Bearings From the Director
ONE OF MY FONDEST MEMORIES leading into the London Olympic Games was working on the design of a vast new gallery for the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The Sammy Ofer Wing was to be built right up against the boundary of Greenwich Park. Working with the architects CF Moeller, we had to find clever ways to seamlessly integrate this massive modern structure into a historic World Heritage listed royal park. One way was by creating a series of water features, rills and fountains all carefully positioned around the entrance. Although mainly ornamental, these quickly became one of the most used wetplay interactives in Greenwich Park. Now if you visit Greenwich in summer, you see them ‘adapted’ by families to float paper boats, launch pooh-sticks or simply splash about in. At the time this playful adaptation was largely a happy accident, but for me it’s a powerful reminder of the playfulness and creativity museums can inspire not just in children, but also in adults. Since the early 1980s museums have developed particular expertise in designing play-centred environments that stimulate children’s imagination, creativity and dexterity. This year the Australian National Maritime Museum launched a new play centre, the Aquatic Imaginarium. The development, led by Annalice Creighton, the museum’s Education and Programs Coordinator, incorporated a range of play-centred activities for children up to 12 years and their families. What Annalice and her team created was an entire learning environment, weaving together a diatom disco sensory space and whimsical sculptures of marine animals, together with a series of carefully conceived and open-ended play activities. The Aquatic Imaginarium has been so successful that we are expanding the concept and bringing it back to Darling Harbour later this year. But it’s not just children who enjoy playing in museums. This is borne out by responses to our recent visitor survey. When asked their main reason for visiting the Maritime Museum, over half of our adult respondents replied that it was to climb aboard HMAS Vampire, HMAS Onslow and our replica HMB Endeavour. These three ships are enormous interactive environments about which adults as well as children learn primarily through physical interactions – climbing up and down ladders, clambering through hatches, lying in bunks and hoisting sails. I contend that not only are these three ships the largest objects in our nation’s cultural collections, but they are also the most popular playgrounds for adults in Sydney!
Children examine and touch specimens and artefacts in the Aquatic Imaginarium over the summer holidays. Image James Horan Photography
For more than 20 years I have developed play-centred galleries and learning environments at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Powerhouse Museum and Royal Museums Greenwich. In doing so, I have been guided by the work of the education psychologist Howard Gardner who, in his 1983 Frames of Mind study, put forward a list of multiple intelligences as a challenging alternative to rigid, traditional IQ tests. He proposed that humans possess eight distinct units of mental functioning. He labelled these units ‘intelligences’ and asserted that each has its own observable and measurable set of abilities. It was never Gardner’s intention to equate intelligence with play, but I believe he has given museums a wonderful design checklist. Today I continue to use this checklist whenever I approach the task of building a gallery, playground or education centre and always strive to ensure that it incorporates one or more experiences inspired by Gardner’s verbal, inter-personal, intrapersonal, logical, spatial, musical and bodily–kinaesthetic intelligences. If, like me, you are passionate about play-centred learning in museums, can I recommend the MuseumNext conference. MuseumNext is a major conference series that explores the future of museums and takes place in Europe, North America and now Australia. On 1 and 2 April 2019, the conference is being held here at the Australian National Maritime Museum (see article on page 77) and will feature speakers from around the world discussing the future of play and creativity in our museums.
Kevin Sumption psm Director and CEO Australian National Maritime Museum