purpleSTARS worked with the Ragged School Museum London helping to secure the second bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund. purpleSTARS employee Judith wrote a letter of support for the bid.

Judith with Message for Ragged School

purpleSTARS worked with plans for the new Ragged School and developed ideas for a replica sensory handling collection of Dr Barnardo’s glasses, top hat, umbrella and police whistle.

The video below shows our ideas to present to Erica the Ragged Schools Museum Director for the handling collection using Radio Frequency Identification Codes to trigger information and stories about Dr Barnardo.

We developed the ideas by doing our Sensory Expedition.

We created Wikis about Sensory Museums

Please contact k.allen@reading.ac.uk if you would like purpleSTARS to work with you.

We offer visits by our purpleSTARS team a mix of people with learning disabilities, artists and technologists.

We will explore your museum from a sensory and learning disability perspective, report back what we would like to see more of.

We can engage your staff in sensory workshops to create sensory postcards and labels.

We are developing a unique self assembly sensory label that lets your museum or visitor add a smell, sound, image or textures that directly relate to your museum.

We can create new sensory museum interactives and through inclusive workshop activities help your museum to become more inclusive and appealing for people with learning disabilities.

purpleSTARS funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) it is a follow on funded project the grant aims to create employment opportunities for people with learning disabilities working as part of a team with artists and technologists in museums. STARS stands for Sensory Technology Art Resource Specialists we choose the colour Purple as recently business has started to refer to the Purple Pound, purple has come to represent people with a disability.