Museum-iD magazine, Issue 20

Museum MUSEUMS GALLERIES HERITAGE ARCHIVES CULTURE Issue 20 • museum-id.com

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National Museum of African American History and Culture - p. 40

11 Museum Ideas 2017 Explore progressive public engagement, participatory practice, new digital initiatives and pioneering ideas about social impact

60 Museum of the City of New York New permanent exhibition explores the story of the city from village to global capital and asks visitors to design the city of the future

15 #FutureMuseum Project Challenging the echo chamber, establishing a sense of ownership, building a healthy society and being sanctuaries from the modern age

67 The Idea Museum Corey Timpson on the experiential design of participatory exhibitions and collecting stories as born-digital artefacts

26 New Design Museum Ambitious five-year project completes as the Design Museum opens in striking new £83m home with triple the space

77 Mathematics Gallery Science Museum’s beautiful and dramatic new gallery reveals the importance of mathematics in all our lives

29 Less is More: Digital With a Lean Team JiaJia Fei on why you don’t have to do it all when it comes to digital - contrary to popular belief, less is often more

82 Wonderlab Toby Parkin on how the Science Museum’s new interactive gallery is designed to help visitors make an emotional connection with science

31 MOOCS and Heritage Katherine Biggs on how the explosion of online learning offers heritage organisation the opportunity for mass global engagement

84 Handheld Digital Interpretation International project guide to handheld digital interpretation, mobile multimedia, audio guides and mobile apps

35 Exhibitions for the Contemporary Cultured Fiona Cole-Hamilton on the challenges of attracting and engaging a new target audience and presenting complex scientific ideas

93 Intangible Heritage in the Digital Era Matthias Henkel on how we need to rethink how we collect, curate and present the digital landscape as the new public space

40 African American History and Culture New national museum devoted to exploring and documenting the African American story and its impact on American and world history

101 Transforming Shakespeare’s New Place Delia Garrat on the new contemporary re-interpretation project aiming to keep Shakespeare relevant for all audiences

47 We Need To Talk About Donors Maxwell Blowfield on the lack of sharing fundraising ideas when museums need to raise more money from donations

105 Project Portfolio Showcasing exceptional museum and heritage projects by world-leading companies - including Purcell, Lendlease and Tandem

52 Museum Display Cases Expert guide to the design, manufacture and installation of museum showcases in exceptional projects around the world

114 Rapid Response Collecting Alice Millard on how adopting a rapid collection strategy allows museums to keep up-to-date with social and political changes 3

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Museum MUSEUMS GALLERIES HERITAGE ARCHIVES CULTURE Issue 20 • museum-id.com

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Editor Gregory Chamberlain Creative Director Emma Dawes Design & Production NewEra Media Cover image: © National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo credit: Alan Karchmer © Museum Identity Ltd 2009-2017. All rights reserved ISSN: 2040-736X Online: museum-id.com Email: info@museum-id.com

“Museums can offer some much-needed context, community, scholarship and sanctuary”

Twitter: @MuseumID Join 35,000+ followers #MuseumIdeas Editorial statement With a progressive attitude and international approach, Museum-iD publishes a mix of ideas from leading museum innovators.

Views expressed are those of the writers and not necessarily those of Museum-iD Advertising Promote your company to decision-makers in museums. To discuss how we can help you reach the global museum community email info@museum-id.com Subscriptions Museum-iD magazine is published 3 times a year. The publication is free - subscribers just cover postage costs. Additional fees apply to back issues. Order subscriptions and back issues online: museum-id.com Copyright Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted without the prior permission of the publisher Image notice All images are published by kind permission of the copyright holders Conference Our annual Museum Ideas conference takes place in early October each year in London.

Further details: museum-id.com

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In our polarised, post-truth world museums can offer some much-needed context, community, scholarship and sanctuary. Museums tell remarkable stories - but crucially stories backed up by research and rigour. They can welcome audience participation and respect experts, be challenging and entertaining, global and local.

Museums can provide an essential resistance to disinformation and ‘alternative facts’ and help foster valuable dialogue and discussion.

In this issue, as part of our ongoing #FutureMuseum project, Rosie Stanbury, Peju Oshin, Amy Schaffman and Louise Thompson advocate this kind of positive vision – museums that reach out, establish a sense of ownership for diverse audiences, help build communities and increase a sense of wellbeing.

JiaJia Fei points out museums don’t have to do it all when it comes to digital, Fiona Cole-Hamilton takes on the challenge of attracting a new target audience with complex science, Katherine Biggs talks global audiences and online learning, and Maxwell Blowfield confronts the urgent need to share fundraising ideas.

Matthias Henkel argues that we need to rethink how we collect and curate the digital landscape, Corey Timpson explores collecting human rights stories as born-digital artefacts, Delia Garratt aims to make emotional connections to Shakespeare, and Alice Millard looks at how a rapid collection strategy can help keep pace with social and political change.

Projects featured include the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and the dramatic Mathematics gallery at the Science Museum in London, designed by the late Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid.

I hope you find this issue thought-provoking and full of ideas - something museums do so well and an approach we need more than ever.

Gregory Chamberlain

supported by

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© Meyvaert

© Meyvaert

Meyvaert is synonymous with display solutions: we help museums and art collectors present, preserve and protect their collections by providing sustainable and easy to use exhibition showcases.

One of our most recent project completions in the UK is Winchester College Treasury & Museum.

Meyvaert’s showcase solutions have enabled Winchester College to beautifully present a range of treasures, including a vast collection of Greek vases and classical sculpture. Some of our display cases were installed high up within the structural beams, creating spectacular eye-catchers that complement the impressive architecture.

This project completion is another testimony to Meyvaert’s ability to successfully work in listed buildings, as the Warden’s Stables building in which the collection is exhibited dates back to 1391!

For additional information on our current and concluded museum installations, please feel free to contact us.

CONTACT STEVE PEARSE T: +44 777 427 6514 E: info@meyvaert.be http://www.meyvaertmuseum.be 9

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Museum Ideas Vols. 1 & 2 Discover 974 pages of creative ideas, fresh thinking and valuable experience - order now free worldwide shipping Benefit from the creative ideas and valuable experience of over 150 leading museum innovators based in 16 countries across 6 continents. These two substantial and authoritative 487 page volumes bring together the best in contemporary museum thinking and practice globally. Packed with in-depth and insightful essays from highly-respected museum leaders, Museum Ideas Vols 1 & 2 explore the latest developments and concepts from museums across the world. Comprehensive and compelling, the books contain a wealth of information in key areas such participatory practice, leadingedge digital projects, original storytelling, interpretation and exhibition design, groundbreaking public engagement with inventive and inclusive programming, integrated visitor experiences, plus fresh thinking for audience development, sustainability, collections, leadership, curatorial practices and the future of museums. From opinion pieces and expository essays to in-depth articles and practical case studies, over the course of 974 pages you’ll discover a host of exciting new ideas and be introduced to the wide-ranging opportunities available to you and your organisation.

Order both volumes now to save over 10% and get free worldwide shipping: museum-id.com/books “A go-to collection of essays for the creative, forward-thinking museum professional” - Adam Corsini, Museum of London

Museum Ideas 2017 International conference exploring the future of museums in the era of participatory culture

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Whitney Donhauser - director and president of the Museum of the City of New York

Rosie Stanbury - head of live programmes at Wellcome Collection

“Clever, delightful and thought provoking.

Great collection of people thinking innovatively and with passion” - Helen Divjak, London Transport Museum

Museum Ideas 2017 is sponsored by

arly-bird registration has opened for the sixth edition of the annual Museum Ideas conference. Hosted by the Museum of London, the main flagship conference takes place on Thursday 5 October proceeded by a series of pre-conference workshops, events and get-togethers on Tuesday 3 and Wednesday 4 October.

The conference explores the future of museums with a particular focus on progressive public engagement, new digital initiatives, participatory practice, plus pioneering ideas about collections, audiences and social impact.

Each year Museum Ideas brings together a group of fascinating speakers and challenges them to share innovative ideas in concise, powerful talks. The aim is for delegates to be inspired by perspectives outside their own specialism and locality. What unites the conference is the quality and enthusiasm of contributors along with their desire to share valuable expertise and experience.

Speakers this year include Whitney Donhauser, Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York; Bonita Bennett, Director of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa; Christian Diaz, digital communication and content, Museos de Arte: MBA-MAC, and coordinator of HABEMUS, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rosie Stanbury, Head of Live Programmes at Wellcome Collection; and Anaïs Aguerre, Head of International Initiatives at The Victoria & Albert Museum.

Register for Museum Ideas 2017 for a packed schedule of essential talks, valuable workshops and the opportunity to make exciting new connections. With fresh insights you can take directly back to your team, the conference will add tremendous value to your current work and is an active investment in the future and what you choose to do next.

Early-bird conference registration is now open. To learn more and secure your seat visit museum-id.com. #MuseumIdeas

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ABOVE & BELOW: Multi-touch , ‘Virtual Explorer’ interactive

BELOW: 18m long Immersive AV Experience – The Battle Of Jutland

12 Project: HMS Caroline, Belfast. (The Battle of Jutland) Exhibition Designers: Petrichor

ABOVE: Battle of Jutland, ‘Fleet Explorer’

BELOW: ‘Crack the Code’ interactive

The Battle of Jutland AV, CGI sea, ship & environment

vicky@ay-pe.com + 44 (0)1904 731431

ay-pe.com

13 3D / CGI / DESIGN / FILM / INTERACTIVES / AUDIO / ILLUSTRATION / ANIMATION

C O I N C A B I N E T, ROYA L PA L AC E D R E S D E N D I S P L AY C A S E C O N S T R U C T I O N , E X H I B I T I O N C O N S T R U C T I O N , O B J E C T M O U N T I N G

W WW. ARTEX . AT Photo: David-Brandt.de

FUTURE OF MUSEUMS Talking to strangers and challenging the social media echo chamber Rosie Stanbury on how museums of the future should enable people from different walks of life to talk about the big stuff - human endeavour, discovery, nature, history and the future

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ost of us have a natural desire to meet with like-minded people. It’s one of the reasons that lots of us work in museums, because of a shared fascination in objects, people and history. These days, we can tune-in to the things we like, and switch-off from the things we don’t more than ever before.

The danger of this seductive state has revealed itself acutely this year. In the wake of Brexit and Trump we need to challenge the social media echo chamber we find ourselves in.

We urgently need to create lots of opportunities for people from different walks of life to talk about the big stuff: Human endeavour, discovery, nature, history and the future. Museums offer the perfect space. Objects can provide provocations and can act as social levellers. Of course, there is a danger that museums are echo chambers for their own ideas and their own audiences. We need to open ourselves up to new perspectives and possibilities. As the people that run the spaces, we can seed ideas, invite in new groups with different agendas and provoke new conversations.

But these conversations need careful support and direction to grow. Skills in facilitation and education need to be nurtured and developed. We need to learn from other sectors that are developing innovative engagement techniques, from performance and education to social justice and training.

Over the last year we’ve invited our audience to propose their own ideas for events in Wellcome Collection through Open Platform. This is an invitation to create small-scale pop-up events in our Reading Room. We offer expenses and facilitation training for those that would like it. The emphasis is on participation, and we don’t advertise the events beyond our building, so the audience for the event stumbles across the activities in

Rosie Stanbury is Head of Live Programmes at Wellcome Collection, the free museum and library exploring health and humanity in London.

In this role she leads a team of producers programming public events, youth and community activities. Joining Wellcome in 2006 as an events producer, she played a pivotal role in the inaugural and ongoing programme of events for Wellcome Collection. She took a brief break from the programme in 2010 when she oversaw Wellcome’s Arts Awards grant scheme for a year, taking responsibility for a national portfolio of creative collaborations between artists and scientists. Prior to joining Wellcome, she worked in community arts.

“We need to open ourselves up to new perspectives and possibilities” the building on the day. People sometimes pop in for a cup of coffee, then end up taking part in an event that lasts an hour. Events have explored a vast range of subjects from intersex and death to monkey poo and cancer. It’s been a joy to watch the programme evolve and I’m excited to see even more strangers making connections and challenging one another in the future.

Rosie Stanbury Head of Live Programme Wellcome Collection Join the #FutureMuseum project: www.museum-id.com

Future Proof Museums Intensive development programme for Museum Directors and CEOs who want to create more resilient organisations Boost your organisation’s resilience: Future Proof Museums is an intensive development programme proven to facilitate transformational change and significantly improve the resilience of museums across England. Organised by the AMA, the 10-month Future Proof Museums programme explores: Why the museum is vital – defining purpose or cause, how the museum is relevant in today’s diverse society, what difference does the museum make in an ever-changing world? What direction will drive a successful future – adapting, innovating and transforming to ensure a desirable, feasible and financially viable business model. How to create the right culture – developing an agile organisational culture and leadership to continue to adapt and influence external change in the future. The pilot programme proved successful in sparking passion for change and giving confidence to CEOs in their ability to lead change. The AMA is now working with 20 more museums over a tenmonth intensive programme, with the aim of helping these organisations to be more resilient, able to change, adapt, influence and remain relevant to an ever-changing external environment.

Stage One of the programme involves an in-house diagnostic session to help you and your team identify future opportunities. Each museum taking part in the programme starts by exploring their future direction as a team with the help of specialist trainers.

Stage Two is a three-day intensive residential programme in Cambridge which provides the time and skills to explore a strategic change toolkit for your museum. Stage Three provides on-going facilitation and mentoring support. The AMA will work closely with you to craft a suitable level of ongoing, high-level support according to the different areas of the programme you want to continue to focus on and take forward. For further details about creating more resilient organisations visit www.a-m-a.co.uk, email verity@am-a.co.uk or telephone 01223 578078.

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FUTURE OF MUSEUMS Increasing diversity and helping to establish a sense of ownership Peju Oshin on how museums of the future must understand that engaging diverse audiences requires simple questions rather than over-engineered thinking

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s we look towards the future museums will continue to provide an important place for discussion and the exchange of ideas.

But the conversations museums spark in the future will be greatly improved by increasing diversity - not just of the audience but crucially the museum staff too. Doing so will add to the rich cultural fabric museums preserve and display.

Currently many museums struggle to actively engage and develop long-term relationships with audiences from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) or lower socio-economic backgrounds.

This is a problem. Museums need to be representative of the communities they live in - both in terms of the stories they tell and the objects they collect.

Peju Oshin is a freelance museum educator and independent curator based in London. At the centre of her museum practice she focuses on the engagement of young people and diverse community groups. Peju has developed and delivered workshops supporting the Learning Team at the London Transport Museum and researched and delivered talks at The National Gallery, London. Peju has spoken regularly on issues of diversity within the sector as a part of the group Museum Detox and written independently about access to opportunities at entry level for early career professionals.

“Helping to establish a sense of ownership - both of the museum environment and the collections - is crucial” Museums of the future will understand that engaging such groups requires simple questions rather than over-engineered thinking. Museums need to regularly ask BAME audiences “What would you like to see?” or “What are your interests?” in order to build rapid response practices.

Asking questions and responding rapidly will help open up museums to these new and diverse audiences and will make them feel valued. It will attract additional visitors.

Helping to establish a sense of ownership - both of the museum environment and the collections - is crucial. Museums need to take regular action to collaborate with new and diverse audiences to ensure collections connect with the everyday person who doesn’t yet know they have the museum bug.

Museums have nothing to fear from this process. Rapid response practices simply serve as a tool to bridge the gap between the occasionally un-relatable and the familiar yet significant daily elements of our lives.

To ensure museums stay open and have a bright future, we must be willing to adapt and extend our understanding of our collections and exhibitions to help attract a variety of audiences - in doing so we will keep stories and ideas fresh and relatable.

Peju Oshin Freelance Museum Educator and Independent Curator Join the #FutureMuseum project: www.museum-id.com

LGBT+ Rights Exhibition Local communities unearth hidden stories connected to political and legal fight for LGBT+ rights, past and present The People’s History Museum in Manchester has opened Never Going Underground: The fight for LGBT+ rights, a large exhibition and events programme commemorating the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in England and Wales (1967 Sexual Offences Act).

The exhibition is on display at PHM from February to August 2017 and is the culmination of almost 2 years intensive work with local communities, unearthing hidden stories connected to the political and legal fight for LGBT+ rights, past and present. The Never Going Underground programme explores different areas of LGBT+ activism and campaigning, revealing the impact of decisions taken by government and lawmakers over the course of 200 years.

Visitors are able to discover and share historical and contemporary experiences of marginalisation, through stories and events involving people who fought for change, alongside those of activists who continue to do so. Contributors examine current issues effecting LGBT+ people and the ideas and rights which still need to be fought for both in the UK and internationally. The project, although spearheaded by PHM, is community-led and realised through the museum’s partnership with four LGBT+ community organisations; The Proud Trust, LGBT Foundation, Proud 2 b Parents and Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus. A team of volunteer Community Curators were trained by the museum to lead the charge in uncovering fascinating hidden stories and developing the exhibition. There is a strong Family Friendly element through the creation of engaging and interactive exhibits, Family Friendly activity packs and events to accompany the exhibition.

Catherine O’Donnell, Engagement & Events Officer said: ‘We’re delighted to mark this significant anniversary for LGBT+ rights. The core of this project is working together with local communities, uncovering fascinating local stories and bringing them to a wider audience’.

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Digital Experience Design

isodesign.co.uk hello@isodesign.co.uk +44 [0]141 572 9150 Client EPIC Ireland, Dublin Exhibition Designers Event Communications

EPIC Ireland was launched as the worlds first digital only exhibition. Housed underneath the historic Custom House Quay Building on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin.

32 vaulted rooms have been converted to a promenade experience that tells the story of the Irish, emigration and their impact on the modern world.

ISO were the interactive media designers for the project and created 26 installations. These include Notorious Irish and Storybook which used infra-red motion sensors to track visitor movement and gestures to trigger media and Conflict, a pair of multi-user interactive tables that uses an innovative dynamic graphical interface to interweave stories and animated content.

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FUTURE OF MUSEUMS Not just a building, but building community Amy Schaffman on how museums of the future must become extensions of the communities they serve to play their part in building a healthy society

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useums occupy a unique place in society. Museums offer tangible rewards, but are often misunderstood and undervalued. After all, cultural and heritage organizations cannot cure diseases, end wars, or protect their communities from impending attacks. They are often seen as exclusive places, catering to only certain segments of society. However, I would argue that this is a mischaracterization and that museums are, and will remain, important for a healthy society.

Generally speaking, museums can be catalysts for positive changes within a community. At the Augusta Museum of History, we are dedicated to preserving, protecting, and communicating the history of the region surrounding the Savannah River. The Augusta area has been the epicenter of revolutionary battles, industrialization, and civil rights struggles. The Museum staff is committed to maintaining and expanding relationships and partnerships with the community to accomplish this mission.

As an educator, I actively participate in this process by meeting with local community educators and groups and listening to their wants and needs.

Educational outreach must be a part of the future of an effective museum. The museum should become a resource for the community it serves, both inside and outside the physical building space. Part of the future of museums will involve technology: providing people the ability to examine, explore and participate using their smart devices.

Additionally, using exhibit spaces for innovative programs, such as interactive escape rooms, promotes ongoing visitor interest. The museum auditorium thus becomes a forum for the public to consider the history of its community. Schools and teachers will use the museum’s vast archives to expand the student experience

Amy Schaffman is Education Manager at the Augusta Museum of History in Georgia. Amy oversees all aspects of school, youth, family, and adult programming. In addition to these duties, Amy manages the Historic Ezekiel Harris House tours and provides community outreach. Amy joined the Augusta History Museum after completing an MA in history at the University of Cambridge. She holds an undergraduate degree from The College of William and Mary. Amy has has enjoyed previous opportunities at The Polar Museum, Smithsonian American History Museum, and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Museums offer tangible rewards, but are often misunderstood and undervalued” and make connections to history taught in the classroom. Those with mental and physical challenges will also be able to find enrichment in the museum.

Museums must become an extension of their outside communities. Museums may not directly resolve the many issues plaguing humanity in the 21st century but, by providing creative and intellectual opportunities, they can play a part in the ultimate solutions.

Amy Schaffman Education Manager Augusta Museum of History Join the #FutureMuseum project: www.museum-id.com

Museums and Resilient Leadership Year-long development programme offers 360° examination of resilient leadership for aspiring cultural sector leaders ‘None of Us is as Smart as All of Us’.

Museums and Resilient Leadership (MRL) is a year-long development programme which offers a 360° examination of resilient leadership for aspiring cultural sector leaders.

The programme provides 2 three-day residentials, 8 interactive workshops and a 5 day Overseas Study Visit. Everyone one has a personal Mentor and there are generally 14 participants. Museums and Resilient Leadership Programme Directors Stephen Feber and Nick Winterbotham started thinking about a leadership development programme in 2011 and they are now in their third year of operation. What have they learned?

Participants like the MRL system. They evaluate the programme in depth 12 times during the year; in the 2015-2016 group, 68% said their personal resilience had increased a lot, 100% said they were very likely, or likely to recommend the programme and 74% rated it as either “exceptional” or “life changing”. The year span of MRL is invaluable. Over the programme they use more than 50 different delivery techniques to allow individuals to grow their understanding of finance, presentation, governance, money making, project development and organisational development in ways that fit their own ‘cognitive style’. Their 360° view of leading organisations is powerful; it means they draw lessons from all sectors, political, cultural and commercial. We continuously debate leadership; the good, the bad and the downright ugly. Politics has been throwing up its fair share of ugly recently. Travel, workshops and retreats help create an MRL ‘Action Learning Set’ and develop the habit of discovery based learning. One of the most rewarding aspects of the programme is seeing a group of strangers become a powerful group in this way, growing in confidence, curiosity and stature. MRL is funded

by Arts Council England and is run under the auspices of the Black Country Living Museum, Dudley, England. For further details about the programme visit: museumresilience.com 23

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FUTURE OF MUSEUMS The museum of mindfullness, wellbeing and mental heath Louise Thompson on how museums of the future could be sanctuaries from the challenges and demands of the modern age and shelters for the stressed, the sick and the socially isolated

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he museums of the future will be regarded by many as sanctuaries from the challenges and demands of the modern age, as shelter for the stressed, the sick and the socially isolated.

Museums will be places where people can engage with activities that help them understand that compassion is actually the key to strength and resilience. They will not only find asylum from the hate and fear we see today but actively discover that what connects us as human beings is far greater than any difference that separates us. Why? Because the museum of the future is a mindful one.

Wellbeing is a skill that is cultivated over time and with regular care. The people we work with at Manchester Art Gallery are invited to learn, develop and practise it within our gallery walls.

For the past four years we have been developing mindfulness across our learning programmes and with different audiences, exploring how it is a valuable skill in the appreciation of art. We have helped people to engage more fully with our permanent collection and special exhibitions. In encountering familiar works as well as art that is entirely new to them, they have been able to reflect upon the importance of their own mental health.

Our work with mental health service users saw mindfulness provide a much needed tool to help cope with difficult emotions and thoughts. Our work with schools has shown that mindfulness can help children build up emotional resilience and self-worth. Our dropin lunchtime sessions provided cityworkers with important nourishment as well as respite from the noise and overstimulation of the modern world. Older people have told us that mindfulness has helped them see life in a new way, how they have become more aware of the curious and the beautiful.

Louise Thompson is health and wellbeing manager at Manchester Art Gallery, University of Manchester. The wellbeing programme consists of targeted projects working in partnership with the health and charity sector, supporting people to recover from poor mental health through art and creativity as well as a regular public programme that focuses on helping people to take care of their health and wellbeing through learning about mindfulness.

Louise has been developing work around art and mindfulness for the past four years, supporting colleagues to integrate it across other learning strands and apply it with different audiences.

“Museums will be places where people discover that what connects us is far greater than any difference that separates us” The Mindful Museum is the idea that cultural spaces can be places where anyone can learn wellbeing skills that help protect their mental health, strengthen their emotional resilience, increase their compassion and galvanise their ability to experience life to the fullest.

Louise Thompson Health and Wellbeing Manager Manchester Art Gallery Join the #FutureMuseum project: www.museum-id.com

Happy Museum Project Fifteen new affiliates connect with and contribute to the development of Happy Museum thinking and practice The groundbreaking Happy Museum Project has welcomed the first members of its new Affiliate Scheme. The scheme is a new peer learning network forming part of the wider Happy Museum programme, funded by Arts Council England’s Museum Resilience fund and supported by People United. Their fifteen new Affiliates will connect with and contribute to the development of Happy Museum thinking and practice which puts societal wellbeing at its heart.

They will form part of a supportive and collaborative peer network to explore the role of museums and culture in addressing big issues – such as climate change and social justice. This first round of Affiliates encompasses an exciting range of practice including major partner museums - Leeds Museums and Oxford University Museums; independent museums - Design Museum, People’s History Museum, Seven Stories; local authority and NHS Trust museums Reading, The Atkinson, Abergavenny Museum, Mental Health Museum; museums in development - Museum of Homelessness - as well as a digital museum agency Culture 24, National Trust Midlands, Encounters Arts Museum of Now, the Heritage Team at Toynbee Hall and Chester Zoo. Affiliates join an existing community of practice including the 5-year Study Group Beaney House, Woodhorn, Lightbox, Manchester, Derby and Ceredigion Museums - and connect with thinkers beyond the museum sector in fields such as economics, ecology and psychology.

This diversity of practice - connecting learning with the arts, heritage, social services, the third sector, digital, design and beyond - helps create exciting new museum programmes and partnerships. Affiliate take part in a tailored introductory workshop and a peer developed programme of seminars. To keep the scheme light touch and financially, organisationally and individually sustainable, it takes ideas from the sharing economy and is underpinned by principles of give and gain. happymuseumproject.org 25

Design Museum

T The new Design Museum in London. Clockwise from top-left: Atrium; Exterior; Gallery space - photo credit: Gareth Gardner. Hyperbolic paraboloid roof - photo credit: Gravity Road © Design Museum

Ambitious five-year £83m project completes as Design Museum opens in new home

he Design Museum has opened in its new home on Kensington High Street, west London. Housed in a landmark grade II* listed modernist building from the 1960s, the project is the culmination of a five-year £83m construction process. The museum has now tripled in space to 10,000sqm compared to its previous home in Shad Thames, south-east London. OMA, Allies and Morrison and Arup have restored the building’s spectacular concrete roof and distinctive facade. Remodeling the interior, John Pawson has created a series of calm spaces ordered around an oak-lined atrium, incorporating key elements from the original structure. The permanent collection display has been designed by Studio Myerscough with a restaurant and members’ room by Universal Design Studio. Inside the museum, visitors find themselves in a central atrium with striking views up to the iconic hyperbolic paraboloid roof. The stunning concrete roof spans the length of the building, rising on the two opposing corners to create a manta ray-like structure above. Galleries, learning spaces, café, events space and a shop are arranged like an opencast mine around the main atrium, allowing visitors to navigate the space with ease and to discover everything the building has to offer by simply walking up its oak staircase. The building has two generously proportioned temporary galleries, one on the ground floor, the other on the museum’s lower level. The double-height basement also features a dedicated museum collection store with a glass window, allowing visitors a behind-the-scenes glimpse of objects not on display.

Project: Design Museum, London Opened: November 2016 Budget: £83 million

Architecture: OMA Interior design: John Pawson, Universal Design Studio Exhibition design: Studio Myerscough, Sam Jacob 26

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A milestone in the history of mankind.

And behind it some old phone.

The undetectable glass for exhibition display.

Visit guardianclarity.com and order a free sample

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CLARIT Y

LESS IS MORE digital with a lean team JiaJia Fei on why you don’t have to do it all when it comes to digital

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ith the rapidly expanding role of digital at museums, we often quantify measurements of success with growth - increases in website traffic, social media followers, click-through rates, and user downloads.

More is more when it comes to digital progress, but very rarely do our staff sizes and resources grow accordingly to accommodate for these changes.

At the last Museum Ideas conference in London, I presented a lecture titled “Less is More: Digital with a Lean Team.”

Just nine months into my job as Director of Digital at the Jewish Museum, my intention was not to flaunt a shiny new product or present case studies with accompanying vanity metrics, but to spread the reality of a new concept— that less is more and you don’t have to do it all when it comes to digital.

Contrary to popular belief, not every project or exhibition needs a microsite, and museums don’t have to be on every social media channel or have their own app. Digital projects instead should be prioritized and tailored to your audience needs, and relative to the size of the team and the resources that you need to support them.

Prior to the Jewish Museum, I was Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Guggenheim Museum, where the responsibilities of my current department of three: overseeing our website, email

marketing, social media, search, mobile, video, audio, photography, and digital asset management, were carried out by five departments and more than twenty five staff members. Taking a step back as the director of a newly created department within a 112-year old institution, I made a conscious decision to scale back before moving forward, reducing our digital footprint when it came to one-off websites, social media channels with low engagement, and reimagining our mobile strategy.

Following a deep look at the analytics, I asked: What are we trying to achieve?

How does this initiative align with our mission? Who is our audience? If the digital initiative did not fit the bigger picture, I got rid of it.

Over the last few years, innovations in digitization, social media, and digital media at museums have enabled our ability to bring art and knowledge to an interconnected global online audience.

Technology can be incredibly powerful in reaching those goals, but also risks overgrowth and overthinking the needs of our visitors. So from now on I exercise a new measurement of success: if technology is the answer, then what was the question?

JiaJia Fei has recently been appointed Director of Digital at the Jewish Museum in New York following five years as Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Guggenheim Museum. JiaJia is a digital strategist working at the intersection of integrated marketing, branding, design, social media, web, e-mail, mobile, and multimedia content strategy for modern and contemporary art - making museums and cultural organizations more accessible through technology.

“Technology can be incredibly powerful but also risks overgrowth and overthinking the needs of visitors”

JiaJia Fei Director of Digital, Jewish Museum, New York 29

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Katherine Biggs is the Multichannel Producer for Historic Royal Palaces, working across all six palaces to engage audiences with culture and heritage through digital technology. Alongside developing MOOCs this has included large-scale, interactive 360 degree experiences at family festivals and app-based digital missions for children. Prior to this, Katherine co-managed the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre.

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he phenomenon of MOOCs and online courses, and the ways in which the heritage sector can tap into their potential, is not going away any time soon. At a time when museums are looking closely at how they can make the most of their often diminishing budgets, MOOCs (massive open online courses) provide a tempting option for mass engagement.

American museums have long been advocates of the online learning model, for example MoMA’s large presence on Coursera, but the UK is fast catching-up, with the British Library running courses on FutureLearn, Tate’s collaboration with Khan Academy, and the University of Leicester’s introduction to Museum Studies online course, to name just a few examples.

At Historic Royal Palaces we wanted to better understand whether this free online course model could provide a platform to engage a new audience with our stories. We worked with FutureLearn, an Open University owned platform which has been running courses since 2013, and our first course, ‘A History of Royal Food and Feasting’ launched in June 2016. Produced by our Learning & Engagement team in collaboration with the University of Reading and colleagues from across the palaces, the course charted the history of royal food from the Tudors to the Victorians.

Our key objective was to use the course to reach out to a large, global

“Our key objective was to reach out to a large, global audience”

MOOCS AND HERITAGE Storytelling for a Global Audience Katherine Biggs on why the explosion of online learning offers heritage organisation the opportunity for mass engagement audience who hadn’t visited the palaces before. And at a topline we achieved this: we had nearly 13,000 sign-ups for the course, of whom 57% were converted into learners (a learner is someone who has completed at least one step of the course the average conversion for a FutureLearn course is 50%). These learners came from 153 different countries (only 31% of participants were from the UK), spanned a diverse range of ages and they really did represent a new audience for Historic Royal Palaces: 35% said that they had never visited any of the palaces, and 25% had never heard of the organisation before.

However the real surprise for us was the added bonus of running a course on this scale for such a range of learners. One of the most exciting benefits of MOOCs for the heritage sector is the accessibility they offer. By its very nature a MOOC is open to anyone (and traditionally free), and its massive scale means that there are no limits to joiner numbers. Anyone who wants to join can, from any corner of the world. FutureLearn’s guiding principles fit within this ethos; they want to embrace this massive reach as a beneficial, exciting, social way of learning. Their learners are at the core of their mantra, as we quickly learnt during the first run of the course, with 35,366 learner comments posted across the five week course.

Rather than just replicating the experience onsite, the online course model provides a completely different,

personal way for learners to engage.

Participants from across the world shared their personal stories, anecdotes and thoughts on the course, all of which provided a layer to the interpretation that we don’t see at the palaces.

Feedback from a course participant: “I’ve really enjoyed this course, especially the contributions from the non-UK learners regarding their own cuisine and history. All of the personal recollections have been lovely too, I think it’s really important to hear stories of grandparents and relatives that lived through previous ages whilst we still can! Thank you to all who contributed!”

However, the difficulty with this model is that the course really needs to be tailored to this social learning style. We pitched our course on the intersection of social history and ‘lifestyle programming’ to have broad appeal, and to provide a hook to those who might think that history is not for them. Courses are made up of a range of activity steps, including videos, animations, quizzes, articles and discussions: lots of variety and opportunities for active participation.

We were guided by the University of Reading’s expertise in creating these courses, and at every step we were encouraged to think about what opportunities there were for learners to participate, and ways of keeping interest by varying the content. So we created discussion steps, historical recipes for learners to try at home, videos of 31

“There are huge opportunities for the heritage sector to use these courses to tell different stories which cannot be told onsite”

Images - clockwise from top left: MOOC activity steps; Course intro; Proud course completer on Twitter; filming taking for the course © Historic Royal Palaces

experts from Historic Royal Palaces and the University of Reading, costumed characters filmed within the palaces, animations showing where foods came from, and for the second run of the course we’ll be including even more hands-on activities. We also ran Q&A sessions with our course experts, to actively respond to learners. In the next run of the course, we have responded to learner feedback, and included ‘shared by learners’ links to external sites. Peer to peer knowledge sharing has been a key part of the course, and so we want to recognise this, as well as providing additional resources for new learners.

The digital nature of the course allowed us to show a cross-section of our work, much of which can’t be easily shown onsite. For example, we included exciting new research on chocolate from Collections Curator Polly Putnam, alongside conservation films revealing the Great Kitchens at Kew Palace, and a range of Georgian satirical prints from the collection. We also focused on four of our palaces, to draw attention to our smaller sites such as Kew and Kensington Palaces. A secondary achievement from running the course was driving learners to our existing online content. The postcourse survey showed that 59% of learners would like to learn more about Historic Royal Palaces through its website and YouTube channel, and the web links 32

featured within the course showed an uplift during its run.

Feedback from a course participant: “The Historic Royal Palaces site is amazing! There’s such a lot of stuff there.

Of course I got diverted from the course and have been watching videos about the king’s fools, about Henry VIII’s diseases, his beliefs and his policies, and listening to great podcasts of all sorts. So, many thanks for the link.”

One unknown for us was whether online learners could be converted to onsite visitors, or whether the course might actually remove the incentive to visit. When designing the course we were mindful of this, and also of participants who may be existing visitors to the palaces, so the course provides content that complements what is onsite, rather than duplicating it. Feedback from learners has been positive: of those surveyed at the end of the course, 46% of people said they planned to visit one of our palaces, 85% of people said they felt inspired to visit one of the palaces, and comments reflect these statistics.

It is hard to measure whether the course has deterred visitors who might otherwise have visited the palaces, but both qualitative and quantitative feedback from the course supports the theory that this course is more likely to drive people to the palaces, rather than removing the incentive to visit. The Arts Council report

‘Understanding the Impact of Event Cinema’ supports this theory, concluding that large-scale digital initiatives like this can convert digital joiners to onsite visitors.

Feedback from a course participant: “We have decided to extend a planned visit to London in September in order to incorporate a visit to Hampton Court Palace.”

Any course participants now visiting the sites may have an increased sense of ownership, and more of a personal relationship to the palaces. They have cooked food which was traditionally cooked in our kitchens, they know the story behind the folded napkins at Hampton Court Palace, and their questions have been answered by our experts.

We have learnt a huge amount from running this course, and will continue to learn more during the next runs. There are huge opportunities for the heritage sector to use these courses, not just for reach, but to tell different stories which cannot be told onsite. We look forward to seeing what future courses appear on the horizon, and how other heritage sites balance their online and onsite visitors’ expectations.

Katherine Biggs Multichannel Producer, Historic Royal Palaces

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The Colour and Vision exhibition © Natural History Museum

Fiona Cole-Hamilton is Interpretation Developer at the Natural History Museum in London.

Since 2012, she has led on a number of exhibition projects, most notably the five star reviewed temporary exhibition Colour and Vision, and the Hintze Hall Redevelopment Project due to open summer 2017. She is now seconded to the International Engagement Department and is leading on the redisplay of two permanent galleries at the Hong Kong Science Museum. Fiona has an MA in Ancient History from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester

Temporary Exhibitions for the Contemporary Cultured

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Fiona Cole-Hamilton on the challenges of attracting and engaging a new target audience and presenting complex scientific ideas

ne of the first steps of developing a temporary exhibition is identifying a target audience – it allows content to be appropriately shaped, marketing properly targeted and relevant Press bodies briefed. The target audience may be the segmentation that are known to frequent the institution and are thus likely to spend money on a temporary exhibition ticket, or alternatively, it may be the segmentation least likely to visit and are therefore targeted to try and raise the appeal of the institution in their eyes.

As a national museum welcoming over five million visitors a year, the Natural History Museum in London is not short on numbers, yet it is most frequently visited by families and international visitors, rather than the segmentation referred to by the Museum as Contemporary Cultured.

Contemporary Cultured audiences are described as professionals making the most of their middle youth. They are seen as progressive, adventurous, ethical and open to new ideas and influences. They have a broad and heavy arts repertoire and engage with many different art forms, are seen as cosmopolitan and liberal and are usually aged 18–34 with an even gender split. They usually work full-time and are educated to degree level.

With a view to raising its profile with Contemporary Cultured audiences, the Natural History Museum programmed a series of adult-focused exhibitions in its Jerwood Gallery. The most recent of these, Colour and Vision ran July–November 2016. This article explores different elements of this exhibition and looks at whether the methods of presenting complex science were effective in engaging the target audience, whether the inclusion of a citizen science experiment in an exhibition setting was beneficial to both scientists and visitors, and whether the success of the exhibition should be based on press reviews, visitor satisfaction or ticket sales.

Communicating academic subjects to a broad audience Aside from exploring the link between colour and vision in the natural world, Colour and Vision set out to explore three subjects that we know our audiences find difficult: deep time, evolution, and taxonomy. While these subjects may seem dry and science heavy, the exhibition worked to present a narrative that would include these subjects in an accessible and holistic manner, rather than as dry subjects to be conquered before the exhibition could be enjoyed.

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“Museum scientists, content and digital teams worked together to create an animation based on the evolution of the eye”

Visitor research showed that animations helped visitors understand that an eye could accidentally evolve from a simple pigment spot to a fully-formed eye in less than half a million years. © Natural History Museum

After entering the exhibition through a light installation designed to act as a moment of colour-bathed calm before the shower of content, visitors were plunged into virtual darkness and brought faceto-face with fossils of the soft-bodied organisms that existed around 565 million years, a time before the imageforming eye had evolved, a time when animals existed but were simple in form.

The aim was to encourage visitors to accept that the image-forming eye has not always existed and that the animals that lived several hundred million years ago, without image-forming eyes, were simple in form and colour because they did not need to be otherwise. With a view to conveying the deep time being addressed, the design brief suggested a graphic timeline that would allow visitors to anchor themselves chronologically as they walked through this first section.

Unfortunately, evolution does not follow a graphic plan and as such, it became awkward to present the slow sludge of life for several hundred millions of years, and the sudden explosion of life that occurred shortly after the eye had evolved, in one clear timeline. Instead, visitors were told in both large text panels and small specimen labels that they were engaging with the remnants of life from hundreds of millions of years ago.

Summative evaluation of the exhibition tells us that while visitors understood 36

they were looking at life that existed a long time ago, few grasped the concept of hundreds of millions of years and that the visitors would have preferred more help with this subject, a useful learning for the Museum.

The evolution of the eye is a subject that even Darwin struggled with: ‘To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances (…) could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree’ (Darwin, C. 1869, On The Origin of Species, New York, p167), yet this subject was key to the Colour and Vision story and the Museum worked to convey it accessibly. One method involved Museum scientists, content and digital teams working together to create an animation based on the widely accepted model of the evolution of the eye over a theoretical 364,000 years, proposed by Land and Nilsson in their book Animal Eyes (Land, M. and Nilsson, D. 2012, Animal Eyes, Oxford, p15).

Results from visitor research showed that the animation undoubtedly helped visitors to understand that an eye could accidentally evolve from a simple pigment spot to a fully-formed image-forming eye in less than half a million years. It did also suggest, however, that some visitors understood that an eye could evolve in this time, but they felt that this evolution had happened to facilitate a behaviour,

rather than the other way round. It seems, then, that while the animation was effective in conveying the key message, visitors still struggle with the complexity of the mechanisms of evolution. It is perhaps worth considering that given the space available in a temporary exhibition, perhaps it is not the format to try and correct these misconceptions.

Of the Tree of Life’s roughly 38 branches, animals with image-forming eyes are found on just six of them (but roughly 98% of species are found in these six). It was necessary to convey the subject of taxonomy within the gallery to ensure the audience would appreciate the evolutionary significance of similar biological traits evolving on several distinct branches, yet the subject is tricky and visitors tire of it quickly. The design brief suggested an immersive tree and Nissen Richards Studios, responsible for both 2D and 3D design, responded to this by proposing printing a walkable Tree of Life onto the incredibly resilient G-Floor – a single, solid layer of polyvinyl that encases the graphics, resisting scratches and other wear and tear. By allowing visitors to walk the branches of the Tree, the audience was immersed in taxonomy.

The phyla holding animals with imageforming eyes were picked out in unique colours that corresponded to the showcase backdrops, clearly separating them from the other branches. This

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“Should the success of the exhibition be judged on the number of ticket sales, the levels of visitor engagement or the reviews it received?”

Colour and Vision received over 40,000 visitors in 16 weeks © Natural History Museum

subtle, but effective design intervention allowed visitors to engage with taxonomy, and according to the visitor research, understand that the branches of the Tree of Life were independent, yet still linked.

Using citizen science to engage The Natural History Museum has a rich programme of citizen science projects (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/takepart/citizen-science.html) – research, collection and education are all streams of the Museum’s work that benefit from the input of the interested public, yet this is not something that usually features in exhibitions, either temporary or permanent. After consulting with Prof.

Martin Stevens, Head of the University of Exeter’s Sensory Ecology Lab (http:// www.sensoryecology.com/), on content research, the idea for citizen science collaboration was posed. Stevens and his team had already developed a successful, computer-based citizen science experiment to test the effectiveness of camouflage in nightjar birds. The group proposed developing a similar game that would allow them to use our visitors to test the effectiveness of shorecrab camouflage. Visitors could choose to play as either a human or the crabs’ natural predator, the Pollock, (each of which has a different visual system) and were then asked to spot crabs within

a variety of natural and engineered habitats. Gameplay numbers were high (around 20,000) and the number of crabs found compared to those not found was enough for the scientists to draw some interesting conclusions (nearly 315,000 vs around 16,000 that were not found).

Evaluation suggests that visitors enjoyed the game, but around half had skipped over the information and consent screens and therefore didn’t realise they were contributing to a citizen science experiment. This is a lesson learned in the need to present a citizen science experiment clearly as such, making sure visitors know what kind of project and experiment they are contributing to.

Judging success Colour and Vision received over 40,000 visitors in 16 weeks and segmentation research shows that, as expected with most of the Museum’s exhibitions, the visitor groups were reasonably mixed.

The number of international visitors was high, as were Learned Liberal audiences (similar to Contemporary Cultured, but in a higher age bracket), and there was a rise in Contemporary Cultured visitors. The exhibition received five star reviews from The Guardian, Time Out, the Londonist and four stars from the Evening Standard, alongside positive reviews in the Museums Journal and other publications, while

exit surveys demonstrated that 89% of visitors surveyed ranked their enjoyment of the exhibition as either ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. Looking at these outcomes, should the success of the exhibition be judged on the number of ticket sales, the levels of visitor engagement or the reviews it received?

For the Museum, the most important is the rise in engagement with Contemporary Cultured visitors; this was a key aim and an ongoing ambition.

While the increase was not huge, it was enough to demonstrate that the Museum is beginning to be seen as place for this audience to engage positively. Further, the positive reviews in publications read by this particular audience should have helped to raise the Museum’s profile amongst this group, potentially leading to increased visits in the future.

Overall, the Museum has drawn a number of benefits from Colour and Vision, and it has been be considered a positive starting point for increased engagement from the Contemporary Cultured audience, while the valuable lessons learned will be applied to the next exhibition in the series, with the aim of even greater success.

Fiona Cole-Hamilton Interpretation Developer Natural History Museum, London 39

Images Š National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo credit: Alan Karchmer

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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New museum devoted to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history

ccupying a prominent location next to the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the largest and most comprehensive cultural destination devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showcasing the African American story and its impact on American and world history. The nearly 400,000-square-foot museum opened to the public in late September 2016, in a ceremony led by then U.S. President Barack Obama, as the nineteenth and newest museum of the Smithsonian Institution and has already welcomed over 700,000 visitors.

36,000 artefacts related to such subjects as community, family, the visual and performing arts, religion, civil rights, slavery, and segregation.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established by Act of Congress in 2003, following decades of efforts to promote and highlight the contributions of African Americans. To date, the Museum has collected more than

The building design is the product of a collaboration of four design firms - The Freelon Group, Adjaye Associates, Davis Brody Bond and the SmithGroupJJR. The design of the building features two distinct design elements - the “Corona,� the signature

Located at the corner of 15th Street N.W. and Constitution Avenue, the museum broke ground in February 2012. Total cost for construction and installation of exhibitions was $540 million, one-half funded by federal funds and the remainder by the Smithsonian. It was a complex building project, in large part due to the challenges of constructing 60 percent of the structure below ground.

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“The outer layer of the building draws on imagery from both African and American History, reaching toward the sky in an expression of faith, hope and resiliency”

Images © National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo credit: Alan Karchmer

exterior feature that consists of 3,600 bronze-colored castaluminum panels weighing a total of 230 tons, and the “Porch,” which serves as the location for the main museum entrance on Madison Drive.

Design architect David Adjaye focused on the formal development of the building design and is the creative force behind the building’s Corona. As the outer layer of the building, the Corona draws on imagery from both African and American History, reaching toward the sky in an expression of faith, hope and resiliency. The three-tiered shape is inspired by the Yoruban Caryatid, a traditional wooden column that features a crown or corona at its top. The pattern of the exterior panels evokes the look of ornate 19th-century ironwork created by enslaved craftsmen in New Orleans and allows daylight to enter through dappled openings. At night, the Corona glows from the light within, presenting a stunning addition to the National Mall.

Adjaye designed the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Norway, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. He is the winner of the 1993 Royal Institute of British Architects award and has taught at the Royal College of Art, where he had previously studied, and at the Architectural Association School in London. Adjaye has also held distinguished professorships at the universities of Pennsylvania, Yale and Princeton and is currently the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard.

Phil Freelon was the lead architect and architect of record.

Beginning in 2006, he led the programming and planning effort that set the stage for the design of the museum. Freelon led the four firm design team to create an iconic building design aligned with the vision of the Smithsonian. Freelon’s team was responsible for the coordination of 32 consultants through documentation and construction to ensure that the design intent and the museum’s vision become a reality.

Freelon has earned recognition for his design of museums with cultural and social themes such as the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. His experience includes African American focused art and culture museums, including the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte - all winners of American Institute of Architects (AIA) design awards.

Davis Brody Bond provided additional design depth for the complex project, drawing on its experience with designing large museums and other cultural projects. David Brody Bond was responsible for designing the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theater and the History Galleries, all below grade. The firm was involved in the planning, design and execution of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center in New York and also led the restoration and expansion of the New York Public Library.

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“The Contemplative Court provides a water and light-filled memorial area that offers visitors a quiet space for reflection”

Images © National Museum of African American History and Culture. Photo credit: Alan Karchmer

SmithGroupJJR developed and coordinated the design and construction of the entire exterior enclosure. Bringing 35 years of experience working with the Smithsonian on many of its largest and most complex building projects, SmithGroupJJR previously served as lead architect for the National Museum of the American Indian.

The museum includes exhibition galleries, an education center, theater, auditorium, café, store and offices. Visitors enter through the grand Porch on the National Mall side of the building. The Central Hall is the primary public space within the building and the point of orientation to the museum’s offerings. As visitors move through this generous space they can stop at the Orientation Theater, Welcome Desk or the museum store.

As visitors move through the exhibitions, a series of openings frame views of the Washington Monument, the White House and other Smithsonian museums along the Mall. These openings or “lenses” offer respite and pause at selected moments along the exhibition experience. The framed perspectives serve as a reminder that the museum presents a view of America through the lens of African American history and culture.

The Contemplative Court provides a water and light-filled memorial area that offers visitors a quiet space for reflection.

A raised overhead oculus (circular window) allows light to enter the space.

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One of the largest spaces in the museum, the 350-seat Oprah Winfrey Theater will be a forum in the nation’s capital for performers, artists, educators, scholars, authors, musicians, filmmakers and opinion leaders. The theater’s programs will enable audiences to gain a broader understanding of how African American history and culture shape and enrich the country and the world.

The museum is led by Founding Director Lonnie G. Bunch III. Before his appointment in 2005, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society where he led a successful capital campaign to transform the society in celebration of its 150th anniversary and initiated an unprecedented outreach initiative to diverse communities. A prolific and widely published author, Bunch has written on topics ranging from the American presidency and all-black towns in the American West to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums.

Lonnie G. Bunch III has worked at the Smithsonian in the past, including six years (1994–2000) as associate director for curatorial affairs. He has held numerous teaching positions at universities and was curator of history and program manager for the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles (1983 to 1989). In 2005, Bunch was named one of the 100 most influential museum professionals of the 20th century by the American Association of Museums.

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We Need To Talk About Donors

The Dome Area and Sepulchral Chamber © Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Gareth Gardner

Maxwell Blowfield is Communications Officer at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. As part of his role, he manages the Museum’s press, website content and social media platforms. He is also Senior Editorial Consultant on the Museum’s printed publications – the SOANE magazine and the Annual Review - commissioning and overseeing a complete revamp of the latter publication in 2015. He has previously worked at the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill, the National Portrait Gallery and the Science Museum. In April 2016 he organised an all-day live reading across four London venues to celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth which was featured on BBC Radio 4’s World at One. Maxwell has an MA in Museum Studies from University College London. @maxwellmuseums

Maxwell Blowfield on the urgent need to share fundraising ideas as museums have to raise more money from donations

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he museum sector is good at talking. Sometimes we’re accused of talking too much and doing too little. But as a sector we are good at talking because we understand the benefits of sharing and exchanging knowledge, skills and experience. Every museum professional has benefited from a colleague offering their advice and every museum success has been influenced by the success - or failure – of others.

This peer-to-peer learning occurs daily - often in the unglamorous setting of a staff meeting room - but its most obvious manifestation is the ubiquitous museum conference. I must confess: I love them. You can go from one speaker offering advice of how to escape threats to our very survival (read: cuts), to another demonstrating how Snapchat filters put a rocket under their follower numbers. Conferences are diverse, they are inspiring and they are bursting with ideas that will help you do your job better.

I’ve attended as many conferences as I can this year, and they have all been fantastic. I’ve always returned to my job as Communications Officer at Sir John Soane’s Museum buzzing with new ideas and new perspectives on the work that we do. I try and circulate my notes to my team the day after so that I can play my part in passing the baton. However,

when looking back over my notes for this article, I realise that there is one major area of museum work which is missing – fundraising.

At first I thought I was mistaken, but examining the programmes once again, I couldn’t find any talk that focussed on how to fundraise better. Even the Museums Association 2016 conference in Glasgow, the largest of its kind in Europe and surely the one that should offer the most comprehensive coverage of contemporary museum activity, did not have a fundraising-focussed session.

Museum Ideas 2016 in London was packed with brilliant and inspiring talks but there was nothing on fundraising.

MuseumNext, the global conference which aims to showcase “best practice today to shine a light on the museum of tomorrow,” was a fundraising-free zone at their latest session in Melbourne in February 2017. Is there no “best practice today” concerning donations to share with the sector?

At the Soane, our communication function sits within the development department. So fundraising is what my team do. Just like all other museums, it is hugely important to us – with dwindling public funding we need to raise more and more money from donations. I don’t need to elaborate further; we all know 47

“In order to be more sustainable, we need to constantly channel our efforts into encouraging private donations”

The Picture Room © Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Gareth Gardner

the state of things and the serious gaps in funding donors need to fill. It is universal to all museums. But if conferences aren’t talking about fundraising, we can’t expect the whole sector to improve.

We all know of course that there is a wealth of experience that can be shared.

Fundraising income across the DCMSsponsored museums (The National and some non-national museums which receive direct funding from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport and provide free entry) was up a huge 60% between 2012/13 and 2013/14. A year later, it had increased another 20.6%.

Many museums have led hugely highprofile fundraising campaigns for capital projects - the Science Museum, Tate, and the Design Museum are just a few who have demonstrated success in this area in recent years. Others have managed to save objects that are worth millions of pounds from being sold abroad. It feels like we are doing the whole sector a disservice by not dissecting these experiences, and not talking about them and learning from them at every opportunity.

There really has never been a more important time to start having this dialogue. As I write this article, the Private Investment in Culture Survey, published by Arts Council England, shows that 66% of private investment went to London-based organisations in 2014/15. Organisations in the capital rely on private investment for 22% of their 48

income – highlighting their established fundraising success. But for organisations in the North West and North East, it accounts for just 10% of their income.

In the East Midlands, it is 9%. But in the West Midlands, just 6% of income is from private investment. It is no coincidence then that this is the region seeing the high-profile fight to save Walsall’s New Art Gallery, amongst many others. These regions are struggling to attract major donors, and they are the regions whose institutions are most under threat.

What’s perplexing about the relative silence surrounding fundraising, is that the figures above will be a surprise to noone. We all know the direction of travel.

Ever since the UK Coalition Government came to power in 2010, public funding has been decimated, whether through central government or local authorities.

Nobody believes this will ever be reversed. Increasing individual giving has been on the government agenda for years – the DCMS launched their Philanthropy Beyond London report in 2012; the Museums Association said that fundraising “in all its forms, is going to be of increasing importance in the future”.

That was in 2013. Yet as time has gone by, we’ve seen more and more museums close or cut their opening hours, and the Museums Association’s cuts survey continues to deliver bleak prospects for the sector year after year– the percentage of organisations reporting decreases in

total income has been 58% in 2011, 32% in 2012, 49% in 2013, 52% in 2014, and 47% in 2015. Clearly museums need help with fundraising, and they are ready to embrace the experience and knowledge the sector can offer. In the most recent cuts survey, 79% of respondents were planning on increasing their focus on this area. We need to start talking about our donors and we should be talking about little else. This is a question of survival.

So with that in mind, what can I offer from our experience at the Soane? We are in a more privileged position than many museums - as a national in the heart of London, we enjoy more funding opportunities than many others - but we still face significant challenges. Nothing will ever replace our public funding, but in order to be more sustainable, we need to constantly channel our efforts into encouraging private donations. Individual giving plays a major part of this, and fostering relationships with high-net worth donors is key. We succeeded this year in delivering a big capital project, but as five years had elapsed since the fundraising campaign for this was completed, and with a new Director of Development and Communications and a new Director in post, it became clear late last year that we needed to review how we communicate with this group in order to build on our recent success.

Our Annual Review was our main focus. It is not the method of

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ShowcaSing:

Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, Canada

Ranked “One of the 10 Biggest Museum Openings of 2015” by Condé Nast Traveler 2016 Prairie Design Award for Excellence 2016 Canadian Museums Association Award of Excellence for Exhibitions in Science 2016 International Design Award - Gold in the Interior Design category

PLEASE GET IN TOUCH WITH OUR TEAM FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO REQUEST A BROCHURE:

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By Appointment to HM The Queen Display Case Suppliers ClickNetherfield Limited Livingston

“Fundraising is a massive beast, equal parts art and science, and getting it right is difficult”

The Picture Room © Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Gareth Gardner

communication which necessarily ‘seals the deal’ with donations, but it plays a crucial role in laying the foundations.

We began producing a Review five years ago as a way of updating major donors on progress to our capital project. But after four incarnations it was looking tired and directionless. Major donors want to know that their money is making a difference - they are agents for change, they don’t want their money to simply tinker around the edges. They will give if they see that they can support the whole organisation head into a brighter future. This can be a difficult concept to capture, but we know that an Annual Review is perfectly positioned to begin conversations about these big ideas.

We were wasting an opportunity if our Review continued to offer nothing but a simple snapshot of highlights of the past twelve months.

We began working with CultureShock Media on the 2015/16 Review. Although museums are putting increasing effort into digital platforms and cutting back on printed materials, it would have been a mistake to follow that trend here. Donors like physical product; we needed to focus even harder on it. As Thomas Phongsathorn, former Editor at CultureShock told me, “print conveys a prestige and confidence – through tangibility, production values and objecthood.” In other words, an Annual Review is a statement of intent;

a commitment to an ambitious vision that can only be fully demonstrated in print. When a Museum’s fundraisers go out to meet donors for the all-important one-on-one meetings to make ‘the ask’, they can take this document with them.

It is the museum’s values condensed into beautiful pages.

So Thomas and CultureShock offered us a new direction, for both the content and design. As a small museum, we know that we can’t compete with the headline figures of other institutions – the millions of visitors or the hundreds of object loans for example. We have to show our value in other ways. So Thomas was clear: we should ensure the Soane Annual Review “reflected the depth and rigour of discussion that occurs within the museum itself, among staff and visitors, while also providing something readable, interesting (and) clear.” So out went disjointed department-by-department reports, in came a body of subjects that reflected our activities, distilled into fully-formed essay ideas to be commissioned from both internal and external contributors.

These essays provided the space to not only bring together various strands from across the institution, but they allowed us to confidently discuss our position within the cultural landscape, and the unique way in which we can enrich people’s lives.

The external writers we commissioned – journalists, architects, academics – were some of the most well respected in their

fields and they demonstrated how the Soane’s work reaches far beyond the four walls of the museum.

The feedback we received from major donors and stakeholders after publication was overwhelmingly positive. Many have told us that it is not only the best Annual Review we have produced, but the best publication of this type they have ever read. As many of our donors are philanthropists for numerous London cultural institutions, this puts us in a very strong position. We will use the messages we set out in the Review to guide all our interactions with donors in the year ahead. The publication is just the start of the conversation.

While our experience in revamping our Annual Review are not the most ground-breaking, I hope at least it provides an insight that can be useful, or that it will spark an idea or discussion in others that may well lead to better fundraising. Fundraising is a massive beast, equal parts art and science, and getting it right is difficult. As every museum worker has a part to play in this process, it is vital that it is prominent in our conversation. I hope that we can all become better at talking about our donors, and that it finally takes centrestage, including at a conference.

Maxwell Blowfield Communications Officer, Sir John Soane’s Museum 51

CLOCKMAKER’S COLLECTION, SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON - UK. Established in 1814, the Clockmakers’ Collection is one of the oldest collections of clocks and watches in the world. The collection recently moved from the Guildhall to London’s Science Museum where it perfectly complements the existing Measuring Time gallery. Meyvaert de-installed the existing exhibition structure, refurbished 15 existing cases and supplied 6 new custom-made display cases that seamlessly blend together in the exhibition space. The old gallery floor required reinforcement in order to make the cases sufficiently stable and additional security profiles were required in order to ensure the safety of the objects - a precautionary measure taken to address the increase in visitor numbers. meyvaert.be

WHITE HOUSE VISITOR CENTER, WASHINGTON D.C. - UNITED STATES. The White House Visitor Center offers visitors a window into the US President’s iconic home. The showcases - by Armour Systems - are suspended above the floor and designed to incorporate vertical light boxes. Some of the showcases are big - 5m wide by 2.8m tall - and with the internal lightling and surrounding vaulted space they create a striking effect. All showcases and steel plinths were designed to discreetly incorporate silica gel housings and cable routing for lighting and alarms. The ability to design, rapid prototype and test virtual structures and products enables Armour Systems to produce consistently accurate and intricate designs to critical deadlines. armour-systems.com

ARMED FORCES MUSEUM, OSLO - NORWAY. Danish exhibition designer studio Kvorning Design and Communication tasked ClickNetherfield to create elegant, frameless showcases combined with high class environmental control for the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum. The new exhibitions feature many delicate exhibits that demand exact air exchange rates and environmental control and the museum wanted glass joints to secure good visibility across all exhibits “We are very pleased with the new showcases”, says Einar Lepperød, Curator and Lead of Exhibitions, “We were comparing environmental control, frameless glass designs and price, and ClickNetherfield in liaison with Kvorning Design and Communication turned out to be the best solution”. clicknetherfield.com

CENTRAAL MUSEUM, UTRECHT - THE NETHERLANDS. When the Centraal Museum staged Pleasure & Piety, an exhibition of works by Joachim Wtewael, Guardian Clarity™ anti-reflective glass provided the perfect solution in terms of security, low reflection and high light transmission. Kristine Kavelaars, Senior Project Coordinator at the Museum stated “We needed to strike a balance between delivering the highest levels of security whilst meeting our visitors’ desire to get as close as possible”. Describing Guardian Clarity as “unexpected glass”, Ms Kavelaars added: “I have to say that I had never seen anything like the ‘no glass’ effect. Many of our visitors, too, were not aware of the glass layer until it stopped them from touching the paintings.” innovation.guardianglass.com

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Museum Display Cases International Project Guide DRESDEN CASTLE - GERMANY. For almost 400 years, Dresden Castle or Royal Palace has been the residence of the Electors (1547– 1806) and Kings (1806–1918) of Saxony of the Albertine line of the House of Wettin. It is known for the different architectural styles employed, from Baroque to Neo-renaissance. After being closed for eleven years, the “Münzkabinett” - Coin Cabinet - has reopened to the public at Dresden Castle. It is one of the largest universal collections of European significance, comprising a total of about 300,000 objects. The collection is presented in more than 30 showcases with passive and active climate control and safety alarm systems, specifically manufactured by ARTEX Museum Services for the exhibition. The showcases have been specially designed to ensure an appropriate presentation of the sometimes very small items. The foundation of the collection was laid in the early 16th century by Georg der Bärtige, Duke of Saxony, and well into the 18th century its development was largely determined by the orders placed by Saxony’s ruling dynasty. The Münzkabinett exhibition shows approximately 3,300 objects, including rare and unique items, which portray the history of money, from Classical Antiquity to the present. They are presented in four chapters. For research work, the collection has a library of some 30,000 volumes. The library and a study room are open to the public. The collection is among the oldest of its kind in Germany. Photo credit: David-Brandt.de. artex.at 53

RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS, ST. PETERSBURG - RUSSIA. CXD recently completed a project for one of the world’s earliest photographs. The rediscovery of a lost triptych presented by French photographic pioneer Louis Daguerre to Tsar Nicolas I gave CXD the opportunity to build a bespoke container to protect and preserve a priceless piece of history. The challenge was to make a controlled atmosphere frame to house the triptych in the original frame. CXD built a Timecare® NoOxTM aluminium frame – designed by and exclusive to CXD for the creation of airtight or oxygen free frames. With built in protection it is able to maintain stable hygrometry, preventing corrosive pollutants and ultraviolet radiation damage. The housing allows viewing from both sides and protects the contents physically from future degradation. Using CXD’s production facilities and those of Armour Systems, the company’s Museum Showcase brand, the pair worked together to produce the frame and all the components required. A bespoke conservation solution was built within the profiles consisting of a Plastazote® mount containing chambers to hold humidity control socks of ProSorbTM. The Plastazote® mount was wrapped in Charcoal Cloth® to keep the air pure within the frame that was monitored by a variety of indicators. This package was sandwiched between two “Black” Timecare® Cotton Museum Board mounts with the Daguerre frame floating within the mount void using laser cut transparent supports. The whole package was held between two panes of Tru Vue® Optium® Museum, UV protection glazing and compressed by the frame onto an airtight gasket. conservation-by-design.com BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON - UK. The British Museum selected Guardian Clarity™ glass for their Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds exhibition. The Museum opted for Guardian’s doublesided, anti-reflective Guardian Clarity™ glass for use in the display cases, to provide the public with the best possible viewing experience while also offering protection and security for the exhibition’s 300 objects, many of which have rarely been seen outside of Egypt. Guardian worked closely with the nonprofit European Institute for Underwater Archaeology in staging this traveling exhibition, with a view to enhancing the display of these precious objects, while also providing them with maximum protection. Overall, the exhibition used 200 square meters of Clarity specialty glass. innovation.guardianglass.com NORTON PRIORY MUSEUM AND GARDENS, RUNCORN - UNITED KINGDOM. A new £4.5m museum opened at Norton Priory in August 2016. Telling a 900 year story, the new space allows the display of more than four times the amount of artefacts than previously on show. A large-scale open storage display runs the entire length of the ground floor gallery. This effective display now allows never-before-seen pieces from the archaeological collection to be presented to visitors and stored safely. The project comprised thirty eight showcases - supplied

by Armour Systems - in a number of configurations. Showcases incorporate LED Lighting, provision for silica gel, for passive humidity control and in some cases integration with interactive touch screens. armour-systems.com 54

PALACE OF SHIRVANSHAHS, BAKU - AZERBAIJAN. The palace, built in the 15th century, is regarded as one of the masterpieces of Azerbaijan architecture and has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The State History and Architecture Museum, opened in 1964, has been brought to new life in direct cooperation with the Old City of Baku (Administration of State Historical-Architectural Reserve) and with the support of the architect Checo Sternec. The new exhibition has specially designed display cases supplied by ARTEX Museum Services. ARTEX was also able to draw on the expertise of Christiane Rainer (story box) for the development of the audio and multimedia guides which are available in five languages. artex.at

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND, DUBLIN. The National Museum of Ireland’s Treasury Exhibition houses a collection of Ireland’s medieval art masterpieces ranging from the late Bronze Age to the 15th century. The new permanent exhibition, designed by Patrick Gannon, also tells the extraordinary story of the Faddan More Psaltar discovery and preservation. R[cases] won the contract to supply all the showcases for the exhibition.

Though the display cases vary greatly by construction – the design stipulated they they should form a unity in appearance.

They also needed to have internal fiber optic lighting. The cases also had to have a small footprint and needed to be able to be fixed to the floor without damaging the historic mosaic floor which had been carefully restored. r-cases.com

ASIAN CIVILISATIONS MUSEUM, SINGAPORE. Working with Freeman Ryan Exhibition Design, FARM Design and the museum’s in-house team, ClickNetherfield took the project from concept to detailed design. The project consisted of 105 specially designed showcases for four of the redeveloped permanent galleries. There were a variety of showcase types, some standalone and some built-in, and there were artefacts that required a very low and exacting air exchange rate because of their sensitivities to humidity. Alan Chong, the museum’s director, stated “The clean design of ClickNetherfield’s cases fully direct attention to the objects in our galleries. They beautifully match the pure lines of the new buildings, and take full advantage of the natural light.” clicknetherfield.com

MUSEUM OF ENGLISH RURAL LIFE, READING - UK. Linked to the University of Reading, the museum collection tells the story of rural England by exploring how the skills and experiences of rural people, past and present, help shape the lives of English citizens today. The impressive collection contains over 25,000 objects and more than 4.5 kilometres of archives.

Meyvaert produced a diverse array of display cases including a huge recessed wall case. At nearly 4m high, the case beautifully presents a precious tapestry that was handcrafted for the national Festival of Britain in 1952. The wall hanging had been in storage since then but is now on show to the public thanks to this high quality display solution that take into account all aspects of artefact conservation, security and presentation. meyvaert.be 55

CULLODEN BATTLEFIELD AND VISTOR CENTRE SCOTLAND. Working in partnership with the National Trust for Scotland, the ColliderCase is being used for displaying and interpreting three documents written by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746. These highly significant documents are being brought to life through the unique technology the ColliderCase offers. Original handwritten documents can be a vital resource for historians. However, they can also be difficult to interpret effectively, especially when, as is the case with these letters, they are written in a script and language form now unfamiliar to most visitors. This was one of the main interpretive challenges tackled on this project. The central document in the display, a memoire written by the Prince to his cousin King Louis XV of France, is the focus of rich media interpretation. Chris Walker, Director of Virtual Case Systems, explains the interpretive approach taken; “It was important to ensure that these letters remain the focus of the visitor’s attention as they access the interpretation. We designed an experience that enables visitors to read a translation of the medieval French directly from the original document, something that they would not normally be able to experience.”

Visitors watch as the script on the original document glows, highlighting a passage of text, before this is ‘replaced’ with accessible type in one of a choice of languages. The exclusive capabilities of ColliderCase technology enables this visual transformation to take place, without the need for additional specialist equipment or personal devices. Virtual Case Systems is a partnership between award-winning interpretive designers Bright White Ltd and software experts d3t Ltd. virtualcase.com

CENTRO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEA INHOTIM, BRUMADINHO - BRAZIL. The images in this exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim - a popular museum located in southeast Brazil - narrate swiss photographer Claudia Andujar’s lifelong relationship with the Brazilian Amazon and the indigenous Yanomami people. More than 400 photos and 95 drawings in the permanent exhibition are framed in Artglass by Groglass. Andujar became an important activist in the indigenous people’s cause, successfully advocating for the demarcation of the Yanomami Land in 1992. In addition to Andujar’s work, the exhibition shows Yanomami drawings that the artist commissioned during the 1970s. Photo and framing

by SOMAR - Groglass partner in Brazil. groglass.com GRAMMY MUSEUM MISSISSIPPI - UNITED STATES. Following the success of its big sister museum - the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live - a second Grammy Museum has recently been built in Mississippi that celebrates the rich cultural music heritage of this American state. Meyvaert was awarded the contract for the production, delivery and installation of the showcases. The showcases were created by Meyvaert’s engineers and constructed at their factory in Belgium. The display solutions - which include freestanding cases and recessed wall cases - fit perfectly into the exhibition galleries and are equipped with the latest security mechanisms and conservation systems, thus enabling the museum to safely present captivating objects for the public to enjoy. meyvaert.be

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MILITARY HISTORY MUSEUM DRESEN, GERMANY. Designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, the facade of the Military History Museum Dresden hints at the museums new profile: an historical yet at the same time contemporary look at military history and its impact on society. The Museum is spectacular and evocative. ARTEX was responsible for the furnishings in the historical building as well as the “LibeskindKeil” in this prestigious museums project. A unique look at the military history of mankind is made possible with oversized display cases. ARTEX manufactured and installed about 200 pc. wall-, table and island showcases with passive climate control and safety alarm systems. Only conservation approved materials were used. Photos: David-Brandt.de. artex.at

MARY ROSE MUSEUM, PORTSMOUTH - UK. The Mary Rose Museum was built to house Henry VIII’s flagship. The vessel sank during a battle with the French in 1545 and the wreck lay undisturbed on the seabed until being raised from the water in 1982. R[cases] facilitated a 3-year consultation period between the Mary Rose Trust, Land Design and manufacturer Reier to create and test the concept. This was followed by an 18 month period to design the showcases and 5 months installation on site.

Smaller artefacts are displayed in airtight and environmentally closely controlled showcases. The strict climate conditions - a stable temperature between 18-20° and humidity between 5055% under ambient conditions of 15-27°C and 40-60%RH – were the biggest challenge of the projet. r-cases.com

LADY LEVER ART GALLERY, BEBINTON - UK. The Lady Lever Art Gallery houses one of the UK’s finest collections of fine and decorative art. It has the best collection of Wedgwood jasperware anywhere in the world and its collection of PreRaphaelite paintings is internationally renowned. Showcases at the Gallery were carefully designed by Armour Systems to display a wide range of artworks using internal plinths and shelves of differing sizes, some incorporating dimmable LED spot lights to pick out particular pieces. It was also important for the showcases to complement the period architecture of the building whilst providing a secure and stable environment for exhibits. Many of the showcases were shaped to fit into or reflect the gallery spaces, corners and niches. armour-systems.com

PIERRE AMALRIC MEDIATHEQUE, ALBI - FRANCE. The Médiathèque Pierre Amalric d’Albi houses rare and historical books. The library wanted an impressive, seven-meter-long showcase to house the contents of a major new exhibition which opened in 2016. Albi Médiathèque Director Jocelyne Deschaux found the solution with Guardian Clarity™ glass with help from Promuseum, a supplier specialized in sourcing materials and equipment for museums, public spaces and cultural sites. With more than 25 years of experience, Promuseum, based in Rosnysur-Seine, France, is a global designer of museum showcases.

“Guardian Clarity anti-relfective glass met the museum’s three conditions for the showcase: preservation, aesthetics and value for money,” stated Deschaux. innovation.guardianglass.com 57

YORK ART GALLERY - UNITED KINGDOM. York Art Gallery is one of the best regional galleries in the UK. Recently revampled, the gallery now has 60% more space. The new galleries designed by Ushida Findlay / Simpson & Brown accommodate the Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA) and display the largest collection of British studio ceramics in the world.

R[cases] provided 10 showcases for the gallery, each with pull/slide front access, fine art shelf hanging system and fiber optic lighting. In order to decrease maintenance - two new technologies were introduced here to the UK museum market: a specific wire-based shelve hanging system and fan-less fiber optic LED light sources. In addition, a 17m glass wall was supplied for the new south gallery. r-cases.com

AUDAIN ART GALLERY, VANCOUVER - CANADA. ClickNetherfield were originally contacted by Bricault Design in late 2014 to support the design development process, budget estimating and ultimately final design of the First Nations and special exhibition cases for the Emily Carr galleries of the Audian Museum in Vancouver. Oversized, angular and architecturally integrated cases span floor to ceiling, wall to wall, providing the visitor with an close up view of the artefacts. Integrated fully dimmable, adjustable and concealed LED driven fibre optic lighting provide both pinpoint highlighting and soft wall wash detailing within the fully bespoke cases. ClickNetherfield USA teamed with Kubik in fabricating a comprehensive turnkey solution for the project. clicknetherfield.com

ARTEX MUSEUM SERVICES GorskistraĂ&#x;e 17 1230 Vienna, Austria T: +43 (1) 743 36 08 E: office@artex.at Web: www.artex.at

ARMOUR SYSTEMS Lyon Road, Denbigh West, Bletchley, Milton Keynes MK1 1EX, UK T: +44 (0)1908 37733 E: info@armoursystems.co.uk Web: www.armour-systems.com

CLICK NETHERFIELD Glassworks, Grange Road, Livingston, EH54 5DE, Scotland, UK T: +44 (0) 1506 835200 E: showcases@clicknetherfield.com Web: www.clicknetherfield.com

COLLIDER CASE Suite 2F Swinegate Court East Swinegate, York, YO1 8AJ, UK T: +44 (0)1904 500503 E: chris@virtualcase.com Web: www.collidercase.com

CXD - CONSERVATION BY DESIGN 2 Wolseley Road, Kempston, Bedford MK42 7AD, UK T: +44 (0)1234 846300 E: info@cxdltd.com Web: conservation-by-design.com

GROGLASS Katlakalna iela 4B, Riga, LV-1073, Latvia T: +371 67502910 E: sales@groglass.com Web: www.groglass.com

GUARDIAN GLASS Tom Pudding Way, Goole, Yorkshire, DN14 8GA, UK T: +44 (0) 1405 726800 E: uksales@guardian.com Web: innovation.guardianglass.com

MEYVAERT Dok Noord 3, 9000 Ghent, Belgium T: +32 9 225 54 27 E: info@meyvaert.be W: www.meyvaert.be

R[CASES] Vanguard Business Centre, Alperton Lane, Greenford, UB6 8AA, UK T: +44 (0)7539 994466 E: LH@reiershowcases.com Web: www.r-cases.com

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See Objects in an Entirely New Light

Objects and stories share the same stage. Requiring no smartphones, no special glasses, and no learning curve.

Visitor focus is firmly on the object: with enjoyment, insight and appreciation.

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The technology is invisible, only the storytelling and object can be seen.

With ColliderCase you can: • • • • • • • • • •

See inside objects See how they work See their history unfold See their internal workings See them come to life, or back to life See fine detail that is easily missed See hidden aspects and meanings See missing parts See them reunited with other objects See greater meaning in objects

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"Stories surround and interact with objects in enchanting and enlightening ways."

ColliderCase creates a truly engaging learning experience. Objects are animated, their stories unfolding in a magical way.

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NYC - exploring the past imagining the future

“Future City Lab encourages visitors to contemplate the challenges the city will face in the years to come�

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Museum of the City of New York’s new permanent exhibition explores the story of the city from village to global capital and asks visitors to design the city of the future

F

ive years in the making, New York at Its Core is the first museum exhibition to comprehensively interpret and present the compelling story of New York’s rise from a striving Dutch village to today’s global city and look to the future of the City in a fastchanging world. The exhibition presents the city’s dramatic historical narrative in two galleries covering the years from 1609 to 2012 and culminates with the Future City Lab, an interactive space designed to encourage visitors to contemplate the challenges the city will face in the years to come and design for themselves the city of the future.

Nearly 450 historical objects and images, almost 40% of which come from the Museum’s own rich collection, are complemented by digital maps, data visualizations and multimedia installations - inviting visitors to fully engage in a multitude of ways with the unprecedented range of stories presented.

Opposite page: Visitors using interactives in World City, 1898 2012 and Port City, 1609 - 1898.

This page: Multimedia installations in Future City Lab and Port City; New York at Its Core. Images Filip Wolak Courtesy MCNY © Museum of the City of New York

Occupying the entire first floor of the Museum’s landmark building at the top of New York’s Museum Mile, the exhibition is shaped by four themes – money, density, diversity, and creativity – that provide a lens for examining the character of the city. The exhibition argues that a distinctive blend of these key themes has produced a powerfully creative environment that has made New York a center of innovation in the arts, business, science, politics, and urban development for over four centuries.

Gallery 1 – Port City, 1609 - 1898 The first gallery takes the story of the city from the time of Henry Hudson’s voyage of discovery to the creation of today’s five-borough city of Greater New York. Visitors discover more than 220 key objects from this period, including a ceremonial war club from the native people of the area, the Lenape; a slice of a wooden pipe that formed the original water system of the city; and William M. “Boss” Tweed’s gold tiger-headed cane.

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Whitney Donhauser has enjoyed a twenty-three year career in Museum management. She was appointed the Ronay Menschel Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York in January 2016. Previously, Whitney was Senior Advisor to the President and Deputy Chief Officer for Development and External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

World City, 1898 - 2012. Filip Wolak Courtesy MCNY © Museum of the City of New York

“Striking artifacts are complemented by interactive installations that enable visitors to digitally meet New Yorkers of the past”

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These striking artifacts are complemented by interactive installations that enable visitors to digitally “meet” New Yorkers of the past – from Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant to Chinatown pioneer Wong Chin Foo and anarchist Emma Goldman. These diverse characters are set against immersive digital projections of historic New York street scenes that fade into contemporary views of the same scenes created for the exhibition by New York photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao.

More than 200 historic objects and images in the second gallery are displayed around a central video installation, which uses vivid, overlapping footage to immerse visitors in the rhythms and dynamism of the 20th-century city. The gallery features a touchscreen filled with moving silhouettes of notable people who embody the exhibition’s themes – ranging from industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to trailblazing feminist Gloria Steinem and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z.

Gallery 2 – World City, 1898 - 2012 The second gallery showcases the dizzying evolution of New York as it grew into a modern global metropolis. Cycles of financial growth and crisis reshaped the city’s economic, cultural, and social life throughout the 20th century, as did the influx of new waves of people from across the country and around the world. The gallery dramatically shows the repeated challenges – extremes of wealth and poverty, the Great Depression, the fiscal and urban crises of the postwar era, crumbling infrastructure and rising prices, the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – that tested and ultimately affirmed the creativity and resilience of the residents of a metropolis that had become one of the most influential cities in the world.

Gallery 3 – Future City Lab The Future City Lab brings the focus to New York’s present and looks to the future. The interactive space invites visitors to explore five central challenges and opportunities that New York will face in coming generations: how the city will house its growing population; how it can continue to offer opportunity to new generations of arrivals in an increasingly competitive global era; how the city can retain and foster its defining diversity; how New Yorkers will get around in the 21st-century city; and how the city can prepare itself for rising waters in an age of climate change. Media installations and interactives include: • Mapping NYC 2000 – 2050: A portrait of New York City in a series of nearly

Creating incredible Multimedia experiences for the Cultural and Heritage Sector For those who expect MORE...

Whilst strong storytelling skills continue to be a must, todays visitors require more sophisticated entertainment and an innovative approach to education and interpretation; which is where ATS really comes into its own. Focused on stretching the boundaries in terms of communication, we create high quality tours and visitor experiences which will engage, enhance and deliver multilingual and access friendly content to your visitors.

Our solutions include our unique iTouch Multimedia Guide handsets, Mobile apps, and more traditional audio-guides. Our standards are very high. Our teams are led by creative producers with valuable expertise, and we have studios with an experienced production and editing team. We’d like you to think of us as creative collaborators. We’ll not only design absolutely what you need in terms of access and interpretation - we’ll take it to the next level.

Please make contact and share your requirements; you may be surprised by what ATS can achieve for you and your visitors.

Contact ATS today to enhance your visitors’ experience

T 023 9259 5000 E enquiries@ats-heritage.co.uk www.ats-heritage.co.uk 63

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World City, 1898 - 2012. The Museum is pursuing a boldly 21st-century approach by embracing interactive technology as a storytelling tool, enlisting hardware and software to directly engage every visitor in the story of New York City. To assist in this effort, the Museum engaged Local Projects, the experience design studio behind the 9/11 Memorial Museum and Cooper Hewitt. Together, the Museum and Local Projects integrated storytelling with experiential technology to bring the past, present, and future to life throughout all three galleries. Filip Wolak Courtesy MCNY © Museum of the City of New York

“The Museum is pursuing a boldly 21st-century approach - technology plays a key role in presenting the past, present, and future”

100 maps presented alongside images and data visualizations on a striking three-dimensional array of monitors that represent the largest compilation of visual information about the city available.

• Interactive Games: Visitors can design a building, redesign a street, or create a new park, using an intuitive touchscreen interface. Designs can then be shared with other visitors on the larger-than-life streetscape wall, where motion sensors allow visitors to appear in their scenes and become a part of the future they’ve designed.

• What If Table: Here visitors can compose their own “What if?” questions about New York City and join conversations about the city’s future with everyone from their fellow museumgoers to exhibition curators, area experts, and scholars.

• Data Nook: Offers a peek behind the numbers of the Future City Lab, inviting visitors to explore the layers of complexity and curatorial choice behind every statistic and data point in the gallery.

New York at Its Core – Technology Throughout the exhibition and particularly in the Future City Lab, technology plays a key role in presenting the past, present, and future of New York City. The Museum is pursuing a boldly 21st-century approach by embracing

interactive technology as a storytelling tool, enlisting hardware and software to directly engage every visitor in the story of New York City. To assist in this effort, the Museum engaged Local Projects, the experience design studio behind the 9/11 Memorial Museum and Cooper Hewitt.

Together, the Museum and Local Projects integrated storytelling with experiential technology to bring the past, present, and future to life throughout all three galleries.

New York at Its Core is the capstone of the Museum’s decade-long $100 million renovation and is accompanied by a redesigned website, also launched this fall. As a precursor to the exhibition, the Museum relaunched its popular and critically acclaimed Timescapes documentary, reaffirming the Museum’s mission to tell the story of New York’s origins and where the city is going in innovative and engaging ways.

Project: New York at Its Core, Museum of the City of New York Opened: November 2016 Budget: $10.5 million Gallery design: Studio Joseph Experience design: Local Projects Graphic design: Pentagram 65

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THE IDEA MUSEUM

Intangible Museum Collections and Dialogic Experience Design Image: Canadian Journeys is the largest of 11 galleries at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It includes 19 mixedmedia story alcoves of varying experience design (active, passive, interactive – all immersive) and varying design style around the perimeter of the gallery, a 30m x 2.5m projection cycling through 7 animated stories, a 2-storey image grid, digital kiosks, a 30-person theatre, a shareyour-story booth, and a full-body motiontracking projection game in the centre.

Image Credit: © CMHR/Ian McCausland

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Corey Timpson on the experiential design of participatory exhibitions and collecting stories as born-digital artefacts

isitors pass from gallery to gallery, space to space. They watch film, read texts, look at images, observe artefacts, play games, share stories, and are immersed in multisensory mixed-media environments. Now two years into its operation, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) has been finding its form, working through the functional scenarios of program development, service offerings, and also determining its place in the national and international museum landscape.

Understanding the potential it holds in operating with such a broad and intangible subject matter, the CMHR has found constructive challenges in

determining how it can be a new kind of museum, and also operate within museological best practices. As the scenario has shifted from “opening project” to “daily operations”, museum staff have had to adapt, evolve, and change.

We have now begun to understand the various practical implications of being a museum (versus planning to be one), and have had to develop a new and workable path through operational contexts, noble intentions, infinite possibilities, and practical constraints.

Like any good challenge, this has created a fertile environment for innovation not only in design & production, but also in methodology.

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Corey Timpson is Vice President - Exhibition, Research, and Design, at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR). As a member of the executive leadership, Corey is charged with the fulfillment of the CMHR’s national mandate and is responsible for the direction and oversight of all exhibition programs, research and curation, design and production across all media, digital platforms and transmedia storytelling, and collections-based initiatives. Corey has a B.A. in Law from Carleton University and a PostGraduate Diploma in Interactive Multimedia from Algonquin College of Applied Arts & Technology. Prior to joining the CMHR in 2009, Corey spent 8 years at the Canadian Heritage Information Network and the Virtual Museum of Canada.

“An artefact is treated like any other storytelling tool. The artefact is not the 3D object, it is the intangible. It is the story itself”

1. Barry Lord, Gail Dexter Lord, The Manual of Museum Exhibitions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002 2. Reference the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12 (privacy) vs article 19 (information), or article 19 (expression) vs article 2 or 3.

3. Canada Museums Act - http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/ eng/acts/m-13.4/page-1.html 4. Canadian Museum for Human Rights - https:// humanrights.ca/about/mandate-and-museumexperience 5. Read about the public roundtables https:// humanrights.ca/about/transparency/public-roundtables 6. Such as remote vs in-situ visitors, educational groups vs general visitors, etc.

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An idea was born The “idea museum” was first considered, questioned, and examined by Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord in 20021.

This concept was at the very core of the design and development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The CMHR was intended, and has become, a museum whose core programming explores a conceptual subject; a contemporary subject; a universal subject; a subject that is susceptible to varying interpretations; a subject that can be both difficult and uplifting; and a subject that can even contradict itself2.

An amendment to the Canadian Museum’s Act, made by the Government of Canada in March 2008, formally established The Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a national museum.

As such, the CMHR is charged with preserving and promoting the heritage of Canada and its peoples, both in Canada and abroad, and in contributing to the collective memory and sense of identity of Canada3. The CMHR’s mandate further accentuates that it will provide special, but not exclusive reference to Canada, while enhancing the public’s understanding of human rights, promoting respect for others, and encouraging reflection and dialogue4.

It is within this mandate, that this new idea museum, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, was born and now operates.

Methodology Seeding Design An early initiative of the CMHR saw the establishment of a Canada-wide content development and public engagement program. A Content Advisory Committee was created, and this group, along with museum staff, visited 19 cities, inviting thousands of people into facilitated discussions in order to inform content development processes5 at the museum.

This process, initiated at such an early phase of the museum’s existence, established what would become standard practices at the CMHR – both engagement of the public in project development, and the creation and use of advisory committees. Both of these practices have now been consistently used across the museum enterprise in the design and development of museum programs and

services. When dealing with a subject as broad as human rights, these practices have proved invaluable in allowing the museum to meet the expectations of the public, reflect public sentiment(s), and ensure informed decision making – in the areas of service and business channels, as well as in interpretation, design, and even curatorial practices.

Initial exhibition design saw a clear focus placed on storytelling as the primary experience design tactic. This doesn’t differ from most museum exhibitions, where storytelling is at the nexus of the experience. What is unique, on the part of the CMHR, is the manner in which stories are delivered. Rather than present an artefact, and then relay stories about the artefact to the visitor, at the CMHR the scenario is reversed. Stories are selected, collected, and curated. The artefacts are then chosen which can help express these stories. The experience design scenario doesn’t end at the presentation of artefacts. In fact, an artefact is treated like any other storytelling tool – audio, video, image, text, object, prop, lighting, scenography, and artefact. The truth of this scenario, is that the artefact at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is not the 3-dimensional object, it is not the image, it is the intangible. It is the story itself.

The museum mandate, specifically the phrase “encouraging reflection and dialogue”, along with the developing practices described, were critical to informing the CMHR’s experience design framework. In most museums, the predominant experience design scenario is: the museum informs the visitor. When considering the experience design of the CMHR a 4-layer experience design framework was created: . the museum informs the visitor . the visitor informs the museum . visitors inform one another (museum as venue/facilitator) . visitor types inform visitor types6 This design scenario was constructed in 2009. At that point, shared authority was barely an emerging concept within museological discourse. The implications of such a participative experience design, such as the impact on curatorial authority,

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are still being worked through and debated across the museum field today.

This framework was in part designed to facilitate engagement - a well-proven technique among interaction designers - it is far more likely to have an engaged audience when they are co-owner of the output, and/or when the output holds personal relevance. It was thus applied to the CMHR’s experience design intentions7. This 4-layered experience design framework, however, was not just an attempt to ensure positive and rich engagement with the museum’s audience, but most importantly was a tactic that would help ensure museum programs dealing with a potentially volatile subject matter, would always remain informed and protected from undue, uninformed, or unintended bias.

Engaging audiences in the design and development of content and programs, informing museum decisions through advisory groups, collecting and curating stories, expressing these stories through rich, mixed-media installations, and ensuring this expression is dialogic and reciprocal – this is the design approach to working with an intangible concept, with the subject of human rights, at the CMHR. Design in Action As technology increases in ability to perform tasks, user expectations increase in terms of demand on technology and experience. The cycle iterates and rolls forward and growth in technological capability persists. Between 2009 and 2014, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, not yet open, was confronted with enormous opportunity in the areas of information communication technology (ICT). The maturity of semantics and standardization in technology, the global aggregation and ubiquity of information, and the general pervasiveness and fluidity of access to the internet via mobile computing and smart devices, meant a great deal to a museum whose artefacts are intangible and whose experience design scenario is participative storytelling.

Collecting stories, and expressing stories, allowing for participation and discourse, could be done through dynamic and scalable means.

The CMHR exploits the latest technology in order to present interesting stories, but the greatest innovation created by the museum remains unseen by the visitor — an enterprise content management system (ECMS). The ECMS is a system that manages collections, all content, digital assets, enterprise search, and feeds all digital endpoints across the museum enterprise (exhibitions, web, mobile, reference centre, digital signage, etc). In the creation and management of this system, the museum takes advantage of the maturity in semantics and standards, and the absence of any legacy systems, to ensure that its use of technology is scalable, and therefore cost-effective for future purposes. A defining characteristic of the CMHR’s technology implementation scenario is that by keeping software and hardware integration as open and flexible, and as modular as possible, the museum is well positioned to grow along with technological advancements. This in turn means that resources can be spent on design and production instead of adaptation and reproduction. For a museum collecting and presenting stories of an evolving and contemporary nature, addressing the resource spend on production (vs reproduction) of said stories, is critical in terms of sustainability.

Careful consideration is placed on descriptive language. At the CMHR “interactive” is not a synonym for “digital”. Pushing a button on a digital interface in order to read, watch, or listen, does not constitute interactivity.

These are all passive activities. Nathan Shedroff proposes “the most interactive experience you’ll have in your life, is a great conversation”.8 This notion is fundamental. Interactivity at the CMHR demands cause and effect, reciprocity, and is dialogic9. The museum would sell its experience design scenario short, and ultimately jeopardize fulfillment of

7. Corey Timpson, Plenary: Placing Our Bets, Rutgers University & Liberty Science Centre, Digital Ubiquity Symposium, 2010 8. Nathan Shedroff, Experience Design, Waite Group Press, 2001 9. Corey Timpson, Placing Our Bets, Building a National Museum’s Media Strategy From Scratch, Museum-iD magazine, 2010

its mandate, if it considered accessing a menu through a digital interface in order to read a text an “interactive” experience.

With over 100 hours of video, 19 mixed-media immersive environments, audio soundscapes, 4 documentary films, projection mapping into non-uniform geometric spaces, gesture-based digital installations, a 360° theatre, video games, a 24-person digital study table, tangible interfaces, environmental graphics and motion-graphics, a share-your-story booth, and powerful original artefacts, the fabric of the exhibition design is extremely heavy with digital media. That said, styles vary from documentary and photojournalistic, to illustrative, animation, info-graphic and data visualization, to fine-art, and abstract-interpretive.

“Collecting stories, and expressing stories, allowing for participation and discourse, could be done through dynamic and scalable means” The exhibition design approach is to determine the story, and then present the story in a manner that best suits the nature of the story being told. All the while, the broader design view considers all storytelling and all galleries and is focused on the 4-layered experience design, while offering a healthy mix of passive, active, interactive, and immersive experiences.

The implications of this type of exhibition design does not lessen any established burdens on staffing or project planning. While exhibition project budgets remain comparable to museums of similar scope and size, the composition of expertise on the team can be somewhat different, including software developers working alongside interpretive planners and exhibition designers. At the CMHR the demand for the mixed-media/ multimedia designer may be greater than 71

it is at other museums, but this is also a consistently growing trend across the industry as museums increasingly look to become more participative, personally relevant, and augment digital storytelling.

Presenting the subject of human rights through museum exhibition has demanded a scalable infrastructure in order to support the mixed-media (but heavily digital) environmental designs, that facilitate a rich variety of activity types (active, passive, interactive, and immersive) in achievement of a 4-layered experience design framework.

Collecting and Managing the Intangible While the practice of collecting intangible heritage is not a new one, it is a rare proposition to build a museum collection around an intangible subject that is as

“The focus on borndigital and the intangible requires a high digital literacy of staff within the Collections department”

contemporary as human rights are. What would the fabric of such a collection be?

Again, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights focuses back on the mandate (reflection and dialogue), and with the opportunity of being a museum of its time, looks to stories as the focus of the collection. In practice, while the CMHR does collect some 3D artefacts, archival documents/paper, and other ephemera, a strategic decision was taken to focus collection activities on the born-digital.

The CMHR’s Oral History program is intended to be the cornerstone of its collection, while other digitized, imaged, 3D-scanned or modelled, and digitalmedia based objects are sought for acquisition. Another strategic variable to this collections mandate was the intention to not be redundant, or competitive, with the other national museums and heritage institutions in Canada. These 72

sister institutions, including the Canadian Museum of History, the Canadian War Museum, Library and Archives Canada, the Canadian Museum of Immigration, as well as several others, are all co-stewards of Canada’s collection. As such, the recently established Canadian Museum for Human Rights has an opportunity to be unique in the national landscape, to be collaborative with its peers, to fill a gap, and all the while meet both its mandate and the Museums Act. Policy work in this area has been critical. Between 2010 and 2016 the policies and procedures in Collections have been persistently edited and adjusted as the museum reconciles intention against the demands of every day practice and finds equilibrium. It is important to note that operating a robust loan program for 3D artefacts may save longterm conservation resources, however it is a heavy burden on the curatorial and registration teams to be consistently researching, curating, and loaning new artefacts. Nevertheless, the primary advantage of this scenario is that the core exhibition program is never static.

New artefacts are consistently rotated through the program, expressing the stories in evolving ways, and as such, the core exhibition program is as live and contemporary as human rights are themselves.

One of the greatest challenges with regards to the CMHR collection is that it did not proceed the design and development of the museum. The museum was not born of another, it did not originate from an existing collection, there was no organic growth. It was established via an act of Parliament, built on the bold vision of a great Canadian philanthropist and the tireless efforts of his daughter10. This meant that inaugural content development and exhibition design happened concurrently through iterative processes. It also means that at this time the museum is slowly and carefully building the collection that satisfies the Museums Act, and is really in its infancy. There is no precedent other

than what is being set at present. There is also no legacy. Presenting the curated and collected stories in exhibition creates a requirement on licensed material, beyond the loaned artefacts. The goal of the CMHR is to pursue and eventually engage in Creative Commons, OER, and other Open Knowledge opportunities11.

Yet currently, without a deep collection of its own, it relies largely on the licensing of material from other institutions. Given the CMHR has only just celebrated its two-year anniversary, acquisitions are deliberate and careful. Precedence setting happens with each acquisition, and attention to balance is just as paramount as those unique and critical original intentions.

The focus on born-digital and the intangible also requires a high digital literacy of staff within the Collections department. The Archivist is a Digital Archivist, the library has as much digital material and subscriptions as print. The standards of library science are the semantic structure of the museum’s enterprise content management system and the thesaurus for its enterprise search, and the reference centre is growing towards being a Knowledge Commons for all visitors, with access to live news and data feeds as well as specialized subscriptions and databases.

Transition While the existence of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to date can be seen as the binary of pre-open (project) and being open (operations), the scenario is slightly more sophisticated.

The museum is currently in transition.

Although visitors have been enjoying the compliment of museum programming and service for 2 full years now, much of what happens at the museum is a first time experience for both visitors and staff. Setting benchmarks for evaluation, crafting and adjusting policies and processes, and planning various programs to be two to three years in advance of the present, are all tasks only just underway.

Dealing with the contemporary nature of

10. Read more about the CMHR’s origins, https://humanrights.ca/about/mandate-and-museum-experience/project-origins 11. OER/Open Education Resources, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

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APPS & TOUCH SCREEN TECHNOLOGY

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GAMES

the subject and planning in advance for programs and activities are procedures and processes that are just now being understood and crafted as the CMHR applies established due diligent museum protocols and scenarios to its own context.

The CMHR launched its Temporary Exhibition Program in August of 2015.

While the program, like at any museum, is intended to be a driver for repeat visitation and membership, and to vary and supplement the core offerings, it is also a challenge that museum staff are learning their way through. The breadth of the human rights subject at large ensures there are several temporary exhibitions that can be brought to the museum. However, virtually no potential exhibitions are ready-made to fit within the CMHR’s narrative structure 12.

Additionally, the programmatic offerings of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights are subject to the Official Languages Act of Canada, and are thus required to be in both official languages (English, French), while the CMHR’s inclusive design and accessibility standards are extremely progressive and stringent13. This means that every temporary exhibition brought to the CMHR requires varying degrees of curatorial and interpretive contextualization to fit the narrative, as well as design and production effort to be presented in two languages, and to meet inclusive design and accessibility standards. The challenge for museum staff isn’t so much going through these processes and tasks. The challenges actually lie in getting far enough ahead with planning, and availability of options, to ensure succinct resource spend, while also balancing the fact that the national and international discourse on human rights related subjects has proven to evolve and change pretty quickly by museum standards.

Dialogue and Equilibrium There is a lot of work yet to be done before the Canadian Museum for Human

The museum, only just two years old, has much self-discovery to undertake.

How “human rights” as a subject matter evolves and matures will change over time, and will impact the museum’s operations, program designs, and service development. Image © Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Rights really hits its stride. The museum, only just two years old, has much selfdiscovery to undertake. How “human rights” as a subject matter evolves and matures will change over time, and will impact the museum’s operations, program designs, and service development. With the evolution of the human rights concept, the collections and exhibitions must be managed in such a way as to facilitate responsiveness, yet not compromise museological due diligence.

A recent meeting at the CMHR saw staff discussing how best to respond to the changing national discourse on a topic that could affect interpretation across a number of museum exhibits, as well as public and educational activities.

When stepping out of the conversation itself, it was clearly apparent that this discussion epitomizes just how unique the breadth and contemporaneity of this subject matter is when applied to a museum context. The museum’s President and CEO, Dr. John Young, closed the meeting with the following sentiment:

“Well, we’re a museum built on dialogue, and this is where the dialogue has taken us”14. Simple, clear, and to the point.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has a unique opportunity to meet both the Museums Act and its mandate, by collecting stories as intangible artefacts, and presenting them through mixedmedia, dialogic exhibitions. In doing so, perhaps it is only natural that this museum’s standard practice will be the need to consistently check, recheck, and reestablish its equilibrium. In this way, it’s collections will be a rich source for study, allowing future generations to tap the national and international human rights discourse at various points in Canadian history, and the exhibitions will present and represent the pluralism of evolving perspectives and ideas that comprise such a dynamic and intangible subject matter.

Corey Timpson Vice President - Exhibition, Research, and Design Canadian Museum for Human Rights

12. The CMHR Metanarrative https://humanrights.ca/about/governance-and-corporate-reports/board-profile 13. Read about the CMHR’s Inclusive Design & Accessibility at the following sources: https://humanrights.ca/visit/ inclusive-design-and-accessibility ; & https://humanrights.ca/visit/inclusive-design-and-accessibility/our-commitmentuniversal-accessibility; & http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/inclusive-design-from-approach-to-execution/; and http://name-aam.org/uploads/downloadables/EXH.fall_15/7.%20EXH%20Fall%202015_Timpson.pdf 14. Internal meeting at the CMHR. Dr. John Young. November 2016.

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Mathematics: The Winton Gallery brings together remarkable stories, historical artefacts and design to highlight the central role of mathematical practice in all our lives, and explores how mathematicians have helped build the modern world over the past four centuries. © Science Museum. Photo: Nick Guttridge

T

he only permanent public museum exhibition designed

by Zaha Hadid anywhere in the world, the Science Museum’s beautiful and dramatic new gallery reveals the importance of mathematics in all our lives.

Mathematics: The Winton Gallery brings together remarkable stories, historical artefacts and design to highlight the central role of mathematical practice in all our lives, and explores how mathematicians, their tools and ideas have helped build the modern world over the past four centuries.

More than 100 treasures from the Science Museum’s worldclass science, technology, engineering and mathematics collections have been selected to tell powerful stories about how mathematics has shaped, and been shaped by, some of our most fundamental human concerns – from trade and travel to war, peace, life, death, form and beauty.

Mathematics

Science Museum’s remarkable new gallery reveals the importance of mathematics in all our lives Curator Dr David Rooney said, “At its heart this gallery reveals a rich cultural story of human endeavour that has helped transform the world over the last four hundred years. Mathematical practice underpins so many aspects of our lives and work, and we hope that bringing together these remarkable stories, people and exhibits will inspire visitors to think about the role of mathematics in a new light.”

Positioned at the centre of the gallery is the Handley Page ‘Gugnunc’ aeroplane, built in 1929 for a competition to construct safe aircraft. Ground-breaking aerodynamic research influenced the wing design of this experimental aeroplane, helping to shift public opinion about the safety of flying and to secure the future of the aviation industry. This aeroplane encapsulates the gallery’s overarching theme, illustrating how mathematical practice has helped solve real-world problems and in this instance paved the way for the safe passenger flights that we rely on today.

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“The gallery design is driven by equations of airflow used in the aviation industry”

© Science Museum. Photo: Nick Guttridge

Mathematics also defines Zaha Hadid Architects’ enlightening design for the gallery. Inspired by the Handley Page aircraft, the design is driven by equations of airflow used in the aviation industry. The layout and lines of the gallery represent the air that would have flowed around this historic aircraft in flight, from the positioning of the showcases and benches to the three-dimensional curved surfaces of the central pod structure.

As well as being the first permanent public museum exhibition designed by Zaha Hadid Architects anywhere in the world, the gallery is also the first of Zaha Hadid Architects’ projects to open in the UK since Dame Zaha Hadid’s sudden death in March 2016. The late Dame Zaha first became interested in geometry while studying mathematics at university. Mathematics and geometry have a strong connection with architecture and she continued to examine these relationships throughout each of her projects; with mathematics always central to her work. As Dame Zaha said, “When I was growing up in Iraq, math was an everyday part of life. We would play with math problems just as we would play with pens and paper to draw – math was like sketching.”

Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum Group, said, “We were hugely impressed by the ideas and vision of the late Dame Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher when they first presented their design for the new mathematics gallery over two years ago. It was a terrible shock for us all when Dame Zaha died suddenly in March this year, but I am sure that this gallery will be a lasting tribute to this world-changing architect and provide inspiration for our millions of visitors for many years to come.”

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From a beautiful 17th century Islamic astrolabe that uses ancient mathematical techniques to map the night sky, to an early example of the famous Enigma machine, designed to resist even the most advanced mathematical techniques for code breaking during the Second World War, each historic object within the gallery has an important story to tell. Archive photography and film helps to capture these stories, and introduces the wide range of people who made, used or were impacted by each mathematical device or idea.

Some instruments and objects within the gallery clearly reference their mathematical origin. Others may surprise visitors and appear rooted in other disciplines, from classical architecture to furniture design. Visitors will see a box of glass eyes used

by Francis Galton in his 1884 Anthropometric Laboratory to help measure the physical characteristics of the British public and develop statistics to support a wider social and political movement he termed ‘eugenics’. On the other side of the gallery is the pioneering Wisard pattern-recognition machine built in 1981 to attempt to re-create the ‘neural networks’ of the brain.

This early Artificial Intelligence machine worked, until 1995, on a variety of projects, from banknote recognition to voice analysis, and from foetal growth monitoring in hospitals to covert surveillance for the Home Office.

A richly illustrated book has been published by Scala to accompany the new gallery. Mathematics: How it Shaped Our World, written by David Rooney, expands on the themes and stories that are celebrated in the gallery itself and includes a series of newly commissioned essays written by world-leading experts in the history and modern practice of mathematics.

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Mathematics: The Winton Gallery

The Science Museum has also announced the launch of Digital Lab, a pioneering research project that will explore new ways to use the latest digital technologies to engage and inspire the Museum’s global online audience and visitors of all ages.

The Digital Lab, developed by the Science Museum with support from Founding Sponsor Samsung, will use technology, including Virtual Reality (VR), 3D scanning and high definition rotational photography, to bring objects from the Museum’s world-class collections to life like never before.

The first Digital Lab project focuses on the Mathematics Gallery, of which Samsung is Principal Sponsor. The Science Museum has worked with Samsung to digitise some of the most important artefacts in the gallery, making use of a number of technologies to capture - and allow visitors to interact with the objects, including 3D scanning, high definition rotational photography and component photography. Amongst the remarkable objects brought to life with the help of 360-degree rotational photography are the Three Ring Enigma Machine and the William Thomson Tide Predicting Machine, while a beautiful 17th Century Islamic Planispheric Astrolabe will be brought into the 21st century with component photography.

Taking inspiration from the experimental 1929 Handley Page aircraft which forms the iconic centrepiece of the Mathematics Gallery, an immersive prototype VR experience created with the Samsung Gear VR, will allow visitors allowing visitors to reach new heights as the plane takes off and learn more about the mathematical principles inherent in the plane’s design.

© Zaha Hadid Architecys /Science Museum

Working with the Museum’s rich collection of digital assets, the Science Museum will invite groups to take part in a series of Digital Lab ‘hackdays’ to develop experimental interfaces such as maps, timelines and data visualisations, and create alternative ways for visitors (both at the museum and online) to navigate its rich collections.

John Stack, Digital Director at the Science Museum, said, “The Digital Lab will build on the Science Museum’s long history of digital innovation and enable us to remain at the forefront of use of new technologies within the cultural sector. Digital technologies and our audience’s use of digital continue to evolve rapidly. It is important that the Science Museum explores the potential of digital to engage audiences with the Museum’s collections and the important stories that they tell, and we are delighted to be working with Samsung to make the first of many Digital Lab projects possible.”

The gallery has been made possible through an unprecedented donation from long-standing supporters of science, David and Claudia Harding. It has also received generous support from Samsung as Principal Sponsor, MathWorks as Major Sponsor, with additional support from Adrian and Jacqui Beecroft, Iain and Jane Bratchie, the Keniston-Cooper Charitable Trust, Dr Martin Schoernig, Steve Mobbs and Pauline Thomas.

Project: Mathematics Gallery, Science Museum, London Opened: December 2016 Budget: £5 million Gallery design: Zaha Hadid Architects 81

W

Above, clockwise from top left: Matter Zone; Infinity Boxes exhibit; Friction slides; Colour Room © Plastiques Photography. Left: Shape Maker label, illustrated by Andrew Rae

onderlab: The Statoil Gallery opened its doors in October 2016 at the Science Museum in London.

The £6m gallery is our most ambitious interactive space to date, with over fifty exhibits, immersive experiences and specially-commissioned artworks.

A large part of what we do at the Science Museum is to ignite curiosity in science and help people see that science is for them. We want people of all ages to see how science affects their lives and that in engaging with it you can learn skills and gain knowledge that will help you whatever age you are or whatever job you do.

We created Wonderlab with that mission in mind. Wonderlab is a gallery that shows the wonder and beauty of science and maths. The gallery helps people use the skills that scientists need: skills like curiosity, close attention and creativity.

There is a slide with three lanes made of different materials so you can test which is the fastest. A huge rotating turntable you can walk on that models the solar system so you can see how we get day and night, seasons and eclipses. You can touch a cloud, see lightning strike or have your own chemistry experiment made at the chemistry bar. The gallery is staffed by Explainers who do demonstrations on gallery and in the new show space.

In focusing not just on young people gaining scientific knowledge but also on them recognising science skills we 82

Wonderlab.

Toby Parkin on the new interactive gallery helping visitors make an emotional connection with science Toby Parkin is Head of Learning at the Science Museum, London. He was previously Lead Curator of Interactive Galleries, overseeing the development of Wonderlab, and has worked at the Science Museum for 13 years.

hope they will gain an insight into the transferability of these skills. One way we have tried to achieve this is through using illustrations on our exhibit labels. These illustrations, by Andrew Rae, depict information about the exhibit as well as giving a real life context.

An important aspect of the gallery is to engage visitors on an emotional level as well as physically and intellectually. We aimed to achieve this through large scale, bold and sometimes immersive experiences specifically with the aim to try and ‘wow’ visitors. A million volt tesla coil that fires bolts of lightning, a space lit purely by monochromatic lights and a haze-filled room pierced by beams of light are all exhibits designed to help people make an emotional connection with a science experience.

Toby Parkin Head of Learning Science Museum, London

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WURTTHEMBERH STATE MUSEUM, STUTTGART GERMANY. The audio tour for this exhibition about Swabia - the cultural, historic and linguistic region in southwestern Germany - uses Swabia’s distinctive local dialect and is voiced by popular German comedian Dodokay. Tonwelt developed the audio tour and in addition to the audio narratives created animated portraits of prominent Swabians, such as Friedrich Schiller, Emperor Barbarossa and Anton Fugger. These historical figures engage with visitors via videos delivered on the tonwelt supraGuide. Tonwelt also created an interactive polling terminal for visitors to vote for their favourite Swabian exhibit. The results are displayed in real time in the exhibition. © Landesmuseum Württemberg / photo: Hendrik Zwietasch. tonwelt.com

THE ROMAN BATHS, BATH - UK. The audio guide is the key method of interpretation used for this world-famous historic site and consistently receives excellent feedback from visitors.

Acoustiguide has worked with The Roman Baths - and their one million annual visitors - since 1995. They won the new contract for a five year period from 2016. Acoustiguide has worked hard with the Roman Baths to consistently improve and develop their audio guide offer to visitor. This can be seen with the evolution of the players on-site. The Opus+ is durable and ergonomically designed, with enhanced battery life and improved charging capabilities. Wireless Charging helps to speed up the distribution process and reduce maintenance issues. acoustiguide.com

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - UNITED STATES. Following a three year $305m renovation and expansion, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened to the public in April 2016. As part of the transformation Antenna International examined and upended almost every traditional audio tour assumption to create nine hours of fresh, fun, radiostyle documentaries. These include reflections and responses to artworks by composers, comedians, artists and playwrights, among others. The results are are surprising, engaging and immersive. For example, for one particular sculpture of a woman hanging upside down, Antenna International decided to explore how the subject would be feeling and then interviewed an aerial dancer mimicking the same pose. antennainternational.com

GOWER PENINSULA, WALES - UK. ‘This is Gower’ is a location-aware guide to the UK’s first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. With over 80 places to explore, the app (available on iOS and Android) promotes popular locations such as Worms Head and Arthur’s Stone alongside other less well-known spots.

This is Gower also features 15 easy-to-follow trails varying in length and theme for users to explore – from a quick jaunt to visit the remains of WW2 defences on Mumbles Hill, to a wild ramble out to Whiteford National Nature Reserve. The bilingual app is also jam packed full of beautiful photos and audio soundbites. Learn the language that once flourished in the south of the peninsula, send souvenir photos and collect badges as you explore the stunning Gower peninsula. audiotrails.co.uk

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Handheld Digital Interpretation International Project Guide ELTHAM PALACE, WALMER CASTLE, BOLSOVER CASTLE, APSLEY HOUSE - UK. English Heritage chose four sites to introduce their first multimedia tours. Each site was tendered individually and ATS Heritage were appointed to deliver all four projects with creative content development and hardware provision. As part of the re-interpretation project at Eltham Palace, ATS developed an immersive multimedia guide tour with audio, film, interactives. They also produced the introduction film. The free multimedia guides continue the story with multi-layered interpretation including a mix of expert interviews, interactive games and augmented reality. There is a specific family and adult tour for the house and the garden as well as a multi-access solution including a British Sign Language tour and Audio Described tour for blind and partially sighted visitors. The Eltham Palace project was recognised by winning the Association for Heritage Interpretation Award and being ‘Highly Commended’ at the Museums & Heritage Awards. Services provided included: Scriptwriting, film & audio production, professional narration, on site film crew, archive material and oral histories, green screen studio filming and production, drone filming, 3D modelling, visual and sound after effects, interviews, animations, games, quizzes, app user interface, hardware provision and support. ats-heritage.co.uk 85

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, LONDON - UK. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1673, St Paul’s Cathedral is one of the most iconic buildings in London attracting visitors from around the world. As a everyday working church the diverse narratives of St Paul’s include Faith, Architecture, the people and the city of London and the Crypt. St Paul’s were clear in their brief that they wanted more than simply an audio guide plus images, they wanted the latest in multimedia guide techniques. ATS Heritage were given the freedom to explore a range of concepts that resulted in a wonderful variety of media that engages and maintains interest throughout the visit. ATS worked closely with St Paul’s to deliver a revitalised visitor experience. As part of the entry ticket price, every visitor receives a multimedia guide that is available in multiple languages, British Sign Language and an Audio Described tour. A separate Family tour features an animated Phoenix character that leads younger visitors around the cathedral, along with fun games and quizzes that encourage looking and exploring. There were multiple challenges to address with the design of the multimedia guide. St Paul’s enjoys a high volume of visitors, particularly during the holiday seasons, therefore the guide needed to deliver a high quality meaningful experience to visitors who may dwell between 30 minutes and 3 hours. ATS produced 200 minutes of multimedia content, a blend of audio, film, music and interactives, which are presented in bite-size pieces, ensuring that the multimedia guide meets its aim as an essential part of the visitor experience. It was important to support visitors in their orientation of the site and use of the multimedia guide itself. Following user-testing ATS developed a bespoke user interface that improved orientation and navigation for visitors, in addition to presenting layered content that is accessed in the right place at the right time. Services included: Scriptwriting, film, audio production, professional narration, on site film crew, archive material and oral histories, green screen studio filming, 3D modelling, interviews, animations, games, app user interface design, hardware provision, on-site staffing and support. ats-heritage.co.uk LA CITÈ DU VIN, BORDEAUX - FRANCE. This unique cultural centre is dedicated to the living heritage of wine. At the heart of the experience is an immersive audio tour through 19 different themed spaces where visitors can interact with digital exhibits. All the audiovisual exhibits are accessed and interpreted by the visitors’ personal Tonwelt supraGuide touch.

By scanning special beacons placed throughout the exhibition, visitors activate content sent from a central video server to more than 200 screens. Tonwelt created interpretative, lip-sync audio content in eight different languages plus special content in each language for children. To ensure visitors can listen to their interpretative audio content without being cut off from the surrounding soundscape, tonwelt developed a unique headset with free-floating ear cups, the supraPhones. For an improved after visit experience each visitor can store a diary of their favourite exhibits and topics on their supraGuide. Back at home the visitors can then access relevant information about their visit on a personalised area of the website of La Cité du Vin. © La Cité du Vin/ Casson Mann / photo: Anaka. tonwelt.com 86

VERKEHRSHAUS DER SCHWEIZ - SWISS MUSEUM OF TRANSPORT, LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND. The Swiss Museum of Transport is impressive both in size and content.

Boasting 700,000 visitors per year with a total area of 20,000 square meters, it is a vast and popular cultural attraction. With such a volume of diverse visitors spread over a complex building structure, the use of a digital resource to provide engagement and wayfinding was an obvious choice for Verkehrshaus. The building of a museum app is no simple task. However, Xponia were able to offer a holistic approach to embrace the whole museum experience. Through the use of Beacons, Xponia provided an app which offers visitors on the spot content, and precise indoor navigation. A challenge was to install Beacons in large spaces with objects such as steam engines and airplanes on display. Also, the museum is only one part of the infrastructure, with attractions such as a planetarium and ‘chocolate Adventure’ available to visitors alongside it. The app was designed to accommodate all aspects of Verkehrshaus, providing interactive content, information on events (both current and upcoming) and wayfinding throughout. Despite the scale of the project, the implementation time was relatively short - due in part due to the fact that much of the digital content was readily available. The museum can now continuously add new updates and content such as audio and video so the app will continue to grow and develop. xponia.com MAURITSHUIS ART MUSEUM, THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS. The world-famous Mauritshuis - home to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft; Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch; and Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp - has selected MPti™ players by Imagineear.

The Mauritshuis has taken 100 MPti™ devices for the permanent collection tours and 60 more for the current Vik Muniz exhibition - which includes meticulously created 3D copies of the backs of well-known paintings from museum’s treasures including those mentioned above. ‘Our robust MPti™ devices with their touch screens are ideal for touring shows and also for revealing the layered histories of the paintings interpreted

by Vik Muniz,’ says Eleonore Heijboer, Creative Director at Imagineear. For groups visiting the permanent collection the Mauritshuis is taking 120 of Imagineear’s Media Packer™ (MP™) players for groups of visitors, and is set to increase the number to around 200 players. Photo credit: Johannes Vermeer, Meisje met de parel, c. 1665 Mauritshuis, Den Haag. www.imagineear.com FOREST OF DEAN - UK. The Hidden Heritage of the Dean app by Audio Trails reveals the Forest of Dean’s rich industrial past that was in danger of being lost forever. With the help of an interactive 1920s Ordnance Survey map, the GPS-triggered app guides visitors along the Forest of Dean’s ‘Family cycle trail’ - the former Severn and Wye steam Railway. There are 30 points of interest to explore. Each place of interest page is populated with stunning, automatically fading images that transition perfectly from historic photos (some dating back 120 years) to the modern scene today. The app was developed by Audio Trails for a passionate local community group. audiotrails.co.uk 87

MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS, BUDAPEST - HUNGARY. Museums in Budapest of all themes and sizes are using handheld digital interpretation to offer their visitors an engaging experience and to expand their audiences. The Museum of Applied Arts became the pilot project in Hungary for Xponia. Their aim was to let visitors of all ages and nationalities experience the museum and to attract more young visitors. Through the app they are able to provide experience-based learning in a variety of languages. The Lutheran Museum is a small site of only around 400 square metres. However, visitors are greeted inside with an interesting collection complemented by a wide range of digital interpretation including interactive displays and a mobile app.

The use of technology throughout the museum expands and extends the experience, motivating visitors to spend longer in the museum. It also offers multi-lingual content for the many tourists who visit the central point of Budapest where the museum is located. Another significant museum to undertake an app project is the Hungarian National Gallery. After writing out a tender in 2016 for a sophisticated multimedia app supported by android and iOS platforms, Xponia’s offer was accepted. The Hungarian National Gallery are now working towards building their Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide the app in online mode, allowing visitors to seamlessly access large amounts of media, audio and video content. xponia.com

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EXHIBITIONISM, TOURING WORLDWIDE. Exhibitionism, the touring blockbuster exhibition about The Rolling Stones, commissioned Imagineear to create a multimedia tour to complement the charting of half a century of the group’s fame.

‘The challenge was to create a multimedia tour of rare and unusual content while the first leg of the show was still being structured by the curators in time for the London opening at The Saatchi Gallery. This required flexibility, coding, translation and equipment installation in a tight timeframe,’ explains Clare Cooper-Hammond, Managing Director of Imagineear. ‘The exhibition is big and loud, and filled with immersive moments using audio-visual, ambient sound and recreated spaces. This presented additional challenges for the multimedia guide as we needed to work with the space, often in an environment too loud for traditional audio, whilst still offering value to the user.’

Content was sourced and developed to complement and add rich layers to the immersive experience, with design work reflecting its brand image. Production included laying rare sound archive interviews over band tracks and video, and translations into French, German and Spanish. The tour is provided on bespoke Imagineear’s MPti™ devices with branded lanyards. Exhibitionism will tour the world – travelling next from New York to Melbourne – with Imagineear’s multimedia tour adapted for local interest in the band and translated into appropriate languages. www.imagineear.com

STOWE HOUSE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE - UK. The Grade I listed house - which is home of Stowe School - is owned by Stowe House Preservation Trust, who have spent more than £25m on the restoration of the property. The gardens (known as Stowe Landscape Gardens) are a significant example of the English garden style and passed into the ownership of The National Trust in 1989. The house is open to the public on 280 days a year. Antenna International were tasked with creating a multimedia app for Stowe House which tells the story of the family who once lived there. By incorporating the home’s traditional and stately design through photos and illustrations of objects in each room, visitors connect the multimedia digital experience with the onsite experience. antennainternational.com THE FITZWILLIAM, CAMBRIDGE - UNITED KINGDOM. The Fitzwilliam commissioned a digital guide as part of their 2016 bicentenary celebrations. Acoustiguide were chosen to build an intuitive and engaging app for visitors, to be available for download on personal devices or rented out on the 100 site devices. The new, adaptive wireless charging racks from Acoustiguide enable multiple devices to be charged at once – Fitzwilliam have both iPods and Acoustiguide’s proprietary Opus+ devices for the Visually Impaired. The app houses thematic trails dedicated to their permanent collection, along with a trail reserved for current temporary exhibitions.

Interactive mapping also help to guide visitors around the museum. acoustiguide.com ARCHBISHOP’S PALACE, SOUTHWELL MINSTER - UK. The Archbishop’s Palace is layered with over 1000 years of history.

Audio Trails were commissioned to design a fascinating ‘Who’s Who’ multimedia tour for the site.

It was here that Cardinal Wolsey spent the final months of his life, trying to clear his name after failing to annul the first marriage of Henry VIII. King Charles I was brought to the State Chamber to complete the ‘paperwork’ of his final imprisonment. The results are a beautiful app filled with rich content. audiotrails.co.uk 89

BLETCHLEY PARK, MILTON KEYNES - UK. Bletchley Park played a major role in WWII, producing secret intelligence which had a direct influence on the outcome of the war.

ATS Heritage have created a brilliant multimedia tour that provides visitors with a virtual on-screen guide akin to a mini documentary, using a rich blend of archive materials, interviews, images, games and puzzles. ats-heritage.co.uk

OSIRIS, ARAB WORLD INSTITUTE, PARIS, BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, MUSEUM RIETBERG, ZURICH. This touring exhibition explores the cult of Osiris – the god of the underworld. Tonwelt created a dedicated audio narration to suit each leg of the exhibition. For example, the narration of the British Museum tour was curator-led with many personal accounts and explanations from expert voices. tonwelt.com

CHURCHILL WAR ROOM / HMS BELFAST, LONDON - UK. The audio guides at both these sites are important interpretation tools, enabling Imperial War Museums to bring the history of these two sites to life through the experiences of the people that lived and worked there. Acoustiguide has worked alongside these iconic sites for some years and following a tender process, were awarded the new contract in 2015. acoustiguide.com

MUSEUMKAART - THE NETHERLANDS. The Dutch Museums Association are using MPTi™ players by Imagineear together with the Intersolve Scan’r App, to gather usage information on Museumkaart - the popular pass to over 400 museums in The Netherlands. There are over 1.2million Museum Cards in use and in 2015 they were used as many as 8.3 million times. imagineear.com

TALKING POSTERS, BERLIN GERMANY. Following the huge success of the innovative ‘Talking Statues’ project in London and Manchester, Talking Posters’ in Berlin by Antenna International used posters of famous paintings placed around the city to encourage people to learn about art as they walked the streets. The characters inside the paintings “call” passersby for a unique experience. antennainternational.com

ROCKMUSEUM, MUNICH GERMANY. With only 1% of their collection on display, in 2016 this Rock’n’Roll museum decided to make their full collection available via an app, built by Xponia. This will not only enable visitors to have an extended experience, but will also provide international fans of the museum access to their digitized collections. Via the new app, the Rockmuseum is able to showcase its entire collection without relocating. It is also able to reach out to its community and keep people informed and engaged whilst attracting additional visitors. xponia.com

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Images - top left: Acoustiguide; top middle: Audio Trails; centre left; Imagineear; centre right: Antenna International; far left: Xponia; left: ATS Heritage; above: Tonwelt

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Proximity interpretation YEARS

heritage

culture

nature

Creators of mobile digital visitor experiences and location-based storytelling.

Audio tours and contenttriggering apps (native & web).

audiotrails.co.uk 92

planning | content | software

Matthias Henkel is an Associate Lecturer and on the Board of Directors at the Center for Audience Development at the Freie Universität Berlin. Matthias served as director general of the Nuremberg Municipal Museums - a network of seven museums, three collections and two historical sites - from 2009-2013.

Previously he had been head of the department for public affairs at National Museums of Berlin General Directorate which consists of sixteen museums including Museum Island, New National Gallery and Hamburger Bahnhof. He holds a PhD and a Masters Degree in European Ethnology and Archaeology from the University of Goettingen in Germany. Matthias is also the founder and owner of the agency Embassy of Culture www.embassy-of-culture.com/

“We are living in an era in which objects are disappearing from our everyday lives more and more”

Intangible Heritage in the Digital Era

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Matthias Henkel on how we need to rethink how we collect, curate and present the digital landscape as the new public space

n the past, museums have been object-based institutions. These days, in a new media-based world, museums are going to become landscapes of cross-media memories.1 Previously, we looked at objects in a showcase – now immersive technology allows us to stand inside the scene.2 Digital Society, Virtual Reality, Big Data, Compatibility, Spatial Turn, Immersive Arts, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Media Interface, Augmented Reality, Mental Representation, Shared Economy, Swarm Intelligence, Sense of Place: these are some of the new buzzwords. And UNESCO is working to define the difference between Digital Heritage3 Virtual Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).4 We are living in an era in which objects are disappearing from our everyday lives more and more. At the same time, we are embedded in a new public space: the World Wide Web. As I see it, the Web has still not been comprehensively considered when it comes to museum practice. At most, it’s being used as an additional form of media for museum communication. It is important that this new public space is recognised as a future field of work, a new field of research, a new source, a new stage and a new tool: an unknown landscape that needs to be explored. To remain relevant in the future, museums need to develop entirely new methods of documenting these sources; they need to curate and present the digital landscape as an new entity of public space.

‘Goodbye Hardware… Hello Data’ For hundreds of years, museums have dealt with objects. Museum experts have learned to work with silver and gold, canvas and oil, wood and ceramic. Since Duchamp came around, we care about readymades – Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys showed us that a broken TV could be a piece of art.

In the past, artworks were made out of something (i.e., material). All of the objects collected in museums were defined by formal criteria like time,5 space6 and material7 – and, if possible, social status.8 These days, we’re talking about the Digital Age. The amount of electronic data doubles every two years,9 but there is little talk about the dematerialization10 of daily life, or the lack of spaciotemporal determination and localizability. These are simultaneous, ongoing processes.

One result of the upcoming Industrial Revolution 4.0 will be the Internet of Things.11 That is, large parts of material culture will be embedded into a stream of data: physical, digital and biological items will be connected and intertwined. This will have a great impact on museums and means we have to rethink our concept of collecting, preventing, curating, researching and presenting.

Analogues and digitals These days, the world is split into Analogues, Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives.12 Therefore we have to be aware that different types of experiences not

1. Thorolf Lipp: Arbeit am medialen Gedächtnis. Zur Produktion und Archivierung von Intangible Heritage Medien 2. Britta Neitzel: Facetten räumlicher Immersion in technische Medien. Patrick Rupert-Kruse: Notizen zur Strukturierung medialer Erlebnisräume zwischen Phantasma und Apparatus. Seite 11-19.

3. UNESCO Charta zur Bewahrung des digitalen Kulturerbes Paris. 17. 2003. UNESCO/UBC, Vancouver Declaration. The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation, 2012.

4. UNESCO Übereinkommen zur Bewahrung des immateriellen Kulturerbes; Paris, 17. 2003.

5. Date of production.

6. Place of origin.

7. Texture of material and production technology.

8. Tenure status.

9. http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/webwelt/article118099520/Datenvolumen-verdoppelt-sich-alle-zwei-Jahre.html 10. http://www.neuland.digital/wp-content/151210_ExSum2.pdf Ralf T. Kreutzer / Karl-Heinz Land: Digitaler Darwinismus – Der stille Angriff auf Ihr Geschäftsmodell und Ihre Marke. Verlag Springer. Heidelberg 2013. Ralf T. Kreutzer / Karl-Heinz Land: Dematerialisierung. Die Neuverteilung der Welt. Futurvisionpress. Köln 2015.

11. ‘The internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical objects – devices, vehicles, buildings and other items – embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data.

12. Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001).

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only lead to different opinions, but they also ‘lead to different brain structures.’13 Data will be the new oil in the era of the cyber-physical revolution.14 In order to deal with these new circumstances, new soft skills will be necessary,15 new job descriptions will need to be developed for the new staff.

In 2015 the Tate Gallery published a small survey conducted among 17 museum experts about the future of museums. 16 The following word frequencies give us an interesting and simultaneously frightening insight17: people/audience/visitor (24), public (16), artist (16), space (11), experience (8), transformation (5), building (4), event (4), collection (4), community (3), education (2), knowledge (2), participant (1). To put

talk about local, global and digital in addition to north, south, east and west • In the era of storytelling we have to talk about truth and the reputation of the sources20 Like before, the investment in architecture is common – but not the necessary investment into the infrastructure, particularly to educate and develop the staff. The phenomenon of ephemeral cultural representations is not really new, but our dealings with with intangible heritage will increase significantly.

Christo – the act of the ephemeral and its long-term effect Getting Christo as the keynote speaker for the ICOM general conference was a great

“In the era of co-creation we need a new definition of authorship; In the era of infinite reproduction we need a new definition of authenticity; In the era of digitalization we need a discussion about originality” it bluntly: nothing about media, nothing about the Digital Revolution – and little reference participation.

Frances Morris, the new director of the Tate Britain, gives us hope: in an interview on the occasion of the opening of the new building on Friday 17th June 2016, she says: ‘With the Switch House, we are now getting a significantly expanded range of spaces, flexible galleries and a broader scope. Who knows, maybe the next challenge will be virtual space? Then we won’t need galleries anymore. That’s the big question: what happens next when we are in post-gallery times?’18 It seems that the Industrial Revolution 4.0 has reached the world of museums. I think it is time to open up the discussion: • In the era of co-creation we need a new definition of authorship • In the era of infinite reproduction we need a new definition of authenticity • In the era of digitalization we need a discussion about originality19 • In the era of globalization we need to 94

stroke of luck.21 As an artist, he has been working hard over the course of many years to create ephemeral thrills for all the senses – afterwards, almost nothing remains. Still, all of these events do have long-lasting effects deep in our memories, hearts, emotions, dreams and souls.

With his projects, Christo manages to overwrite our collective memory.22 But this causes problems for museums. How can such a project be collected and displayed?

Christo: ‘The most important thing is the visual experience, a celebration of the space and the people in the room. All of my work is about the experience of the space. […] No theatre director can stage the twenty-four year battle that we had to fight to realize the Reichstag project.’23 Christo’s installations are effective and sustainable because media dissemination is an integral part of the project.

Embedded Artits Joseph Beuys adopted the idea of combining arts and communication early with his concepts of an ‘Erweiterter Kunstbegriff ’ (expanded concept of art) and ‘Soziale Plastik’ (social sculpture).

These days, nearly all artists are embedded artists. Ai Weiwei is a typical example as an artist on the boundaries of threedimensional artworks, performance, multi-media-communication, mediabased representation and commerce. So what is action? What is reaction? What is production. What is reproduction?

What is documentation? What is communication?

In light of the discussion above, we can recognize a great shift in the core function of the museum: In the past, museums have been institutional explainers of the world. These days, they are not only transmitters of cultural messages, but must become senders and

13. Quote from: Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Baylor College of Medicine.

14. Clive Humby, UK Mathemetician and architect, 2006.

15. The TOP 10 skills in 2020 are (1) Complex Problem Solving (2) Critical Thinking (3) Creativity (4) People Management (5) Coordinating with Others (6) Emotional Intelligence (7) Judgment and Decision Making (8) Service Orientation (9) Negotiation (10) Cognitive Flexibility.

16. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/what-museum-future 17. The whole survey contains a total of 2637 words. The words are listed according to their frequency.

18. The original quote in German: ‘Wir bekommen jetzt mit dem Switch House eine deutlich erweiterte Auswahl an Flächen, flexiblere Galerien und größeren Spielraum. Wer weiß, vielleicht ist die nächste Herausforderung der virtuelle Raum? Dann brauchen wir gar keine Galerie mehr. Das ist die große Frage: Wie geht es nach der Post-Galerie weiter?’

19. In the past we were talking about materials – in the future we are going to talk about data.

20. https://licensed.storyful.com/videos/116521 21. On the day of the conference in Milan, his new project came to an end.

22. Press Conference on the occasion of the acquisition of the estate ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ of the Germanische Nationalmuseum in Berlin 18.7. 1998.

23. The original quote from Christo in German: ‘Das Wichtigste ist die visuelle Erfahrung, eine Feier des Raums und der Menschen im Raum. In all meinen Arbeiten geht es um das Erlebnis des Raums. […] Kein Theaterregisseur kann den vierundzwanzig Jahre dauernden Kampf inszenieren, den wir ausfechten mussten, um das Reichstagsprojekt zu verwirklichen.’

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receivers at the same time – they have to become platforms for discussion.

Museums need to broaden their channels of communication, curation, collection, presentation and interpretation.

From stone to data – information is the new stream In recent years, museums have been described with different adjectives: connective (2005)24, engaging (2005)25, responsive (2006)26, participatory (2010)27, transforming (2012)28, connected (2013)29 – to name a few.

All of the different functions of museums must be considered together – with integrative thinking. As I stated above, there will be a dematerialization of daily life and of the boundaries between the analogue, digital and virtual. What collection items will be relevant and meaningful in the era of the Internet of Things?

We are facing great challenges:

analogue exhibition with media usage; website and social media is in use – but not in an authentic way.

I think most of our traditional museums are between level (a) and (b) at the moment. c) The Smart Museum: storage with digitised data (objects and context); responsive exhibition (the scenography of the exhibition authentically refers to the content); website with embedded social media (website and social media are based on an integrated concept of a piece), catalogues and databases – printed and online etc.

Our own International Committee

“In the era of real time we have to talk about new documentary instincts for collecting; In the era of digital we have to think about new skills for staff and new methods of collecting”

• In the era of the Web we need to talk about the lack of temporal stratification (everlasting presents): If something is online, it is present. If something is offline, it - in a manner of speaking - does not exist. This notion is very influential when we think about categories like past and present.30

for documentation, CIDOC, is still in discussion about the future-proof processing of inventory data.31

• In the era of simultaneity we need to talk about the present.

d) The Embedded Museum: The Embedded Museum seems like a Smart

• In the era of real time we have to talk about new documentary instincts for collecting the relevant artefacts.

• In the era of the digital we have to think about new skills for the staff and new methods of collecting.

Embedded Museums have to be on-site and online I will try now to outline the four steps to an Embedded Museum: a) The Analogue Museum: analogue storage, analogue exhibition, printed catalogues, website. b) The Digitalised Museum: analogue storage with partly digitised objects;

Museum, but the curators are using the digital landscape as a new space for authentic research, presentation and an open-minded discussion with the audience. The museum is no longer just intra muros – the museum has grown into a really ‘Third Place’32 – even extra muros.

Social media is used as an authentic resource for involving young people in the activities of the museum.33 But the integration of media in the museum should not be an end in itself.

Digital media should be used as powerful tools to direct awareness to the content (objects, context and data). All techniques must be used to help us to reach the Point of Relevance – curatorial, scenographical, educational, communicational.34 According to the motto content and

connectivity are the new oil, the museum shares its competence and knowledge with the audience – and the audience supports the Museum as a relevant place of social interaction.35 The choice of communication media

24. Dagny Stuedahl: The Connective Museum. August 2005 25. Graham Black: The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. Routledge. London 2005. 26.

Caroline Lang/ John Reeve /Vicky Woollard: The Responsive Museum: Working with Audiences in the Twenty-First Century.

Ashgate Publishing. New York 2006.

27. Nina Simon (2010): http://www.participatorymuseum.org/ 28. Graham Black: Transforming Museums in the Twenty-first Century. Routledge. London 2012.

29. Drotner, Kirsten / Schrøder, Kim Christian (Eds.): Museum Communication and Social Media: The Connected Museum.

New York 2013.

30. The digital age has to lead us to a new level of the verification of sources. http://journalistsresource.org/ tipsheets/reporting/tools-verify-assess-validity-social-media-user-generated-content and https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=sNV4yIyXXX0 and https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514056/preventing-misinformation-fromspreading-through-social-media/ 31. http://icom.museum/the-committees/international-committees/international-committee/international-committeefor-documentation/ / http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/ 32. Ray Oldenburg: The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York 1989.

33. Dagny Stuedahl: Social Media As Resource For Involving Young People In Museum Innovation. 60 International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 6(3), 60-80, July-September 2014. donald, S. (2007). Interconnecting: Museum visiting and exhibition design. CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 3(sup1S1), 149–162. http://museumtwo.blogspot.de/2014/12/what-you-lose-when-you-become-embedded.html 34. Nina Simon: The Art of Relevance. Museum 2.0 Santa Cruz, California 2016 35. Nina Simon: The Art of Relevance. Museum 2.0 Santa Cruz, California 2016

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depends on the content. Content first means that the content has priority. From this perspective the museum becomes a newsroom – based on the past, focussed on the present – oriented towards the future. The museum will become a social co-working place – based on values for a democratic development of society. This is a very special way of thinking about a participatory design (PD) for museums in the 21th century.

In some respects, concepts from Pierre Bourdieu36 and Joseph Beuys37 will come back to life: Bourdieu’s cultural and social capital (social status in societies is defined by education and knowledge) and Beuys’ social sculpture. Beuys did not confine

However, many of the references and allusions that Harry Graf Kessler made in his diary are no longer comprehensible to us today and require explanation.

With the help of electronic footnotes, we recontextualised his quotes.

In this way, we connected the account in Twitter and Facebook directly with the official website of the exhibition40. This is a simple example of how you can bring historical written sources – a special sort of intangible heritage – back to life again.41 Technological development is occurring rapidly when it comes to museums. Substantive and conceptual issues should be addressed with absolute priority over simple technical

“Technological development is occurring rapidly in museums. Substantive and conceptual issues should be addressed with absolute priority over simple technical improvements”

the definition of art to a selfcontained, finished work. His art included creative thinking, human action and all aspects of action in society and social relations.

‘Focusing on the social connections of museum objects goes in this way a bit deeper into questions of relevance and motivation than the former wellknown attention to museum encounters.

It demands that we think about how the museum may support multiple knowledges and understandings, values, histories and futures.’38 Stepping forward In 2016, the Brandenburg Gate Foundation in Berlin organised a special exhibition about a historical figure: Harry Graf Kessler. During his life (1868–1937), he wrote a diary that was about 16,000 pages long. It is an interesting source about a very interesting time period.

To create a useful communication strategy, we decided to use 100 percent historical source text to communicate this information via Twitter and Facebook.39 98

improvements, as they will be very quickly become outdated by further technical development. In order to develop the museum as a Third Place (Ray Oldenburg) and a Landscape of Relevance, a sustainable development and a re-inventing of museums for the

era of Intangible Heritage is key.

Last but not least: In the time of big data, we have to carefully consider data protection. For intangible heritage, privacy policy is as necessary as preventive conservation is for objects made out of wood, leather, silver or gold.42 Otherwise, the NSA will become the biggest collector of our daily lives in the digital landscape of the future.43 It might not always be advantageous to be an early mover44 because the investment could be costly. Still, museums should be very attentive observers of social developments. We need to strengthen all of our senses (i.e., concepts) to explore the digital landscape as new public space – multimedia, multidimensional and multisensual. ‘The consequences are cultural and related to access to knowledge, definition of knowledge as well as understanding of medias shaping of the world.’45 Matthias Henkel Associate Lecturer Freie Universität Berlin This article is based on the Intangible Heritage 2.0. How to collect, curate and present the digital landscape as the new public space conference paper presented

by Matthias Henkel at the Joint Session ICFA (Museums and Collections of Fine Arts) and COMCOL (Collecting) at the General Conference of ICOM on 4 July 2016 in Milan, Italy.

36. Pierre Bourdieu: Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital. In: Reinhard Kreckel (Hg.), »Soziale Ungleichheiten« (Soziale Welt Sonderband 2), Göttingen 1983, S. 183-198.

37. Wolfgang Zumdick: Joseph Beuys als Denker. PAN/XXX/ttt, Sozialphilosophie – Kunsttheorie − Anthroposophie, Mayer, Stuttgart, Berlin 2002.

38 Dagny Stuedahl: The Connective Museum. August 2005.

39 https://dermuseumsheld.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/museum-und-social-media-ja-nein-vielleicht-eingrundsatzartikel/ - 10 Social Media Trends for Museums in 2015 http://artsdigital101.tumblr.com/post/105353922405/10social-media-trends-for-museumsin-2015 40. HGK-Website: www.hgkberlin.de / Facebook-Account http://hgkberlin.de/facebook / Twitter-Account: http:// hgkberlin.de/twitter 41. www.hbkberlin.de The linguistic program WORD CRUNCHER made it possible to locate interesting passages in the diary.

42. Simon Hebler: Digitaler [Stadt] Raum. Wechselwirkungen zwischen digitaler Technologie und menschlicher Kultur.

Diplomica Verlag. Hamburg 2016. https://books.google.de/books?id=NCDfCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=d ematerialisierung+kultur&source=bl&ots=HD59uW98dX&si g=6kUJybj7hA7Pj2S9sC4o2SSBCIE&hl=de&sa=X&ved= 0ahUKEwjx6oXM06DNAhXDnBoKHZLkAwA4ChDoAQglMAI#v=onepage&q=demateria lisierung%20kultur&f=false 43. https://www.nsa.gov/ 44 Malcom Gladwell: Tipping Point. How little things can make a big difference. Boston, New York, London 2000.

45. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282076177_The_Connective_Museum

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Beautiful

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Delia Garratt is Director of Cultural Engagement at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust where she oversees collections, learning, research, digital and cultural events. Previous roles include Museums and Communities Manager at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council and Collections Development Officer at the National Waterways Museums. Delia received her doctorate from the University of Leicester in 2002.

Transforming Shakespeare’s New Place

Image: Hi Mind’s Eye, the brone tree sculpture standing proudly at the heart of Shakespeare’s home © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

“It aimed to create a new kind of cultural destination which allows visitors to make new emotional connections to the playwright”

Delia Garratt on the contemporary re-interpretation project aiming to make emotional connections to Shakespeare

I

n August 2016, Shakespeare’s New Place reopened after a major project to transform the site and revitalise a significant part of William Shakespeare’s biography in Stratford upon Avon.

It was an ambitious project which aimed to make the important site of Shakespeare’s family home once again one of the most significant places in our Shakespeare heritage. It also aimed to create a new kind of cultural destination which allows visitors to discover more about the life of Shakespeare in Stratfordupon-Avon, but also inspires them to make new emotional connections to the playwright.

For over 250 years, the site of Shakespeare’s family home in the town has attracted fans seeking to walk in the footsteps of William Shakespeare, but during this time the site has not only presented an intriguing mystery for its visitors but also an interesting challenge for its custodians. How do you tell the story of a house that no longer exists?

How do you make sense of an empty but complex site for visitors hungry to get up close to Shakespeare?

In 1597, William Shakespeare bought New Place one of the largest and most important homes in Stratford upon Avon.

He was aged just 33. With this purchase Shakespeare established himself and his family in one of the most prominent dwellings in the town, built in the grand medieval style with a great hall around

a courtyard. A socially symbolic move, it reveals much of both his social and financial status as well as his considerable success as a playwright and poet by this point in his life.

New Place was Shakespeare’s primary residence for 19 years until his death in 1616. It is where he lived with his wife Anne and his two daughters Susanna and Judith. It is the home he owned during the time he wrote around 26 of his plays. His ownership of this property raises important questions about our understanding of Shakespeare’s biography, challenging the notion that he simply retired to Stratford upon Avon after a glittering career in the capital, and confirming that he stayed firmly connected to his roots in the town of his birth throughout his life.

For 85 years after Shakespeare’s death New Place remained essentially unaltered, however by 1702 the home that Shakespeare had known had all but vanished, being replaced with a new, more fashionable, eighteenth-century house which was also called New Place. By 1759 this too had gone, demolished by its disgruntled occupant who was quite unappreciative of the house’s association with William Shakespeare.

For over 250 years since, the ghost of Shakespeare’s home has been simply marked by a gap in the street frontage.

The site of New Place finally came into the care of The Shakespeare Birthplace 101

Trust in 1884, along with the house next door known as Nash’s House (also connected with Shakespeare’s family as his granddaughter once lived here) and in the following years the whole site was operated as a traditional museum in commemoration of Shakespeare, the actual site of the demolished home becoming a registered garden. However the experience was far from satisfactory as it made for a confused and complicated narrative; visitors were encouraged to imagine Shakespeare’s New Place alongside hearing stories of the occupants of Nash’s House through the ages.

The Trust recognised that visitors did not always understand the multi-layered narratives and that many left thinking they had visited Shakespeare’s home when they had actually been in the house next door. In addition years of tourist activity had taken its toll on the historic fabric of Nash’s House and the property was in dire need of extensive conservation.

The main objectives of the transformation project were to develop the organisation’s understanding of the site and how this might inform

a new era of volunteering at the Trust; more than 400 volunteers gave their time during the four year archaeology project and we have now recruited over 70 volunteers to take part daily in the work of Shakespeare’s New Place.

As the site is a registered garden, it was never the Trust’s intention to reconstruct a house that was lost over 250 years ago, and respecting the garden tradition was always paramount as we planned for the next chapter in its story.

Shakespeare’s New Place as presented today now provides an imaginative contemporary perspective on Shakespeare when he was in his prime. It showcases artworks, contemporary landscapes and traditional gardens, as well as a major new exhibition displayed in the now restored and extended Nash’s House.

The creative design for Shakespeare’s New Place was led by theatre designer Timothy O’Brien and engineer Chris Wise. Timothy is an artistic associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chris is a successful creative engineer whose projects include the London Velodrome and the Millennium Bridge.

“We recognised that visitors didn’t always understand the multi-layered narratives and many left thinking they had visited Shakespeare’s home when they had actually been in the house next door” Shakespeare’s biography, to carry out much needed conservation works on Nash’s House, and to completely represent the site to make it relevant for a 21st century audience. The project is the biggest undertaken by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 50 years, and is funded with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Historic England and through public donations.

The project began in earnest in 2010 with ‘Dig for Shakespeare’, a community archaeology project which saw key parts of the site excavated (in some cases for the very first time) by volunteers.

This work was vital as it allowed us to unlock previously unknown aspects of the site and therefore new knowledge of Shakespeare. ‘Dig for Shakespeare’ was also significant as it was the catalyst for 102

The challenge facing the design duo was how to evoke the spirit of Shakespeare within a garden setting, and to make it relevant to visitors of all ages and backgrounds: a retelling, rather than a rebuilding, of Shakespeare’s home.

To achieve this they avoided creating a literal representation, choosing instead to take every visitor on an individual, imaginary journey into the world that Shakespeare knew, conjured up through a series of artworks. These artworks range from a strongbox guarding the deed to Shakespeare’s house (testament to his wealth) to the terrestrial globe of Shakespeare’s time, an armillary sphere depicting the vanishing notion of the earth as the centre of the universe; and a ship-at-sea representing The Tempest, arguably his most autobiographical play.

Together, these build a multi-faceted picture of Shakespeare for a contemporary audience.

At the heart of the new garden, a circle of pleached hornbeams marks the spot where the family had its private living quarters. At stage right, there are Shakespeare’s chair and desk, with a view back over the Golden Garden representing his life’s work. Centre stage is the stunning pivotal sculpture, His Mind’s Eye, a bronze tree, inspired by a living hawthorn, five metres high and six metres in canopy. The tree is bent under the force of Shakespeare’s power of imagination – a metaphor for the humanity and nature at the centre of Shakespeare’s art. The exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail across the transformed site is plain to see.

The transformation also extends to Nash’s House. This Grade 1 listed Tudor townhouse has undergone extensive conservation work, and a modern timber and glass extension with bronze roof has been added to provide modern, fully accessible facilities and a new first floor viewing platform with views to landmarks that Shakespeare would recognize today.

Inside a major new exhibition designed by Real Studios brings to life the stories of Shakespeare as husband, father, businessman and gentleman of his home town. The exhibition also includes displays of significant objects from the Trust’s collection including a copy of Shakespeare’s will and a signet ring understood to have belonged to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s New Place today is a seamless blend of the historic and the contemporary, offering visitors a complete contrast to anything they will find at the four other Shakespeare family homes. It is a place to connect with, and reflect upon, Shakespeare and his life in Stratford. This really is a different visitor experience to what is offered at the other historic houses in the care of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and this re-interpretation is a reflection of the Trust’s desire to keep Shakespeare relevant and contemporary for all audiences.

Delia Garratt Director of Cultural Engagement, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

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Portfolio NATIONAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND, EDINBURGH. The Museum’s new exhibition ‘Monkey Business’, opened in December 2016. ay-pe were commissioned to produce several digital interactives and the soundscape. The interactive exhibits were designed to be eye-catching, engaging and informative - appealing to a broad demographic and utilising contemporary illustration and animation.

The unique interactives were designed around the curatorial content supplied by the museum. The ‘Primate Family Tree’ interactive asks users to place primates in the correct place on the evolutionary family tree. Other interactives inform rather than challenge users knowledge.

The most alarming interactive showcases primates calls, the sound of the ultrasonic Tarsier is particularly shrill. ay-pe.com

AHMAD AL-JABER OIL AND GAS MUSEUM - KUWAIT. Designed by Event Communications, the highly interactive Ahmad Al-Jaber Oil and Gas Museum in Kuwait museum tells the story of the country’s oil industry and its connection with both history and modern life. BECK were commissioned late on in the build of the project along with their sister company, the Hub. They completed the museum project undertaking the role of construction manager as well as the prefabrication and installation of all setwork exhibits and the commission of specialist sub contractors. The Ahmad Al-Jaber Oil and Gas Museum identifies the international reach of BECK and its unrivalled experience in managing and delivering projects in the Middle East region. www.beckinteriors.com

NATIONAL HORSERACING MUSEUM, NEWMARKET - UK. Mather & Co has completed one of its most prestigious projects to date with the National Horseracing Museum. Newmarket is widely recognised as the international home of horseracing, and this new world-class attraction brings together the National Horseracing Museum, the British Sporting Art Trust and the Retraining of Racehorses Charity on one site to share the global history of the sport and to bring a nationally significant collection to life. matherandco.com ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON - UK. The Dutch exhibition design studio Kossmann.dejong designed the new immersive family-friendly exhibition for and about the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Visitors are taken on a multi-sensory journey through time in which the secrets and stories behind the RSC are revealed. Kossman.dejong were concept designers and creative lead on the project. director. kossmanndejong.nl 105

SANTA CECÍLIA DE MONTSERRAT, CATALONIA- SPAIN. Founded in 945 AD, Santa Cecília has been a place of worship for eleven centuries. The importance of the site and its content demanded a unique museographic intervention to emphasize both the heritage value of the site and the uniqueness of the art centre and the work of one of the international icons of contemporary art, Sean Scully.

Playmedia has created a setting that makes it possible to resize the space, converting the anteroom to the chapel (where the work of the painter is exhibited) into a space of interaction and reflection. The project is presided over by a metallic structure that plays with shapes and perspective, giving the room height and creating a cathedral visual impression of the interior, so that visitors perceive the relevance of the place as soon as they enter. www.playmedia.biz TOWER OF LONDON - UK. Commissioned by the Royal Armouries, in partnership with Historic Royal Palaces, hsd has upgraded the popular Hands on History gallery with a new exhibition called Armoury in Action. Visitors explore historical characters associated with the Tower’s defensive, ceremonial and administrative functions through time. The brief for the exhibition expressed the need to create an engaging, sustainable and family-friendly experience, as well as catering for high visitor numbers. The interactive parts of the exhibition are based around the job that each of the characters performed.

A well-planned mixture of mechanical and digital interactives allows visitors to test their own skills and gain an understanding of what was required to successfully fulfil each role. haleysharpe.com

WHITEHEAD EXCURSION STATION - NORTHERN IRELAND. The Railway Preservation Society of Ireland appointed Marcon to carry out the fit-out works at its new Museum and Interpretive Centre in Whitehead. Marcon were responsible for the manufacture and installation of all specialist joinery, display cases, integration of audio visual hardware, interactives and installation of graphics within the new museum space. marconfitout.com 106

VilVite Sotra Authority Sartor Holding AS

Surface area m2 1.000 m2

Design NorthernLight

Opening 22-05-2015

Photography: Thor Brødreskift / VilVite Sotra

VilVite Sotra: A unique combination of shopping and Science Science Center VilVite Sotra is based in the Sartor Senter, the main shopping mall of Sotra Kystby. The center reflects the strong traditions of a once isolated fishing community, which is nowadays the thriving center of Norway’s high-tech deep-sea fishing industry.

We are Bruns, specialized in the development, production and installation of interactive exhibits and exhibitions.

Our contribution to project is driven by an ambitious goal: to offer visitors a complete experience and maximum educational value.

More about the story behind VilVite Sotra and other projects at www.bruns.nl

Bruns B.V. • Stökskesweg 11 • 5571 TJ Bergeijk • The Netherlands • T +31 (0)497 57 70 27 • E info@bruns.nl • I www.bruns.nl

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Purcell is involved in the care and development of some of the UK’s best loved cultural buildings.

Our award-winning architectural practice offers a start to finish service for museums and galleries of all sizes, overseeing their conservation and repair or designing and delivering new facilities. Our clients include the British Museum, St Fagans National History Museum, the Bristol Aerospace Centre and the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

With regional studios covering the UK and a growing presence in Asia-Pacific, we have the local knowledge and vision to handle projects of all sizes and bring your aspirations to life.

_ info@purcelluk.com www.purcelluk.com @purcelluk

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The refurbished Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral

Architects & Designers Heritage Leaders Consultants

“Purcell has recently been appointed to develop design proposals for the Harris Museum & Art Gallery”

Right: Harris Museum and Art Gallery; Below, left to right: The Great Gallery, Wallace Collection; left, Sammy Ofer Wing at National Maritime Museum, National Museum of the Royal Navy

Profile: Purcell Purcell deliver award-winning conservation and contemporary projects

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urcell works as one family of many experts: architects, designers, heritage leaders, and specialist consultants. Ideally placed in key regions covering the UK and Asia Pacific, they undertake a wide variety of projects of different types, sizes and significance.

The practice has expertise and experience in both conservation and contemporary insertions, supporting clients from the outset by looking at feasibility, and then working with contractors and exhibition designers to design, repair, refurbish and build new structures. Projects include: The Wallace Collection, Great Gallery: The refurbishment was overseen

by Purcell in collaboration with John O’Connell of Dublin. The Grade II listed

Great Gallery was painstakingly rebuilt to a design inspired by its original Victorian arrangement. The ceiling has been entirely renewed to reintroduce natural daylight and incorporate environmental control in a more visually sensitive manner.

National Maritime Museum, Sammy Ofer Wing: Purcell delivered the RIBA Award winning £37.5m extension to the National Maritime Museum, creating a new entrance with public facilities, a special exhibition gallery, research space and an archive for over half a million maritime artefacts.

National Museum of the Royal Navy, Babcock Galleries: Purcell led the conservation and refurbishment of a Grade I listed Georgian naval storehouse and transformed it into the Babcock Galleries. The project included

construction of a new glazed link building and terrace.

Purcell has recently been appointed to the Harris Re-Imagining project in Preston - to develop design proposals for the Harris Museum, Art Gallery and Library. As conservation architects, the practice will develop plans for the Grade I listed building and review the existing conservation statement. Purcell is collaborating with internal designers HemingwayDesign who will work with the Harris project team on the interpretive strategy.

For further information contact: Cristie Hammond +44 (0)20 7397 7171 info@purcelluk.com purcelluk.com 109

Profile: Lendlease

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Lendlease has an established reputation as the consultant of choice for arts and heritage

The Heritage and Arts team at Lendlease is renowned for its positive, proactive and solution orientated approach to its clients’ property and construction needs.

Lendlease has an established reputation as the consultant of choice for a number of outstanding organisations across the UK, delivering complex capital projects for clients including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum, Parliamentary Estates Directorate, King’s College, Royal Collection’s Trust and Petersfield Museum.

Providing consultancy and construction services for projects from conception to completion, Lendlease has a proven ability to provide the following in the heritage and arts sector; Project and Programme Management; Exhibition Management; Development Planning; Logistics Planning; Employers Agent, Project Monitoring and Due Diligence; Construction Management; Cost Management; Principal Designer.

Lendlease’ core values of Respect, Integrity, Innovation, Collaboration, Excellence and Trust are at the forefront of everything they do, driving the strong partnerships developed over the years with a number of long-term clients. Its longstanding and successful relationship with the Victoria and Albert Museum began in 2000, with Lendlease’ expert Heritage and Arts team now acting as 110

sole Project Management providers on the museum’s FuturePlan capital works programme. The complex programme has seen Lendlease involved in excess of 30 gallery refurbishments and large capital works projects to date, including the Medieval & Renaissance galleries, Clothworkers centre for Fashion and new Europe 1600-1815 galleries and the Exhibition Road scheme.

Similarly Lendlease continues to build upon an excellent client relationship at the Science Museum, having been appointed as sole provider of project and programme management services on its major masterplan capital work programme. Recently completed projects include the Maths Galleries and much acclaimed interactive Wonderlab. In addition the team is currently progressing work on the Medicine Galleries, which will house one of the most significant medicine collections in the world, as well as a new corporate entertainment space and the London science city gallery.

Throughout all projects being delivered across the Heritage and Arts sector, a key focus for Lendlease is ensuring the balance between maintaining the historic integrity of the buildings whilst integrating modern demands for reduction in energy consumption and sustainability, as well as ever increasing visitor capacities. From restoring modern design and innovation to the heart of

Top, l-r: V&A; Tate Britain; Maths Gallery, Science Museum, London; Above, Houses of Parliament, Parliamentary Estate Directorate

world renowned visitor attractions such as the Tate Britain and National Museum of Scotland, to current projects being delivered, Lendlease continues to apply its extensive knowledge in the Heritage and Arts sector, ensuring the past is preserved for years to come.

For further information contact: Peter Chana: Regional Director, Consulting Europe +44 (0)7720 599335 peter.chana@lendlease.com Stuart Henniker-Smith: Project Director, Heritage, Arts and Education, Consulting Europe +44 (0)7860 711615 stuart.henniker-smith@lendlease.com lendleaseconsulting.co.uk

HERITAGE, ARTS & LEISURE “We work in partnership with our clients to help preserve the past for future generations” • Programme & Project Management • Cost & Risk Management • Contract Administration / Employers Agent

• Technology Consultancy • BIM Management • Principal Designer

Peter Chana: Head of Heritage, Arts & Leisure, Consulting Europe T: +44 (0)7720 599335 | E: peter.chana@lendlease.com Barry Taylor: Director, Consulting Europe T: +44 (0)7802 931881 | E: barry.taylor@lendlease.com

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Man & Boy, at HomePlace, celebrates poet Seamus Heaney’s life, influences and words.

“I expected it to be special.

But I didn’t expect it to be so deeply moving.”

Catherine Mack, Travel Writer

Photos: © Seamus Heaney HomePlace

tandemdesign.co.uk

tandemstudio

At Tandem we create interpretive visitor and brand experiences that captivate, thrill and inspire.

We can help you tell your story: 112

Call +44 (0) 28 9042 5590 | Email hello@tandemdesign.co.uk

© Rory Moore

“The project has made a significant impact, drawing the attention of international visitors” Profile: Tandem Tandem’s latest project is an engaging, layered exploration of the life and work of Seamus Heaney

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eamus Heaney’s death in 2013 sent shockwaves through Ireland, and nowhere was it more keenly felt than in the south of the DerryLondonderry area where the poet grew up, and where many of his friends and relations still live.

Mid Ulster District Council set in motion a plan to create a legacy, a fitting tribute and a force for creativity in the borough. Three years later, the visionary Seamus Heaney HomePlace opened to the public in Bellaghy in September 2016.

HomePlace encompasses an engaging, interactive exhibition, along with a performance space, learning areas, café, shop and an annex for community use.

The permanent Man & Boy exhibition was developed by Tandem, working closely with the Heaney family and a panel of Heaney experts.

From his roots in mid-Ulster, Seamus Heaney’s influence spread far and wide.

One of the major challenges of the project lay in interpreting his life and work in a way that would prove as meaningful to the people of the surrounding area as to the Heaney aficionados coming from all over the world.

Conceived as a journey through Heaney’s life, the exhibition charts his influences and experiences, from a young boy to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through a layered approach, visitors get to know the poet through his personal experiences while encountering the structures and conventions of poetry, encouraging them to engage on multiple levels.

The multi-sensory exhibition features ample opportunities to hear Heaney’s poetry in his own voice through the use of Acoustiguide audio devices and to read his poetry with optional added analysis through touchscreens. Atmospheric projections recreate the sights and sounds of his childhood in the area, and images and animations blend seamlessly to symbolise the well of experiences from which he drew his inspiration.

An interpretation of Heaney’s workspace features handwritten manuscripts and many of the objects that surrounded him in his study. It also features the only opportunity to see the poet as he reads one of his best loved poems ‘When all the others were away at Mass’, a poignant moment and culmination of his work and

life at that point.

Finally, a creative zone allows visitors to have fun with words and images, as well as offering space for reflection, a chance to feedback on the exhibition and contribute their own memories of the much-loved poet and man.

A project of this size based on a single poet is unprecedented in Northern Ireland and has already made a significant impact, drawing the attention of international visitors.

Early evaluation suggests that it has encouraged visitors young and old to experiment with their own poetry, to contribute reminiscences of Ireland’s recent past and to look afresh at their surroundings. For locals, it has given them the chance to feel a growing sense of ownership and pride in their area, a beautiful place still rich with the sights and sounds that so inspired Heaney.

For further information contact: Andrew Todd, director +44 (0)28 9042 5590 andrew@tandemdesign.co.uk tandemdesign.co.uk @TandemStudio 113

Rapid Response Collecting Alice Millard on how adopting a rapid collection strategy allows museums to keep up-to-date with social and political changes Alice Millard works with the Learning and Engagement team at The Novium in Chichester to deliver the museum’s learning programme via school workshops, museum sleepovers, and other children’s events. Recently graduated with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she is now building her career in the museum and cultural heritage sector.

Alice has a strong passion for museums and archives and is currently working towards a Masters in Cultural Heritage and Resource Management. She writes the Museum of Musings blog: museumofmusings.com.

“Adopting a rapid collection strategy enables museums to keep up-to-date with social and political changes”

S

o this is not breaking news any more, I am more than slightly late for the party, but I think the V&A’s decision to adopt a new strategy of ‘Rapid Response Collecting’ is very cool. Institutions have been collecting contemporary items for years, but in 2014 the V&A deliberately made it their business to immediately collect items from breaking events around the world. For example, they accessioned their first phone app, Flappy Bird, after its creator made the mildly controversial decision to remove it for sale when the public got too obsessed with it. I don’t know how they plan to conserve the app, but it is nevertheless a valuable asset to a museum focused on design and its impact upon society.

My favourite, however, is the pair of cheap and dull trousers from Primark.

An item that is so easily collected anyone could do it. But what makes this item collection-worthy is the shared experience of thousands of factory workers employed at the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to make Primark clothing.

The building collapsed on 24th April 2013 killing 1133 employees and injuring thousands more. This event brought to light the dangerous working conditions of those employed, just so Britain could buy cheap garments. Also, the tragedy highlighted the rapid changing of clothing trends, and the need of the market to keep up, much to the detriment of large communities of people.

It is hard not to be awed by the complex history of a simple pair of trousers. The way that the V&A have constructed this new strategy allows them to respond quickly to modern events without the paperwork and committees needed for new acquisitions.

In turn this also allows them to collect in the moment, theoretically meaning that the item chosen will have a stronger historical connection in a few decades.

Museums are no longer places that solely put the past on display. Museums are evolving into spaces for reflection on current events, and although the public engage more critically with what they’re seeing, museums have a unique advantage in that people still trust them as an institution. This unique trust should be put to good use. Adopting a rapid collection strategy enables museums to keep up-to-date with social and political changes, local or global.

The People’s History Museum in Manchester created a wooden ‘EU tunnel’ as a place for visitors to discuss the EU Referendum. Another example is the installation of life jackets worn by refugees in an exhibition called Call me by my name: stories from Calais and beyond by the Migration Museum Project. The project leaders saw the opportunity to purchase the life jackets and ship them to Britain for the exhibition, and thought it would be a compelling collection that would challenge how visitors view migrants and refugees.

On an more local museum scale, the M Shed in Bristol has a permanent exhibition about the Occupy Bristol protests in 2011. included in the exhibition are items such as a radio, placards, and other objects collected from the protest camp site. The M Shed actually opened a few months later, showing that the decision to accession these items matched the thoughts of the V&A’s Rapid Response strategy, but on a local scale.

Museums are, at heart, democratic.

They should be “by rule of the commoners” and the freedom for the public to expect, and demand, exhibitions and events that reflect the rapid way in which we experience the world should be adopted as at least a ‘way-of-thinking’ in museums. Working it into museum policy would be even better.

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