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Today I went to Manchester Art Gallery, and visited the Clore Interactive Gallery. It’s a fantastic fully interactive gallery about the art collections which is aimed at children but it’s lots of fun for adults as well. There’s some really well thought out exhibits, both computer and physical. I’m told the gallery opened in 2001 and I would say that it’s still at the forefront of interactive interpretation of art. One of my favourite exhibits was the one where you get to dress up and pose like a painting of two people climbing the Jungfraujock. In another where you have to sit very still to understand how it feels to have your portrait painted - move just a little bit and its ruined!

Today I gave a talk at the BIG Event, a conference organised by the British Interactive Group (BIG). BIG is a British organisation for everyone involved in interactive communication but most of its members come from science centres so there’s a lot of science demos. Best demo was definitely the guy who brought two small pipistrelle bats to the conference in a small box. They seemed quite happy in the box and were admired by everyone. My session was called Tools for the job and discussed how you should go about chosing the right type of exhibit for your exhibition. I was lucky to be joined by visitor studies expert Ben Gammon and Steve Pizzey from Science Projects.We had a good attendance and it all went very well.