Building a prototype that added feelings to objects.
The Sensational Museum was a large-scale collaborative project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It ran between April 2023 and October 2025 bringing together a diverse group of professionals.
We joined the project to deliver a multi-sensory collections prototype. Our goal was to take traditional museum collections and add the technology and user interfaces to allow sensory information to be recorded.
We built a prototype that took core collections records and data, and enabled staff to add emotive, evocative and evaluative content over it. We built simple interfaces to ask things like:
- How did this object make you feel?
- What did it remind you of?
- What is it like to touch?
We also worked with the team to think about how staff could interact in a more human way with their collections. Prototype users could add their preferences, triggers, or flag items in the collection as needing content warnings.
The workshops and discussions were fascinating. And what we built was simply the Museum Platform doing what it does best: bringing user friendly interfaces and search tools into the collection.
One of the things about the way we’ve built the platform is that it is open to this sort of rapid prototyping. The core model we’ve built is highly flexible, and ready for “quick-fire” ideas to be thrown at it. We’re excited to extend this part of our business with future partners and see what we can come up with together!
– Mike Ellis, Director
The Museum Platform
Quick facts
- Agile prototyping project
- Based on a multi-month partnership / workshop model with multi-disciplinary teams
- A new flexible approach to enriching museum records
Look out for..
- Collections records with feelings attached!
