Looping Nature Knowledge. Enhancing Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Practice in Natural Science Museums
Looping Nature Knowledge.
Enhancing Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Practice in Natural Science Museums
This paper introduces the concept of the knowledge loop as a central framework for transdisciplinary knowledge production within the initiative Netzwerk Naturwissen at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. The knowledge loop conceptualizes knowledge as emerging through iterative interactions among museum visitors, network members, and various urban stakeholders. Through formats such as the so-called User Lab, the initiative investigates, in exemplary ways, how sensory engagement can generate new insights and relational understandings of human–nature connections. Visitor contributions are subsequently analyzed in interdisciplinary settings (Data Lab) and translated into new formats and tools. By tracing how knowledge moves from individual experience to internal institutional reflection, adaptation, and transformation, and then back into public engagement, the paper demonstrates an innovative approach to how museums can incorporate different voices while extending into the communities of network members and, by extension, into the wider urban fabric.