Museum Identity magazine - Edition 05

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Contents issue 5 18

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04 EDITORIAL The future of museums: Like they are now, just different...

06 EDITORIAL BOARD The great and good helping us make Museum-ID indispensable 07 THE NEW MUSEUM ECONOMY The new mantra. Repeat after me: Sustainability, transition, resilience 10 YOU ARE NOT A CURATOR Look, it’s an important word so just don’t mess with it...please 12 IN SUPPORT OF IDIOSYNCRASY And against all those perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums...

14 MUSEUMS & CLIMATE CHANGE Engaging audiences in green issues.

Fighting the good fight - cleverly 16 TRANSITION MUSEUMS Is it time for Transition Museums?

‘Yep’ seems to be the answer 18 PARTNERSHIP STORIES Small independent museums working together to tackle social issues 24 CATALYST FOR CHANGE Galleries of Modern London raise the bar for museums around the world 36 THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM In conversation with Nina Simon - a vital voice in the museum community 42 MOBILE INTERPRETATION Leading innovators present guide to best practice and look to the future 60 CULTURAL COMMUNITY £10 million transformation of Jewish Museum - history, culture and identity 66 ENCHANTED PALACE The big multisensory interpretation experiment at Kensington Palace 72 INTERPRETATIVE AUTHORITY Interactive new media and more diffused authority in narrative 82 MUSEUMS AND ME Tracy Puklowski, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 3

Museum Identity

editorial So what does the future of museums look like? Now should feel like a great time to be working in the sector. Over the past decade or so the museum community has flourished and developed the ambition and ability to reach more people around the world than ever before. And then seemingly just before we get the chance to move ahead with confidence and conviction the money becomes harder to find and enthusiasm and momentum stalls.

Museums certainly face an era of tremendous upheaval. And not just in terms of budget constraint. As Sir Nicholas Serota recently wrote in The Art Newspaper: “The forces that are changing the world are challenging the role of museums”. What we perceive museums to be and how they interact and connect with both the public and each other is changing. And change can seem daunting.

However we shouldn’t expect museums to be exempt from tough decisions. While often representing value for money we have to acknowledge straightened times and shift from simply protesting about the unfairness of it all to focussing on how museums should function in the future. More than this, as we embark on the difficult times ahead we need resolve and purpose to ensure museums continue to create memorable and moving experiences which spark the imagination in a unique and powerful way.

The new age of austerity forces the museum community to look hard at how resources could have been better used in the past and think creatively about how we do things differently in the future. For some this may feel like a call to return and retreat to core values. And I agree that being authentic and realistic are crucial to success. But just as importantly, I think it’s about museums becoming more adaptable and transparent, working together to build credible and sustainable partnerships - locally and internationally - and ensuring we continue to make a compelling and convincing case for the vital contribution museums make to society, the economy and the world.

Change is here and we either help shape it or let it happen to us. At times like this it’s worth remembering the long and ongoing tradition of change which has taken us from cabinets of curiosity - the wonder rooms of old - to the diversity and popularity of museums today. Things are different now and much has changed but museums are still museums and recognisably so. We should expect change and realise that we are often better at it than we think.

So what will museums be like in the future? Well, like they are now – only different, very different.

Gregory Chamberlain 4

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Publisher / Editor Gregory Chamberlain

2010 EDITORIAL BOARD Alec Coles Director, Western Australian Museum David Fleming Director, National Museums Liverpool G-Gina Koutsika Head of Interpretation, Tate Britain Devon Akmon Deputy Director, Arab American National Museum

Creative Director Emma Dawes

Dave Patten Head of New Media, Science Museum, London

Design & Production newera media

Kathy Jaller Senior Associate, Design & Social Media, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco

Cover image: © Museum of London

Nick Poole Chief Executive, Collections Trust Tony Butler Director, Museum of East Anglian Life

© Museum Identity Ltd 2010.

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Helen Monaghan Education Officer, National Gallery of Ireland

Printed in England

Hugh Wallace Head of Digital Media, National Museums Scotland

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Tenets of the New Museum Economy Sustainability, Transition and Resilience

by Nick Poole I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the West Midlands Museums Federation event ‘A Sustainable Future?’ It was interesting, partly because it has coincided with a real rush of Green Museum events (including the recent MuseumID seminar ‘Towards Greener Museums: Sustainability Strategies and Public Engagement’) and discussions, and partly because I think that some of the messages coming out of the event have a much deeper resonance across the rest of the sector.

The first thing that struck me, as I arrived at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Collections Centre in Duddeston, was Chair Phillipa Tinsley’s badge of office, suspended from a ribbon festooned with the names of past chairs stretching back to the mid-Fifties. Here, in the form of the Federation, is an organisation that is all about the long now. Outlived only by the Museums Association, it has seen strategies, wars, strikes, recessions, changes in practice, the invention of the Internet, and has calmly carried on serving a useful purpose through all of them.

In a world in which Twitter helps us look at a resolution of ‘23 seconds ago’, and the election of a new Government pushes us to look at a resolution of the next 6 months, it is really useful to remember that the further back you stand, the more these incipient crises resolve into the flutterings of a general trend that is moving forever upward.

I was invited to keynote, and inspired

partly by the general air of implacability, took the opportunity to take a very harsh look at the realities of the current environment. The main thrust of my presentation was that there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Golden Age of cultural funding in the UK, which began with Chris Smith in the mid-90’s, is coming to an end, and that there are two ways we can respond.

The first is to shrink back into our shells, abandoning in the process the great advances in museum thinking over the past two decades, and wait until the sun shines once again on culture.

The second is to embrace this inevitable transition from one professional model to the next, and to try and proactively seize it as an opportunity to consolidate and shout about the new narrative of how Collections can serve society.

We run the risk, as organisations trample over each other to demonstrate their public value through exhibitions, acquisitions and outreach, of abandoning one of the most important achievements of the past decade - which is the unification of Collections and public service as two parts of the same process. We risk a return to the old polarity, and in the process a loss of that tremendous momentum towards ensuring that culture is reflective of life, and not reductive.

This, to me, is the risk of trying to preserve what is now (which is only, after all, the professional reality of the past 10-15 years and not some immutable fact about the world) against the colossal, epochal shifts in the wider 7

political and consumer environment.

On the other hand, we can regard the current chill wind as a natural part of the cycle of the sector, and one for which we can prepare by ensuring that we are suitably provisioned and equipped to deal with it. I put forward the idea that the best way of working with the grain of the current emergent situation is to go back to first principles, and make sure that we are confident in the basic tenets of our profession.

To the meeting, I offered the following points, and I offer them also here for feedback, comments, thoughts and criticism!

1. I suggest that, in some appropriate forum, we strip things right back to the very first principle - which is the question of why society should care about Culture. I think that the majority of people working in Culture share a common belief, which is the belief in what happens when someone stands in front of something they have never experienced before, could never experience anywhere else, and come away having been transformed by it. That is the basis of our contribution to society, and on it are built great inventions, great cultures and great advances for humanity. This is the unique power of Culture, and it is telling that so many people I speak to have lost touch with it. So many people are so entrenched in fighting the battle that they have lost sight of that divine spark of inspiration which says that this business is worth protecting, and worth committing a career to.

If this is what we, collectively, believe then we have everything we could wish for - a common, powerful motivation. From this, we can ask ourselves the questions of how it should best be achieved, whether the museums of today are the best vehicle for achieving it, how we can imagine a future in which we do it better. But the first step in weathering this particular storm has to involve reconnecting with the intrinsic wonder of working with Collections and people.

2. The second proposal is that we drag out into the cold, harsh light of day our collective family secret, and deal with it. We have way, way, too much stuff and we are looking after a lot of it really badly. We have more stuff than we can keep safe, more than we can document, more than we can preserve. And having too much stuff does profound damage to our ability to look after, interpret and protect the stuff that does matter. Worse than this, the secret of the 8

crap we’re hanging onto is accreting like an undigestible lump in the pit of our collective stomach. Every cupboard bulging with material, every unaccessioned object, every corner of the store piled high with unmarked boxes to be ‘dealt with one day’, every single one of these things is holding us back, and staining us with an indelible mark of unprofessionalism.Because that ‘one day’ is here. While we were rushing towards the future, sustained by the rocket fuel of easy funding, it was OK to ignore a few incomplete accession forms here and there, to put that broken cartwheel to one side. But not that growth has stopped, that the fuel is spent, now is the time when we have to confront those easy decisions and make up for them.We have to deal with this legacy of poor and incomplete practice swiftly and decisively before it becomes toxic, before it critically undermines our ability to advocate for what the sector has achieved in becoming more progressive and open than ever before. I suggest that to do this, we look to the mantra of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ‘do it, delegate it or delete it’. With our collections, we must use them, hand them on for someone else to use, or dispose of them. And we must do it proactively, positively, in plain sight and in open consultation with our audiences.

3. The next proposal, which builds on the last, is that we go back and query that other great tenet of the museum faith - that we should own everything. We must ask ourselves as a professional community whether the first responsibility of museums is to own things, or to curate, interpret and present them. Because if our real endgame is ownership, then we are going to fail in our mission to collect and reflect contemporary material. The market for art and antiquities is global, and while in some collecting areas is may be possible to use public funds to collect material, it is no longer tenable to use public investment to participate in a competitive art market that has lost all touch with notions of real value. Public Private Partnership is neither a sin nor a political trick - if you take the capital letters away, it is about two different communities with different but mutually complementary aims working together to achieve both their own singular aims and those of the common good.

4. My next proposal is not really a proposal at all, but an observation. That in Tony Butler’s Museums and the No-Growth Economy (Museum Identity - issue 04 pp XX), this brave

new cultural economy, which started with the election and will continue for the next 5 years, the first and most fundamental principle has to be sharing. No museum is an island, although they sometimes behave as though they were when the chips are down. But survival in this economy will depend in part on your willingness to share large institutions will become small, small ones will band together, unweildy top-down structures will have to become more agile and connected.

And in the process, a new mantra is emerging of shared infrastructure, shared services, shared people, shared knowledge, shared time, effort, even comfort. Solidarity is likely to become the new byword as people overcome the short-term discomfort of living in closer proximity to each other and depending more on each other than they had to in the past. But it is not only with each

perhaps binged less than any of us on the ready availability of taxpayers cash in the past.

5. My final proposal concerns standards.

There is a risk that the current generation of professional standards, born as they were in a foment of creativity and reinvention for museums in the 70’s and 80’s, don’t come to be used as a tool to obstruct the changes that need to happen in the sector. Standards such as the new Museum Accreditation Scheme, which is soon to be released for sector consultation, must be useful, relevant and agile enough to ensure that they promote the interests of the sector and its audiences.

So, to conclude, I offer the my closing remarks from the talk to the West Midlands Museum Federation: “There are, it seems to me, two ways we can go from here, two paths we can

“Embrace the process of change, reimagine the future and help create a new and compelling narrative” other that Museums will need to share. They will need to learn to share resources, spaces, audiences with other sectors - be they private, public, commercial, non-commercial. Wherever our interests are in common, we will need to explore how best to work with other people to achieve our objectives. And we will, I hope, also continue that vital golden thread of the past 10 years of learning to share with our users. As the hyperbole about Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing recedes, what is left is a return to the basic idea of a volunteer economy - and this is an economy which has continued throughout the past two decades of development.

It is telling that of all the sub-divisions of the Culture sector, the one that is set to weather this incipient storm with greatest dignity and fortitude is the National Trust - which has been constructed since its foundation on the twin principles of the long-now and the ability of collective goodwill to move mountains, and which

take. One is to retreat, to enter hibernation and to wait for the sunshine to fall once again on the old way of doing things. A sunshine that may take a very long time to come, if it ever arrives.

The other is to take ownership of our destiny, positively and proactively, and to create a new narrative about how Collections can help stabilise a troubled society, how they can contribute to the process of rebuilding, how we can make ourselves more efficient and more open, and how we can deliver public value in the process.

So I’d invite you not to think about sustaining what is, but to embrace the process of change, to reimagine the future and help to create a new, clear and compelling narrative about the value of what we do and the way do it.

Nick Poole Chief Executive, Collections Trust

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You Are Not a Curator

by NewCurator The Information Superabundance. It flows all around us and drowns us. It saturates our increasingly mobile computers. It follows us around through our increasingly powerful phones. It engorges our still-infuriating television.

It invades more and more space.

It managed to turn the music industry inside out. It turned the film industry into a paranoid delusional inmate. It scares the living daylights out of the newspaper and journalism industry. It has proved the fiction publishing industry to be delightfully stubborn.

In response to the Superabundance, the buzzword has become “curator”. There’s too much stuff and even that stuff is being repeated so how do we get to the good stuff? Well, curators just select stuff, don’t they? We need curators to sort this stuff out for us. The definition of a curator is becoming mutated. So, I’ve come up with the carefully designed test.

Ask yourself: Am I a curator? The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.

You are, at best, a filter. You may make a name for yourself by excelling at some kind of selection process, but you are not a curator.

“Curator” does not mean “I have good taste”.

That just makes you some kind of fleshy gauze for the rest of us. The good come to us whilst all the pus and snot that came through your information media streams stay on your side. You are a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.

Also, anyone calling themselves a “curator” when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed.

You are not trying to fool us into believing that your job is anything outside marketing, branding and selling. Be proud of what you do without assigning the make-believe title of “curator” to sound more important. You have not reached some cultural apex through the range of shoes you have on offer. You are not a Connoisseur of a Stock-Take.

You Are Not a Curator. Don’t worry, there’s no shame. Just keep repeating it to yourself. You aren’t an editor of a newspaper by just simply 10

choosing what articles to print. You aren’t an army general by simply shouting, “Charge”. So an inflated sense of worth in your Pick ‘n’ Mix does not a curator make.

I have becoming increasingly frustrated by the nonsense being stuck to the term “Curator” because people struggle to find the word for “Someone (Else) to Sort Through This Rubbish”.

I still maintain that a curator, a job with actual skills, is starting to be abused by people from industries notorious for abusing definitions. This is why I sometimes despair at my Museopunk group when they start straying into territory that I covered in the Death of the Curator articles and calling it punk. It’s all well and good to get lots of involvement from your visitors/users/patrons/ but if you don’t have it based around an honestto-God curator, do you know what you end up with? Reality television. Prove me wrong. Very high participation from an audience who get to crowdsource the answers/outcomes/selections to the most base and voyeuristic products of the underculture.

I believe an antidote to this may well be Nina Simon’s new book, The Participatory Museum. At the very centre of everything Nina says in this book is the curator (or more specifically, museum staff) as facilitator, designer and collaborator. Not just a presenter, as I fear curators will become when someone thinks participation means voting for favourites.

I warn you again; there needs to be a proper handle on curatorship before others start claiming it or misrepresenting it (I’m looking at you, U.S. NEWS). The very notion of a museums is integrated with the action of analytical thought.

We go to museums to define ourselves, the world and the civilisation around us. If the curator is devalued cheapened through this woolly thinking then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions. When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a single person said “selecting“. http://newcurator.com/

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In Support of Idiosyncrasy

by Nina Simon

People often ask me which museums are my favorites. I don’t like to give a list. I’ve only visited about 0.01% of the institutions out there and I suspect that the other 99.99% includes some real gems. But when I really think about it, all my favorites (so far) have one thing in common. It’s not the extent to which they are participatory. It’s not their size or type or subject matter. It’s the extent to which they are distinctive, and more precisely, idiosyncratic.

I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. The institutions that stick with me are the ones that have a peculiar individuality. In some cases, that’s based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Other institutions are idiosyncratic in their relationship to their environment, like the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, or to their community, like the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St. Louis or the Brazos Valley African American Museum, whereas others are august stalwarts like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. While most of my favorites are small (idiosyncrasy is easier to maintain without too many committees), some are quite large--places like the Exploratorium where a singular ethos infuses a massive facility.

Idiosyncratic institutions aren’t just quirky and weird. Their directors have big visions that they pursue unapologetically. They are staffed by people who feel incredibly passionate about the vision and their place in it. These institutions are often more connected to their specific, local communities than more generic institutions. They are akin to local news organizations and charities.

They reflect the soul of the community and can be responsive to its unique interests and needs.

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They are places that people point to with pride and say, “that’s our place.”

Even the business world is getting wise to the power of idiosyncrasy. In Seattle, coffee lovers can enjoy charming, handmade touches in a funky café called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. But 15th Avenue is not a small community-owned place.

It’s a Starbucks. Over the last year, Starbucks has been opening stores in a few US cities with a very different look--one that emulates the do it yourself, community vibe of locally-owned coffee shops. Whether you think this is a brilliant move or a corporate swindle, it demonstrates that even a large company with a highly branded, consistent image sees the benefit of individualizing offerings to different markets. Starbucks can’t be a small funky startup, but it can try to look like one.

And so I cringe when museum directors proudly show off 4D theaters and galleries filled with exhibits purchased from outside institutions or firms. Why are museums trying to become more consistent rather than celebrating their idiosyncrasies? To some extent, it’s externally driven. Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or tightly focused institutions. But that’s only part of the story. Most institutions move away from idiosyncrasy on their own accord. I see four significant internal reasons for homogenization in museums: 1. As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are “proven” by other institutions’ successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.

2. The increasing professionalism of museum work, including interpretative planning, arts marketing, and educational planning, has produced a set of best practices that are

frequently used as templates. Learning from each other is important, but we should use best practices as starting points, not copy machines.

3. Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms’ projects often have a common look across different institutions which is more unique to the firms than the constituent communities.

4. Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.

The institutions that seem most prey to a “cookie cutter” approach are science centres and children’s museums. These institutions have three additional reasons for homogeneity:

community-focused, idiosyncratic approach.

The best children’s and science museums are deeply community-interrelated, often in ways that are hard to discern from the exhibits when experiencing them casually. They may feature community gardens or exhibit labels in languages tailored to locals. They may employ local artists to help create visitor experiences. They may build their exhibits to accommodate the interests and needs of particular families and school groups they have known and worked with for years. Or they may just have an unusual and distinctive spirit or ethos behind their work.

I understand why retail establishments benefit from becoming bigger, more homogeneous, and more distributed. People like to buy from chains because they know what they are going to get. But consistency should not be

“I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums” 1. The audience cycles frequently as families “age out.” Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.

2. The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and waterplay exhibits are waterplay exhibits. Many science centres were launched at the same time as millennium projects and share common content, even if their local audiences and industries are quite different.

3. These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years.

There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.

This is a particular shame because children’s museums and science centres have the greatest opportunity to introduce young visitors to the special delights of a uniquely

the number one value when it comes to providing visitors with educational, aesthetic, social, and hopefully transformative experiences. I’d argue that one of the top reasons people DON’T visit museums is that they think they already know what they are going to get. Especially when it comes to small museums with limited collections, a distinctive personality is often the best thing the institution has to offer. And idiosyncrasy can turn the most cynical visitor into someone wide-eyed with wonder and surprise. A museum is not a museum is not a museum. Let’s keep it that way.

Nina Simon Nina Simon is an independent exhibit designer based in Santa Cruz, Calif. She is the author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 blog.

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Is it time for Transition Museums?

by Tony Butler

The development of the Transition movement should be very instructive to UK museums.

Faced with climate change, Peak Oil and gas and a dependency on state aid for funding either at local or national level, museums might look to Transition as a means to encourage environmental, economic and social resilience.

The Transition movement in the UK is probably best known in the town of Totnes in Devon. Here activists and local people created Britain’s first Transition Town and have collaborated to design an Energy Descent Action Plan which will see the community less reliant on energy and fossil fuels so that its citizens might lead happier lives. By 2030 the town plans to be self sufficient in energy use. A commitment to energy sustainability has impacted on other aspects of life in the locality. Other initiatives include the emergence of a local currency – the Totnes pound, the growth of a slow food movement and emphasis on genuine community well-being through arts programmes and food projects.

I think the transition movement offers a guide to museums so that they become more attuned to the rhythm of their environments and communities.

A starting point for transitions museums is to transition primer a wiki created by communities who have lived the transition process. There are 12 steps to transition and I’ve picked out the most salient ones: Lay the Foundations – use the Transition Initiative to act as a catalyst for getting the community to explore solutions to Peak Oil and to begin thinking about grassroots mitigation strategies.

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Use Open Space - use Open Space Technology to engage a large group of people to explore a particular topic or issue, with no agenda, no timetable, no obvious coordinator and no minute takers. Whilst this process shouldn’t work, the methodology has been largely responsible for the richness of Totnes’ Energy Descent Action Plan.

Develop visible practical manifestations of the project - ensure the project is not a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. In Transition Town Totnes, the Food group launched a project called ‘The Nut Tree Capital of Britain’ which aims to get as much infrastructure of edible nut bearing trees into the town as possible.

Facilitate the Great Re-skilling – in moving to a lower energy future and relocalising communities, many of the skills that previous generations took for granted will be needed. One of the most useful things a Transition Initiative can do is to reverse the “great deskilling” of the last 40 years by offering training in a range of some of these skills. Re-skilling programme will give people a powerful realisation of their own ability to solve problems, to achieve practical results and to work cooperatively alongside other people.

Honour the elders - in order to make real a lower energy society, we have to engage with those who directly remember the transition to the age of Cheap Oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960. There is much to be learnt from how things were done, what the invisible connections between the different elements of society were and how daily life was supported.

Create an Energy Descent Plan – this is the ultimate goal of the Transition movement, to reduce the carbon footprint and increase community resilience.

So what would need to happen to create a new generation of Transition Museums? Here are a few thoughts: Collective action is crucial. No museum could make the transition alone. Federations or clusters of organisations should asses their energy use as a whole and examine the collective capacity to both reduce and generate energy. Imagine an open air museum generating energy which could be used by museum in an urban area (or any business for that matter) in exchange for resources such as learning or design services.

to graphic design or build exhibitions or do basic woodwork, or lay a hedge. The notion of being multi-skilled should not be restricted to the possession of multiple layers of knowledge.

Museums should ensure that ‘elders’ are genuine associates. Frequently, older people are subjects or objects of a museum’s work, rather than collaborators. At MEAL (Museum of East Anglian Life) we are fortunate to have a large number of older people who volunteer, who share and pass on their skills and knowledge. Our oldest member of staff is 81. Our training programmes, especially in areas of horticulture, have been enriched by people who worked the land in the 1950s and 1960s and understood the need for co-operation. This knowledge used effectively will make museums mainstream skills centres of the future.

“We need to re-skill museum people.

Since the early 1990s a profusion of postgraduate courses have produced thousands of bright people with a general understanding of the power and purpose of museums but few with practical skills to exchange”

Other resources might be exchanged depending on the distinctive assets of that organisation. Large organisations should recognise that they might draw on expertise from staff or volunteers from small museums rather than sourcing expensive products on the open market. Museums have spent 20 years working in one-off partnership projects but few have developed long-term ‘asymetrical’ collaborations which exchange knowledge and services in nonrelated areas.

We need to re-skill museum people. Since the early 1990s a profusion of postgraduate courses have produced thousands of bright people with a general understanding of the power and purpose of museums but few with practical skills to exchange.

I suspect there are few curators or educators who might be able to turn their hand

There are signs that the transition movement is already having an influence.

M-Shed, the new corporate identity for Bristol Museums have engaged the Transition Network in their future planning.

Museums are recognised as unwieldy beasts, occupying large energy inefficient buildings and constantly competing with neighbours for relatively small amounts of funding.

Understanding how to harness collectively the resources and skills of their distinctive assets and those of their communities, should be a first step in that descent to a low energy future.

Tony Butler Director, Museum of East Anglian Life

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Engaging Audiences in Greener Museums

by Bridget McKenzie I was invited to contribute to a seminar run

by Museum-ID all about Greener Museums.

My session was about the role of museums and heritage in working with communities and learners to tackle and adapt to climate change.

As the audience were professionals already deeply involved in sustainable heritage I decided to be provocative. My key message was that we need to be both more aware of the global risks we face and also more optimistic and creative.

Beneath my argument lies a personal concern about the UK’s action on climate change. If we base our plans on the IPCC 2007 projections, this will be a poor management of risk because the IPCC was very conservative, not accounting for polar melting or emissions of methane (a much more potent gas than CO2) from melting tundra.

Also, if we focus our efforts on controlling UK emissions, by watching emissions from our own museum buildings, this is like blowing out a candle while a forest fire rages, because we outsource most of our emissions. The UK is the biggest outsourcer in Europe and the third in the world after USA & Japan.

Moreover, in the cultural and heritage sectors, if we focus our efforts on mitigating climate change by controlling carbon emissions, even if we make broader efforts such as planting trees and persuading audiences to live green, we are still not addressing the far bigger challenge, which is adapting to change.

The major contribution of culture and heritage, unique to our sectors, is not so much in reducing emissions and modelling green practices for our audiences to follow, but in finding alternative ways to preserve and sustain culture and heritage as places and communities are threatened, and above all in nurturing people to be more resilient and creative. So the challenges we face above all are: Making culture and heritage as accessible as possible for the fast exchange of knowledge (which may mean open digital access); Contribute to the human and cultural challenges of preparing for and recovering from disasters; Prioritising learning programmes, making them as participatory and active as possible, with key outcomes that people will be more ecologically aware and able to design solutions.

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To achieve this change, I proposed that organisations would need to turn themselves upside down, to give a higher status to activities which engage people, as in ‘communities of enquiry’ and local communities, and to reduce the prerogative of directors and curators, who currently have higher status because they engage with the most powerful people (experts, sponsors, donors and so on).

In preparing for this session, I struggled to find many case studies of museums that were tackling sustainability via their communities and learners in such an overt way. I could find examples of specific exhibitions or artist-led projects, but only one UK museum stands out.

That is the Museum of East Anglian Life and it stands out because its director, Tony Butler, is so articulate about its mission. In a nutshell he advocates museums to do much less and to focus on helping people be more resourceful towards their own wellbeing.

In the discussion that followed I heard about a lot more inspiring practice, including M-Shed in Bristol, where Sarwat Siddiqui, the community history curator, is developing new displays on the environment. She plans to work with Transition Bristol and other green groups, and hopes that in the future people will trace positive changes in the city (and beyond) back to M-Shed’s active enquiry-based approach.

One of the things we agreed is that climate education by museums should be stealthy, integrated, broad and creative. We wondered if we should stop doing climate change exhibitions because it just scares people, puts them off and makes them unlikely to shift to a green lifestyle.

I do think it is appropriate for some contexts, for example, for the Science Museum, to address climate science in depth with its planned Climate Science galleries. Other museums shouldn’t feel the need to follow suit, especially given that the Climate Science project is offering online and distributed resources, but they should develop programmes that suit their collections and expertise, that in many ways may help to develop ecologically minded citizens.

Bridget McKenzie, Director of Flow Associates

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Fenland Stories The Fenland Stories touring exhibition is an example of how a partnership of small independent museums can work together to create an innovative exhibition which tackles larger social agendas with non-traditional audiences. Stuart Hall explains how...

Greater Fens Museum Partnership The flat landscape of the Fens could be argued to have had a fairly bad press when compared to other more obviously dramatic parts of the country. What the area lacks in topographical variety however, is more than compensated for by the richness of its oral traditions.

The vibrant stories once told in isolated public houses are currently centre stage on a new touring exhibition Fenland Stories a Renaissance East of England Regional project being delivered by the Greater Fens Museums Partnership with the support of Norfolk Museum and Archaeology Service. The partnership worked together to create a mutually beneficial exhibition that is rooted in sustainability. The exhibition creates a new and exciting way to access many of the traditional Fenland stories such as the “Buried Moon”, “Tiddy Mun”, “Tom Hickathrift” and the “Dead Hand”. It also explores more recent stories such as the drainage of Whittlesey Mere and the tales collected by Enid Porter, past curator of the Cambridge and County Folk Museum.

Fenland Stories is organised by the Greater Fens Museums Partnership Fenland Project (GFMP). The partnership was formed in 2005 and the first travelling exhibition project the Feast of Fenland proved enormously successful with its theme, not surprisingly, on Fenland food.

The partnership consists of twenty Fenland 18

museums ranging from small volunteer-run sites at March and Chatteris to the larger local authority museums in Peterborough and King’s Lynn. Equally the area the partnership covers is huge, crossing over the boundaries of the East of England and East Midlands regions and taking in parts of Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough unitary authority. Likewise the partner museums are vastly different in their access to resources, materials and staff, many being run by volunteers. The formation of the GFMP has allowed focussed exhibitions, specific to the needs and aspirations of the partnership, to be developed.

Following the success of the Feast of Fenland exhibition, the partnership looked at ways to make future exhibitions more responsive to the needs of partner museums and their local communities. It also sought to facilitate greater involvement by the partners in the development and delivery of the next project. The result was the setting up of a Fenland Stories Working Group under the Chairmanship of Ely Museum. This enabled the partnership to take real ownership of the exhibition project, but also allowed for a more focussed decision-making process. Regular meetings of the full partnership allowed all museums to contribute to the process.

The development of the Fenland Stories

© Greater Fens Museum Partnership/ David Kirkham Photography

travelling exhibition has been shaped by the huge variation in partner museum venues in terms of access and available display space. The need to provide a flexible, adaptable and sustainable exhibition suited to a broad range of spaces led to the centrepiece interactive willow tree being made up from two self-contained units, which could be “split” to allow even the smallest museum to take the exhibition.

The centrepiece of the exhibition takes the form of a replica, yet realistic pollarded willow.

These short stumpy trees, many hundreds of years old, line many of the dykes in the Fens.

Accessibility has been a key factor in the design of the exhibition. The tree contains two audio visual screens embedded into the gnarled exterior bark.

Each screen is set at different heights for use by children and adults. External speakers hidden in the upper branches provide very localised sound while two headphones on each half allow the visitor to listen to the films at a higher volume.

Hearing loops on both half sections provide additional accessibility options. Each side of the tree has a small display case built into it, cleverly disguised as hollow chambers in an old willow.

To accommodate the braver children, four feely holes are hidden in the roots of the tree. The two audio-visual touch screens allow visitors to watch up to thirteen films exploring different Fenland

tales and stories. Each film has been produced by community groups including schools, youth and adult groups drawn from across the Fens.

Fenland Stories has been working on embedding a sense of community ownership of the exhibition. Establishing a social and psychological link to the sense of identity and pride in local heritage centred on local museums. Most of the stories represent a collective community narrative, especially true with the old stories like “Tiddy Mun”, “Buried Moon” and the “Dead Hand”. These stories are part of a rich Fenland oral tradition that has only quite recently been written down. The films shown on the interactive willow tree - including many stories identified by individual museums - include live action and animation. This has created a final gallery of films comprising a very eclectic mix of subject matter and presentational style.

The approach to creating these films was for local museums to work in partnership with existing community groups, to share resources and work to the needs of a particular audience.

The Fenland Project Officer and a professional filmmaker supported the groups in turning their idea into a concept then a narrative and then a film. The groups were empowered to develop their personal interpretation of the story and to inject creative approaches even though the story line 19

ultimately remained true to the original.

The majority of the community groups that contributed to the exhibition consisted of young people - a demographic group that does not feature strongly in the audience for many partner museums. The project was very much about making the partner museums relevant to young people and their local community. Fenland Stories allowed young people to initially focus on developing skills and confidence with filmmaking and animation. The only conditions were that the film was a Fenland story and that it would eventually be displayed as part of the exhibition in their local museum. Animation proved to be the most popular film-making technique. especially with its almost magical qualities of making something quite clearly inanimate animate! The young people were able to express themselves through creative and directional freedom, often re-interpreting the story and adding their own personal touch, a direct link to the original story telling tradition. In essence they took ownership, which facilitated a sense of pride and interest in the subject matter. The film-making project also helped change their perceptions of museums and challenged their views on what museums can be and do. This element of challenge is an essential ingredient for any exhibition needing to be rooted within both communities and new audiences.

“Normally people associate museums with like… dinosaurs and everything, but I think its good to get teenagers and children really interested in everything to see what museums can be about” Young person participant

One of the most positive outcomes of the project - as well as increased skill development was that many of the young people participating in the project received recognised qualifications.

Cambridgeshire Youth and Community Service a key partner issued these qualifications, further illustrating how museums can contribute to improving employability and confidence.

“The majority of the participants achieved their Cambridgeshire Youth Award and some even went on to get three Cambridgeshire Youth Awards, which means they get a locally recognised accreditation. A fantastic outcome” Julie Gunn, Locality Lead Youth Worker, Whittlesey 20

It is important to note that the young people participating in the project included those diagnosed with ADH or Aspergers Syndrome, others with special needs and those categorised as NEET, making the positive outcomes even more significant for some individuals.

The Fenland Stories exhibition has genuinely been developed by local museums, involving local people in their creation. All those who have worked on the exhibition are essentially stakeholders and have some kind of investment in the exhibition and their museum.

In these more austere times it is increasingly important for projects to plan and operate in a more sustainable way. However, the very concept of sustainable fixed-term projects can be seen as a contradiction in terms. True sustainability should see an ongoing legacy and benefit, whereas most community projects are characterised by short-term funding. The challenge is how can museums redefine the concept of ‘project’? The GFMP is taking on this challenge by looking at how each shortterm project like Fenland Stories can contribute to the longer-term capacity and sustainability of the partnership. The underlying principle is that each partnership project should not be delivered in isolation. Instead, each should contribute to sustaining the long-term viability of the

All images © Greater Fens Museum Partnership/ David Kirkham Photography

partnership in terms of resources, skills, training, communication and marketing.

The GFMP has used both The Feast of Fenland and Fenland Stories exhibitions as building blocks for the partnerships future capacity. Where possible, resources from Feast of Fenland have been reused e.g. the exhibition content being added to the new Fenland Stories website. This website will form a key part of the travelling exhibition, but will also act as a platform for projects and community participation.

Another Renaissance East of England funded programme, the SHARE advice network has proved invaluable to this process and has benefited the GFMP greatly. The SHARE ‘Training Calendar’ has provided free professional training to the partners on everything from governance, retail, marketing, conservation to pest control.

Fenland Stories has built sustainability into its planning and development from the early stages. Instead of using outside professional companies to make the films a decision was made to purchase the equipment to enhance the partnerships future capacity. However, this means little unless there is investment in training for museums, communities and of course individuals.

“Being part of the working group that produced

the exhibition has also been an important part of my development as a professional and given me access to training that I would not have otherwise had.” Ellie Hughes, Curator Ely Museum

This has the advantage of not only increasing the positive outcomes of community engagement and increasing skills, but in the longterm it allows these outcomes to be maintained within other community groups. All the elements of the exhibition are designed to facilitate their reuse at a later date. New films can be added to the interactive willow tree, allowing the core part of the display to be re-branded and reused minimising the cost of developing future exhibitions.

The opening of Fenland Stories at Ramsey Rural Museum on the 1st April 2010, marked the end of the first year of a somewhat exciting development journey. However, this is only the beginning, with other components of the project about to begin and more established elements evolving. These developments include a Fenland Learning Project for schools based on creative writing. This will use the ‘old stories’ as a starting point with children creating new stories inspired by the old. This schools programme will be developed and co-ordinated by Ely Museum, one of the partners and will support capacity building 21

and skills development at that site.. New and exciting outreach programmes are currently being planned, reinforcing what has been achieved during the first year and also exploring new areas such as training for the unemployed and even training for those currently in prison. Fenland Stories is currently funding an ESOL course with the aim of recording traditional stories from around the world for the website and to link into the 2012 Olympics.

What Fenland Stories essentially represents is the maturing of a partnership that brings together a wide range of museums, people and skills.

what they can offer to social agendas is immense, often only limited by our own imagination. A rich fabric of heritage underpins the whole identity of this country from the landscape, natural history, invasion and settlement, migration or life and death. Neither should this be seen as a loss of the traditional values and museum identity, objects will always and should remain core to what we do. It is important to advocate why museums are important not simply because of the rich treasure house of cultural and national identity, which is held in trust. It is also the role we can play within the framework of social agendas and how we can contribute not as lightweight participant but as an

“museums are a unique and adaptable social resource. No other sector is better placed to work in areas of place, belonging and pride in cultural identity.

The changing face of museums and what they can offer to social agendas is immense, often only limited by our own imagination” “However, there have also been less tangible benefits such as sharing expertise and seeing different ways of doing things. Interestingly, it was not always the small volunteer run museums learning from the large museums, the small museums had plenty to teach such as how to manage on a small budget and make the most of local networks, volunteers also have a great wealth of knowledge about their area.”

Ellie Hughes, Curator Ely Museum

The GFMP and Fenland Stories clearly illustrates that museums are a unique and adaptable social resource. No other sector through its collections is better placed to work in areas of place, belonging and pride in cultural identity. The changing face of museums and 22

essential partner. Museums can communicate from multiple perspectives and to be able to adapt to the specific groups and audiences. It is about creating approaches that provide a platform to engage. The GFMP has become stronger and more dynamic. It is a good example of how museums can contribute to larger social agendas with non-traditional audiences.

Stuart Hall Greater Fens Museum Partnership Project Officer Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service Renaissance East of England www.fensmuseums.org.uk

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Š Museum-ID

Galleries of

catalyst

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Cathy Ross, Director of Collections and Learning at Museum of London explains how the opening of the new Galleries of Modern London raises the bar for museums around the world...

Modern London

for change

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Š Museum of London 26

If there was a world league table of museums, where would the Museum of London be ranked?

The launch of the Galleries of Modern London, the biggest intervention to the building since the Museum opened in 1976, is a good time to reflect.

Do the new galleries shoot us to the top of the premiership or just mildly improve our position in the first or second division of British museums?

Ranking museums is a notoriously inexact science since each is so different. The Museum of London is more sui generis than most: not a fully fledged national museum (as defined by direct funding from national government), yet more than just local. The great gap in UK museum provision is any national museum of history and the Museum of London has always gone part of the way to filling that gap, its national scope often unacknowledged thanks in part to regional sensitivities.

Internationally, the Museum of London sits more comfortably with a group of international city museums, a type of museum that emerged around the turn of the 19th century (our own

London Museum of 1910 being a good example).

City museums have been something of a growth area in recent years, as city authorities have come to realise the importance of bolstering civic identity; City museums have shifted their scope to encompass intangible civic issues such as citizenship, race relations and social values. It is fair to claim some degree of leadership status for the Museum of London in this context. The Museum has long been acknowledged by its peers as an innovator, and we regularly share our experiences with colleagues from around the world.

So what will the new Galleries of Modern London do for the Museum? Have we raised the bar? How will it change us? Professor Jack Lohman, the Director, points out that just doing the project has already changed the Museum: ‘The project has enabled a culture change within the Museum, one which had always been part of our objective. We now have a culture which raises the status of learning within the Museum and places it centre stage. Accompanying this is a philosophical change which places communities as part of our central mission. The second key change for the museum is that we have ‘up-skilled’ an entire workforce: this project has helped us develop a workforce, which gives us a far stronger platform for our future.’ Altogether the project has already been an agent of reinvigoration, giving the Museum the means and confidence to grow further into its already strong position among history and city museums, nationally and internationally.

© Museum of London 27

But what about the galleries themselves: how does the reinvigoration translate into visitors’ experience? Many aspects of the new galleries will feel slightly different, despite the presence of old favourites among the actual objects. We have developed our exhibits with learning and audiences more explicitly in mind: there are new stories woven around the objects. It is perhaps worth mentioning just two of these new aspects as examples of how the new galleries can claim to be raising the bar professionally.

The first relates to the design of the galleries, and more particularly the way we have integrated the content and its presentation. We have been lucky in our timing in that developing the gallery content has coincided with the phenomenal rise of digital technology. Although UK museums have made stunning use of

not have been possible with a smaller selection of photographs presented conventionally in frames.

If the way we present our content raises the bar, so too does our subject matter. We set out to explore some ‘big ideas’ about the past; again, our timing is lucky in that big ideas about Britain’s intangible heritage, such things as democracy, rights and free speech, are very much in the public eye these days. It would be too much to claim that they form the main gallery narrative (as was the case in the British Library’s 2008 exhibition ‘Taking Liberties’), but they are woven very strongly into the story. One of our narrative strands is about people and change: we want visitors to leave the galleries reflecting on, or indeed inspired by, the thought that people do have the power to bring about social change.

Placing our objects in this sort of narrative, as

“Digital technology gives you the means of enriching content, adding complexity, diversity and quantity” multimedia before now (most memorably at the Imperial War Museum North in 2002), we can certainly claim to be raising the bar in the way we have integrated digital content with real objects.

The 18th century printing press exhibit is a case in point. Technology enables us to make the press ‘come alive’ but we still preserve the object’s integrity as a rare and historic survivor.

When digital exhibits first started to appear in museums they were often assumed to signal ‘dumbing down‘. In fact the opposite is the case. Digital technology gives you the means of enriching content, adding complexity, diversity and sheer quantity. Our ‘Snapshot of London’ exhibit contains over 1,600 browse-able photographs of contemporary London - fifty images for each of the 33 London boroughs. It cannot capture all strands of London’s multi-faceted character but it does give a flavour of the city that just would 28

opposed to, say, an art and design narrative, is another mark being slightly ahead of the curve, at least for UK museums. As Jack Lohman points out, it reinforces the international character of what we do: ‘the approach to subject matter has ultimately delivered a more international outlook’.

London is a fearsomely complex city, and this has been a fearsomely complex project to work on. The proof of the pudding will of course be in its reception, from both critics and visitors.

But from a viewpoint inside the project team, the Galleries of Modern London feels like a real catalyst for change.

Dr. Cathy Ross, Director of Collections and Learning, Museum of London The Galleries of Modern London opened at Museum of London on 28 May 2010

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DESIGN: Galleries of Modern London The new Galleries of Modern London are a showcase for architectural and design excellence.

Architects Wilkinson Eyre and the Museum’s inhouse design team have transformed the building and its display spaces to deliver a new revitalised Museum.

The innovative design increases the space by 25 per cent, creating an entirely new gallery by extending the Museum to meet the street along London Wall. Wilkinson Eyre has conjured a lighter space with the introduction of a window elevation by the Museum’s garden court to breathe new life and light into the lower level where the new galleries are situated. A glass frontage on London Wall allows visitors and passers-by to see into the Museum from ground level for the first time, with the Lord Mayor’s State Coach, one of the Museum’s most well known objects, taking pride of place. A spectacular hanging staircase now links the spaces of the new Clore Learning Centre, and the Museum’s Weston Theatre is reborn as a multipurpose location for cinema, performances and talks.

The design extends the stylistic legacy

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of the original architects of the Museum, Powell Moya & Partners. They developed a modernism that was shot through with humour and humanity, from the light-flooded spaces of the Churchill Estate in Pimlico, to the Skylon, a symbol of the Festival of Britain and a feature of the Galleries of Modern London. The Museum building Powell and Moya created is an icon of London design, with its bold rotunda invoking the Roman garrison whose remains sit beneath it. This playful purposefulness is carried into the new building design. Wilkinson Eyre has democratised the building, opening it up with new views and sightlines.

Unusually, the interior design of the new Galleries of Modern London has been led by a specialist in-house team. Visitors can step inside a real 18th Century prison, see an original printing press leap into life, and encounter London’s wells bubbling up. From large-scale features, like the extraordinary LED ellipse curtain encircling the Sackler Hall, designed by Furneaux Stewart, to smaller details, such as fonts taken from street signs in the City and Westminster, the new galleries are full of inspired design.

Opposite page: The Imperial Capital section of the People’s City gallery. Below: World City 1950 – today gallery. Below: The exterior of Museum of London by architects Powell Moya & Partners. All images © Museum of London

The resin floor is embedded with the history of the capital - from Hogarth prints to Charles Booth’s poverty maps. Immersive spaces abound: an 18th century pleasure garden featuring real trees and starry skies; a war space with a suspended bomb; an interactive river of ideas where London debates are played out amidst architectural icons from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Olympic aquatic centre. Innovative showcase arrangements see archaeological finds displayed underfoot, West End costumes in a sweeping case curved with the moderne styling of the glamorous Selfridges lift opposite, and a giant’s causeway whose many-levelled plinths step through the turbulent post-war decades.

Professor Jack Lohman, Director of the Museum of London, said: “The design and architecture of Museums should be as varied and surprising as the locations in which they stand. Our new galleries of Modern London have given us a wonderful opportunity to showcase how creative design can bring a new diversity of content and experience into the heart of the Museum. Marrying the extraordinary architectural spaces opened up by Wilkinson Eyre with truly innovative interior design has gifted us a worldclass Museum for a global city. London speaks through these galleries, and it’s testament to the skill of the design teams that space has been created to make the city’s many voices heard.”

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STORIES: Galleries of Modern London The new £20million Galleries of Modern London tell the story of London and its inhabitants from the Great Fire of London in 1666 to the present day.

On display are over 7,000 fascinating objects telling the stories of Londoners over the past 350 years. Ann Fanshawe’s extravagant 1750s court dress will make visitors wonder how its wearer was able to walk through a door with its two metre-wide skirt. A reconstructed Georgian pleasure garden, with its parade of exquisitely dressed strollers modelling speciallycommissioned hats and masks by Philip Treacy, will expose the excitement and intrigue of Georgian social lives. But hardship was just a turn of fortune away, as the Wellclose debtors’ prison, etched with inmates’ graffiti, shows.

Moving into the twentieth century, the stunning Art Deco lift from Selfridges department store is evidence of the opulence of the new century. The flurry of political campaigns and voices of protest is exposed in stories of the suffragettes fighting for women’s votes, and of the emerging communist and fascist groups as the nation moved closer to war. The refugee trunk belonging to the Seelig family, who escaped to London from Dresden in 1939, tells the story of those forced to move to the city in hard circumstances.

From the city’s more recent history, visitors can learn about an increasingly multicultural post-war London, and the swinging sixties with the new era of fashion and design that the decade welcomed in. The Ghetto, an artwork by Tom Hunter, reveals the harsh realities of London life as it uncovers a Hackney street of the 1990s populated with squatters.

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Professor Jack Lohman, Director of the Museum of London, said: “The new Galleries of Modern London breathe new life into the Museum. They provide a home for the story of London – celebrating the unique spirit and energy of the city ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

It is thrilling to see this ambitious and complex project realised at last, transforming the Museum and placing it at the heart of the city it celebrates.”

Right: Large-scale projections used in The War Room - with a suspended bomb in the middle of the space; Top: People’s City; Middle: Interactive of Charles Booth’s Map of London 1889; Above: Large-scale exhibits in the People’s City Gallery 1850s – 1940s. All images © Museum of London

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FILM: Galleries of Modern London

LDN24 follows 24-hours in the life of London with hundreds of filmed sequences from across the capital - framing the city waking, working and winding down on a giant plasma screen. © Museum of London

An innovative and radical vision of the city is played out across an impressive elliptical chandelier screen, which stretches for 48 metres around the Sackler Hall, the hub and heart of the Museum of London’s new galleries. The Light Surgeons craft a dynamic exchange with the living city by marrying high-definition filmwork with a kaleidoscopic LED display. This display perpetually rewrites the London scene, and prompts the audio soundtrack whose pulse is dictated by the currents of digital data. LDN24 follows 24-hours in the life of London with hundreds of filmed sequences from across the capital - framing the city waking, working and winding down on a giant plasma screen. An enveloping stream of over 200 statistics flow around the LED ellipse, producing an ever-changing map of the city. From tidal patterns to temperatures, flight arrivals to FTSE fluctuations, RSS feeds and live links to Google searches, partner news channels, and Twitter keep an ear turned to the rhythms that compose the city. Software specially developed by the design studio FIELD choreographs the rituals and movements of London and Londoners into a compelling statistical dance.

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The Light Surgeons’ LDN24 is the first winner of the Museum of London Film Commission, a new biennial competition in association with Film London, which will attract and develop London’s brightest and most innovative multimedia artists and film-makers.

Streetmuseum Augmented Reality A groundbreaking iPhone app ha been launched as part of the opening of the Galleries of Modern London, bringing the Museum of London’s extensive art and photographic collections to the streets of the capital. Streetmuseum, developed with creative agency Brothers and Sisters, guides users to sites across London, where hidden histories of the city dramatically appear.

Over 200 sites have been picked where users can look through their iPhones and see the past emerge, locked as an overlay across the present scene. These can be viewed as ghostly alignments, or the archive images can be brought up and explored in detail, along with information about Streetmuseum’s photographs and paintings.

Project:

Museum of London Galleries of Modern London, 9x AV / Interactive exhibits Featured:

Expanding City 3D spatial modelling Multi-screen motion graphics Hand crafted letterpress type Sound design

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06/07/2010 15:37

Nina Simon is a vital voice in the museum world.

Offering refreshing and innovative thinking and solutions Nina’s Museum 2.0 design consultancy focuses on creating participatory, dynamic, audience-centred museum spaces.

Based in Santa Cruz, California, Nina writes the influential Museum 2.0 blog and has just published The Participatory Museum – a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places.

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interview

The Participatory Museum Gregory Chamberlain talks to Nina Simon about her new book and why museums need to take more risks...

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museumidenity interview

Why did you write The Participatory Museum?

I wrote the book for two reasons.

First, I believe the cultural sector has reached a critical point where many professionals believe in the “why” of participation but need good resources on the “how.” As a designer with an engineering brain, I wanted to examine and share the range of techniques for visitor participation and the ways those design technique affect the experience and the outcome.

Second, I’m always amazed by the number of people I meet who don’t read blogs, or who tell me that their bosses don’t read blogs. I wanted to publish my ideas in a vehicle that would be accessible to a larger number of cultural professionals, who tend to be more traditional when it comes to how they choose to get their information.

You certainly practice what you preach by actively seeking comments and discussion about the book and by making it available free online. Was that an important part of the project for you?

Absolutely. I needed the participants to be a kind of virtual team—to keep me accountable, cheer me on, and slap me when I lost my way. And I always knew I would make the book available for free in some form. Getting the ideas out there is more important to me than making money. I dream that this book will change the museum field, and that can only happen if it can get into as many hands and brains as possible.

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In this issue of the magazine you argue that museums should be idiosyncratic. So does the idea of the participatory museum work equally well in all types of museums or are there limitations?

There are not limitations, but there is differentiation. Some museums will never engage in participatory techniques. Others will do a great deal. What matters to me is that professionals pick design techniques that suit their mission statements. Many institutions have put goals like “community engagement” and “being a town square” at the forefront, and participatory techniques are useful for those goals. But there are many, many different approaches. The institutions that are in trouble are those that do not frequently interrogate themselves to determine whether their programs fit their goals.

How do museums currently get participation wrong? Is it down to bad design of exhibits or do they sometimes fundamentally misunderstand the whole notion of participation?

Visitor participation is not about letting the public have a bit of fun with the collection. It’s about inviting visitors and community members to make meaningful contributions to museums in ways that improve the experience for staff, participants, and visitors alike. When institutions start participatory projects because they think those projects will offer visitors “fun things to do,” the resulting projects are often inconsequential and silly. Visitors can see through it, and they don’t participate - or not in the ways the institution might have hoped.

And how do they get it right? What are the core principles of participation?

Here’s the litmus test I use: you should design participatory projects that will allow the institution to get better the more people get involved. “More” can mean more people or deeper involvement— it’s different for different projects. But the museums that really get it right are those where everyone on staff clearly understands how useful and essential participation is to producing a high-quality museum experience for everyone. In particular, I think the Wing Luke Asian Museum and the Glasgow Open Museum are extraordinary

between executives and the lowest-level staff. I frequently meet executives who want to support risk-taking and experimentation. These leaders are often insulated from the energetic, low-level staff by middle management. Managers are in tough roles - protecting their departments, weathering storms wrought from those above and below them. But that often leads them to be the most conservative people in museums. The institutions where I see people really take risks are those in which staff members at all levels are in good communication - so no one is insulating good ideas from anyone else.

“Visitor participation is not about letting the public have a bit of fun with the collection.

It’s about inviting visitors and community members to make meaningful contributions to museums” examples of institutions that have a consistent and symbiotic relationship between visitor participation and successful museum practice.

Like you I meet many people in the museum community who are full of ideas and energy. So why is it that many museums often seem afraid to experiment and take risks?

There are so many reasons for this—funding models, conservative boards, institutions that are built to last instead of to compete—and most of the reasons are hard for professionals to change themselves. But here’s one thing we can change: communication on staff, especially

Do you think museums need to be much more active and engaged in looking outside the ‘museum world’ to find new and better ways of doing things?

Yes. But I think people in most fields need to do this. It’s not about finding “new and better” ways of working as much as it is about exposing yourself to new ideas, new patterns, and then doing some self-reflection to consider how and why you might apply it to your own work. The best kind of projects are the ones you don’t know how to do, because those are the ones that send you outside your experience to look for relevant models. Those projects are also the 39

most frustrating and potentially scary, because you don’t know how to assess what’s going to work in your institution. You have to keep some perspective and confidence through the process so you don’t get overwhelmed by the vastness of the options.

You obviously see enormous potential for museums in the future. But to deliver on that potential you argue that museums need to radically change the way they view themselves.

Do you think the museum community is ready and able to accept the challenge?

In the book you argue that the cumulative effort of thousands of participatory institutions could change the world. Personally I welcome your optimism but do you think there is a danger of over promising the kind of change that museums can help achieve in society?

Not all of them. And that’s fine. There are many kinds of potential for museums in the future, including potential they are already delivering on now. With specific regard to visitor participation, I expect that it will take a similar course as did interactive exhibit development. While hands-

“User participation on the web has had a huge impact on society. There is no consistent venue for user participation in the physical world. If museums become those venues, I see no reason why they wouldn’t have a comparably large impact” Heck, we’ve been overpromising as a field for much longer than I’ve been alive. Most museums already presume life-changing status in their annual reports and mission statements. When I read a good mission statement, I’m inspired. The challenge is to make good on those fancy words.

Missions that are about community engagement and promoting peaceable society are very exciting to me. If museums can do the work to deliver on these missions, it will make a very big impact indeed.

User participation on the web has had a huge impact on society. There is no consistent venue for user participation in the physical world.

If museums become those venues, I see no reason they wouldn’t have a comparably large impact.

40

on science centres are wholly interactive institutions, interactivity has made its way into the design departments of art, history, and science museums as well. Comparably, I think that some museums will make radical transformations toward participation (and some, like the Glasgow Open Museum, already have), whereas most will integrate bits into more traditional practice. I don’t see participatory practice as the only way forward for museums. I see it as a set of specific design techniques that have particular strengths when it comes to making museums more personal, dynamic, user-driven, and diverse.

The Participatory Museum by Nina Simon is available for purchase, perusal, and discussion at http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

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© Museum-ID 42

special feature

Mobile Interpretation and Multi-Platform Museums Leading museum innovators examine current examples of best practice and to look to the future of mobile interpretation...

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the museum as distributed network Nancy Proctor, Head of Mobile Strategy & Initiatives, Smithsonian Institution

At first glance, ‘multi-platform museum’ is a perfectly serviceable term to name the multifaceted nature of museums’ interactions with audiences today: it makes us think beyond the physical site and suggests the museum’s presence in multiple digital contexts. Plus it has a nice alliterative ring. But for a technologist, ‘multiplatform’ has implications that make another metaphor, the distributed network, a more engaged way to approach 21st century museum outreach across digital and other platforms.

Technically speaking, ‘multi-platform’ implies publishing to many outlets or ‘platforms’ from a single content source. In other words, the aim is to create a direct copy – as perfect a replica as possible – of the same original (content, message) on each platform, or at least control the content and experience centrally. But like any wholesale export of culture without sensitivity to the ‘native’ context and its communities, multiplatform publishing results at best in forcing square pegs into round holes, at worst in a sort of colonizing effort; either way, it ultimately fails.

Content designed for one use, context or platform rarely ports directly and easily onto another.

Brochures do not make good websites. Texts written for catalogues and wall labels sound stilted and dry as audio guide scripts. And just as physical artifacts have to be photographed or scanned in order to create a digital representation for online use, at a minimum videos and photographs have to be recoded and reformatted to meet the size requirements of social media platforms.

Tailoring content and experiences for each audience and platform, seemingly the alternative to a mass-export approach to content publishing and management, can be prohibitively expensive, especially for reaching niche audiences. As a result, museums often live within their budgets by 44

trying to develop a single, ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution that is intended to serve a ‘broad’ audience but in effect compromises both quality and specificity at the risk of fitting none. Because of its spoke and wheel structure, the multi-platform model does not easily incorporate feedback loops or ways for user-authored content and experiences to get combined with museum content and redistributed without passing through centralized channels, where editors and censors monitor the conversation.

Creating content and messages with a more discursive dynamic and greater sensitivity to the specificity of platforms, audiences and contexts requires a different approach to content and experience design from what is implied by the ‘multiplatform’ metaphor. Instead, we need more flexible, modular structures and methodologies, akin to what a technologist might call a ‘distributed network’ or rhizomic model.

There is no center or panopticon to a distributed network: no Hegelian master or slave.

The constituent platforms work together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

In terms of content, we speak less of the ‘original’ and more of the ‘simulacrum’ – the copy without an original, about which Jean Baudrillard wrote so eloquently. Notions of authority and hierarchy are not very helpful in describing relationships and processes that work together more like mash-ups than pronouncements. Truth, rather than being disseminated outwards from a center point, is discovered in its intersections and interstices, through the (sometimes surprising) juxtapositions that can happen when experiences are assembled collaboratively along the many-branched paths of a rhizome. In the museum as distributed network, content and experience creation resembles atoms coming together and reforming on new

platforms to create new molecules, or ‘choose your own ending’ adventure stories.

The Internet is a distributed network, structured as a rhizome by its military inventors precisely to make it impossible to destroy the entire network through an attack on any single center. In the loosest sense, every time you perform a Google search, you have tapped into a distributed network. The original content that forms the results page – itself a ‘mash-up’ – exists on a number of different computers, physical and virtual, each potentially in its own network or grid. It is delivered to you in an entirely new and personalized context on the basis of your search interests and terms at that precise moment in time; yet the original digital assets are

metaphor to describe new ways of authoring and supporting museum experiences that are: • conversational rather than unilateral, • engaging rather than simply didactic, • generative of content and open-ended rather than finite and closed …and that become ‘smarter’, more effective and useful the more they are used.

Like the Internet, the Museum as Distributed Network is enhanced, not diluted, by multiple voices and authors. But it requires powerful tools for making the ever-increasing data and metadata of assets, interpretations

“Creating content and messages with a more discursive dynamic and greater sensitivity to the specificity of platforms, audiences and contexts requires a different approach to content” completely untouched in their original form, and you can easily trace the results content back to discover its full context and original publication environment. The value and authority of the ‘original’ is not diminished, but rather enhanced, by being placed in new contexts alongside content from other sources. Quality is determined by the content’s relevance, depth, longevity and quantity of ‘peer-reviews’ and recommendations – also known as links.

Other than the Internet itself, distributed networks don’t really exist yet in the technical sense, because most computer systems are built on the master-slave model. But we do see the products of master-slave systems being distributed, e.g. in peer-to-peer gaming, social media environments, and some wikis. As we begin to design interpretation and information systems for the museum in the age of social media, the distributed network can serve as an inspirational

and interpreters findable, and for connecting communities of interest in meaningful ways across oceans of content and contributors.

Here is one vision of how a distributed network approach can be deployed to foster and support mobile experiences of the museum both on-site and beyond.

From headphones to microphones: Mobile experience design for the museum as distributed network.

Audio tours are the oldest and most common form of ‘self-guided’ mobile experience in museums and cultural sites. The traditional development model began with the question, “What are the most important messages we want visitors to take away” from the encounter with this collection, exhibition or object – and content was developed to support those goals.

As the audio tour platform evolved from analog tapes to digital media players, the 45

devices that could deliver the mobile experience proliferated. Today not just audio tours but mobile multimedia, including text, video and interactive content, can be delivered to the visitor’s own devices as well as those provided on-site by the museum. In a multi-platform museum, the traditional audio tour content is repurposed and published to these new devices: cellphones, personal media players like iPods, and webenabled phones, as both mobile websites and native applications. Especially with some planning ahead with cross-platform content design and minor versioning for the different delivery platforms, this is not a bad strategy: museums should seek to ‘meet our audiences where they are’ by publishing their content in as

approach?

A distributed network design offers a more sustainable model for building mobile experiences that are also more responsive, meaningful and relevant to different audiences and their interests. Employing the principle that the best way to learn is to teach, it turns visitors into docents and ambassadors for our museums by taking the mobile experience from headphones to microphones, “from we do the talking to we help you do the talking.”

In the next issue, we’ll look at the major ingredients for this new kind of mobile solution: an ‘un-tour’ that begins with asking what audiences want to know about our collections, exhibitions, research and scholarship (both on-

“A distributed network design offers a more sustainable model for building mobile experiences that are more responsive, meaningful and relevant to different audiences” many places as possible.

As Koven Smith has asked, however, will delivering what is fundamentally the same, narrow-cast tour experience to shiny new gadgets really ‘take them some place new?’ Will adding images, or video, or a sexy new consumer device really improve the take-up or penetration rates of mobile technology use by museum visitors?

Although in conflict with visitors’ self-reported usage of mobile interpretation in museums, in reality the audio tour reaches a sobering minority of the museum’s on-site audience, and one has to ask how well podcasts, cellphone tours and iPhone apps serving up the same basic content fulfill the needs of those audiences who’ll never be able to visit the museum in person. And yet what museum has the resources to develop content and experiences that will suit the full range of its audiences on all the mobile platforms, using a spoke-and-wheel design and distribution 46

site and beyond the museum’s wall) – not with what we want to tell them. By responding first to the questions that visitors ask of the museum, we are able to use mobile solutions to engage them more fully and immediately: to truly “meet them where they are and then take them some place new” – to deeper levels of experience and understanding. Most importantly, we can help connect communities of interest and facilitate conversations among our audiences as well as with the museum itself. By playing to the museum’s strengths in providing niche content and expertise, mobile social media has the potential to stimulate the wonder and the passion of the direct encounter with the physical museum for audiences using mobile platforms both on-site and beyond.

Nancy Proctor, Head of Mobile Strategy & Initiatives, Smithsonian Institution

One of Europe’s leading exhibition designers Winner of five consecutive AHI Interpret Britain & Ireland Awards IDI, Digital Media and IDEA Award winners

www.martellomedia.com | T: +353-1-2844668

Glasnevin Cemetery Museum, Dublin 47

Trends in Mobile Interpretation: A Look Into The Future Matthew Petrie, Managing Director, Fusion Research + Analytics

A Mobile Revolution?

Only a few days into a new decade and Google introduced the ‘Superphone’. Billing it as the next wave in mobile technology, the Superphone joins the iPhone and smartphone in increasing the availability and ease with which consumers can download 3rd party content on the go – whatever, wherever, whenever (that is as long as you are connected). With the market drivers in place, the Superphone and other future advances will only increase consumer expectations of mobile technologies and in doing so provide a large receptive audience for cultural mobile content.

Which raises the question: what does the cultural institution audience expect today? Where are the signs that show what visitors want now and what they will likely want in the future?

Chart 1: European Mobile Phone Activities SMS

80%

Take pictures

39%

MMS

35%

34%

Play games

Listen to music

28%

14%

Mobile Internet

10%

E-mail

Q. Which of the following activities have you performed on your mobile phone?

Some Clear Signs One thing is clear, the introduction of the iPhone has changed how consumers use and think about mobile phones. Today mobile phones are used for much more than just talking. As chart 1 illustrates a majority of European mobile phone users use SMS text and a third take pictures with their mobile phones and one-third use it for a source of entertainment in playing games and listing to music. Although these activities do vary by age, older consumers are not always so far behind younger mobile users (Chart 2). For example, 35-44 year olds lag only slightly behind younger mobile users in SMS, taking pictures, MMS and utilizing mobile internet.

Source: Forrester Research – European Technographics, Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009

Chart 2: European Mobile Phone Activities SMS

Take pictures

16-24

MMS

25-34 35-44 45-54

Play games

55-64

Listen to music

65+

Mobile Internet

E-mail 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Q. Which of the following activities have you performed on your mobile phone?

Source: Forrester Research – European Technographics, Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009

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80%

90%

100%

Chart 3: European Mobile Phone Activities Send SMS text messages Take pictures with mobile camera

47%

21%

Listen to music on mobile phone

41%

15%

Play mobile games

31%

10%

Access the mobile Internet

7%

Touch screen mobile phone users represent 7% of the European mobile population

26%

6%

MMS/picture messaging

Send of receive emails

79%

56%

19% 18%

4%

Q. Which of the following activities have you performed on your mobile phone?

Source: Forrester Research – European Technographics, Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009

Chart 4: Type of Mobile Guide Interactive Tour 9%

Multimedia Tour 18%

Audio Tour 66%

Other 7%

Q. Which of the following best describes the type of handheld guide your Institution currently offers?

Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Chart 5: Mobile Guide Institution Objectives Provide supplementary information

72%

Create a more interactive experience

40%

Provide particular/ multiple voices to experience

37%

As an introduction to the museum

29%

As a foreign language provision

22%

To attract new visitors

18%

As the primary interpretation tool

18%

Up-to-date with peers and tech. trends

17% 11%

Revenue generator Access for visitors with special needs

11%

Specific funds were made available for guides

8%

To assist visitor navigation

7%

Q. What are the main objectives for using handheld guides at your Institution? (Please select a maximum of three options) Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Chart 6: Challenges of Developing and Managing Mobile Guides (top 2 box) Updating content

47%

Cost of content creation

39% 34%

Content production Cost of sustaining and maintaining system

30%

Guide Maintenance

23% 20%

Design Purchase / rental of the guide player Managing visitor and guide provisioning Selection of the guide player

18% 16% 15%

Q. How challenging were the following in the development and operation of the handheld guide system?

1 = Not a Challenge, 5 = Very Challenging Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Beyond demographics the type of mobile phone makes a big difference in how consumers use their phones. Touch screen mobile users are far more likely to engage in mobile activities like taking pictures, listening to music, playing games and accessing the mobile internet than non-touch screen users (Chart 3). Although touch screen users represent less than 10% of European mobile users the effect on usage behavior is clear and offers a glimpse into future mobile trends.

Is the cultural industry noticing?

How are cultural institutions adopting these mobile technologies and how do they see their audiences’ expectations changing? With private and public investment in cultural institutions under pressure, will an increase focus be placed on visitor needs? Within this context is technology viewed as a burden or an opportunity? The huge variety of cultural institutions, geography and budgets makes answering this question conclusively impossible. However, surveying how institutions from around the global are developing and managing their mobile content provides insight into how institutions are responding to technology to enhance the visitor experience.

The institution research presented here is provided by the 2009 International Handheld Guide survey, a joint initiative between Learning Times and Loïc Tallon, launched online in October 2009. The research objectives were to identify A) why institution use handheld guides, and B) how institutions envision the future of mobile interpretations.

In terms of mobile guide format – not surprisingly a majority offer a traditional audio guide format with less than one-fifth offering a multimedia guide (chart 4). The primary objective of mobile guides is straightforward: to provide supplementary information (Chart5). In this sense the objectives of guides are to provide a very basic function. However, objectives important to the development of new guide formats, such as multimedia, are recognized by institutions, these include: creating a more interactive experience, attracting new visitors, and keeping up with institutional peers and audience usage of new technology (chart 6).

Institutions can clearly see how technology is pushing mobile guide evolution.

In the next 5 years the majority of institutions foresee an increase of downloads to visitors’ 49

own devices as well as an increased use of inhouse capabilities to develop content and linking to visitors’ pre, during and post visit experience (Chart 7). Although rated lower, other important guide evolutions include the use of more powerful multimedia players, linking to community sites, the ability to upload content and mobile content delivered via wifi. When these evolutions will take place is anyone’s guess and heavily dependent on the size and commitment of institutions. That said one thing is clear, few institutions foresee the end of their mobile guide programs.

Keeping up with the pace of technology is never easy, but the majority of institutions make it a priority to keep up-to-date on the latest developments in mobile guides on either a regular or a project basis (Chart 8). Peer groups and custom visitor research rate the highest as important sources of information followed by conferences and general internet research (Chart 9).

What About Your Audience?

Understanding how your audience uses their mobile phones and other technologies is an essential first step in developing a mobile content and interpretive strategy. As audiences enter cultural institutions, they bring with them aspects of their daily lives that can influence the visiting experience. Consumers are heavily dependent on technology in their daily lives and as it evolves so do consumer behaviors and expectations.

To assess how these tools may be affecting the cultural arts experience, a series of institutional visitor research studies are reviewed.

The research presented here is provided by leading museums in the US and Europe in partnership with Discovery Communications and Fusion Research + Analytics. A key theme through this breadth of research is an assessment of visitor expectations and behaviors and how demographics and/or the use of technology affect the visitor experience.

The visitor research reviewed here includes the following cultural institutions:

Chart 7: Mobile Guide Evolution in the Next 5 Years

Increase use of in-house capabilities to develop content

58%

49%

Linking visitor's pre, during and post visit experience Use of more powerful multimedia players

36%

23%

Onsite links to social community sites Enable visitors to upload content

22%

18%

Mobile content delivered via. Institution's WiFi 10%

No longer providingmobile guides

Q. How do you see your Institution's handheld guide evolving in the next five years?

(Please select a maximum of three options) Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Chart 8: Keeping Up-To-Date?

Yes, on a project-byproject basis 20% Yes, occasionally 29%

Yes, on a regular basis 36%

Not really 15%

Q. Do you / your Institution keep up-to-date on new developments with handheld guides?

Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Chart 9: Primary Sources Of Information On Mobile Guides (top 2 box) 68%

Private discussions / correspondence w ith peer Netw ork

64%

Custom research from your or other institutions

53%

Conferences on museum technology

52%

Web sites, w ikis and online searches / research General museum conferences

44% 42%

Discussions w ith contractors

Articles in the museum press

42% 41%

Conferences on handheld guides

34%

Subscription to a blog or listserv

Q. How important are the following to you / your Institution as information sources on handheld guides?

1 = Not Important, 5 = Very Important Source: International Handheld Guide Survey 2009

Chart 10: Community Site Users By Age 65 or better

88%

13%

55 – 64 45 – 54

• National Gallery, London • English Heritage, Down House • Edinburgh Castle • Berlin Museum Island

63%

Increase of downloads to visitors' own devices

35 – 44 25 – 34 21 – 24

64%

36%

62%

38%

40%

60%

37%

63%

16 - 20

Audience Basics And Beyond The National Gallery in London conducted an 50

10%

90% Social site user

Q. Do you use … (community site)

18%

82%

Non social site user

Chart 11: Guide Effect on Visitor Experience

Don't Know

26%

Less/Much less

45% 54%

Neutral

71%

Somewhat More Enjoyable Much More Enjoyable

45%

30%

Percent of guide users

Under 26

26 to 45

46+

19%

51%

31%

Q. Did the audio guide make your experience today.....

Source: Discovery/Antenna Audio & Fusion Research + Analytics

Chart 12: Importance Of New Guide Features Link experience to e-mail or community site

56%

Provide digital map

50%

40%

46%

Provide images/pictures

Provide family version

75%

59% 58%

47%

47%

31%

64%

54%

46%

More entertaining

48%

25% 33% 31%

Ability to customize tour

39%

36%

Download guide onto iPod

25%

46+

32%

26 to 45

Under 26

Q. How important are the following potential new audio guide features to enhancing your audio guide experience.

Source: Discovery/Antenna Audio & Fusion Research + Analytics

Chart 13: Guide Device Preference

15%

Don't Know 33%

30%

22%

29%

Don't Own an iPod Strongly/Somewhat Prefer iPod

15%

25%

No Preference Strongly/Somewhat Prefer Audio Device

39%

Under 35

35%

35 to 44

43%

45+

Q. Would you prefer to take a tour using an audio device provided by a museum or your personal iPod/MP3 player?

Source: Discovery/Antenna Audio 2008 UK Museum and Historic Site Research

Chart 14: Guide Format Preference 4% Don't Know 42%

28%

Strongly/Somewhat Prefer Multimedia Tour

25%

24% 29%

No Preference

21%

Strongly/Somewhat Prefer Audio Tour

33%

37%

Under 35

35 to 44

Q. Would you prefer to take an audio only tour or an audio guide with both audio and images/video?

Source: Discovery/Antenna Audio 2008 UK Museum and Historic Site Research

audio guide evaluation among English and nonEnglish speaking visitors. Core to the research objectives was understanding how non-English speaking visitors rated the guide in comparison to English speaking visitors. While the results showed a clear difference between these two groups the research went beyond the guide ratings and profiled visitor technology and community site usage to better understand what new guide features visitors prefer and their ability to use them. In particular, the use of community sites across age groups showed compelling evidence that not just young visitors are using them and but that a larger audience could be engaged pre and post visit through such social media platforms (Chart 10).

47%

45+

Wanting More‌ A Younger Visitors Perspective Edinburgh Castle, a major tourist destination, with both indoor and outdoor exhibit areas, conducted an evaluation of its audio guide. Aggregate evaluations of the traditional audio guide showed that visitors overall rated the guide relatively high and that ratings also compared well against peer institutions. However, a closer look at how the guide rated between young and older visitors revealed a significant difference in how each group rated the guide and how the guide affected the overall experience (Chart 11). Focusing on visitors’ future guide feature preferences, it is clear that the traditional guide is not meeting younger visitor expectations , due to the lack of features they are accustomed to using in their daily lives (Chart 12).

Device preference and guide format are also critical issues to address in determining how an evolving digital world is affecting visitor expectations. When visitors were asked whether they would prefer using their own device versus one provided by a museum or historic site, not surprisingly older visitors are far more likely to prefer a museum provided device than younger visitors (chart 13). Even among younger visitors, only a third would prefer using an iPod/MP3 player to access guide content. More indicative of visitor preference is guide format - clearly younger visitors can see the benefits of a multimedia guide format and a majority of younger visitors prefer a multimedia format to an audio only format (Chart 14). In contrast, fewer older visitors intuitively see the benefits or need for a multimedia guide format.

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Chat 15: Words that Best Describe Multimedia Guide Experience

2%

Tier I

Tier II

Informative

Under 35 72%

35 to 54 81%

55+ 73%

Interesting

79%

72%

68%

Educational

79%

63%

57%

48%

51%

56%

Comprehensive Accessible

69%

56%

52%

Historical

41%

40%

38%

Biographical

31%

12%

23%

Scientific

34%

14%

18%

Intellectual

38%

9%

14%

14%

12%

Inspiring

Tier III

21%

Repetitive

7%

0%

Fun

41%

16%

6%

Emotional

10%

5%

4%

Demanding

0%

0%

4%

Complex

0%

0%

4%

10%

5%

4%

Technical

14%

2%

3%

Social

3%

2%

3%

Boring

3%

2%

0%

6

4

4

Median number of words:

14% Dont know not sure

12%

7%

26%

4% 5% 20%

20% 17%

Written content or a guidebook

Audio content only

85%

79%

6%

Anti-social

Chart 19 Multimedia Guide User

Chart 17: Guide Format Preference by Age

70%

Audio and video content, like the guide you used today

Under 35

35 to 54

iPhone

55+

Blackberry

All visitors

Q. What words best describe your guide experience?

Q. . Would you have preferred a guide that provided…

Source: English Heritage, Down House/Fusion Research + Analytics

Q. Have you ever used a museum guide that provided both audio and video content?

Source: English Heritage, Down House/Fusion Research + Analytics

Source: Discovery/Berlin Museum Island survey /Fusion Research + Analytics

Chart 16: Video Guide Comparison Chart 18: Likelihood to Recommend Multimedia Guide by Age

Chart 20: Device Preference

8%

11%

36%

33%

31%

33%

25%

33%

30%

12%

24%

Strongly

Prefer my own Personal device

64%

67%

67%

14%

83%

No Preference

68%

59%

29%

23%

Prefer Museum Provided Device

23% Under 35

Under 35 Much better Somewhat worse

35 to 54 Somewhat better Much worse

55+ About the same Dont know

3% 11%

18%

Somewhat

46%

Dont Know

Probably not

35 to 54

55+

iPhone

blackberry

Non-mobile user

Q. . Would you recommend this video guide to a friend?

Q. Would you prefer to take an audio tour using an audio device provided by a museum or your own personal device (e.g., iPod, etc)?

Source: English Heritage, Down House/Fusion Research + Analytics

Source: Discovery/Berlin Museum Island survey /Fusion Research + Analytics

Q. How would you compare video guide to other museum or historic site audio guides you have used?

Source: English Heritage, Down House/Fusion Research + Analytics

Acceptance of Multimedia Among Young and Old An evaluation conducted at English Heritage site Down House illustrates how multimedia guides can appeal to both young and older audiences.

The Down House (Charles Darwin’s house) multimedia guide was launched in the summer of 2009. The multimedia guide was planned as an integral and inclusive part of the visitor experience, and it covered both indoor and extensive outdoor areas. A key objective of the multimedia guide was to provide an engaging experience for all visitors, however the site management harbored concerns that older visitors’ “lack of familiarity” with touch screen technology and a multimedia format might hamper their experience.

Clearly, visitors varied in their assessment of guide attributes. Younger visitors were far more likely to characterize the guide experience as accessible, inspiring and fun compared to older visitors (slide 15). Further, younger visitors rated the multimedia guide higher than other guides that they have used at other museums or historic sites (slide 16). After using the multimedia guide, a large majority of visitors indicated a preference for a multimedia guide format - older visitors were only slightly less likely to prefer a multimedia format than younger visitors (slides 17). Young and old visitors expressed that the multimedia format allowed them to explore more of the site than they would have using a traditional audio 52

tour and that the multimedia guide allowed them to learn more with less effort. Overall, visitors across the age groups rated the guide highly - demonstrating that a multimedia guide can satisfy the demands of a younger audience but still meet the basic needs of an older audience (Chart 18).

The Revolution Is Just Getting Started What does the future hold? How fast will visitor expectations change and how will cultural institutions react to evolving visitor needs and the availability of digital technology? Leading cultural institutions are only now developing strategies in response to these questions. Focusing on the most advanced users of multimedia content (The iPhone, or more broadly touch screen users) offers some insight into the evolution of mobile guides even in traditional museum settings.

Based on a recent survey conducted on the Berlin Museum Island, iPhone museum visitors are more likely to have used a museum multimedia guide format and are also most likely to prefer using their own personal device when accessing guide content (Charts 19 and 20). This trend in device preference will only increase as the segment of visitors owning Smartphones, iPhones and Superphones grows.

Matthew Petrie, Managing Director, Fusion Research + Analytics

Visitor Communications for Museums, Heritage Attractions & Visitor Centres

we don’t build systems

we design solutions...

Graphics : Videos : Touchscreens : Soundtracks : Experiences : Websites WE HAVE MOVED 34A High Street Thames Ditton Surrey KT7 0RY NEW TEL: 020 8398 9509 www.motivation81.co.uk

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The British Museum’s Multimedia Guide Silvia Filippini Fantoni and Matthew Cock The British Museum

Since the turn of the century, a variety of multimedia guides have been piloted or adopted by a range of museum worldwide. This is mainly due to the great potential that such solutions offer to museums and their visitors. Advantages include variety of interpretation, engagement of visitors, outreach to new audiences, support for orientation, and flexibility with content distribution (Filippini Fantoni and Bowen, 2008). Hoping to take advantage of such benefits, the British Museum has recently undertaken a one year project for the development of its first multimedia guide, whose aim was to completely replace its audio offerings both for its temporary exhibitions and permanent collections.

Supporting the learning process The guide, which launched in December 2009, is sponsored by Korean Air and will be distributed in the museum until December 2014. It is available in 10 languages (English, Korean, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish) and provides access to audio visual commentaries related to over 200 objects in the collection.

These commentaries include audio descriptions, filmed interviews with curators and conservators, 360 degree view of selected objects and contextual material in the form of photographs and music; all accessible to the visitor at the touch of the screen.

By providing an in-depth and varied level of interpretation for the museum collection and 54

history, this content is of great support to the learning process because the visitor can retain information more easily by using several different sensory channels at the same time (Mayer, 2001).

Moreover visual interactives such as games and “touch and listen” also offer a viewing “hook” for a reluctant visitor, together with the ability to choose and control what s/he wishes to listen to or view.

Providing visitors’ with choice To facilitate visitors’ control over their experience, the British Museum multimedia guide provides not only multiple layers of content and information types, but also various ways of accessing commentaries.

First of all, visitors who want to select information regarding objects based on their interest or location, can use the virtual keypad, which allows them to type in the number of selected works on display to play relevant commentaries (see figure 1a).

Secondly, an interactive map of the museum’s three floors, is available for those who feel more comfortable with spatial navigation. By using the zooming and scrolling functionalities and/or inputting the number of the room they are in into the keypad, the map can be centred on a selected location, showing the objects that are featured on the guide and allowing easy access to the relevant commentaries (see figure 1b).

Finally, for visitors who need more guidance and support, the guide provides a choice

a

b

c

Figure 1: Screenshots of the guide’s virtual keypad (a), zoomed in interactive map with highlighted the location of the objects featured on the guide (b), and an example of audiovisual directions in the Ancient Egypt guided tour (c)

of five guided tours with audio-visual directions between objects (1c). Based on visitors feedback from other similar applications (Metfinder, 2006), audio visual directions have proven to be the most effective way of guiding visitors around the galleries. This is because the audio descriptions are reinforced by maps highlighting the path that the visitors must follow or by pictures of specific landmarks that the visitor will encounter. The guide currently offers tours of the Parthenon, Korean and Enlightenment galleries, a tour of the highlights of Ancient Egypt and of the most popular objects of the collection. Two more guided tours will be added by the end of the summer.

Facilitating visitor’s orientation While guided tours and the interactive map provide alternative ways to access content to visitors with different needs, they also offer an incredible support for way finding. An application called the “Museum Navigator” has been recently added to further help visitors find their way around the intricate galleries.

Using the same approach that was adopted for the guided tours, this application provides audiovisual descriptions of the location of selected objects, galleries and facilities (e.g. restrooms, lifts, stairs, cloakroom), without relying on location-aware technology. The descriptions provided are general and include an indication of the floor, level, room number, orientation (North, South, East or West side of the museum), and the proximity to one or more landmarks in

the museum (stairs, lifts, ticket desk, entrance, multimedia guide distribution desk, etc.). Without knowing where people are, these descriptions have proven to be fundamental to allow visitors to get a sense of where objects or galleries they are interested in are located and to help them find their way there.

Serving the needs of new audiences Beside supporting visitors’ learning, choice and orientation, multimedia guides have also the benefit of appealing to new audiences, such as children, families and deaf visitors, who normally are not served by more traditional forms of mobile interpretation. By recognizing this potential, the British Museum has also launched a children’s (3a) and a British Sign Language (BSL – 3b) versions of the guide, as well as an Audio Description guide for the visually impaired.

The children’s guide is aimed at 5-11 years old and features 57 objects across 30 galleries. It features 7 short guided tours focusing on different parts of the world (Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece Early Britain, Africa, Americas and Oceania, Asia and Middle East). The tours are narrated by Vid the alien and two children that he commandeers to teach him about human cultures through the Museum’s galleries, and is light-hearted and irreverent. It also features activity suggestions and interactive games around some of the most interesting objects.

Using the capability of the multimedia guide to display video, the Museum also launched 55

c a

b

Figure 2: Screenshots of the children’s (a and b) and BSL (c) multimedia guides

a BSL guide, with short videos about each of the 220 objects signed in British Sign Language.

This is believed to be the most extensive sign language offer for a Museum in the world. The Museum also offers an Audio Description guide, again, featuring all the objects in the main guide, with extra description to help blind and visually impaired visitors in their appreciation and understanding of the object. The Audio Description guide is made available on a more traditional handset with physical buttons, being more accessible than the virtual touch screen.

A project developed in-house By taking advantage of the benefits provided by touch screen mobile devices, the British Museum has managed to develop a simple and user friendly mobile solution that is able to support visitors’ learning, choice and orientation in the galleries, and to serve the need of families, deaf and visually impaired visitors. The increasing take up rates and the positive results of the evaluation that was carried out at the beginning of 2010 seem to confirm the overall success of the project.

These results are even more impressive if we consider both the short time frame in which the project has been developed and the fact that the guide’s information architecture and content development and assembly processes have been carried out mainly by internal staff and free lancers who worked on script writing, content assembly and building, video shooting 56

and editing, translation and production checking, as well as with the support of a few external contractors for audio production, translation, BSL video recording and equipment.

Despite the challenges that the museums has had to overcome in the development of the project, including hardware and software limitations and difficulties in developing content in multiple languages in such as short time, the experience has been in overall positive, showing that, with adequate resources, it is possible to develop a mobile guide in house, that is easy to use and provides an adequate support to learning and orientation in the galleries.

Silvia Filippini Fantoni and Matthew Cock The British Museum Filippini Fantoni S., and Bowen J. (2008).

Mobile Multimedia: Reflections from Ten Years of Practice in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience: Handheld Guides and Other Media, edited by Loïc Tallon and Kevin Walker, AltaMira Press, August 2008 Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metfinder (2006). Metfinder: A Handheld Solution for Independent Exploration and Discovery in the Museum. MCN Conference, Pasadena, November 2006. http://72.5.117.137/conference/mcn2006/ SessionPapers/Metfinder.pdf

Developing the App for the V&A Quilts Exhibition Miranda Hinkley, Producer at Antenna Audio

To enter the V&A’s Quilts: 1700-2010 is to step into a private, inner world created by hundreds of hands. In places this world is centuries old, in others contemporary, but it’s always haunting, complex and quirkily beautiful. My challenge as producer of the exhibition guide was to do it justice on a mobile, digital platform; Apple’s iPod touch.

An ‘app’ is a software programme containing multimedia content, specially created for Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPod touch and newly launched iPad. Antenna Audio have been working exclusively with the V&A for the past eighteen months, but the reasons behind the choice of our Pentimento™ ‘app’ for iPod were, I think, twofold. Firstly, the audience profile for the exhibition is unusual. We always expected a strong, specialist interest, but in the weeks running up to the opening, quilting groups across the world were block-booking local hotels. It has also proved very popular with the wider public; perhaps due to the recession there is a strong interest in traditional crafts and the hand-made.

Mindful of this, we wanted an interpretational tool that would provide enough in-depth, technical detail to satisfy the hard-core quilters, as well as the compelling, human narratives that would engage the broader audience. So far, visitor comments have been very positive: “The best audio guide I have ever used. An excellent use of modern technology to truly enhance this inspiring exhibition. Fantastic! And: “Excellent audio guide, particularly the possibility of close-up - almost

as good as touching it.” Our Pentimento™ ‘app’ gives visitors an elegant, visually rich experience combining flawless audio and video with zoomable images, that allow them to use the iPod’s MultiTouch screen to actually zoom in and view the works up close, stitch by stitch.

Secondly, the quilts are displayed as they would originally have been seen; on beds or as wall hangings. This contributes to a wonderfully intimate experience; visitors are literally stepping into the bedrooms and private quarters of the past. But it also throws up an interpretational challenge, as some of finer detail on the works is hard to see. In addition, due to the very fragile nature of some of the older quilts, they need to be shown under relatively low lighting. Using the app, with its zoom function, meant that some of this detail could be revealed. An added bonus was that the app could also be offered for download online. This not only created an additional income stream, but meant that enthusiasts around the world who couldn’t make it to the exhibition could still experience these remarkable objects.

The exhibition encompasses a huge variety of quilts, coverlets and bedcovers; 65 in total. The app covers about a third of these, specially chosen by the curators to represent the full range of periods, styles and techniques, in over an hour of content. The early 18th century Coverlet with Aesop’s Fable is pieced together from hundreds of triangles of silk and silk velvets, embroidered and appliquéd with flowers, birds, animals and sprigs of greenery. Mrs Shepherd’s 57

The App provides a visually rich experience combining flawless audio and video with zoomable images - visitors can view the quilts up close, stitch by stitch

1930’s Bedcover is made from a single piece of peach cotton sateen, but stitched with a complex pattern of her own design, which includes the seat of a bentwood chair and scallop shells, probably inspired by her upbringing on Coquet Island. Meanwhile in Right to Life, Grayson Perry uses the classic ‘tumbling block’ pattern to create a stunning quilt, which on closer inspection is made up of foetuses, rotating on a background of vivid velvets.

As many of the quilts included in the exhibition are part of the V&A’s collection, the V&A also holds the rights to the associated images. A visually rich app is a great way of utilising and re-purposing existing digital content. The ability to include detailed, hi-resolution photographs meant that we could show an extraordinary level of detail; the tiny snake at the bottom of the tree of life in Ann West’s Patchwork with Garden of Eden, even the minute stitches that spell out her initials on an appliqué of a minister’s hymn book.

We were also able to showcase some of the fresh discoveries made in the run-up to the exhibition.

When the linen lining of the Coverlet with Aesop’s Fable was removed during the conservation process, paper templates dating from late 17th and early 18th century were revealed. The app includes a series of images that illustrate this, including an infrared photograph that identifies one piece as a handbill for a popular medicine.

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A big part of what makes the content so engaging is the wonderful stories associated with the quilts; the personal, family and social histories that are worked into them, stitch by stitch. The app includes an exclusive video interview with textile artist Jo Budd, who explains how her Winter/Male, Summer/Female pieces were put together in her Suffolk studio, inspired by the life she shares with her partner and the colours of the water meadow that surrounds their home. We discover how a patriotic woman created a celebration of British sea power in her Coverlet with George III Reviewing Troops.

The quilt includes a series of 40 tiny vignettes, where scraps of coloured fabric make up complex and detailed scenes. One shows a sailor, or tar, holding hands with his love, his ship waiting in the background to carry him away from her. The composition is based on an illustration that accompanied a popular song of the day, Poor Jack, a sort of shanty that tells of the bravery and patriotism of a poor sailor.

We were delighted to be able to show a close up of this vignette, together with the original illustration from the collection of the National Maritime Museum. Folk singer Sam Lee gave us an exclusive performance of the song that we wove into a haunting soundscape. But the most moving story is probably that of contemporary textile artist Michele Walker. She describes how her mother’s slip into dementia, and the resulting loss of personhood and relationship led to Memoriam; a challenging work in which imprinted patterns from the artist’s skin are surrounded by thick strands of wire wool, which caused her hands to chafe and bleed.

Working with the V&A on the Quilts exhibition has been a real privilege; to hear the stories at first hand and get close to the works was truly special. What I love about the app is that it gives people their own, personal key to this world; it literally puts these exquisite works in your pocket. Just like the LoveArt app we created for the National Gallery in 2009, Quilts is packed with beautiful images and stories that you can explore at your leisure. What could be more compelling?

Miranda Hinkley, Producer at Antenna Audio

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26/05/2010 11:46

© Jewish Museum

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Cultural Community

In a ÂŁ10 million transformation The Jewish Museum London tells the story of Jewish history, culture and religion in an innovative and compelling way - exploring the experience of immigration, cultural diversity, and Jewish identity as part of the wider story of Britain...

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All images Š Jewish Museum 62

The Jewish Museum London has reopened after a £10 million transformation creating a landmark museum that celebrates Jewish life and cultural diversity. Its new displays and exhibitions tell the story of Jewish history, culture and religion in an innovative and compelling way allowing the visitor to explore Jewish heritage and identity as part of the wider story of Britain.

One of Britain’s oldest minority groups, the Jewish community has made a vital and extraordinary contribution to British life. From banking and business to fashion, entertainment and food, many sectors have benefited from the energy and talents of the Jewish community who have come here from all over the world. At the same time, the story of the Jewish people reflects the experiences of other immigrant groups settling in a new country, seeking to make a new life while retaining their identity and traditions. The new museum brings this experience of immigration

100-seat auditorium, an Education Space and a new café and shop.

The four permanent galleries are:

to life via internationally important collections of artworks, artefacts and photography, as well as through new technology and interactive displays.

Displayed across four permanent galleries, the huge variety of objects, films, photography, hands-on exhibits and personal stories on display paint a rich and nuanced picture of British Jewish life and religion as well as exploring contemporary social issues around immigration and settlement. The new museum also houses a Changing Exhibitions Gallery, a

Jewish people have come to the UK from around the world and the challenges of making a new home in a new country.

Welcome Gallery – This innovative multimedia exhibit is the first you encounter as you enter the museum. It introduces visitors to a diverse range of Jewish people including a third generation smoked salmon manufacturer, an Indian-born marathon-running grandmother, a taxi-driver and an ex-army engineer who was commended for her action during the London bombings of 2005.

History: A British Story - Visitors can play the Great Migration board game, or smell the chicken soup in an immigrant home. The Same Old Story? interactive display allows visitors to explore attitudes to immigration over the past two centuries. This gallery explores how and why

Judaism: A Living Faith – Newly commissioned films in this gallery will reveal a range of contemporary Jewish families celebrating festivals and Jewish lifecycle events such as a wedding and bar mitzvah. These are shown alongside rare and beautiful ceremonial objects including silver Torah scrolls made by George III’s silversmith 63

and religious textiles, such as a fabulous Torah mantle commissioned by the Mocatta family, one of the oldest Jewish families in Britain. Interactive displays enable visitors to design their own synagogue and to hear the chanting of the Ten Commandments from a Torah scroll.

The Holocaust Gallery – this unique space explores the impact of Nazism through the experiences and poignant personal items of London-born Auschwitz survivor Leon Greenman OBE and other survivors who have made their home in Britain.

Rickie Burman, Director of the Jewish Museum said: “What it means to be British and the issue of cultural identity has never been

object an anti-apartheid activist was allowed to take with him into solitary confinement in prison in South Africa; Rare and precious ceremonial objects including a 17th century Italian Ark and the oldest English silver Hanukah lamp; A Yiddish theatre karaoke presented by comedian David Schneider, whose grandparents were performers in London’s Yiddish theatre, displayed with costumes, posters, programmes from the museum’s extensive collection; and a medieval mikveh (ritual bath) from the 13th century, on display for the first time since its discovery in 2001 in the City of London.

The first exhibition in the Changing Exhibitions space will be ILLUMINATION: Hebrew treasures from the Vatican and Major British

“What it means to be British and the issue of cultural identity has never been more hotly debated” more hotly debated. At the new Jewish Museum we explore these issues in the context of one of Britain’s oldest immigrant communities. We hope our ground-breaking new displays will inspire people to take a stand against racism and build interfaith understanding and connections.”

Highlights from the four permanent galleries include: A highly evocative recreation of an East End street and tailor’s workshop brought to life with different characters talking about their lives at home and at work; A map showing where Jews have come from around the world, embedded with highly personal objects that they brought with them to their new country, for example a doll brought by a child refugee on the Kindertransport and a bible which was the only 64

Collections from 25 June until October 2010. The museum is bringing together rare and exquisitely beautiful illuminated manuscripts which are among the most important Jewish works of scholarship and learning. Future planned exhibitions include Jews in Entertainment and Jewish Food.

The new museum has been designed

by Long & Kentish Architects, an award-winning practice who have a long history of developing museums and galleries including the British Library Centre for Conservation, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (Museum of the Year 2007) and the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth.

The new museum triples the space at its Camden Town site.

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

... the art of keeping art

Lutz Hartmann Kenilworth, Gravel Hill, Chalfont St Peter, SL9 9QP Mobile +44 (0) 7809760546, Fax +44 (0) 1753880749 e-mail: LH@reiershowcases.com

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Showcases Ltd. 65

Š Historic Royal Palaces 66

the great big multisensory interpretation experiment Kensington Palace has become the Enchanted Palace in a unique multisensory exhibition combining fashion, performance, and dazzling spectacle to reveal Kensington’s magnificent State Apartments in a magical new light.

Intrigued by Historic Royal Palace’s audacity and ambition, we wanted to find out more...

Kensington Palace has become the Enchanted Palace in a unique multisensory exhibition combining fashion, performance, and dazzling spectacle to reveal Kensington’s magnificent State Apartments in a new light.

Historic Royal Palaces is undertaking a £12 million major project to transform the visitor experience at Kensington Palace by 2012.

Whilst improvement works are being carried out, acclaimed UK theatre company WILDWORKS has cast a spell over the palace, creating a mysterious and atmospheric world for visitors to explore, and bringing the hidden stories of the historic royal residence dramatically to life.

In the sumptuous State Apartments, leading fashion designers Vivienne Westwood, William Tempest, Stephen Jones, Boudicca, Aminaka Wilmont and illustrator/set designer Echo Morgan have each created spectacular installations in collaboration with WILDWORKS, taking inspiration from Kensington Palace and the princesses who once lived there - Mary, Anne,

Caroline, Charlotte, Victoria, Margaret and Diana.

These extraordinary contemporary designs are displayed alongside historic items from the Royal Collection and Kensington Palace’s Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, together with two dresses worn by Diana, Princess of Wales and Princess Margaret.

The complex and mysterious world of the royal court is opened up through dreamlike installations, interactive theatre, intimate storytelling, soundscapes, haunting film projections, and a series of intriguing clues hidden throughout the historic rooms, revealing tales of love and hate, surprise and sadness, secrets and jealousy.

Each room has a powerful story to tell about Kensington Palace’s former royal residents and the life of the court - a world within a world, with its own time and rituals:

• Guided by the whispered voices of servants long gone, visitors make their way into the palace via the private backstairs, and 67

emerge into the splendour of Queen Mary II’s Bedchamber, a luxurious but dark room with a melancholy atmosphere. The room will reflect on royal marriage, birth and the importance of producing a dynastic heir. Queen Mary (reigned 1689-1694) had no children, reportedly a great sadness to her, whilst her sister Anne (later Queen Anne 1702-1714) had fourteen pregnancies but none of her babies survived. Aminaka Wilmont will create ‘a dress of tears’ for this room, based on the ancient tradition of collecting tears during times of mourning.

• The Privy Chamber, an ‘airlock’ between the private and public realms of the royal palace, was a place of masculine power, politics and intrigue, extreme etiquette, flattery and disguises.

Milliner Stephen Jones has produced a number of hats for a stunning installation inspired by the historic 18th century busts of great philosophers and scientists, in particular Sir Isaac Newton and his law of motion, evoking themes of the universe, revolution and flights of imagination.

• The King’s Presence Chamber, a small but opulent room in which the monarch came face-to-face with his subjects, received petitions and granted favours. This was a place where cultures collided, where foreign visitors, lower classes and curious characters of the court, would encounter their king. In this room of absolute royal power, visitors are invited to sit on WILDWORKS’ ‘wishing throne’ to record their own desires… what changes would you make if you were king for a day?

• The King’s Grand Staircase is of true fairytale proportions, with its winding chequered stone stairs, and walls and ceilings lavishly painted with a vivid, life-sized depiction of George I’s court. Intriguing and unexpected characters including the King’s Polish page, Turkish servants, Yeomen of the Guard, a giant Scotsman, a hairdresser, a ‘wild boy’, various mistresses, and a portrait of the artist himself, William Kent (1685-1748), all peer down at those who dare to ascend this grandest of staircases. In this dramatic space, Vivienne Westwood displays ‘a dress for a rebellious princess’ inspired by the spirited Princess Charlotte (1796-1817), daughter of King George IV and Caroline of BrunswickWolfenbüttel.

• The Cupola Room was the principal state room of the palace, and the most lavishly decorated. Its centrepiece is a spectacular clock 68

© Historic Royal Palaces

upon a dais; it once contained a musical box that played specially commissioned melodies by Handel, Corelli and Geminiani. Four great ancient monarchies - Chaldaea, Persia, Macedonia and Rome - are illustrated by the painted scenes on the sides of the clock. Boudicca’s dramatic installation imagines the lavish timepiece as the clockwork driving the palace and the machinations of court life. A soundscape of clocks ticking and chiming will be heard, whilst ‘dresses the colour of time’ circle the room.

• The King’s Gallery, originally built for

William III in 1695, features an elaborate winddial connected to a wind-vane on the roof so that the King could see which way the wind was blowing, where his navy was likely to be heading, and when the posts might arrive. Inspired by this device, WILDWORKS has created an installation featuring hundreds of toy soldiers and boats campaigning across the floor, echoing the war games played by William and his little nephew in this room.

• The Duchess of Kent’s Dressing Room and Anteroom – believed to have been once used

Fashion designer William Tempest’s ‘A Dress for Dreaming of Freedom’, his installation for the Enchanted Palace exhibition at Kensington Palace. Enchanted Palace combines fashion, performance, and dazzling spectacle, inspired by the stories of the palace’s former royal residents, to reveal Kensington’s magnificent State Apartments in a magical new light. The exhibition runs from 26 March 2010 until January 2012.

Credit: Richard Lea-Hair / newsteam

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as a royal nursery, these rooms display a number of items of children’s clothing from the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection, including a beautiful pair of fur trimmed red boots, Princess Beatrice’s kid gloves and tiny baby shoes belonging to Queen Victoria’s children.

• Queen Victoria’s bedroom - this is the room in which Victoria was sleeping when her uncle King William IV died at Windsor Castle in the middle of the night, and where she awoke to the news that she was to become queen. The installation in this room will represent Victoria’s life changing overnight transformation from young princess to Queen of the United Kingdom. Inspired by Victoria’s new-found freedom and independence as a result of her accession, William Tempest has created an avant-garde interpretation of a period dress that will incorporate origami and produce a trompe l’oeil effect whereby the dress will appear to vanish and merge into its surroundings.

• The King’s Drawing Room – a grand reception room in which Echo Morgan will curate a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ inspired by renowned royal collectors Queen Mary III and Caroline of Ansbach (1683-1737), queen consort of George II. Both were famously keen on acquiring precious, special or intriguing artefacts including paintings, porcelain, exotica, textiles and curiosities. It will feature historic exhibits such as items from Princess Margaret’s shell and coral collection, alongside weird and wonderful contemporary creations. Echo has also created a ‘dress of the world’, in the style of an 18th century court dress, sculpted in paper and decorated with prints of antique maps.

• The Council Chamber - in this historic room where the resident monarchs held their Privy Councils, dresses belonging to Diana, Princess of Wales and Princess Margaret will be displayed in crystal-like cases surrounded by a birch forest. A theme for this room will be the joy of dancing - Diana and Margaret were both patrons of British ballet companies.

• The Queen’s Dining Room – a cosy, intimate room lined with oak panelling, in which William III and Mary II liked to dine in private, often upon fish and beer. Redolent of royal domesticity, a portrait of their housekeeper hangs on the wall.

• The Queen’s Closet – in this claustrophobic oak-panelled room a terrible argument took place between Queen Anne (reigned 1702-1714) and her greatest friend and confidante, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Sarah had become too bold and 70

confident in her position in Anne’s heart and overstepped her authority by trespassing into the private sphere of royal power. They never spoke again. Listen closely and you may still hear their angry voices echoing through the walls…

• The Queen’s Gallery – a spellbinding finale awaits those who have bravely ventured through The Enchanted Palace. WILDWORKS will conjure up the effect of a whirling ballroom through music and film projections. A series of shining mirrors hang on the walls - if you look carefully, you may catch a fleeting glimpse of Kensington’s princesses….

Historic Royal Palaces’ Curator Alexandra Kim comments: “This is an innovative ‘animated exhibition’ set against the backdrop of the magnificent State Apartments, and offers a truly unique opportunity to discover the hidden stories of Kensington Palace. Featuring specially commissioned contemporary fashion installations woven into fascinating tales from the palace’s history, The Enchanted Palace will enable visitors to explore the extraordinary lives of Kensington’s former royal residents.”

WILDWORKS Producer Bill Mitchell adds: “We have found the stories of the palace incredibly inspiring, they’re like true fairy tales the rebellious princess who was so universally loved that, when she died in childbirth, London ran out of black mourning fabric; the little sickly prince who played peashooters with his uncle, the king; the court that kept a wild feral boy as a pet; the young princess who wept for three days when told she had to marry a man twice her age; the two friends who had a quarrel that caused deaths, changed the fortunes of great families and the map of Europe. It’s such rich material for art and theatre - to be exploring these stories in the rooms where they took place is thrilling.”

Enchanted Palace is inspired by the £12 million major project that will transform the visitor experience at Kensington Palace by improving accessibility, introducing new education and community facilities, reconnecting the palace with the surrounding park through new public gardens, and enabling us to present exciting exhibitions inspired by the palace’s rich past and unique collections. This project, ‘Welcome to Kensington – a palace for everyone’, will be completed by Historic Royal Palaces in June 2012, in time for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics.

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Over the last 40 years many museums have been established dedicated to celebrating the technology, life and landscape of individual industries, or localities and regions within the UK. Generally, two methods of interpretation are used in these museums in various combinations: explaining the technology of industry, and providing a “taste” of what life in an industrial community was like in its heyday. The first method tends to be very object-centred and technically-focussed, while the second often attempts to give the visitor an immersive environmental experience.

In both the authority of the historical narrative is fairly fixed: definitive information is given out through the object label or from the mouth of the demonstrator. The National Waterfront Museum in Swansea has attempted to break out from this mould in a thoughtful and elegant way that capitalises upon the benefits of interactive new media to provide a more diffused authority in its interpretative narrative.

The National Waterfront Museum is run

by Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales in partnership with City and County of Swansea.

It is located in the heart of Swansea’s historic Maritime Quarter. The museum was designed by architects Wilkinson Eyre and the displays created

by Land Design Studio. It was developed at a cost of £33.68m and opened on 17 October 2005.

To date, it has attracted around half a million visitors. Created from a refurbished late-Victorian warehouse and new build galleries, the museum provides a multi-faceted insight into the effects of industrialisation and maritime trading on the people of Wales and beyond. The storylines begin in the eighteenth century and continue to the present in order to provide an understanding of where Wales is today and what its future might hold. It is one of a family of seven museums across Wales. The project was the culmination of the Industrial Strategy, devised in the 1990s by Amgueddfa Cymru which has previously led to the redevelopment of the National Slate Museum, Llanberis, the National Coal Museum/Big Pit, Blaenafon; and the National Wool Museum, Drefach Felindre.

The new museum’s origins lay in the decision in 1998 by Amgueddfa Cymru to close its Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum in Cardiff Bay and to find a partner to create a new type of museum in a new location. One of the principal reasons for deciding to close the museum in 72

Cardiff was that it had literally been built around a number of large industrial objects. What this meant was that the museum had absolutely no flexibility or opportunity for change, and visitor numbers were falling. In developing the proposals for the new museum it became clear that there were a number of key issues which had to be addressed. These included relevance and appeal to both genders and a wide range of social and age groups, as well as the need for more openended and flexible learning to take place by children and adults inside the museum. This pointed to the need for a dynamic approach to interpretation where interactive IT-driven media could deliver a wide range of content that was arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and where a human rather than a technological storyline could be presented. As three other

Diffusing interpretative authority

Steph Mastoris on interactive new media and interpretative narrative museums within Amgueddfa Cymru already looked at the major Welsh industries of coal mining, slate quarrying and woollen weaving by means of preserved historic sites and machinery with lively and engaging human interpretation, it was felt that a cooler, more kaleidoscopic approach could be used in providing an overview of the last three centuries of industry and innovation throughout the whole of Wales.

The overall result has been that the National Waterfront Museum provides an historical analysis of industrialisation, rather than of industry. The real focus is on how people and communities in Wales have been created, shaped and affected by the processes of technological and industrial change. In such a vast and complex story overarching chronologies and comprehensive narratives are impossible and

rather than even attempt to do this, the museum’s displays adopt a more synoptic approach, using 15 broad, general themes. These include the mineral wealth of the land, landscape, the sea, communications networks, communities and organisations, along with the working day and retailing. A major section looks at upcoming technologies and innovation in Wales today.

Within each thematic section collections are grouped to provide small case studies. In the “Sea” section four contrasting Welsh ports are discussed, while the “Communities” section is divided into areas dealing with belief, learning, recreation and home-life. Generally the quantity of artefacts displayed is minimal and an interdisciplinary approach has been used for their selection. Many items from the social history collections are used to develop the frequent 73

human storylines and a degree of lateral thinking has been employed. For instance, a leather trouser belt is used as a point of departure in discussing the nature (and violence) of patriarchy in nineteenth-century industrial homes.

This approach is not without its drawbacks. After two years of evaluation and visitor observation there does seem to be a need for a basic timeline into which the broad array of periods discussed can be placed. Also, there is a perceived need for a reference point to explain the overall spatial relationships of natural resources, industrial activity and the landscape of Wales.

These will be fairly easy to provide but when they are added to the displays care will be taken not to diminish their overall sense of selectivity, for it is this that provides one of the key elements of diffused authority in the narrative.

listed in the 1851 census to demonstrate the complexity of the urban communities created by industrialisation. What starts as a fairly traditional, local history-type of display featuring artefacts, images and written texts about a number of people who typified the working life of the town develops into a far more dynamic learning experience by use of three interactive installations in the middle of the gallery. Here a selection of locations within the historic town can be investigated firstly by travelling through a virtual reconstruction of Swansea in 1851, then through the information contained in the 1851 census about the residents of each property.

A virtual room has been recreated for each building and this can be investigated on screen.

Photographs of artefacts on display are imbedded within these environments and these can then

“a large amount of raw historical data is also on offer.

This encourages visitors to come to their own conclusions and indeed challenge the thrust of the curatorial narrative”

Even to the most casual of visitor it is clear that the displays at the Waterfront make no attempt to tell the “whole story” about any of the subjects dealt with. Such open-ended interpretation is greatly enhanced by the multiple layers of information that can be accessed through the interactive information pods. In over half of the thematic sections visitors can work through two or three levels of data, delivered by touch-screen new media displays. In this way the interpretation of the artefacts on display, are aided by a wide variety of historical source material, including photographs, topographical prints and drawings, maps, spoken testimony and transcripts of manuscript records.

The most extensive use of this layering of information is found in the “People” section. This uses a selection of people and places in Swansea 74

be viewed in the round before a short spoken discussion of the context of the artefact and its link to the person featured in the census. Besides being very engrossing in itself, this system of interactive interpretation allows visitors to choose the level of information to be provided for each item on display, as well as introducing them to the wide range of historical sources that can aid our understanding of an artefact and its context.

It becomes clear very quickly that there is a vast body of information available through the touchscreens, and although some of this has been processed by the curators, a large amount of raw historical data is also on offer. This encourages visitors to come to their own conclusions and indeed challenge the thrust of the curatorial narrative.

A recent study of visitors to the “People”

section suggests that these learning outcomes are taking place. One barrier to this was found to occur where the visitor is not confident to use the interactive touch screens. However, given the simplicity with which the technology can be used, many of these visitors quickly learn the techniques of interaction, either by themselves, through the help of the museum’s Gallery Assistants, or even by inter-generational learning. There have been several reported instances where young children have taught much older people how to access fully the on-screen information.

With the same approach of layered information used throughout the museum (though delivered in different ways) each visitor is able to assemble an individual historical narrative for Welsh industrialisation as they progress through the displays. This open-ended approach provides much food for thought and stimulates further personal discovery and learning. It also seems to encourage repeat visits, as it is impossible to access all the on-screen information in one day.

For about a year after the opening of the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea there was a small but steady stream of visitors from the immediate locality asking staff, “Where’s the woollen mill?” They were referring to an exhibit in the former Swansea Industrial and Maritime Museum that had occupied part of the site from 1977 to 2002. This had comprised working machinery from the Abbey Woollen Mill, in nearby Neath which had been operated on the upper floor

of the museum and produced traditional Welsh woollen nursing shawls for sale in the shop.

This combination of evocative old technology and heritage retailing was obviously a powerful draw for the users of the old museum, and at first it was very hard to match it with the elegantly-minimal, IT-driven displays of the new National Waterfront Museum. However, as these visitors returned a number of times and got to explore the themed displays, their requests for the woollen mill have dwindled away and most now praise the museum for its variety and its engaging and thought-provoking displays.

This story could be read as one of popular concern at the loss of a familiar exhibit being mitigated by smart new technology. But it also suggests that a more dynamic and open-ended method of interactive interpretation, combining artefacts and a wide range of historical sources, can be more engaging and personally empowering than the raw emotive power of working machinery.

Steph Mastoris, Head of the National Waterfront Museum, Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales

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Bowes Museums Doubles Storage Space

Housed in an impressive French-style chateau in the picturesque market town of Barnard Castle in the north Pennines, The Bowes Museum has doubled its storage space and improved the conditions for its paintings and books with contemporary storage facilities by Bruynzeel Storage Systems.

Work commenced in 2005 with much needed repairs to the roof following the winning of a number of grants. The project saw the transformation of visitor amenities, as well as the creation of new galleries on the upper floors of the Museum where Bruynzeel installed modern storage systems at the end of 2009. At the top of the building, a spectacular Reading Room was created, where researchers and students can access the Museum’s archive and library.

When the project was initiated, storage facilities for the major items in the collection were spread thinly across the entire third and fourth floors. Many stores were in the attic space, directly below the roof. Access was difficult, conditions were inappropriate, and the1960’s style nut-andbolt shelving provided neither the capacity nor the level of protection that the collection required.

A complete re-design of gallery and storage 76

space was required; with new storage equipment deemed a priority.

Brynzeel Storage Systems fitted two rooms with ArteStore picture racking and installed Bruynzeel Compactus mobile shelving in the Archive and Rare Books store. The Library was furnished with Bruynzeel’s latest Sysco® Library shelving, which was powder-coated in Antique Bronze to complement the interior design.

Working in conjunction with the main contractor as the four mezzanine storage platforms were installed, Bruynzeel fitted the rails and tracks for the Compactus mobile and ArteStore picture racking before the finished floors were laid. By countersinking the rails and tracks into the depth of the mezzanines, Bruynzeel optimised the Museum’s storage capacity in the available headroom. Access restrictions to the library, and its curved walls, meant that all of the new storage equipment had to be craned into the building through a window almost 30 metres above the ground.

“Bruynzeel’s innovative storage solutions have increased our storage space and improved the conditions in which our reserve Fine Art collection and Books are stored”, says Jon Old,

Senior Conservator at The Bowes Museum.

“Bruynzeel understood our requirements and what we were trying to achieve. They worked closely with our project team throughout the entire contract, with the result that the somewhat challenging delivery and installation went smoothly. We are now able to more easily catalogue books and most importantly, to store them in such a way that they are easily retrieved for reference and viewing in our fantastic new Reading Room”.

The internationally acclaimed Bowes Museum was created over 100 years ago by local businessman John Bowes and his Parisian wife Joséphine. Both had a great love of art

and together they built the greatest private collection of Fine and Decorative arts in the north of England. The popular museum contains an outstanding collection of treasures including furniture, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, textiles and other items covering an extensive range of European styles and periods. The Museum’s famous Silver Swan - a solid silver automaton - is the icon of the collection.

Bruynzeel Storage Systems Murdock Road, Dorcan, Swindon SN3 5HY T: +44 (0)870 2240220 E: enquiries@bruynzeel.co.uk www.bruynzeel.co.uk 77

iTunes App Store...

Creators of #1 ranking Apps in the Education category on the iTunes App Store (Love Art and Yours, Vincent), Antenna Audio is using its vast experience as producers of high quality audio and multimedia content to create new and engaging experiences for users at the time, place and platform of their choice.

Museums, galleries and cultural attractions are quickly recognising that having their own compelling, customised App is as essential to their marketing and communication plans as having a website was in the 1990s. uk@antennaaudio.com

Fryderyk Chopin Museum...

The largest collection in the world of Chopin’s belongings has finally found its place. The Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw, the most modern biographical museum in Europe, opened on March 1st 2010, the 200th anniversary of the great composer’s birthday.

Meyvaert was responsible for the execution of the complet internal fit-out and installation of this €4 million project including interior finishing, lighting, graphics, in addition to the showcases for the museum. www.meyvaert.be / steve@meyvaert.be

Interpretational Signage...

Pryorsign have over 40 years experience in sign manufacturing, producing interpretational signage using Duralite, which is a highly vandal resistant and weather-proof material equally suited to rural locations as it is to an inner city museum.

External or internal, traditional or contemporary, experience and expertise are at your service right from the initial brief, through design, manufacture, installation and maintenance. www.pryorsign.co.uk

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Shakespeare’s Globe Brand...

Small Back Room has been appointed to help develop the Shakespeare’s Globe brand following a competitive pitch against a number of brand and design agencies.

The aspiration for the project is to develop a strategy, visual language and style which will enable the Globe brand to be communicated in a coherent and creative manner that resonates with the Globe’s many and varied user groups. www.smallbackroom.com

Award winning projects...

We are very fortunate to continue to be invited to undertake many of the iconic projects around the globe and we are very proud to have been part of the Museums & Heritage Awards this year where a number of our projects were nominated for awards.

We are extremely pleased that Centre of the Cell won the award for best educational initiative and Ulster Museum won the award for best permanent exhibition It has been a privilege to have the opportunity to be part of these fantastic projects. www.beckinteriors.com

New Name for Nordplan...

The merger between Nordplan and Univeyor creates a new and more competitive company.

Nordplan and Univeyor, both with head offices located in Denmark, have been merged into one company with effect from late 2009. Since the merger was announced in June 2009 the focus has been on creating a common platform for the new company.

The new company - Qubiqa - provides intelligent and customized solutions for both storage and logistics. www.qubiqa.com

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Tracy Puklowski

General Manager, National Services Te Paerangi, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

What made you want to work in a museum?

Studying Art History at school and realising that art could tell stories and reflect or challenge societal mores was a turning point for me. I was fortunate enough to have a teacher, Colin Dobson, whose love of art was infectious, and that year was a fabulous romp through Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and everything in between.

My eyes were opened, and my career path was a foregone conclusion from there – I wanted to work in the places that helped unlock the stories that artworks and historical objects have to tell.

Are you optimistic for the future of museums?

There are plenty of challenges ahead, but challenges always bring opportunity. So as long as museums are responsive, timely, nimble, and are connected to their communities; as long as they bring people’s opinions, experiences and stories into the museum and take their expertise and collections out; as long as they develop meaningful and effective partnerships; as long as they tell engaging stories and ask provocative and challenging questions; as long as they continue to question and challenge themselves; and as long as they advocate effectively for themselves, museums will remain relevant. And as long as museums remain relevant, there’s no reason not to be wildly enthusiastic about the future.

What do you want your museum to achieve?

I want Te Papa to continue to build on its unquestionable strengths, including biculturalism and scholarship. However, I’d also like us to take a leaf out of small museums’ books and learn

museums and me how to be more nimble and more connected with our communities. I’d also like us to be a little less safe - to push boundaries more. In my particular area (Outreach), there’s substantial scope to develop some really innovative projects around museum partnerships and sharing our collections. I’m looking forward to the future at Te Papa enormously.

What can other museums learn from you?

We lost our leader (Dr. Seddon Bennington) in tragic circumstances last year. The institutional response, which was very much driven by how we do things as a bicultural museum, was a powerful reminder that this is a museum of tremendous heart with incredibly strong core values. I’d like to challenge other museums to define their core values – or reconnect with them - and use them to help steer their organisations through good times and bad.

In the next edition...

Would you like to contribute to Museum Identity magazine?

Please get in touch with your ideas and suggestions for articles and features in the next edition. Email: greg@museum-id.com subscribe today www.museum-id.com

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Collection & Space Surveys ~ Design Layouts ~ Feasibility Studies ~ Installation & Project ManagementÂ

The National Charter Monument Bahrain

The National Charter Monument, Bahrain The National Charter Monument, Bahrain, comprises of over 2,500sq metres of exhibit space separated into 12 zones within two crescent shaped galleries, sloping from top to bottom.

Undertaking the entire fit out this iconic project was extensive comprising of many different disciplines including, Audio Visual hardware & software, Interactives, display cases, models, multi facetted graphic production glazed structures and a vast complexity of bespoke exhibits predominantly Corian fabricated in additional all specialist ceilings, finishes and electrical and lighting services. The Project was seamlessly managed and delivered to a highest level of quality.

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