News Story

SPICE project is launched

Paul Mulholland, Tuesday 19 May 2020

SPICE is a 3 year EU project developing new technologies and methods that enable groups at risk of exclusion to actively participate in culture through a process we term citizen curation. Our approach to citizen curation supports virtual and physical visitors to the museum to engage in two interrelated processes of interpretation and reflection. Citizens will be supported in developing their own interpretations of museum objects, using techniques such as collecting and storytelling. They will also be supported in reflecting on the varied perspectives revealed in the interpretations of other visitor groups.

Rather than converging on the city of Bologna, the first meeting of the SPICE project consortium was conducted virtually between 6th and 15th May. The meeting brought together representatives from three museums (Design Museum Helsinki, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Fondazione Torino Musei), three SMEs (GVAM Interactive Guides, PadaOne Games, CELI Language Technology) and eight universities (Bologna, Italian National Research Council, Aalto, Aalborg, Open University, Complutense University of Madrid, Turin, Haifa). KMI was represented at the meeting by Paul Mulholland, Enrico Daga and Trevor Collins.

The aim of the meeting was to plan our upcoming activities which will focus on the co-design of the citizen curation methods and supporting technologies through case studies in five countries: Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Israel. In each case study a museum serves as a hub to support citizen curation with specific target groups including older people, asylum seekers, young people living with illness, Deaf people and children from different religious and secular communities.