Exciting Funding News at Kew Gardens

I am very pleased to share the news that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) have awarded £14.7million for the restoration of the historic Temperate House at Kew Gardens.

This is particularly exciting news for me as I spent most of last year from early Summer into the Autumn working for Kew on this funding application. In May 2012 I responded to an invitation to tender for the interpretation content research which led to a much larger involvement than expected right through to October 2012.

Temperate House (from Treetop walkway)

On appointment I visited the gardens a number of times, speaking to the Community Engagement, Learning, Horticulture, Ethnobotany, Marketing and Digital Media teams. What I discovered at the existing Temperate House was a place and collection with an incredibly exciting potential. It is the largest surviving Victorian glasshouse in the world, covering 4,880 square meters and up to 19 metres high. Some investigation revealed that the plants shown there display the richness of the plant kingdom across all the inhabited continents of the world and could be used to tell stories about Kew’s role in global plant conservation, sustainable development and maintaining biodiversity.

In August, based on the success of the content research contract, my role was extended to include delivery of an Interpretation Strategy including visual representations of the potential interpretation.
The main challenge for the Interpretation was the vast range of plants and the fact they come from such different parts of the world. Also the word ’temperate’ does not really excite most visitors. Confusingly, it has slightly differing definitions in horticulture and world geography and is more often a zone defined by what it is not (polar or tropical) than what it is.
Although individual plant stories were already well told in the glasshouse, the key themes behind the selection and display of the plants and the organisation of their layout was not clear to visitors. In addition, Kew has ambitions through this project to really push forward their interpretation and community engagement and broaden their existing audience.

Chilli interpretation panel

However, plants in the Temperate House illustrate well the important role that plants play in people’s lives all over the world and stories of exploration and travel from the earliest plant hunters to modern-day field-work and conservation projects. Working with the community engagement staff, we analysed the current Kew audience and target under-represented audiences to see how the information we have about those groups might help us structure the Temperate House to enable engagement with a broad cross-section of visitors and future visitors.

Tea interpretation panel for children

This work, along with the Kew brand guidelines and working with the newly identified plant stories enabled us to identify three key themes for the plant stories as well as a layout which complemented the horticultural needs of the displays and an aesthetic with broad appeal.
Design team Bright3d successfully pitched to create the visuals for this aesthetic and interpretation plan. They refined our ideas and visualised our ideas to produce some fantastic sketches to show the potential visitor experience and how the interpretation could work sympathetically with both the plant collection and the historic building.

As acknowledged by HLF the project:
“…will not only enable vital conservation of the Grade I listed heritage building, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world, but will result in a more inspiring public display for visitors and help broaden awareness of the importance of plants through learning and engagement programmes with community groups”.

I am very pleased that the HLF have recognised the huge potential of the Temperate House project, and I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Kew team on their hard work and wish them all the best for the next phase of fundraising and delivery, and thank Bright3d for their work with us.

Richard Deverell, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, says: “This project represents a real step change in the way in which Kew will communicate and bring to life why plants matter, why saving them matters and ultimately why Kew’s science and horticultural expertise matters.
“We want to use the Temperate House to open up visitors’ minds and imaginations to look at plants and Kew in a new light.”

More info:
http://www.hlf.org.uk/news/Pages/KewTemperateHouse.aspx
http://www.kew.org/support-kew/donate-now/temperate-house-appeal/

Rockets and Telescopes

A couple of new exhibits for the Royal Observatory Edinburgh Visitor Centre. Installed last night in a blizzard!

First a model of the James Clark Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This telescope is home to the SCUBA camera developed and built at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

James Clark Maxwell Telescope model

And the nose-cone from a Skylark Rocket:

Rocket nose-cone

Skylark rockets flew from the 1950s up to 2005 and carried experiments into space, some of which were designed at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

Skylark rocket nose

Plinths and graphic panels built/printed by Leach Colour.

 

Visitor Studies Group – Conference 2013

The Visitor Studies Group (www.visitors.org.uk) is a community of professionals who promote dialogue, facilitate debate and provide continuing professional development in Visitor Studies for anybody working in cultural and natural heritage organisations.

I have been aware of the work of the VSG for some time through working closely with the Visitor Studies officer at National Museums Scotland on the redevelopment project, but in April 2012 I was pleased to secure a freelance job supporting the group’s committee with coordination and administration.

The mission of the group is ‘Championing excellent visitor experiences’ which really resonated with me. Although I am not a Visitor Studies specialist, I use a lot of visitor studies methods in my work and often work closely with specialists to ensure that the exhibitions and projects I work on are truly visitor-focussed.

Right now, I am busier than I’ve ever been with VSG work because we are holding our 2013 Conference and AGM on 4th and 5th February at the London Wetlands Centre. The venue is beautiful but also particularly appropriate as this year’s theme for the Conference is ‘Environments’. We will be offering sessions covering how your environments affect the visitor experience, how to evaluate environmental factors and what influence environments might have on your work. Although I am going to be very busy making sure delegates are all registered for the right sessions and speakers have all they need, as well as liaison with our hosts at the venue, I very much hope that I will be able to sit in on many of the sessions because the programme the committee has put together looks fantastic!

London Wetland Centre

Monday 4th February will be a day of talks and discussions as well as VSG news and AGM. Highlights include Keynote Speaker architect Gareth Hoskins, particularly known for contemporary and considered design responses for the reuse of listed buildings, and in the creation of spaces for community, heritage and social purposes. Other sessions will cover a range of topics from innovative work in Outdoors environments to Disability Access in indoor spaces.

On Tuesday 5th February we will be focusing on practical workshops. Each delegate will have the opportunity to choose three workshops from a selection of six, as well as the plenary session. Workshops cover visitor studies tools, techniques, projects and findings in a range of environments from art galleries, outdoor spaces, museums, zoos, parks and even digital spaces.

A full programme and booking form can be found at http://visitors.org.uk/node/511 and, although it won’t be anything like taking part in person, I am sure that many of the resources will be posted on the website too, I will post a link here when that happens.

Holiday Greetings!

Image: Edinburgh City Council

Holiday Greetings from a cold and beautiful Edinburgh. I’d like to extend warm greetings to all those who made 2012 such a rewarding first year for me as a sole trader.

So, to those I worked with in 2012, thank you.

And to you all, I hope that 2013 brings exciting and rewarding new projects and a chance to work together or at the very least catch up for a chat over a nice glass of something.

All the best for the Holiday Season and New Year!
Lyndsey

Museums and Science Communication

I recently attended the Imperial College Science Communication MSc 21st Anniversary event. It was a really good day, both for the opportunity to meet up with friends from my year on the course (98/99), and catching up with a wide range of ex-colleagues and contacts from the years that followed the course when I worked in the sci-com world in central London (and it felt like every second person I met through work was a graduate of the course).

Science Journalism discussion

The timing of this anniversary event was particularly good for me because just a month later I delivered my first lecture to the Edinburgh University Science Communication and Public Engagement MSc students.

The module I am teaching is ‘Effective Exhibit and Programme Development’ and I’m delivering it on behalf of, and along with, National Museums Scotland. It is basically a six-week introduction to the role of Museums in science communication. This is a subject that is close to my heart as I divide my professional work between museums and science engagement projects.

Cloning exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland

There are five full-time MSc students on the University of Edinburgh course in this inaugural year. Much has changed since I was in their shoes back in 1998, when the web was very much 1.0, newspapers were still made of paper and video and radio production required expensive equipment. But these media are simply tools, the essence of good communication has not changed and neither has the role that museums can play on the public interface between scientific research and wider society.

Since moving away from London, I have maintained links with other Science Communicators through the British Interactive Group and Edinburgh Beltane as well as my own personal connections and various partnership projects. But it was still a rare privilege to experience such thought-provoking, stimulating and challenging discussions as those that were held at the Imperial College event, and used to be a weekly occurence for us on the course.

I left the anniversary event with a new enthusiasm and a reading list to keep me engaged over the coming weeks and months. I hope to pass some of that enthusiasm to my University of Edinburgh students along with the knowledge and experience I am sharing with them – I know that their enthusiasm certainly rubs off on me.

Energy Lab

I am very excited to announce that the Energy Lab at the National Mining Museum Scotland is almost ready to launch!

The Energy Lab

You can read about the origins of the project in this blog post. Since I wrote that in May, we have been very busy working with our designers and fabricators; Leach Colour to create the exhibits for the space.

Introduction

Roger Meachem of Yet Science CIC has worked hard with the museum staff on a supporting teachers’ resource full of pre- and post-visit activities about energy and engineering challenges. And Ryan Sturrock of Walk the Line Productions has filmed presenter Emily Carr demonstrating some of these activities for the supporting dvd and YouTube clips.

Generating Electricity and Energy Changes exhibits

We have collected objects, photographs and film footage donated kindly by Professor Stephen Salter, the University of Edinburgh, Jamie Taylor, Artemis Intelligent Power and Pelamis Wave Power.

Wave Energy interactive

And we have welcomed teachers and p6/7 pupils from three local schools to try out the activities, interactives and teachers’ pack.

Salter’s Duck display

All that’s left to do is a little bit of final snagging before we welcome Fiona Hyslop, Scottish Government Minister for Culture and External Affairs to open the space formally on 1st October. Then we’ll get our teachers’ pack and film clips live on the museum website and compile our post-project evaluation report for our funders, the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Let’s hope that the Energy Lab can help inspire some of the children of the coal-mining areas of Midlothian to turn their creative problem-solving energy towards engineering a sustainable energy future for us all!

How does your garden grow?

Interpreting Gardens

Recently I’ve been working with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew on plans for the restoration of their Temperate House. As part of the research for this project I spent a day last week at two really special gardens in London museums; the Geffrye Museum of the Home and the Horniman Museum. The gardens at both these museums had been suggested to us as among examples of good interpretation.

Geffrye Museum Garden

The Geffrye is a museum which consists of a number of period rooms with related period gardens and a herb garden. The permanent interpretation of these gardens is quite standard, with a map and occasional boards to complement the plant labels.

Geffrye Herb Garden map

Panel at Geffrye

However, where the Geffrye really excels is in the community and youth projects they do within their museum and gardens. Examples in the gardens include an Asian women’s group private garden, a ‘Plant Explorers’ trail, soap making and baking workshops with herbs and temporary graphic signs on stakes which can be put out for family fun days and school holidays.

The Horniman gardens were our next stop on this wonderfully sunny day and with such good weather we were able to see just how well-used these free gardens are by the local community.

Horniman medicinal garden

The museum has always had a small botanic garden, however recently they were re-designed to emphasise the links between plants in the garden and the cultural objects inside the museum.

Medicinal garden intro panel

Here’s an example in the food garden where there is information about the plants (grains) enhanced by links to objects inside the museum from other cultures.

Grains panel

Here in the ‘materials and fibres’ garden, the links are made very explicit. For example, this panel about silk linked to objects in the museum’s musical instrument gallery inside.

Materials and fibres garden

Silk information panel

The museum gardens are a peaceful oasis in south-east London and well-used by families and groups of all ages. Many garden visitors may not have been inside the museum but there’s no doubt in my mind that these panels make going into the museum a far more interesting prospect.

To finish I had to include two images of the Sound Garden – this isn’t actually a garden of plants so should not have been the focus of our visit but I had to stop and listen to the instruments being played by groups of children and parents. It is a fantastic outdoor interactive space and I am really impressed at how it is so well linked to the inside collections.

Horniman Sound Garden

Sound Garden intro panel

If you get the chance, I would highly recommend a visit to both these wonderful museums and gardens which are now linked directly by a very easy overground rail journey of less than half an hour.