Co-creating accessible guides for the Natural History Museum's new gardens

The Brief

Smartify worked with the The Natural History Museum (NHM) to produce a digital audio guide for the Museum’s new Urban Nature Project gardens. The goal was to inspire visitors to feel connected to, and become active carers of nature. The guide also had to be open and accessible for people with visual impairments.

The Solution

Smartify started this project with a Creative Workshop with key stakeholders from the NHM Urban Nature Project as well as a focus group with young people (including those with visual impairments, wheelchair users and with Special Educational Need and Disabilities). These focus groups helped us define a creative approach, tone and guidelines for helping navigate people through the gardens.

We then set about recording interviews with NHM scientists, youth climate advocates and horticultural experts to add a richness and plurality of voices to the guide. This was combined with spoken word poetry created by a group of visually-impaired young people, led by poet and facilitator Testament.

Finally, we collected ambient sound recordings of the natural garden environment - leaves rustling and birds calling - and combined these with unique bioacoustic recordings the NHM team had  captured in the gardens, including the sounds of beetle larvae moving through a decomposing wood stack and microscopic life below their ponds surfaces. All of this built to an immersive listening experience.

What made our solution unique

Our co-creation approach led to the production of a flexible and accessible guide. For example, some people prefer a shorter, light-touch experience while others wish to dive deeper or follow a longer route through the garden.

Navigating the gardens is a challenge for blind and visually impaired visitors, so we collaborated with leading accessibility researcher Dr Hannah Thompson on our approach to guiding. Alongside core stops we created ‘layer’ stops to provide orientation through noting major markers and sounds.

Finally, the guide was developed to encourage visitors to reach out and touch certain parts of the garden such as sculptures, tiny tactile models of insects, and even some of the plant life. It also indicates moments where visitors can pause to participate in pond dipping, or lie down on custom-designed benches, gazing up at the tree foliage while listening to narrative content and more lyric storytelling about the natural life surrounding them.

Listen to a sample Urban Nature Garden audio guide stop here.

Script walkthrough with testing for visually impaired audiences for the Natural History Museum’s Urban Nature Project digital guide, 2024