MindTour
Make your museum more accessible for people with a mental challenge!
At the end of December we finished the Erasmus + project Mind Tour (Mindful Tourism Services for Mentally Disordered People). For two years we have been searching for ways to make museums and tourist attractions more accessible for people with a mental challenge. In collaboration with the project partners – Tartu University and Pärnu Museum from Estonia, Latvia University and Zeit Hotel from Latvia and Thomas More Mechelen-Antwerpen as a Belgian partner – students accepted the challenge to search for creative solutions. The students of the postgraduate Space and Service Design from Thomas More started to work with us at the museum. After a three days workshop, during which they learned more about the museum and the target group, they worked out four prototypes. Every prototype had a lot of potential and was intended to find a solution for a specific need:
The first group focused on the improvement of signs and orientation in and around the building.
A second group created an educative box dedicated to our senses.
The third group invented a game, in which doctor Guislain and the visitor himself played the main part.
The fourth group developed a pre-service permitting the target group and their coaches to prepare for their visit.
This last prototype has been developed and is tested at the moment in the Museum Dr. Guislain. Even after the project we still want to offer this pre-service because we notice that people with a mental challenge and their coaches don’t visit a museum when they can’t prepare their visit. This can cause stress. The Mini-Guislain tries to find a solution by preparing the visitor in a pleasant and interactive way. It consists of a coach map and individual maps. The coach map especially contains information for the coach about the visit and explains how the individual map has to be used. The individual map contains, among other things, an entrance ticket, a voucher for a free drink in the café, a step-by-step plan for practical guidelines of the visit, photos from some people of the reception staff, a mini museum with stickers representing objects of art that will be searched for in the museum and a frame for the polaroid they can realize in the museum. So the Mini-Guislain is not only a pre-service, it also means an immersive experience and a souvenir for at home.
Another result of the MindTour project is a guidebook that is online available for everybody and for free. This MindTour Book wants to help touristic organizations by making their services more accessible for people with a mental challenge. The Book is the result of extensive literature search, interviews with touristic organizations, exchanges with experts working in the field of tourism or coaching people with a mental challenge and their coaches. People of health care and the target group were consulted.
Aims of the Book:
To make clear why an inclusive service is important.
To explain what a mental disability is and where you have to focus on if you want to be more inclusive as an organization.
To show how to shape your experience as a visitor and to show how service design can contribute to it.
To provide guidelines for the search of visitors’ needs and for the development and testing of prototypes within your organization.
To inform how you can communicate optimally with your target group.
The Book ends with a Self-assessment Tool: a questionnaire which permits you to check how inclusive your organization is.
The Book can be downloaded here
During the following months, we will be occupied by the administrative conclusion of the project, but MindTour clearly planted a seed, thus we keep on thinking of how we can make our museum more accessible and how we can eliminate some thresholds! To be continued.
