Film: Taking a DIWO (Do It With Others) approach to museum public engagement

Fionn Kidney, Global Engagement Manager with Science Gallery International spoke at MuseumNext Indianapolis in September 2015 about how cultural organizations can meaningfully engage their communities in the creative process.

Fionn: Good afternoon, everybody, it’s so great to be here so thanks to Jim and Kala again for inviting me to speak about Science Gallery especially, I guess, at this important time in Indiana when you’re dealing with the Religious Freedom Act, and the theme of social inclusion is something that we really care about in Science Gallery and I think there’s obviously big challenges for arts institutions here at the moment. But I just wanted to take a minute to stop and acknowledge the efforts that all of the arts institutions are making.

Here in Indiana, I mean in Ireland, as was mentioned yesterday, last year we … or, sorry, earlier this year we just passed equal marriage by popular vote in a referendum, and to get there it took a lot of resistance over many years. So I just wanted to say to everybody who’s part of this campaign congratulations, keep it up, and be persistent.

I’m going to talk to you today about Science Gallery, I want to talk to you about the way we create our programmes, I want to talk to you about how we try and include people in that process, how the programmes are participative but it’s not just about the end-user’s participation it’s about participation in the creative process.

And then I’m going to talk to you about a project we’re working on at the moment to grow this approach worldwide through the Global Science Gallery network.

So, this [unintelligible] is [unintelligible] was creativity and discovery where art and science collide. It was great to hear Zac talk yesterday about boring digital [unintelligible] in many ways Science Gallery is a boring participatory institution of sorts. We were established in 2008 so we’re younger than Facebook, [unintelligible] many of [unintelligible] here are centuries old. So we expected to have about 50,000 visitors in the gallery [unintelligible], and recently we’ve just topped 400,000 every year.

So it’s been a real success in Dublin where [unintelligible] young adults, so people aged [unintelligible] and it’s interesting to think about age groups in terms of inclusion because I guess most of the time in some of the more traditional arts institutions in Ireland actually it’s young people who are being excluded so we make a big effort to try and include them. [unintelligible] I guess some big problems globally, worldwide, climate change, hunger, disease. Science Gallery is a place where you can ask questions about the future, what kind of future you want to have. We bring together artists, scientists, designers to think about possible futures, to provoke people with questions about the future, and to draw them into conversations about their own futures.

I guess you could say we are part of the STEM to STEAM movement which you’ll be familiar with the term [unintelligible] we’re really, I guess, injecting the arts into STEM subjects as well. You know there’s so much [unintelligible] science and the arts, and we try and [unintelligible] that out.

We’ve got an ever-changing programme, we do four exhibitions every year so there’s never a permanent collection, there’s nothing in the gallery which is there every time young people come to visit so it’s ever-changing and dynamic so people like to come back.

And hopefully we’re hoping that through our activity we’re fostering, I guess, the next generation of creative thinkers whether it be in science, or the arts, or in other areas.

Presenter: So this is Science Gallery, but I want to talk not about Science Gallery, I wanted to step away for a moment from the arts institutions and think a little bit about the environment in which Science Gallery exists.

So, Joseph Beuys said, I think it was in the Seventies, ‘everyone is an artist’ and I think it’s funny because, you know, it’s artists who started thinking about how can we draw people into more participatory roles with art, how can we imagine … reimagine the role of the public around the same time the Fluxus movement was examining ways to involve other people, you know, really creating kind of these DIY works and having this DIY aesthetic that was drawing people into conversations that they weren’t part of before.

You know recently things have changed, so we’ve moved away from Do It Yourself and we’ve moved into Doing It With Others. And I guess this is also symptomatic of how culture has changed. And that links to what Zac was saying yesterday, I mean so much has changed. When Science Gallery was born in 2008 this is what was happening, I mean the App Store was being launched, Obama was being elected, Sheryl Sandberg had just joined Facebook, and the large Hadron Collider had just been switched on, this was a new world that we were becoming born into.

A lot of cat GIFs, you know, how can you compete for people’s attention in a world of cat GIFs? So this is one of the big challenges we face. I think we can all identify with at least one cat here, right?

So how do you compete with the selfie in the museum, how can you convince people to put down their phones and actually engage with the ideas?

There’s three core values in Science Gallery that we always look to bring through any of the work and programming that we do. They’re very simple, they’ve been part of our work since 2008 when we were born, they are connect, so we like to connect to people, not just connect with them but connect to their interests and help them connect to one another. Participation, I mean, again, you know, a kind of a buzzword now but in 2008 it was something that was only really emerging and it’s been part of the bedrock of what we do since we started up.

Surprise is an interesting one because there was somebody else today who spoke about surprise, the 52 surprises, which I loved. And I think, you know, surprise is the really difficult thing to deliver, you know, you can … it’s easy to talk about connecting with people, and it’s easy to offer, you know, opportunities to participate, but how can you surprise them. So this is one of the most interesting ones I think.

So how have arts institutions changed in the last couple of decades, they’ve moved from being specialist organisations to being … or to asking questions instead of trying to provide answers. They’re not trying to infer knowledge; they’re trying to draw you into conversations. They’re smaller, they’re more agile, they’re focusing on the future rather than the past sometimes. They’re asking questions about the future. They’re more participatory, a lot of talk about meeting, being a meeting place, this weekend as well. They’re more conversational. For Science Gallery we’re also free, and I know that’s something that’s part of a discourse here in the States, and Science Gallery in Dublin is funded through a mix of funding which is kind of a hybrid of the European and the US model so it’s about a third corporate and philanthropic funding, about a third earned income, and about a third comes from the government and from the university to which it’s linked, Trinity College, Dublin.

I guess the big things that have changed is that arts institutions have changed from being exclusive to inclusive, or at least are working on doing so. They’re changing from doing it to or for others to doing it with others, and that’s in doing everything that they do. Essentially we’re working towards becoming a science gallery, a creative platform for other people’s ideas. We want to draw their ideas, their perspectives into the conversation.

This is a photo I love from Science Gallery, so it shows … I guess we’re focused on 15 to 25 year olds, as I said, because it’s at that time when people are considering alternative futures so it’s the time when they’re making decisions about their courses, it’s the time when they’re making decisions about their careers, so it’s a really important time to help people discover their interests. I know when I was 16 and 18 years old I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I’m still kind of, you know, working on it.

So this photo in any case shows a scene in Science Gallery during an exhibition called Risk Lab which was all about, I guess, the science of risk but was presented through, I guess … we turned the gallery into a kind of geeked up casino. So in this picture you see [Jo Rowe], she’s one of our student mediators, and I’ll talk about them in a second, but talking to two students from the university and talking to two tourists who just happened to be in town, so they’re sitting down at a blackjack table, they’re discussing the mathematics of risk, playing blackjack, and they’re actually hooked up to galvanic skin receptors so their stress levels are being actively monitored. So … and that’s like that data is becoming part of research which this … this artwork was actually part of a research project.

So at the same time they’re talking with the mediator, and there’s been a lot of talk about interpretation. For us it’s all about generating real conversations between people. So our student mediators are briefed to go out onto the floor, to start conversations with people, to ask them questions, to find out what their interests are. Sometimes they’ll be specialists themselves, they might come from neuroscience or they might come from psychology, but they’ll always have a kind of a broad ability to speak about many subjects and we find that people really connect with them because they’re just two people having a conversation about something that’s kind of interesting to everybody.

I wanted to show you a couple of examples of works from Science Gallery but this one people love, actually. It was from one of our earlier shows and it was called Kids Culture. So this is what happens when you ask your audience to kiss agar plates and leave them on the wall for a few weeks, so kind of gross, right. Actually the really bad ones apparently are from people with beards, so unfortunate for me I guess.

We’ve asked people for all kinds of things, not just to kiss agar plates, we’ve asked them for their DNA, for their blood, for their dreams, for their failures in, I guess, this drive to be participatory, to draw them into research projects, and to really engage them. And, you know, I guess the essence of it is that we’re all about people and ideas, and that’s the reason we’re doing this work.

But what I’d like to ask is how can you become a platform for people and their ideas that will involve and draw in underserved communities. And, you know, we’ve been talking about inclusion and we’ve been talking about engagement but we haven’t really defined either yet, and maybe we will in the panel.

But, you know, I see them as flipsides of the same thing. You know if you can ensure a diversity of people and a diversity of ideas in your institution then the chances are you’re going to be doing ok in terms of inclusion.

For us inclusion starts and programme development starts in creating common ground for people, and I guess as an organisation that straddles science and art it’s something we’re used to. We have to deal with the normal perceptions of each of these broad disciplines I guess where some people will look at artists and think what a bunch of fruit loops. Well this is actually a real comment from that exhibition that Marina Abramović did in London. Fruit loops are not a cereal by the way in Europe they’re … they mean crazy people.

And you know this is the perception of science often is Bunsen burners, and lab coats, and this kind of thing, so we’re always coming up against that, and even when we bought a show to New York in 2011 you know there was a buzz about art science being a new trend, you know, it can’t just be … people can’t just be open to them living together and possibly that they’ve … that these two disciplines are intricately linked.

Another type of institution that has been trying to beat silos, we’ve talked a lot about silos in the last couple of days, are universities. This is Trinity College, Dublin where Science Gallery was pioneered. This is the long room, you might recognise from Star Wars, the nerds out there amongst you, so this is the campus of Trinity College, Dublin, and you can see … it’s a 400-year-old campus, it’s almost something that Tim should be doing activity in. The cross here is the arts and humanities which were originally built 400 years ago when Queen Elizabeth I was involved in establishing the university.   And down on the right you’ll see the sciences, engineering, maths, they’re kind of completely separated, but like physically separated by the architecture of the campus which I’ve always found kind of interesting.

But even more interesting is the fact that it’s the sports fields and the bar that brings people together in the middle of the campus. Sports and alcohol bring people together no matter if they’re scientists, or they’re studying English literature. This is the Science Gallery in the pink so some people call this area of campus Shutter Island but thankfully more and more people have been coming to it in recent years.

So how can we break down the boundaries between disciplines, between ideas. I love this quote from Yo-Yo Ma who talks about the edge effect where two different types of ecological zones meet. He says in that transition zone because of the influence of two ecological communities [helping] each other you find the greatest diversity of life as well as the greatest number of new life forms. And this is something we really believe.

We see the commonalities between science and art. Arthur Miller the Art Historian actually talks about artists and scientists both being researchers in … you know, essentially just researchers, they just have different methodologies. We see creativity, research, innovation, critical thinking, discovery, debate, these are all common to both art and science. So in many ways when we start to try and bring ideas together we have to try and identify who are the people who are interested in coming together and breaking down these boundaries with us.

Sometimes we say transdisciplinary. I recently heard somebody talk about being anti-disciplinary.

So this is our model for programme development, it’s not something I’m going to spend a long time talking about because obviously it’s kind of complex, but suffice to say we’re … you know, essentially we’re focused on public engagement. On the left on the right in the pink you can see how we connect our audiences with our programme and the type of programmes we create, and on the top and the bottom you can see our programme development process which is what I want to actually talk about.

We start off with the Leonardo Group who are a group of 50 kind of leading thinkers in Ireland, and they’re everything from architects, to designers, to scientists, they’re from all different backgrounds, all different ability levels, and they come together twice a year to discuss new themes for our exhibitions, and that’s where it all starts, thinking about what are big themes that will appeal to many different types of people.

Then once we’ve generated the theme we go out to find ideas, so how do we get those ideas, well between our open call process, from going and speaking to schools, from asking our existing community essentially and finding new ideas from other communities. These are some of the themes that we’ve looked at, so everything from infection which opened the week the swine flu epidemic hit Ireland, surface tension which opened the week unprecedented flooding happened in Dublin which was about the future of water, and most recently secret has opened in Science Gallery, Dublin exploring I guess surveillance, privacy, and the issues that are coming to the fore at the moment.

So 60 percent of our ideas come from our open call process, and 81 percent of those people are collaborating with us for the first time. This is the average over the seven years we’ve been around. More than half of those projects are new projects, so we’re not just collecting existing ideas, people are actually generating original, new ideas and coming to us with their own views, their own ideas, and we’re giving them a platform to share them with new people.

This is a platform which we’ve developed ourselves. It might not seem like a big deal but anybody who’s done an open call for any project before will know how much goes into administering open calls, and with the growth of the global network we’ve known we’ve needed some more kind of digital, I guess, support to take in those ideas.

Now to put it in context, Science Gallery would fit in the corridors of the IMA, so it’s quite a small organisation and we only have 12 staff in each of the galleries, so … there’s only one gallery open so far, so these kind of tools are really helpful for us in terms of administering these kind of processes. It’s where people can come and they can ask questions about the process, they can ask questions about the theme, it’s where we can respond to them, talk to them about their ideas, reassure people, where curators, researchers, and other people we bring together to create programmes can go and they can look at the ideas as they come in, they can share ideas on the programme with each other, and work from, I guess, in the most recent open call nearly 900 people submitted or established profiles submitting over 500 original ideas, and through the process we worked them down to just over 50 ideas.

So, you know, there’s so much involved in this and there’s such a diversity of prospectives coming in. We’ve got people from 61 countries asking a bunch of questions, we’ve got everyone, the teams in Science Gallery, 19 people, nearly 900 comments about those works, sharing ideas, and whittling it down to the 50 that actually get selected for the final show.

The types of people that we involve in our shows are anyone from animators, to designers, to psychologists, to students and even a magician we had in residency in the gallery for two or three months who kept playing tricks on us all the time which was kind of fun.

So what about including the ideas of young people? Well we run a number of programmes in which it’s very important for us to ensure that there’s representation from underrepresented groups. In Ireland the big challenges in terms of inclusion are really … have been around poverty, bridging poverty gap, also ensuring representation in terms of gender, sexuality, and that kind of thing. So we actively try and make sure that we represent the main, I guess, issues that are happening in Ireland.

This is a group from our idea translation course, so these are our students who come into Science Gallery, they come into us from secondary school students, from colleges, and we’re bringing them together to create their own ideas through design thinking processes in response to our open calls for our exhibitions, and then featuring their ideas in our shows.

This is a project from one of those groups called [Opi] Milk, you probably haven’t heard of it yet because it’s a speculative design project, so these students I guess they’re very aware of the chronic disease, or chronic pain, so they wanted to create a painkiller, so their idea was to turn cows essentially into bovine bioreactors that could be milked and genetically modified to produce painkillers. So, again, kind of, you know, incredible wild imagination.

And this idea actually ended up at Ars Electronica which is a big media art festival in Europe. So these students, 15 and 16 years old, suddenly had their idea propelled alongside some of the biggest artists in the world.

So what other kind of ideas do we have in Science Gallery? Well these are some of the ideas that have come through the open call process. This is the Euthanasia Rollercoaster; in many ways I think it kind of speaks for itself. You know, again asking questions about overpopulation, about euthanasia, about the future of the human race. This is a … I guess one approach of asking those questions.

This was a work called Loitering Theatre from our show Hack the City which was back in 2012 I believe, but before kind of drones became something that was of … kind of people … everybody knew what drones were, and these filmmakers sent drones into prohibitive airspace essentially in Dublin, that’s our President’s house, it’s very similar to the White House, same designer. But, you know, these filmmakers actually sent drones into the American Embassy grounds and we were terrified, I was waiting for the call from the police to say, you know, they’ve been arrested, or it was shot down, or whatever, but apparently when they crashed the drone in the Embassy’s gardens the security guard actually walked over to it, picked it up, and brought it back to them and said ‘you lost this.’

So … but this work actually went on to change and inform the law around low-level airspace in Ireland. It kind of started that conversation so it was quite a provocative work which people loved. [Body] Is a Big [Place] was an incredible performance for one of our shows called Oscillator which is about kind of movements, rhythms, and obviously one movement and rhythm we’re all familiar with is heartbeats. So Helen re-animated two pig hearts in the gallery, live, using the same process he would use for a heart transplant, obviously something that which is just kind of terrifying but beautiful in its own way. You know, and there was like little kids in the gallery looking at this and saying … and kind of, you know, disgusted but they were just so interested in it and they thought it was beautiful and I was really surprised at the reaction.

Stranger Visions. Stranger Visions was a project in which the artist Heather asked us to collect a few cigarette butts. You might have seen this project. Took the cigarette butts, profiled the DNA that she took off the cigarette butts, and then 3D printed heads based on the kind of genetic markers in the DNA, so we were kind of looking at our audience and asking our audience, you know, could this have been you, are you a smoker, when the heads came into the gallery.

Human Cheese. Speaks for itself in many ways. This was a project which went massively viral. Originally [Cicil] who’s an olfactory artist and Christina created the cheese from the bellybutton fluff of Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the tears of Olafur Eliasson, so … but also went on to make cheese from a few of our other community members including myself. It’s kind of gross. So obviously it kind of travelled far and wide pretty fast.

You know we don’t think of Science Gallery as being the end point, we think of it as being the starting place for ideas, and this is a good example. This was from Infectious, the exhibition in which we had author tags attached to all the visitors as they came in to model contagion in the gallery. It then went on to be used in Hospital, and this is a scientific paper which was published from that research, and that’s something that’s happened many times from Science Gallery experimental projects, the data has fed into real scientific research. So, again, scientists look at it as a really great way of getting data for their projects.

Unsurprisingly I guess the conclusion was that nurses are the spread of contagion in hospital situations, so it was an interesting one for hospitals.

So Human Cheese, I mean in terms of inclusion sometimes it’s interesting to think about not your … just your own activity but how does your reflection of your work in the media influence inclusion. Well, you know, it’s great to get Gizmodo talking about it, or Wired talking about ideas that is in the gallery but that’s really for us in terms of audience. How can you reach new audiences and really, you know, I kind of prefer often when ideas in Science Gallery end up in tabloid newspapers because it’s normally an audience that we can’t reach in Science Gallery directly, or we find it more difficult to reach those audiences so we’re delighted if the Daily Mail pick up on it for example.

So what’s next for Science Gallery, we’re building a global network of galleries and again it kind of … it’s an ambitious project but we’ve been touring our exhibitions around the world for the last three or four years. We have four exhibitions open around the world now next week in Kuala Lumpur, in Tai Chung in Tai Pei, in Barcelona next week, and then there’s one open in Dublin as well. We’ve confirmed two other galleries, one in London and one in Bangalore, and we’re about to announce our fourth gallery so stay tuned over the next couple of weeks.

So we’re hoping that this network can be something that’s not just a kind of franchise kind of situation, that’s not what it’s going to be. We’re hoping to connect the network and not just the galleries but the communities of people around each of the galleries in a way which is more decentralised or distributed than being kind of centralised, so that’s something that’s kind of in the back of our mind all the time, thinking about sharing ideas from gallery to gallery.

You know, in speaking about Do It With Others it gets a … it’s a whole other level of complication when you start to work with other institutions, when you start to work with communities beyond your own, so these are the posters for some of the shows we’ve sent on tour and I guess Human Plus, this is in Catalan actually, had been kind of challenging in terms of matching creative visions of two institutions but it’s been a really enriching process for the exhibition where it’s been almost fully re-curated and new work has been added to it from Spain, so it’s again enriching it with more diverse ideas.

This is the site for Science Gallery in Kings College, so it’s just at the base of The Shard. You can just about see [Tim’s] palace behind The Shard there, so it’s in the centre of London and it’s going to be a great site. It’s shutting down a McDonalds which is currently in the site so that might be a world first, closing a McDonalds to build a gallery, so you can follow them at [SciGalleryLon] on Twitter as they work towards opening the gallery in 2017.

In Bangalore we’re also opening a gallery in partnership with Indian Institute of Science, so The Times of India it was front-page news for them, that’s a national newspaper in a country of 1.2 billion people, so we were delighted that they’re so excited about it. So we can’t wait to get things up and running there. Again, it’s going to be, you know, a very different audience to the audience in Dublin, and completely different challenges when it comes to inclusion.

Some learnings we’ve had over the years, embrace failure, there’s been a lot of talk about failure this weekend and experimentation. We did a whole show about failure last year called Fail Better, it was based on this famous quote from Samuel Beckett, ‘ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.’

So it’s something we’ve really tried to embrace, and we try and embrace this when we’re working with all different kinds of people. Everything’s a prototype, even the artworks that are in the galleries sometimes are prototypes and require constant maintenance and fixing.

Empowering communities. Science Gallery, London, the team who’ve started programming there have handed over complete editorial control of their media around their shows to their community, so they have a youth media team who produces a lot of video content and written content, so this is a really exciting development for them.

Not talking down to people, this is also people have mentioned this this weekend, so don’t talk down, how do you not talk down, you just chat to people normally, you don’t use jargon, you know, obviously we’re born in the social media generation, Science Gallery was, so I guess we’re more of that conversational tone.

Ask provocative questions to spark conversations, so this was a living leather jacket, so obviously asking questions about the use of real leather when you can just grow a leather jacket from skin cells.

Help others build social capital, so how can you help people who don’t necessarily have access to the networks that some people do, or the ideas that some people do to build their social capital. This is something we put a lot of emphasis on through our inclusion work.

Encourage impish curiosity was a phrase one of our recent curators used which I kind of love. Reach out to global communities, this was one of our teams that we sent who actually developed the Opi Milk to a European partner. We work a lot with European partners in Europe, maybe 12 or 16 different institutions, so … and this really helps us again to enrich our programme, and to share our ideas, and to meet other kinds of people, so it’s been really great to work as part of that process.

And then I guess make the organisation a place people want to make part of their life stories. This is just a nice story from the last couple of weeks where Connor and Shaun had had their first date in Science Gallery a couple of years ago and they got engaged there a couple of weeks ago, so we’re really delighted to see this, so …

Some of the challenges we’ve encountered, siloed resistance, we’ve talked a lot about silos but I guess beating perceptions of being too arty, or being too sciencey, it’s something that we’re still kind of working on. Internal alignment, again, just about internal silos rather than external. Resources, you know because when you’re free it’s very hard to scale in terms of visitors, and when you’re doing very resource intensive work it can be really challenging to have the resources. And then open call fatigue, you know, when somebody might have applied five or 10 times for open calls maybe there’ll come a point where they’ll just stop applying. So we’re thinking about new and creative ways to stop that happening.

So before I finish up I just wanted to ask you guys, you know, how can you connect with people beyond your own institutions? Is it a good idea? You know, we’re creating this global network and we’re really excited about the ideas that it’s going to bring, the connections that it’s going to bring, but how can big organisations connect with other organisations, other communities maybe far away, maybe close, just to enrich the mix of ideas and people in your organisation.

So that’s it, thank you very much.

Fionn: Any questions? Late in the day? Want to hit the bar? There we go, one over here.

Audience: Hi, I resonated with the line you kind of threw out in the middle there about anti-disciplinary.

Fionn: Right.

Audience: And just wondering how that kind of fits with your beautiful Venn diagram of art and science?

Presenter: Well I guess the anti-disciplinary is an idea that I just heard in the corridors in the last few weeks which I really liked, probably just because it’s quite rebellious and, you know, I guess it’s a provocation more than a statement from me personally but I just liked the idea of abandoning the concept of disciplines altogether and just thinking about creativity, thinking about ideas for their own merit.

Any more questions? Ok, I think … one more?

Audience: Hi, thanks. Sorry to throw out a question at the last minute. I was actually wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about your relationship with Trinity College?

Fionn: Sure. So I guess we were established by Trinity College and the connection with the university is really important because in many ways Science Gallery acts as a porous membrane between the university and the city. You know it draws people into the university that might never have gone into a university before, and this is really important in terms of inclusion because you’ll have people who come into Science Gallery and they don’t even realise they’re on the campus of a university, you know. And so it might be their first experience of this kind of institution.

And we do hear … we actually have questions in kind of the entrance survey for Trinity College now and, you know, it’s coming back, the data is coming back as suggesting that Science Gallery’s actually having an influence on people who are applying to study there. So this is great for us. Yeah, absolutely. But it’s brilliant to be in part of a university as well in terms of inclusion because, you know, they obviously have their own access programmes so we can kind of link in with those access programmes and provide a platform for creative conversations, so we put big emphasis on that and we also hire people from access programmes, we … you know, we have a lot of interns who might come from the student body who are all fully paid, and there’s a number of other initiatives with the university itself so I mean it’s integral to what we do. Yeah.

Audience: Could you talk a little bit about how your initial funding structure was and then what it is now, and how you’re looking at, you know, if you’re moving away from a university campus to being in central London, or San Diego, or whatever. How’s that … how did it start and how do you see that working out on that level?

Fionn: Ok, so the way it started out was, I guess, the university invested a lot in establishing the gallery. It was part of a capital project which was already happening, and over the years we’ve built our earned revenue stream considerably where now it’s a third of all of our income in Dublin.

So I guess in terms of the future every science gallery will be linked with the university, will actually be built by the university, so it will depend on each city but they’ll be looking for funding from corporate and philanthropic sources, they’ll be looking for government funding, you know, it’s like any project they’ll shake the trees and try and get the money wherever they can. And they’ve already had some great successes in that respect. But building earned income has been a big emphasis for us especially as an institution that doesn’t charge admission.

Touring income is something as well which has been great for the Dublin gallery, something which has built in the last couple of years, income from the touring exhibitions so that’s been really valuable for them.

Ok. Thank you.

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Fionn Kidney, Global Engagement Manager with Science Gallery International spoke at MuseumNext Indianapolis in September 2015 about how cultural organizations can meaningfully engage their communities in the creative process.

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