Methodology

In every country (Italy, Ireland and Croatia) there will be a national mixed working group made of museum professionals, blind and visual impairment experts who will work on the implementation of an accessible exhibition involving the blind from the very first steps.

Moreover, representatives from these local groups will take part in a transnational expert group that has the task to coordinate and share the experience among all partners, this will ensure homogeneity to the whole project. It will be essential to define a method and togive guidelines to every local group about actions to be done, comparing national experiences, helping in finding solutions to local problems, exchanging practices and feedback, and formalising a final flashbook.

By carrying on internationally this challenge, there will be the possibility to exchange, improve and theorize every single experience and switch from a local project to an international and replicable approach.

Indeed, one of the objectives of BEAM UP is to design and apply a method about how to make accessible to visually disable people a specific temporary exhibition or activity in a contemporary museum. The method developed and tested in the project will encompass the contents of the exhibition, the choice of works on display, the architecture of the exhibition, the contents development, the facilities to be made available, the supporting devices to be realized, the supplementary services to be activated, the public programme offered.

The decision-making phase will be followed by a planning, an operational and a monitoring and evaluation phase.All of these phases will be developed in a shared and participated manner by museum operators, blind people, experts from the world of visual impairment, professionals with heterogeneous competences in all the sectors that have to be considered In order to project, produce, manage and evaluate an accessible cultural activity.

The theme of accessibility to art for for visual disables is processed with an important bottom-up approach, because the methods and technologies available today will be further stressed, developed and tested in new products, conceived and realized with the direct intervention of visual disables.