To work with a range of smaller museums in and around London, in partnership with the London Museums Hub and Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, to develop practical approaches to interpretation planning, redisplay and the use of text for engaging new audiences.

The project recognised something that is consistently true across the sector: small museums are often rich in collections and passionate about them, but lack the interpretive frameworks and resources to translate that passion into experiences that general audiences will genuinely engage with.

Interpretation Planning | Community Engagement | Audience Testing | Skills Development | Handbook Development

Working closely with curators and visitor groups across the partner museums, we helped each institution identify its unique voice and find new ways of using it, developing approaches to redisplay that were practically achievable within the constraints of small museum budgets and volunteer-led teams.

The process moved through Discovery, Development (Creation) and Delivery (Implementation): on-gallery assessment of exhibits, formative evaluation with focus and user groups, and live testing of text and graphic approaches with writers and designers before any final decisions were made.

Skills sharing with curators was central to the working process throughout. The results were documented and written up into Saying It Differently, a practical handbook designed to help any museum make the most of the skills, knowledge and resources they already have.

Museums are experts in their collections but not always in how to tell stories with them, and that gap, which can feel paralysing from the inside, is almost always bridgeable with the right framework and the right support.

The handbook is a direct expression of something TGA holds as a principle across all its work: the goal is never dependency on external expertise, but the lasting capability of the institution to tell its own story, in its own voice.

Saying It Differently was designed to be used without us, and the fact that it remains a reference tool for museums across the sector years after publication is the most honest measure of whether it worked.

Client: London Museums Hub

TGA: Interpretation Planning, Community Engagement, Audience Testing, Skills Development, Handbook Development

Partners: Museums, Libraries and Archives Council