Museum Design for Urban and Rural Children from the Perspective of Aesthetic Education

Abstract

Against the backdrop of China’s new urbanization and the “Double Reduction” policy, the persistent urban–rural dual structure has resulted in disparities in children’s growth environments and educational resources, while the proportion of school-age children engaging with museums continues to increase. However, existing public cultural facilities fail to meet the diverse needs of children from different regions, lacking both a distinct service logic for children and dedicated spaces tailored to them. Current research on children’s museums tends to focus on a single dimension, without systematically integrating spatial, functional, and aesthetic education perspectives. In response, this study centers on the goal of bridging the developmental gap between urban and rural children. Through an analysis of existing differences between urban and rural children’s museums, it constructs a “Urban–Rural Adaptive Design Model for Children’s Museums” grounded in the three-dimensional theory of aesthetic education and embeds aesthetic education objectives within the model. The aim is to provide a systematic and operable design strategy for children’s museums that reconciles spatial utilization, functional adaptation, and aesthetic education goals. The study proposes a “aesthetic education–space–function” integrative design approach for urban and rural children’s museums, enabling children to deepen cognition and enhance cultural literacy through the process of perception–comprehension–creation. This framework offers both theoretical support and methodological guidance for practical museum design, promoting balanced cultural experiences for urban and rural children and contributing new insights to the equalization of public cultural services.