Over the past ten years, Manchester’s Whitworth Museum has been transformed, both physically and in terms of its relationship with its audience, winning the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award in the process. Eliza Williams talks to the museum’s Director, Maria Balshaw, about managing this decade of change, how she has reconfigured the Whitworth to open it up to its surroundings and to communities both in Manchester and abroad, and what it means for a museum to go from ivory tower to ‘social space’