Heritage Priority Area Research Associate Colin Sterling awarded grant for new project on heritage experience design

Research Associate Colin Sterling has recently been awarded a prestigious AHRC Leadership Fellows grant (Early Career Route) as part of a highlight notice on Innovation in the Creative Economy. A brief introduction to the project is below. Further details will be available soon.

Pop-up installations, augmented realities, immersive theatres, curated destinations: the experience economy intersects with the work of heritage in multiple ways and to diverse ends. New Trajectories in Curatorial Experience Design will explore the emergence and impact of such initiatives through in-depth collaborative research with project partners in the arts and cultural sector, including the National Trust, the V&A, Barker Langham and exhibition designers MET Studio and Nissen Richards.

The notion of ‘curatorial experience design’ points in two directions at once. In the first instance it aims to capture the significant shifts currently underway in heritage interpretation, from mixed reality environments to performance-led narrative experiences. In the second it highlights the rapid uptake of co-curated and co-produced methods across the sector – participatory programmes that aim to broaden the ‘experience’ of curating to non-experts and disenfranchised groups.

How might these two trends contradict or reinforce each other as part of the emerging experience economy? To what extent is the curatorial a useful lens through which to understand these developments? In what ways might critical heritage scholarship engage productively with the processes and ideas of experiential and immersive design?

This two-year project – funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of their Leadership Fellows scheme – aims to stimulate new thinking and new design approaches across the broad field of critical-creative heritage practice.

For further information you can contact Colin at c.sterling@ucl.ac.uk.