The Museum Without Walls

Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales have seven sites across Wales. Their 2030 strategic aim to reach and engage with new audiences in less traditional venues across Wales, lead to our paths crossing once again. Amgueddfa Cymru wanted to push the boundaries of what it means to be a museum; to share their collections beyond their sites and change the way the public perceive and interact with their vast collections and chose PDR to help them do this.

DISCOVERY & USER INSIGHT

We kicked off the project by broadening our focus beyond a physical 'kit' to explore ways to engage harder-to-reach audiences. Our aim was to create a sustainable, user centred design that included a versatile kit and a comprehensive service proposition, helping the museum to attract new audiences and empower staff.

Through tailored stakeholder interviews and site visits, we gained insights into the complexities of taking objects out of the museum, we learned about display security standards, and we explored previous outreach schemes and their successes and failures. We also reviewed literature on access barriers and analysed visitor statistics to understand current and unreached audiences. This led to a set of guiding principles for evaluating ideas and guiding co-design sessions with stakeholders.

The findings from our research ensured we could create a solution that was practical, impactful, and ready to create meaningful engagement.

CO-DESIGN, SPECIFICATION & SERVICE PROPOSITION

Building on our discovery phase, we launched a series of dynamic co-design workshops to actively engage museum stakeholders. These workshops were crafted to navigate constraints and challenges while exploring ambitions and hopes. Together, we brainstormed adaptable and practical solutions, which we then evaluated against our guiding principles.

The insights from these workshops, combined with our discovery phase findings, enabled our team to create a detailed specification for the physical kit and refine the scope for service proposition. This specification captured our learnings and set the stage for the next steps in the design process.

We brought together our team of interdisciplinary designers to ideate innovative service propositions that would complement or enhance the physical kit. We explored rapid deployment strategies for reaching locations far from Museum sites, identified key players for running Museum Without Walls exhibitions, and devised an operationally sustainable solution to ensure the museum's long-term impact. Our goal was to empower the museum to adapt the way they connect with people and allow them to create vibrant, resonate experiences for years to come.

CREATING KIT CONCEPTS

We refined the Product Design Specification for the kit, incorporating the merits of the key ideas from our service ideation. This included specifications like transporting all necessary equipment without needing a van. During a two-day design sprint, we tackled mini briefs to create kit concepts that considered the user journey involved in taking an object off-site.

The concepts shared themes of modularity, scalability, flat-packing, and solo assembly. We presented three refined concepts to Amgueddfa Cymru, and the Museum team selected a concept that met their brief in a scalable way, allowing them to start small with minimal upfront investment and the potential to evolve as funds and needs change over time.

DETAILED DESIGN PRODUCTION & DELIVERY

We took the selected concept and refined it, using 3D CAD and low-fidelity prototypes. This iterative process allowed us to test and enhance features, leading to an initial proof of concept prototype. Stakeholder feedback was invaluable, guiding us to create a second high-fidelity prototype that was tested by the Museum team, ultimately finalising the design scheme.