Codesigning Access: A New Approach to Cultures of Inclusion in Museums and Galleries

In museums and galleries, access is often designed and implemented by staff and informed by regulations and guidelines. Codesign approaches have the potential to shift this understanding away from designing access “for” visitors and toward access as a creative process developed “with” visitors. This chapter focuses on the exhibition and practice-led research project Vis-ability: Artworks from the QUT Art Collection, which was presented at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Art Museum in Australia in 2019. Vis-ability represented the culmination of five years of international research into access in museums and galleries for visitors who are blind or have low vision. Literature in the field in the last three years has argued that offering visitors' choice of access resources is important; the research presented in this chapter takes this a step further in addressing the question of who should determine the choices available. This contribution, informed by critical disability studies and creative practices, offers a new approach for museum and gallery professionals to employ codesign as a method and, in turn, access as a methodology to create cultures of inclusion