Museum workers
create instant exhibition

The museum workers were in Kolding to participate in an international seminar organised by the Organisation Danske Museer (Danish Museums) called Why Exhibitions? At the beginning of the workshop they were all asked to take a closer look at the contents of their purse or bag. 

Your purse is a museum archive
- You can actually compare a purse to a museum archive, says Interaction Designer Lærke Thorst Balslev, who works at the LAB for Social Design. She is also the inventor of the toolbox, "COLLECTORS JOURNEY", which the participants worked with during the two-hour workshop.

Receipts and membership cards generate new stories
- The exercise focused on getting the users to work with the contents of their purse. First they had to come up with a way of categorizing it; for instance "sparetime", "work", "health", etc. Then they were asked to select one object and link it to a specific time in their life. Finally, the individual stories were compared allowing entirely new links to emerge between the stories. - It required a bit of work but it was also a positive experience because the participants were willing to play along. This means that they really experimented with speeding up the process. In fact, they learned how to set up an exhibition in two hours, says Lærke Thorst Balslev.

Lærke Thorst Balslev graduated from Design School Kolding in 2013 with the MA Project COLLECTORS JOURNEY.