Designing and Facilitating Slow Looking with Claire Bown

Location: Learning space. Please enter through the main doors and staff will direct you.

Slow looking has a way of changing how people experience a museum, gallery or historic site. This workshop is about how to make that happen by design, whether you are building a programme or exhibition around slow looking or bringing it into the work you do every day. 

Across the day, you’ll learn the principles of slow looking and how to design experiences that work in real settings with real audiences. You’ll take part in slow looking as a participant and explore a variety of objects through questioning practices, activities and different modes of engagement, including a session in MoAD's spaces. Then you'll look at how each experience is put together and consider how it might work in your own context. 

You'll come away with: 

• An understanding of the principles and benefits of slow looking 

• The skills to design effective slow looking experiences 

• Practice with a range of questioning practices and activities 

• Experience of different approaches to engagement that you can take straight into your own work 

The workshop is open to anyone who wants to bring more slow looking into their practice, whether you work directly with visitors, behind the scenes or somewhere in between. That includes guides, educators, front-of-house teams, volunteers, programmers, curators, and interpreters in museums, galleries, libraries, archives, historic sites, and beyond. Slow looking works with all kinds of objects, spaces, and sites, and requires no prior experience. 

About Claire Bown 

Claire Bown is a museum educator, trainer, facilitator and author with over 25 years of experience in museum and heritage education. Originally from the UK and now based in the Netherlands, she founded Thinking Museum in 2013 to help educators, guides and docents develop their skills through creative facilitation and engagement techniques. She is the creator of the Thinking Museum Approach and author of The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums (2024), and host of The Art Engager podcast. Claire works with museums and cultural organisations worldwide, including the Van Gogh Museum, National Museum of Sweden, and Carnegie Museum of Art.