Project Origins

The Sensational Museum was created in response to frustration about how traditional museums often work; visitors move around in silence looking at objects or artworks, often behind glass.

For Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway University of London), as for many people, this ‘look and learn’ approach was completely inaccessible. Audio and tactile experiences she could engage with were rarely offered, and often available just to disabled visitors. This made her wonder, what would happen if we redesigned museums so that the segmented sensory experiences provided for disabled visitors were at the heart of how museums work for everyone?

Working under pandemic lockdown restrictions, Hannah organised a series of online meetings with contacts from across the museums sector, including Matthew Cock and Esther Fox. They quickly realised that this way of thinking about exhibition design would also have huge implications for ‘behind-the-scenes’ museum and heritage professionals such as archivists, cataloguers, and curators.

Ross Parry (University of Leicester) joined the team, providing expertise about how museums might work in a more trans-sensory way. Alison Eardley (University of Westminster) brought her expertise in psychology and the senses, as well as her experience developing inclusive audio description in museums. Anne Chick (University of Lincoln) added her own experience in co-creation and social design.

The Sensational Museum received £1M funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), allowing the project to run between April 2023 and October 2025.

Team members brought together insights and methods from museum studies, critical disability studies, psychology, and design. Postdoctoral researchers, Sophie Vohra and Charlotte Slark, were instrumental in leading research, development, testing, piloting and evaluation for the project.

Innovative museum industry organisations joined the project as partners, ensuring the research and aims of the project were firmly rooted in the museum and heritage industry. It was a collaborative project, drawing on the experience of co-creators with a wide variety of lived experience, and expertise and feedback from professionals at all stages of their careers, and from all parts of the industry.

Project partners The Museum Platform built an online testbed to organise sensory information about collections, and the museum worker recording it. Barker Langham designed, and project managed the build of seven sensory museum interventions, available to be visited by the public throughout summer 2025.

The initial Sensational Museum project was an interdisciplinary and multi-partner project with lived experience at its core: this collective wealth of knowledge and experience of disability meant it could work towards the project aim; using what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.