Co-designing choice: objectivity, aesthetics and agency in audio-description

ABSTRACT

Even though museums and galleries have made efforts to become more inclusive, many continue to find it challenging to engage visitors who are blind or have low vision. The ‘Vis-ability’ exhibition, presented at the QUT Art Museum in 2019 was an exhibition curated with clear social inclusion goals from the outset. Through it, the museum sought to develop innovative, cost effective, and readily replicable techniques to allow blind and low vision visitors and artists to engage with the institution and its collections. The results affirm the benefits of offering blind and low vision visitors a spectrum of engagement choices, and also affirm that blind and low vision artists and visitors have capacity to make a critical contribution in co-designing that spectrum of choices. This exhibition and its use of multisensorial elements offers a useful prompt to museums to engage this community more fully in co-designing inclusion in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Abilities
• audio-description
• art musuems
• co-design
• exhibitions
• inclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Commission [Erasmus + Grant].

Notes on contributors

Bree Hadley

Associate Professor Bree Hadley is Study Area Coordinator for Acting & Drama at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. She is author of The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts Culture and Media (2019, with Donna McDonald), Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making (Palgrave 2017) and Disability, Public Space Performance & Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers (Palgrave 2014), and has written dozens of articles for academic journals, newspapers, and online platforms such as The Australian, ArtsHub, and Australian Stage Online. As Chief Investigator on two Australian Research Council LIEF grants with the AusStage consortium (www.ausstage.edu.au), Hadley has documented the history of disability theatre in Australia, and made information about innovative performers, performances, and organisations available through the AusStage database. Her performance text, The Ex/centric Fixations Project, is also about to be published internationally in At the Intersection of Disability and Drama: A Critical Anthology of New Plays in 2020 (McFarlane https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/at-the-intersection-of-disability-and-drama/). Prior to joining QUT in 2007, Hadley worked as a writer, dramaturg, director, arts facilitator, and administrator for a number of independent theatre companies, and for the Glen Eira City Council.

Janice Rieger

Associate Professor Janice Rieger is tenured faculty in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. She is also a curator, designer and filmmaker and has been advocating for people with disabilities for over twenty years in Canada, USA, Europe and Australia. She has been awarded a Mayor's Access Recognition Award and a State Level Government Disability Award for her leadership in promoting access and inclusion globally. Janice's research looks at the relationship of disability to art, design and culture. She is a member and editor of the European Society for Disability Research, and co-facilitated the 2018 international Disability Mundus doctoral school in France. Her research focuses on creating cultures of inclusion and her recent publications were featured in The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts, Culture and Media (2018), Space and Culture (2019) and CoDesign - International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts (2019). Dr Rieger has conducted research with major galleries and museums across Canada and Australia to create more inclusive environments, exhibitions and programming.