun?, 12-13. ↩︎
- Perry, What Makes Learning Fun?, 35. ↩︎
- Jill Hohenstein and Theano Moussouri, Museum Learning: Theory and Research as Tools for Enhancing Practice (London: Routledge, 2018), 104. ↩︎
- Perry, What Makes Learning Fun?, 80. ↩︎
- Deborah Lupton, “Embodying Social Science Research – the Exhibition as a Form of Multi-Sensory Research Communication,” Impact of Social Sciences, August 23, 2023, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/07/12/embodying-social-science-research-the-exhibition-as-a-form-of-multi-sensory-research-communication/. ↩︎