06/25/2025
CITIZENS’ PANEL DE40 FORMULATES RECOMMENDATIONS ON ACCESSIBILITY AND RELEVANCE FOR DESIGN MUSEUM GHENT
Het Laatste Nieuws | Mona Loontiens
The Design Museum in Ghent is currently temporarily closed. During this period, the museum decided to reconnect with its roots with the help of a citizens’ panel called DE40. The panel was tasked with thinking about how the museum can make design more accessible and more relevant to a broad audience. Their recommendations were officially handed over on Wednesday evening.
In January of this year, Design Museum Gent invited 3,000 residents from Ghent’s population register to take part in a unique citizens’ panel. From the 192 responses, 40 people were ultimately drawn by lot, a representative cross-section of Ghent’s demographics. This is how citizens’ panel DE40 came about.
The group met over two weekends to think about how the museum can be more accessible, more relevant and more meaningful for everyone in the city. These conversations produced a series of concrete recommendations for the museum’s future. On 25 June, DE40 officially handed these recommendations over to the museum team and to Alderman for Culture Astrid De Bruycker (Voor Gent).
“This is truly a unique project within the museum landscape,” says De Bruycker proudly. “Working from the bottom up, with a representative sample of society, on a shared question: I really want to encourage that. Culture can be something of and for everyone, but only if we listen to all perspectives and ideas. That way, together, we remove as many barriers as possible.”
The participants of DE40 also look back on the project with pride and gratitude. “The world sometimes seems to be on fire, but those two weekends were a bright spot for me. The way we engaged in such a constructive dialogue and exchanged ideas has done my faith in people good,” says panel member Kaj.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The two weekends produced more than 100 concrete recommendations. To bring structure, these were grouped into 19 themes, each based on a specific need. Examples include ‘plain language for everyone’, ‘current social issues’, ‘a say for Ghent residents’, ‘stillness’ and ‘stepping outside’.
The results form the core of the first exhibition in the renewed museum, which reopens its doors in 2026. This exhibition explores new ideas for participation as a complement to traditional forms of democracy, fully in line with the citizens’ panel initiative.