Time, Culture and Identity: Building community of practice in museum interpretation

Time, Culture and Identity is a collaborative research programme involving curators, researchers and academics from the Science Museum in London, the Palace Museum, Beijing Jiaotong University and the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences in Beijing. The research focuses on a collection of historic clocks manufactured in the UK for the imperial court in China, which now form part of the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing. Robson was invited to participate in the project led by Tilly Blythe at the Science Museum and funded with a £200,000 grant from the AHRC and Newton Fund. The Robson’s contributions to the research included a workshop in Beijing and a peer reviewed paper for an international journal.

This project initiates and builds an international community of practice for the development of museum interpretative displays, along with the delivery of approaches and methods to achieve this. Through his practice, Robson collaborates with exhibition design teams based at museums and galleries, creating interpretative content and developing exhibits. Within this context, Robson contends that research often gives way to the pressure of project requirements. A lack of research activity constrains deeper dialogue between curators and developers that would broaden interpretation strategies and encourage innovation. This project therefore develops Robson’s involvement in activities where institutions, curators, designers come together as research communities.

The workshop offered a unique opportunity to speak and collaborate with UK and Chinese creative practitioners and academics bringing the possibility of future collaborations.

The project is being disseminated through a series of outputs including a digital resource, collaborative presentations and research papers. An initial output is a special issue published with the quarterly journal Studies in the History of Natural Science, with Robson’s contribution exploring the interpretation of historical scientific collections from the perspective of a creative practitioner.