A Culture without Trash: The Strategy of Green Design Development in Museum Exhibitions

Exhibition is the bridge between a museum and its audiences, as well as the most energy and material consuming project with short life-cycle amongst all the other museum functions. In Taiwan, cultural performances can be divided into thirteen categories such as visual art, craft, design and drama that being conducted around fifty thousand times a year. The materials that used in these performances, whether they are recyclable or non-recyclable, become one of the sources causing environmental pollution and energy consumption after the dazzling shows. Therefore, instead of preserving human cultural heritages and promoting educations, a museum should also devote to environmental protection as one of its social responsibilities, as cultures can only be inherited and developed with our earth unharmed. The aim of this study is to propose the idea of ‘green museum’ by applying green design as the exhibition strategy in practicing environmental protection. Observational survey and in-depth interview are used as the methodology to reflect the current situation of the exhibition projects amongst the national cultural and historical museums in Taiwan, in terms of environmental protection issues. There are ten experts being interviewed in this study, including the researchers and curators in the museums, exhibition designers and scholars of green design who, have had their expert working experiences for at least fifteen years. The results of this research are: 1. The museum exhibition designs in Taiwan are still focusing on the dimensions of content interpretation, object preservation, aesthetic presentation and budget evaluation, whilst environmental protection is rarely being considered and practised. 2. Even though most of the museums have not taken further actions on environmental protection, they still agreed the necessity of introducing the idea of green design to exhibitions, and willing to practice in the future. This study also suggests that, only through the joint development of environmental protection industry, policy making, and identification to environmental care of both museum researchers and audiences, green design exhibitions of museums in Taiwan would possibly be falling into place.