Chen, Xijing
(2025)
Enactive engagement: visitor learning in an industrial heritage museum [a case study of Derby ‘Museum of Making’].
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Since the 1970s, many industrial buildings in the United Kingdom have been remodelled as museums, often following a uniform ‘light touch’ design philosophy. The Museum of Making in Derby, however, represents a transitional model that bridges traditional industrial features with contemporary design. It adopts a novel approach to display, presenting objects in an archive-like setting, while also engaging visitors in the hands-on experience of craft techniques. It appears to mark a significant milestone in the evolution of industrial museum practice, as suggested by its shortlisting for the Art Fund’s 2022 Museum of the Year Award.
This study investigates the reactivation of the Derby Silk Mill as the Museum of Making, assessing its success in relation to its own stated ambitions, from the perspective of museum learning experience, exploring how its architecture functions as a key element in facilitating knowledge transmission. It focuses on themes of adaptive reuse, spatial characteristics, and museum communication to examine enactive engagement in relation to the wider context of industrial museums in the UK. The research draws on historical typologies, such as the Cabinet of Curiosities, while critically engaging with the Tate Modern Director Nicholas Serota’s notion of the modern museum as a ‘history book’. Using a case study approach, it combines site-based investigations, including policy, documentary studies, mapping, and modelling, with visitor studies that address time-spent engagement, movement patterns, behavioural trajectories and feedback. Findings highlight the uniqueness of the industrial museum as a ‘third learning space’, conceived not merely as a repository of artefacts but as an authentic living environment that fosters embodied engagement, spontaneous exploration, and active learning. It reveals how each of these experiences is facilitated by its distinctive spatial configuration and its historical and contemporary building fabric.
The study contributes to debates on the future of museum design by positioning the industrial museum as a distinctive cultural space. It argues that adaptive reuse strategies should establish industrial museums as participatory learning environments where collections, people, and practices co-produce evolving knowledge, informing both conceptual design and ongoing operations. Through bodily engagement supported by dynamic interpretive strategies, such as bodily imagination and hands-on activities, the industrial museum typology can move beyond static preservation, redefining museums as active forums for discovery, creativity, and civic participation.
| Item Type: |
Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
(PhD)
|
| Supervisors: |
Hale, Jonathan
Hanks, Laura |
| Keywords: |
Museum practice; Museum architecture; Knowledge transmission; Adaptive reuse; Spatial characteristics; Industrial museums |
| Subjects: |
N Fine Arts > NA Architecture |
| Faculties/Schools: |
UK Campuses > Faculty of Engineering > Built Environment |
| Item ID: |
82406 |
| Depositing User: |
CHEN, XIJING
|
| Date Deposited: |
09 Dec 2025 04:40 |
| Last Modified: |
09 Dec 2025 04:40 |
| URI: |
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/82406 |
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