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Interactivate is live!

Today I launched the website for my new business:

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The name and strapline will be no surprise to regular readers of this blog!

 

I see this as a way of applying everything I’ve learned from my PhD and beyond to inform practice in museums, heritage sites and cultural tourism destinations. I’ll be aiming to work with anyone who wants to take a look at themselves through the eyes of their visitors. There will be three main strands to the business (more here):

  • Research: specifically visitor research
  • Consultancy: general advice and training
  • Creative: exhibition planning, interpretive text, etc.

This blog won’t be going anywhere – I’ll continue to post regularly on visitor experiences, interpretation, museums and design. I hope you’ll help me spread the word!

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Experience Design

Late last year there was an article on The Conversation about “Experience Design“. I found it interesting and tweeted a link to it; soon afterwards the author, Faye Miller, got in touch. One thing led to another, and culminated in me writing a piece with Toni Roberts for the inaugural XD: Experience Design magazine, which has just come out.

Our piece is on Interpretive Design, and we group our thoughts around the interlinking concepts of Think, Feel, Do. Toni and I have known each other for a few years and have both been working on PhDs on exhibition design – me from the visitor perspective, Toni from the perspective of the design process (her PhD is done; mine is in the final stages). Coincidentally, we had both independently come up with a Venn diagram comprising Thinking, Feeling and Acting – something we came to realise when I posted a link to this presentation I gave last November. We’d discussed that it would be good for us to flesh out the overlaps between our ideas in a publication of some sort, and when the opportunity to write for XD came about it seemed like the right place to do it.

XD is intended to bring together people and disciplines that don’t normally overlap: industry, academia, management; theory, practice and user groups/audiences. I encourage you to subscribe to the XD newsletter, or better yet pick up a copy!