Untitled - Narodowe Centrum Kultury

62
Takeaway
Museum
The objective of the
Takeaway Museum is to
bring the cultural offering
of the National Museum
in Warsaw to children and
youth who cannot visit the
Museum or have limited
access to activities held in
the Museum’s galleries due
to disability, illness or life
circumstances.
f
or years the National Museum
in Warsaw has welcomed visitors
with motoricity, sensory
and intellectual disabilities to its gallery and
temporary exhibitions. Statistics, however,
show that attendance among this group is
scarce. The same is true for children and
youth threatened with exclusion due to social
or economic reasons. Research conducted
among teachers and educators has shown
that it is beyond their financial and logistical
capabilities to visit the Museum with their
students. Special schools, children’s hospitals,
care centres and social therapeutic centres
never organise visits to cultural centres
or do it only occasionally.
special needs schools. To “take the museum
away” we needed a specially designed
packaging – functional, visually attractive
and containing teaching aids that
could be configured to facilitate workshops
and help instructors working in extremely
different settings with different-size
groups. To achieve this, we had to enlist
the help of professional designers. The design
brief was as follows: attractive objects
and packaging, functional design of
the packaging, safety for educators and
participants, ease of movement on public
transport.
The very first meeting of the educators
and designers showed that a convergence
of two different perspectives can be
very inspiring. Both groups formed a creative
and dynamic team whose members
were enthusiastic about a project involving
many challenges and requiring huge conceptual
research and physical effort. The
the project
The museum educators decided to develop
interactive workshops to explain what
an art museum is, what collections it has,
what an artist’s studio looked like in the
past, and how we can interpret works of
art. We set ourselves a challenging task
– to design the workshops so that we
could take them to very different places
such as hospital wards, care centres and