Living The Lockout: The Dublin Tenement Experience Participation Design for Locals, Diaspora, and Teenagers through Engagement with one of the Darkest Times in Dublin’s History

Abstract

How do you interpret generations of memories of deprivation and disease? How do you embody a period of history when workers finally decided to stand up for their rights, even if it meant hunger and suffering for their already impoverished families? This was the aim of Living the Lockout, a pop‐up heritage experience in 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin, a tenement building almost unchanged since the last tenants moved out. The objective was to create an authentic and meaningful offering for multiple audiences, but especially locals who still lived in the area, and the tenement ‘diaspora’—those who had been transplanted to suburban social housing in the 1950s, and those who had left Dublin in search of a better life and scattered all over the world. The interpretation centered upon a situated drama performance in which the actors ‘lived the Lockout’ and asked the crowd ‘what would you do?’ This performance was received with huge critical acclaim. The project website comprised multiple interactive features including a daily blog, many posts of which were crowdsourced both onsite and online. This paper seeks to fully analyse and understand the success of the project by examining visitor feedback and social media engagement. There is a special emphasis on how the project reached atypical museum audiences. The findings will have meaning for museum professionals seeking to evolve their museum agenda into that of transaction and mutual engagement.