This Is Our Playground

On the 25th April 2012 the University of Ulster held a hack day at the Ulster Museum, participants developed innovative interactive experiences within the context of a traditional museum setting. The interactive experiences that participants develop will question the notion of play in the museum, recontextualising the collections and gallery spaces to create new modes for the public to investigate and interrogate the spaces of the museum as an institution and develop new dialogues with the exhibits.A unique feature of this project is the limited involvement of the museum, whilst aware that the hack day is taking place the museum is not directly involved in the planning or running of the event, instead students will observe the normal museums rules and regulations, and in many ways will look and behave like traditional visitors. The aim of this project is to work outside the traditionally slow, often bureaucratic management structure of museums as a means to explore how time constrained working can facilitate innovation within museums.After the event the interactive experiences that students produce will be distributed freely under a creative commons license and will be available for download from this website.