BSEER researchers secure a funding award from the UCL Cities Partnership Programme in Paris

16 December 2022

Researchers from the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and UCL Arts & Sciences have secured funding for a project based in the Osmothèque archive in Paris on the multi-sensory experience of museum collections

Picture of a woman with a digital representation of waves moving around her head

Museum collections are valuable gateways to the past: by exploring them we learn about our history and heritage. Our experience of these collections is, almost exclusively, visual. However, research shows that involving the intangible dimension of collections, especially multisensory stimuli, in our engagement with heritage makes the interaction more memorable, enjoyable and meaningful. Heritage professionals, however, are not usually trained in multisensory interpretation of artefacts.

The award from the UCL Cities Partnerships Programme in Paris will fund a workshop designed to addressing that gap, raising awareness of the potential for multisensory engagement and providing useful tools to develop best practice. The workshop will also explore the connection between sensory vocabularies and the London/Paris environment via a sensory walk. The event will be held in collaboration with the Osmothèque, the world's largest scent archive and a leading international research institution tracing the history of perfumery. Their experienced team will foster the development of sensory vocabularies in the workshop participants, and to lead nose-on experiences of the UCL Object-based lab collections.

The project, entitled: 'The aura of objects: enhancing sensory awareness for curated collections', will be led by Dr Cecilia Bembibre from UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, in collaboration with Dr Francesco Aletta from the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, Dr Thomas Kador from UCL Arts & Sciences and colleagues from the Osmothèque archive in Versailles/Paris.

BSEER researchers secure a funding award from the UCL Cities Partnership Programme in Paris

Links

Related News