Pluralist Exhibition Design Methods: anti-colonial graphic design in British ethnographic museums.

When researching museums as frames that are born of colonial and extractive collecting practices, it is evident that some museums are addressing these complex historical legacies, yet their exhibition graphic design remains unchanged. This oversight informs the basis of this practice-based research, in which museum

exhibition graphic design will act as both the subject being researched, and a research tool to explore pluralist, anti-colonial methods. Exhibition design is a curatorial practice that includes graphic and spatial design to develop, and support displays of knowledge and advance particular kinds of narrative. Focusing specifically on the role of exhibition

graphic design in upholding dominant, linear narratives through hierarchy/emphasis of text, image, visual/aesthetic connotations, and relationship to spatial environments, experiments with printed/digital museum making (captions, information panels, interactives, websites, etc.) and facilitation of learning

events/experiences within exhibition spaces, this research will explore how this discipline can act as an intervention in British ethnographic museum knowledge generation and distribution. Within the research, pluralism, the act of holding two or more ideas/knowledges at one time, is informed by the

theoretical framing and methods from Design Otherwise and Design Pluralism due to their positive implications of sitting with complexity, networks and multiples, and Anti-Colonial Theory, primarily due to the 'active' association with term anti- and its relationship to practice (doing, making, organising, etc.). Working within an

institution that arguably cannot be decolonised, an anti-colonial research-practice could offer new, pluralist methods and ideas for museum knowledge. Through audits of existing exhibition graphic design practices, co-designed workshops with museum outreach, and interactive exhibition graphic design interventions to explore plural readings of museum knowledge, the

practice-research will determine what museum audiences understand as, and hope for pluralism in British ethnographic museum exhibitions, and how graphic design could enable multiple narratives or perspectives to exist in conjunction in exhibition practices.