Workshop 2:
Tate Collective — How Insight has Influenced the Growth of the World’s Largest Museum Youth Membership

Judith Comyn, Guy Turton

How can the world’s art museums better align to the needs of young adults? With art museums across the world finding engaging young adults more challenging than ever, this question feels more vital now than it ever has. 

Whilst Tate has had great success with Tate Collective — a free 200k strong community for 16–25 year olds — we too face challenges in ensuring we remain relevant to young people today. We’ll discuss our insights gained from developing the scheme with exercises that surfaces the challenges that art museums face in activating young audiences during challenging political, social and economic headwinds.

Structure:

15 min presentation — the insight:

• The challenge we and others face in engaging young people (16–25) today.
• What we understand they are looking for from us.
• A short introduction to Tate Collective – its purpose and benefits to young people, who are Tate Collective members and its role at Tate in helping us engage with young people.

Reactions and provocations (15 minutes):

• Q&A on Tate Collective

Exercise (60 minutes – inc. 10 minute break?):

Summary

• Help us to shape the ultimate art museum for young adults.
• If we started again, what would it look like? 
• What would they do, see, say, fear, feel and not feel?
• What will be different as a result?
• In this interactive session we will use the empathy map canvas to co-design the perfect art museum for young adults, establishing the building blocks of young person’s manifesto.

Exercise plan

GT set up and moderate

Split into ten groups (e.g. 10 x 2s, 10 x 3s or 10 x4s depending on scale).

• First is an individual task for each person in each group. Think of a young adult you know (16–25). Try to make them a real person, or they can be a bit of a merging of two people. But based on reality. Ideally this would be someone young today, but it may even be yourself when you were this age.   Write down a little bit about that person. What’s their story. What is their profile? What are their habits, behaviours, ambitions and dreams?

• Read out your profiles back to your group

• Hand out Empathy Map Canvas. Canvas will be modified from the example below, including pre-visit and post-visit.

• Explain how an empathy map works.

• Brief. Design the ideal art museum experience, inspired by the profiles you outlined in your group. As a group, go through each stage of the map. Consider the needs of each of your profiles as you fill in a single empathy map. Notice where there are commonalities and differences. 

• Next, reflect on your empathy map. Capture three ‘Deal Breakers’ for the ideal visit from your combined empathy map. Write your three Deal Breakers on to three different post it notes. Prompt: Deal breakers could be experiences, programming, interpretation, food and drink, messaging, deals, etc.

• Gather the group into one are of the room. In turn, groups read out their three post it notes and place them on a single flip chart.

• If time: theme the deal breakers into categories that could form the basis of a manifesto for young people

Discussion to end.