It was great to meet everyone in our first workshops at the end of January, where we explained the Story:Web co-design project further and how it might help us develop ideas for ‘museums of the future’. Before the workshop we’d asked everyone to find something online relating to an environmental issue they were concerned about. During the workshop we talked about these issues, which included deforestation, poaching, air and water pollution, the environmental impacts of energy generation, fast fashion and block-chain technology, and the often hidden plastics and pollutants in packaging and some musical instruments. We’ve created a Mural with all the environmental issues and the websites participants shared here (zoom into the Mural for more detail) .
We then explored how objects from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums’ (TWAM) collections could help bring these issues to life and help us think about them in new ways. In the week before the workshops, we challenged Dan Gordon (TWAM’s Keeper of Biology) to find objects relating the environmental issues. We then watched videos of Dan with the objects, explaining their connection to the environmental issues, which you can watch online here:
This got us all thinking about how we might have better discussions on environmental issues online and on social media. Better in terms of being more interesting to younger people, more respectful of those in the discussion, and more relevant to everyday life. We started to think about how environmental issues, museum objects, images and sounds shared online (with Creative Commons licences), and interactive technology might combine to do this. Everyone went away with an online worksheet to start capturing and developing their ideas.
In particular, we asked everyone to think about, for their chosen environmental issue:
We’re going to take everyone’s ideas into the second workshop, where we’ll explore the potential of interactive technology, and images and sounds shared online.