About

This research focuses on British ethnographic museums–which conserve, display and contextualise research of people and cultures–as frames that are born of colonial and extractive collecting practices. Some of these museums are addressing these complex historical legacies, yet their exhibition graphic design remains unchanged. This oversight informs the basis of this practice-based enquiry, in which museum exhibition graphic design will act as both the subject being researched, and a research tool to explore anti-colonial exhibition design methods.

Exhibition design is a curatorial practice that includes graphic and spatial design to develop, and support displays of knowledge and advance particular kinds of narrative. This research will focus specifically on the role of exhibition graphic design in upholding dominant, linear narratives through hierarchy/emphasis of text, image, visual/aesthetic connotations, and relationship to spatial environments; including printed/digital museum making (captions, information panels, interactives, etc.) and facilitation of learning events/experiences within exhibition spaces–all of which have been influenced, arguably, by the dominant canon of Eurocentric graphic design aesthetics/ideologies.

Within the research, pluralism, the act of holding two or more ideas/knowledges at one time, is informed by the theoretical framing and methods from Design Otherwise and Design Pluralism due to their positive implications of sitting with complexity, networks and multiples, and Anti-Colonial Theory, primarily due to the ‘active’ association with term anti- and its relationship to practice (doing, making, organising, etc.). Working within an institution that arguably cannot be decolonised, an anti-colonial research-practice could offer new, pluralist methods and ideas for museum knowledge.

Through audits of existing exhibition graphic design practices, co-designed workshops/prototyping with museum-outreach, and interactive interventions to explore plural readings of museum knowledge, the practice-research will determine the role of co-production in British ethnographic museum exhibition display, and how graphic design could enable multiple narratives/perspectives to exist in conjunction in exhibition practices.