Building ‘Digital Courage’ at Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton & Hove (RPM)
Jan 2019 - Feb 2020
The RPM Case Study
This case study formed part of the University of Leicester’s One by One project aimed at building digital literacy and confidence in museums. I worked with Royal Pavilion & Museums Brighton & Hove to explore ways to develop digital courage within the service and asked the question: how can we develop digital confidence in the museum workforce and empower greater personal storytelling around its collection using technology?
There were two main outcomes:
The production of a consensus-led social media blueprint for the museum service, which will be utilised in the writing of the new digital strategy as the organisation goes into independent trust.
The creation of Voices of the Royal Pavilion & Museums, a staff-led voices going behind the scenes at the museum service.
Combining Theory with Practice…
When Digital ‘Confidence’ becomes Digital ‘Courage’
As I developed my interventions in Brighton, I drew heavily on my scholarly background in Visual Culture to build a set of concepts around the democratising power of technology to help reframe the museum. I wanted to show that museum peoples’ needs and aspirations for digital need to be met at their own level, without necessarily the intervention of advanced technology or large-scale organisational change. The idea of ‘digital courage’ was evolved from digital confidence’ as ‘courage’ was felt to be a more empowering and collective term, and more consistent with RPM’s collaborative and community-driven working practices.
This framed the intention of the two final outcomes of the project. For more information on the RPM case study check out this link.
Consensus-led practice
I wanted to experiment with developing a consensus-based approach to digital at RPM where decisions were formulated by the museum people as a group, rather than decisions feeling like something bequeathed, top-down or based on the decision-making of an individual or a siloed team.