Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Museums and galleries are now developing confidence in the area of inclusion. There have been significant advances in the design of cultural physical and digital spaces, which better facilitate access to the museum’s physical and intellectual resources for individuals of diverse ages and abilities. However, responses have varied in consistency, efficacy, and legacy. This year-long design research project, in partnership with the Wellcome Collection and the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, develops a working set of tools that can be used by museums for improving accessibility in an ongoing way, with a clear goal of gathering and sharing learnings between museums. This paper focuses on the new approaches to inclusive design process, using co-design methods to produce principled guidelines that include all relevant stakeholders. Establishing empathetic links between exhibition audience and exhibition-makers is used to productively combine the skills of museum professionals with the lived experience of people with disabilities. A central goal of the research is to explore how access can be framed not only as an essential foundation of exhibition design, but also as an opportunity to creatively engage and inform design, making creators of exhibitions understand design for disability as an opportunity for innovation as opposed to being a secondary and/or obligatory requirement.