Multisensory interpretation toolkit

This toolkit is designed to support museums to produce ‘sensational’ museum interventions and full sensational exhibitions. That means working with disabled, neurodiverse, d/Deaf and nondisabled people to co-create museum interpretation/experiences where no one sense is necessary or sufficient.

The toolkit will lead you on a process of co-creating multisensory interpretation for whichever project you are currently working on. This process can be used for a small temporary exhibition all the way through to a new permanent gallery, or museum redevelopment! The key thing is making sure you embed your co-creation into the early stages of the process.

The toolkit is split into five modules. The first four modules are designed for museum staff as in-house workshop sessions, and the fifth module supports museums through a multi-workshop co-creation process.

The toolkit is designed to be run entirely by the museum. So each module has extensive facilitator notes, including workshop facilitator notes and resources for all of the different activities. These are all available in different formats based on accessibility needs.

As museum work is collaborative and the creation of exhibitions is rarely the sole work of one individual, the internal modules are designed to be done by multiple people in the museum. 

The first two internal workshops provide an introduction to the core principles of the Sensational Museum project, and we think that they will be interesting for staff across the museum, to support understanding of the project, and hopefully to increase buy-in across the museum. Our research has shown that in order to make museums accessible and multisensory, there needs to be wide institutional support, particularly at upper management levels. We greatly encourage you to include a wide range of colleagues in this process.

The toolkit is split into five modules. The first four modules are designed for museum staff as in-house workshop sessions. The in-person meetings will each take a maximum of 2 ½ hours (to include time for breaks!). There will also be some short activities to be done before and after the workshop. Before, this will involve listening to some short (10-20 minute) podcasts. After the workshops there will be some reflection activities (again, short, around 10 minutes). In terms of the timing/scheduling of these module workshops, they can be done one per week, or they could be done one per day in a single week. It entirely depends on what will work best for your museum.  

There are a minimum of four co-creation sessions required for the fifth module. These will also take a maximum of 2 ½ hours each (including breaks!). Depending on the scale of your project, these can take place over weeks or months.