Working to make change

How can we design exhibitions with a lower environmental impact?

The way in which we plan, design and operate exhibitions has an important role to play in reducing our overall impact. We have been working to reduce our scope 3 emissions and have developed a toolkit to guide decision-making whilst developing exhibitions and displays.

For the Design Museum, the idea of producing a Guide emerged out of our Waste Age: What can design do? exhibition which took place in the museum from October 2021 to February 2022 and highlighted a change in the culture of design.

As an institution, it is important that we take up the challenge in our own work, which is why we invited URGE to continue the collaboration that began on our 'Waste Age' exhibition and help us to create this guide to designing exhibitions in a more sustainable way.

Following on from the Environmental Audit of Waste Age, the Design Museum and Future Observatory commissioned URGE to collaborate on an Environmental Impact Toolkit consisting of a written guide to reducing the environmental impact of exhibition design and an open source Impact Model to measure related carbon emissions.

The Impact Model was designed to help the museum to track and calculate the carbon emissions related to each exhibition. As well as recording data, it is also intended to aid decision-making during the design process itself, allowing the exhibition team to compare the consequences of, for example, choosing one material over another.

The Guide examines the opportunities for reducing impact across areas including shipping and transport, programming, design and construction, materials, communications and energy use. It looks at where impacts are made in those areas and what to consider in order to reduce them. In addition, the guide advises on how to embed the consideration of impact reduction in the museum’s design process and how to work with commissioned designers, contractors and suppliers to communicate and deliver on the ambition to reduce its impact, develop effective ways of working and ensure it captures the information needed in order to measure its carbon impact in future.

While the Guide is based on our work at the Design Museum, we hope that it offers some core principles that are useful to other institutions and enables them to reflect on their own working processes. Of course, we recognise that exhibition-making is only one of the ways in which museums create emissions.

Supported by Future Observatory and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this Toolkit has been created by URGE with the Design Museum with the intention to be shared and used across the wider museum community. We invite feedback on improvements that can be made to both the Guide and the Impact Model.

You can download our guide and model below:

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