Working to make change

How can we design exhibitions with a lower environmental impact?

The way in which we plan, design and operate exhibitions has an important role to play in reducing our overall impact. We have been working to reduce our scope 3 emissions and have developed a toolkit to guide decision-making whilst developing exhibitions and displays.

THE CATALYST
For the Design Museum, the idea of producing a Guide emerged out of our Waste Age: What can design do? exhibition which took place in the museum from October 2021 to February 2022 and highlighted a change in the culture of design.

The project team commissioned consultancy URGE Collective to conduct a life cycle assessment (more details here) of this exhibition and used the results to help us make more informed decisions in the future, identify areas that needed increased focus, and share lessons with colleagues in the sector. Together we created an Exhibition Design Guide and Impact Model to help the museum track and calculate the carbon emissions related to each exhibition.

THE IMPACT MODEL
In 2023, we made our Impact Model available online. The initial model was designed to help the museum to track and calculate the carbon emissions related to each exhibition. As well as recording data, it is also intended to aid decision-making during the design process itself, allowing the exhibition team to compare the consequences of, for example, choosing one material over another.

We have now retired this model and are training our teams to use the Gallery Climate Coalition’s new free online tool (find out more here).

THE GUIDE
The Exhibition Design Guide examines the opportunities for reducing impact across areas including shipping and transport, programming, design and construction, materials, communications and energy use. It looks at where impacts are made in those areas and what to consider in order to reduce them. In addition, the guide advises on how to embed the consideration of impact reduction in the museum’s design process and how to work with commissioned designers, contractors and suppliers to communicate and deliver on the ambition to reduce its impact, develop effective ways of working and ensure it captures the information needed in order to measure its carbon impact in future.

While the Guide is based on our work at the Design Museum, we hope that it offers some core principles that are useful to other institutions and enables them to reflect on their own working processes. Of course, we recognise that exhibition-making is only one of the ways in which museums create emissions.

Supported by Future Observatory and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this Toolkit has been created with the intention to be shared and used across the wider museum community, feel free to share with your colleagues and adapt the resources for your projects.

Find out more about the museum’s research, developed with URGE, on reducing the Environmental Impact of Exhibitions via Future Observatory’s Cultural Policy fellowships.

You can download our guide below:

The guide are now available in all 6 UN official languages:
The CHINESE, FRENCH, RUSSIAN and SPANISH versions have been developed with support from consultancy Culture Connect.

ARABIC
Working in collaboration with Art Jameel, URGE Collective have created an updated version of the guide (which includes local case studies) in English and ARABIC for the MENAT region.

Working in partnership with Art Fund and The Exhibitions Group, we have developed a new touring tool to support museum professionals to ask the right questions at the right time when developing touring exhibitions and displays. It also signposts a variety of resources to help teams gather data and access further research to make informed decisions. This tool was created for UK institutions developing or co-producing touring exhibitions, but can be adapted for other types of projects.

See what other organisations are doing and get involved in upcoming events.