purpleSTARS: Inclusive Curation and Production Creates Inclusive Museums

The Sensory Objects research project (2012-2015) was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project encouraged the personal viewpoints of an inclusive research team who engaged critically with museum collections and produced multimedia and sensory art interpretations using various technical tools and creative processes. Our research demonstrated that using technology to critically engage with collections, reflect, and activate a sensory encounter in response, helped engage people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in creating a complementary and more inclusive visitor experience, so widening the public appeal of museums and heritage sites. The follow-up enterprise, named purpleSTARS, combines ‘purple,' the color associated with disability in the UK, with STARS, which stands for Sensory Technology Art Resource Specialists. The purpleSTARS' mission is to bring together artists and technologists with and without ID to transform museum experiences and make them truly inclusive, using sensory and digital media to creatively disrupt and reinterpret heritage sites and museum collections.