This February 10, 2025 article on phys.org was a bit of a surprise as I haven’t seen Marshall McLuhan mentioned in a very long time, Note 1: Links have been removed, Note 2: There’s more (not much) about Marshall McLuhan in the next excerpt,

In recent decades, museums and galleries have made a sensory turn when it comes to designing displays and engaging visitors.

Museums like the Metropolitan in New York offer multi-sensory activities so visitors so can smell, touch and hear art, and museums have curated exhibitions about the senses.

The move is part of larger efforts to make public institutions more accessible.

It’s also aligned with museum and gallery institutional efforts to decolonize governance structures, and widen opportunities for museum and gallery participation from Indigenous and Global South artists and their communities, who have long been marginalized. Museums and galleries have sought to shape policy, reinterpret and repatriate artifacts stolen from Indigenous and Global South societies in response to social movements, community advocacy and decolonial theory.

Thinkers like Taiaiake Alfred have written about Indigenous cultural resurgence and resistance to colonialism, and shaped a questioning of curatorial practices.

As anthropologist David Howes argues, museums’ questioning of traditional forms of museum display and visitor engagement is aligned with the kind of re-ordering traditionally associated with unsettling colonial regimes.

In my forthcoming study, Harley Parker: The McLuhan of the Museum, I examine the influence of exhibition designer and painter Harley Parker (1915-92) on this “sensory turn” in museum curatorial practices.

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A February 10, 2025 article for The Conversation by Gary A Genosko (Professor of Communication and Digital Media, Ontario Tech University), which originated the phys.org piece, delves further into the topic of his forthcoming book (publication date: May 15, 2025), Note: Links have been removed,

Parker was head of design at the Royal Ontario Museum [ROM] for 11 years from 1957-68. By applying media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s ideas to museums, Parker created what has become known as “multi-sensory museology.” It is only beginning to be recognized as a precursor to the sensory museology in practice today.

Head of design at the ROM

Beyond being head of design at the ROM, Parker was an influential media thinker and a longtime collaborator of McLuhan’s.

Parker’s name is not yet well known. One reason is that his book manuscript, The Culture Box: Museums Are Today, was lost for almost 50 years.

Working with Parker’s children, I uncovered a typescript and will be bringing it into print. Retitled The Culture Box: Museums as Media, it contains detailed discussions of how Parker conceived of exhibition display through the lens of McLuhan’s idea that all media were sensory extensions of human capacities

Multisensory design

For Parker, the museum became a laboratory in which a designer could experiment with multi-sensory exhibition designs. These reflected McLuhan’s claim that new electronic media supplanted an older visually oriented linear model with a non-linear, aural-tactile environment.

Getting beyond the close link between visibility and linear thinking was one of main pillars of Parker’s efforts.

Between 1963 and 1967, Parker was considering designing with alternative orchestrations of perception, especially with regard to displays of Indigenous artifacts. He didn’t, however, achieve a fusion of what current sensory studies scholars call “sensory decolonization.”

In museums, “sensory decolonization” refers to shifting sensory and cultural perceptions around the meaning of “artifacts” from Indigenous or Global South communities. It means revisiting assumptions about protocols for engaging with or handling these, and developing new ethical protocols in relationship with communities.

Parker investigated the necessity of changing sensory assumptions around the display of artifacts, but lacked a decolonial critique.

Hypothetical exhibits

In the early 1960s, Parker published essays on hypothetical exhibits of Indigenous artefacts in the museum’s holdings.

He considered using recordings of Indigenous languages, visitor-controlled heating, cooling and lighting, odours, as well as multi-media projections. He tried to provoke, through design, some empathetic correlation between the mental modes of a contemporary museum visitor and the sensory attitudes of an Indigenous maker and creator of objects.

He linked the reordering of the senses with calls for greater community involvement in museums. He also expressed frustration about museum elitism and the gulf between philanthropic culture and visitors’ concerns.

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Genosko’s February 10, 2025 article goes on to mention the changes that have been attempted, in some situations more successfully than others, to incorporate principles of decolonization and inclusion. It also describes one of Parker’s more avant-garde ideas, a ‘newseum’, a space for multi-sensory and multimedia exhibitions..

I don’t usually advertise for authors but I have a soft spot these days for Marshall McLuhan (Canadian communications theorist and philosopher) and Parker’s ideas sound interesting to me. You can order “Harley Parker; The McLuhan of the Museum” by Gary Genosko, published May 15, 2025 by the University of Alberta Press here.