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- Cabinet of Curiosities
- A Catalyst for Change
- The Cinematic Musée Imaginaire of spatial cultural differences [CineMuseSpace]
- Contested Desires Constructive Dialogues
- Cultural activity within historic houses
- Developing learning advocates in the East Midlands
- Developing learning advocates in the North West
- Developing new audiences and promoting social inclusion
- Disorder, dissent and disruption
- Encountering the Unexpected
- Engage, learn, achieve
- Engaging archives with Inspiring Learning for All
- Engaging the City
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- Cultural value of engaging with museums
- EuNaMus
- Evaluating Creativity
- Everyone Welcome 2019-2021
- Everywhere and Nowhere
- Exceptional & Extraordinary
- EXILE at Kingston Lacy
- Generic learning outcomes
- girl.boy.child
- Growing social role of botanic gardens
- HumanKind
- Impact of generic learning outcomes
- Imperial War Museum North
- Including Museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums
- Inspiration, identity, learning: the value of museums, second study
- Leaders in Co-creation?
- Learning impact research project
- Learning through Culture
- The Madonna of the pinks
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 1
- Making Meaning in Art Museums 2
- Mapping the change phase 2
- Mindful Museum
- Mirror
- Museu do Samba, Brazil
- Museums and an ageing population
- Museums and social inclusion: the GLLAM report
- Museums health and wellbeing
- Co-production Framework at National Museums Liverpool
- New Walk Museum vision
- Not for the likes of you
- Open House
- Open minds
- Participatory practices at the Science Museum
- Permissible Beauty
- Prejudice & Pride: exploring LGBTQ lives at the National Trust
- Prisoners, Punishment and Torture
- Redefining the Role of Botanic Gardens
- Research network to advance museum ethics
- Researching Learning in Museums and Galleries 1990-1999
- Rethinking Disability Representation
- shOUT
- Small museums and social inclusion
- Stories of a Different Kind
- Supporting Decolonial Futures
- Talking statues
- TCS project
- The Museum as a Space of Social Care
- The Queer Heritage and Collections Network
- Their Past Your Future 2
- Seeing the museum through the visitors’ eyes
- Trans-Inclusive Culture
- Museums and the Transgender Tipping Point
- Unfinished portrait at Felbrigg Hall
- “In the past we would just be invisible”
- What did you learn at the museum today?
- What did you learn at the museum today? Second study
Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG)
Participatory, collaborative and co-creative practices at the Science Museum
The project
The Science Museum in South Kensington, London, UK, attracts over 2.9 million visitors, and around 12 million online visitors each year. An ambitious new gallery Information Age, which celebrates over 200 years of innovation in information and communication technologies, opened in November 2014.
This research project was commissioned by the Museum as part of a broader desire to more fully understand, grasp and recognise the significance of a number of projects carried out by the Museum around the development of the new gallery that sought to be participatory, collaborative, and co-creative in nature. By drawing on current thinking and trends within museum practice more widely, and utilising key illustrative examples from the sector, this research helped to inform future decisions and practice within the Science Museum.
Aims and objectives
The project aimed to:
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Find out how participatory, collaborative, and co-creative museum work has been understood and developed in recent years, and where the work of the Science Museum sits in this wider context.
In order to address these aims, the project team carried out the following activities:
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Review the current literature on participatory, collaborative, and co-creative museum practices;
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Locate exemplary participation/co-creation policies and practices within the sector;
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Look across the Science Museum’s co-creation and participatory approaches and identify emerging philosophies to date;
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Explore the findings as a team to draw out distinguishing factors or features of the Science Museum’s work in this area;
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Produce a report summarising the findings of the research, including suggestions of where further investigation/action research could be informative.
The project team were Katy Bunning, Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd.
Timescale
February – May 2014
Research findings
Bunning, K., Kavanagh, J., McSweeney, K. and Sandell, R. (2015), Embedding plurality: exploring participatory practice in the development of a new permanent gallery, Science Museum Group Journal, Issue 03
Drawing on a single case study – the development of the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum in London – this paper aims to reflect upon the extent to which existing ideas, theories, and approaches to participatory, co-creative and collaborative practice resonate with museum work on this scale. The development of the Information Age gallery saw a shift away from small-scale, temporary exhibition-driven or project-led participation towards participation which aimed to significantly impact upon the core offer of the museum: its permanent galleries. Both in scale and ambition, the participation activities that shaped Information Age sought to go further in terms of co-operation across departments to embed community involvement more fully in the exhibition development process than had been attempted previously at the Science Museum.