Story Inspiration Station (2023)

Story Inspiration Station is an interactive exhibit in the Great North Museum: Hancock that encourages visitors to become curious about and share their own interpretations of intriguing objects from the museum’s collections. Visitors select an object from randomly presented sets of high-quality images and answer three simple questions about it. Their answers are combined into the beginnings of a story that they can then share in the museum and online to encourage others’ curiosity. The increasing number of visitor responses also represents a valuable dataset of public interpretations of museum objects that could support alternative means of discovering the collection in future.

Be inspired by some of the objects and visitor responses here.

My idea for Story Inspiration Station came following a series of co-design workshops with young people aged 16-19 on how to have better conversations about environmental issues online using museum collections and creative commons media. This project was funded by the UK Museums’ Association’s Digital Innovation and Engagment fund and was a collaboration between Open Lab at Newcastle University and the Great North Museum: Hancock. I led this collaboration, devised and co-ordinated workshops, and co-designed the interactive museum exhibit.

Watch a video made with the young people that accompanied an exhibition of the ideas inspired by the co-design workshops.