aerospace lives project: £30,000 respond & reimagine grant
We’re very proud to announce that Aerospace Lives (our collaboration with Aerospace Bristol) has successfully applied for and received £30,000 funding from the Art Fund’s Respond and Reimagine grants – one of 18 successful grants from a total 114 applications.
First up, congratulations to the management and education teams and others at the museum! We’re fans, as well as friends, and excited to be working with you again.
Aerospace Bristol is a medium-sized independent museum in the process of gaining its accreditation as COVID-19 struck. These two factors – alongside others shared by many independent, regional and local museums – posed additional challenges for Aerospace Bristol. £30,000 is a vital grant with the potential to have a lasting impact for the museum and its visitors.
“The challenges presented by the Covid-19 crisis make it more important than ever to develop new initiatives and adapt to new ways of working, so we are thrilled to have received this vital funding through Art Fund’s Respond and Reimagine programme.”
Amy Seadon, Learning and Community Engagement Manager at Aerospace Bristol
transmedia storytelling and new retail experiences and products
exploring new approaches to and collaborations around accessibility
interactive digital trails layered through the galleries
location based storytelling and heritage mapping around the local area
explore aerospace lives on any device
augmented reality treasure hunts, games, challenges and puzzles
augmented reality interpretive content, interactivity and storytelling
This Art Fund Reimagine and Respond grant, and the ambition at Aerospace Bristol, is about creating space for the museum to develop new creative partnerships, to use and share their collections in new ways, to test new approaches to storymaking and telling, to explore digital thinking at different levels, and bring new skills into the workforce.
Collaboration is an exciting and aspirational process – looking at what is and thinking about what might be – and a holistic approach demands the spotlight be shone into all sorts of corners.
At Aerospace Bristol, as with any creative, digital thinking and storymaking collaboration, we’re thinking across the museum’s entire operation – from end to end of the visitor experience and storytelling journey, through to education, retail, outreach, as well as discovering, developing and adding to the museum’s remarkable collections.
Outputs we can see at this stage include new approaches to interpreting archive materials , not only through self-guided digital trails, but interactive media, games, treasure hunts and Augmented Reality. We are also creating new opportunities to transform archive materials into ranges of unique Aerospace Bristol products with our partners at USEUM. As the collaboration develops, we will see other and different ideas evolve as the needs and ambitions of the museum and its visitors change. This flexible and iterative approach is crucial to developing strategies, resources and experiences that last. throughout, we will be supporting this collaboration with skills sharing, mentoring and in-house development around digital thinking and storymaking.
Aerospace Lives is a project exploring what’s possible as our increasingly digitised histories and heritage collections overlap with our increasingly digital lives and futures.
Alongside AR, we’re very interested in Access and the ways this collaboration might help Aerospace Bristol reach out to new partners and welcome new visitors in new ways. Housed in the beautiful WW1 Belfast Hangar and occupying part of a large airfield in Patchway, the museum is big with an unusual amount of space inside and out. We believe, for example, that this could prove to be a significant feature – given the increasing normalcy of social distancing, natural concerns around health and safety and the subsequent changes to visitor needs and behaviours.
through this collaboration we are seeking to develop new and vital insights that will help Aerospace Bristol and other museums, as well creating space to gather aviation industry insights. These include
Learning about what visitors feel comfortable with, want they want from aerospace bristol specifically and museums in general - now and in the future
Asking how museums might offer more // other // different support and experiences on-site and online
Testing out new technologies and forms of interaction and communication in the heritage context
exploring the potential of new, personalised and dispersed retail models to diversy income and generate revenue
Understanding the effect of linking products to heritage storytelling content and Augmented reality
exploring how museums can engage with and help visitors and audiences make sense of the dramatic social // cultural // political shifts of our time
Gathering feedback and insights from visitors about aviation sector specific concerns
Based around core principles of collaboration and co-creation, we’re using this real world project as a platform for sharing knowledge, building teams, sharing skills and building capacity along every step of the journey. At the same time, we can start to use the project as a platform to engage in essential dialogue with visitors about the future of museums, their hopes and fears, as well as more broadly around aviation, tourism and travel.
Click here to see how you could support Aerospace Bristol’s Return To Flight.
Digital Thinking from Storytelling People
Digital thinking and storymaking are general purpose tools for creativity – putting new and existing ideas together in new combinations and turning them into reality. Bringing them into the mix with expert support will help the museum discover new ways to see and tap into what makes them unique – their stories, using their collections to create meaningful visitor experiences, and finding new opportunities to record and share the voices, the knowledge and the passion of their volunteer community.
In conversation with the museum, Neil Mendoza – the government’s Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal – and many others over the recent weeks/months, three ‘root pathways’ are emerging that might be fundamental for supporting our (independent, regional and local) museums heritage organisations while the context seems to be getting less clear by the day:
i) Mattering to your local community
ii) Work in new ways with new partners
iii) Get the story out beyond the boundaries of your site.
Each of these is a call for transformation in how museums and heritage sites use what makes them unique – the real stuff of history – authentic things, stories, interpretation and narrative.
Cash alone won’t do this. Trickle down change from big nationals and regionals is painfully slow. Small (and even medium size) museums and heritage sites need access now to creativity and expertise to change fast. I’m reminded of the jet-ski and the cruise liner simile…one with the capacity for sharp turns and changes of pace, to play, to try, to fail, fall down and get back up, the other having to handle all that momentum.
Creative collaboration (co-creation - collaborative and collective development) is an emergent process based around a set of shared principles and goals.
it’s important to be open an flexible, to occupy a space that famously john Keats called 'negative capability’ - being open to possibility combined with the ability to follow an idea into uncertain territory without a specific outcome in mind.
As the cultural sector - museums, heritage sites and the creative industries that support them - embarks on the road to recovery and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s great to see the willingness both to engage in and to support new forms of partnership and ways of thinking that could yield powerful and unexpected results.
For us, journeying through this unknown landscape is the next great adventure.