The first user panels have been held!

The CoMe Stronger project has continued to work towards the goal of more appealing museum services for elderly men. To achieve this goal, the project pilots a co-development process with groups of elderly men and cooperating museums. During the process, elderly men are gathered into user panels for museums. The goal is to have five members and a few substitutes in each user panel. This goal was well achieved, and a group of enthusiastic men gathered for the first user panels at the Finnish cooperating museums, the Museum of Naantali and the Museum of Mynämäki, in December 2024.

The agenda of the first user panels included getting familiar with the user panel activities and objectives, having a tour in the museum and collecting feedback as a part of the development process of the museum services. There was plenty of discussion and brainstorming!

The next user panels will be held in the beginning of the year 2025. Before that, both the project staff and user panel members have some interim tasks to do: the project staff will summarize the results of the first panels and the user panel members will find an interesting or important object of their own that they would like to see in the museums. They will also prepare to tell a story related to the object. The goal is to figure out if these stories of the men could bring new ideas for the development or maybe even be used as a part of the new service products.

The project partner, the University of Tartu, will soon start their user panels in Estonia with the cooperating museums, the Estonian Agricultural Museum and the Estonian National Museum. More about this in upcoming news!