The Sensational Museum: The Practice and Provision of Trans-Sensory Collecting and Communicating

The UK heritage sector wants to offer all visitors memorable, inclusive, engaging and enjoyable experiences. Museums increasingly provide access to their exhibitions, narratives and artefacts for everyone, with their evolving practice including accessible offers (such as audio description and BSL, audio-guides, interactive content and a wide range of community and educational programming) for people who cannot experience the museum in traditional ways. Yet, this reliance on 'access' provision to support non-traditional visitors perpetuates a dichotomy between 'abled' and 'disabled' people that marginalises non-normative ways of experiencing the museum. When museums provide alternative ways of accessing content for specific audiences, they unwittingly exclude from mainstream provision those people who want or need to access museums through senses other than sight. Consequently, even as museums aim to create welcoming experiences for all visitors, their assumption that sight is a necessary part of the optimal museum experience, risks alienating people who prefer to access and process information in ways that are not only - or not entirely - visual. A challenge remains: how can museums create inclusive interventions (interventions accessible to everyone) without having to spend time and money on also creating 'accessible' programming for minority audiences.
The Sensational Museum aims to address this systemic issue by rethinking the role and place of the senses in the museum. It declines the orthodox classical assumptions of the fixed array of 5 bodily senses (that have privileged sight, and reductively contained our other senses) in favour of a new sensory logic. It leverages the liberating notion of 'Sensory Gain' and the idea that everyone can benefit from the 'access' traditionally offered only to disabled visitors. Consequently, the research aims (ambitiously and audaciously) not only to articulate what such 'trans-sensory' thinking and practices might be, but to demonstrate and test this approach within the context of real-world museum collection and communication - evidencing its value for practitioners, policymakers and standards agencies. It leverages inter-disciplinary research by bringing together insights and methods from museum studies, critical disability studies, psychology and design and embraces a co-creation, inclusive methodology where disabled and non-disabled stakeholders are involved in every phase of research design and delivery.
It brings together the UK's leading professional bodies and standards agencies (Museums Association and Collections Trust) along with a national network of disability organisations (including the Disability Collaborative Network, the Accentuate Programme and VocalEyes) and a collective of 20 collaborating museums and galleries committed to creative and profound transformation of museum practice (led by Accentuate's 'Curating for Change' network, supported by the NLHF) as well as one of the world's leading cultural consultancies (Barker Langham).
This multi-partner project is not just a project about making museums accessible to disabled people. It is a project that uses what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.
This research will use a design logic to structure and drive its work. First, we will prepare a blueprint for a new sensory logic. We will then prototype an inclusive, co-creation toolkit and trans-sensory data model and interface, before piloting and evaluating these prototypes with museum professionals and visitors across the UK and finally refining and promoting the outputs in publications, conferences and at showcase events.
By responding to this systemic sector issue, leveraging inter-disciplinary scholarship, activating this radical concept of the 'trans-sensory', and following a creative and practice-led line of enquiry TSM will produce a radically new way of thinking about museum experience for both practitioners and visitors.