Where will you find a troublesome bandicoot? A clever use for QR codes? Jasper Fforde's desk? It can only be The Story Museum, who have set about the task of making a public consultation fun, and came up with a collaborative metafictional spaceship. Truly, collecting data has never been so inventive.
The Story Museum is unique in many respects, not least in opening before it is finished. They currently have part of the building filled with exhibits and interactive displays but they're also well into the planning for the next Chapter. As part of this process they need to find out what the museum should be filled with. What are the most iconic stories? What are the best moments? How do people like to meet their stories - through films, books in bed, audiotapes, graphic novels or hearing them from friends? What are the objects that the museum could contain which sum up those stories, and they're not just wanting lovely print copies of old books - the Bodleian does that already. Would you prefer to see the pea that the princess slept on or Gandalf's staff? And so to answer this and many other questions they have invented a dual-medium interactive project involving the good ship Ever After.
The idea is that the Ever After, a spaceship, has gone off to visit the planet of stories. There are continents for the different genres and media of stories, including Bardland where you'll find poetry, Fantasea, and Interactivia which has regions for games, RPGs and more active storytelling styles.
The ship is crewed by a talented team of storytellers and illustrators including Katy Riddell, Joseph Coelho, and Anna Conomos (who specialises in spoken traditional storytelling), and is captained by Nicolette Jones. They will go where they are bid, and record their adventures on the Ever After blog, where there will also be competitions, more information about particular questions they'd like answered, and illustrations of what the crew have found.
In the museum itself there is a room (designed by Tom Piper MBE, the artist behind the Poppies at the Tower of London) decked out in full Voyage theme, with suitcases, shipwrecks, and a flying shed. Here you can give your opinions via a set of interactive exhibits in different formats: being interviewed about spoken stories, acting out a film, or hammering away on an old fashioned typewriter to describe moments from books, for example. There'll be a mystery object from somewhere in the story universe. Can you tell the story it might have come from?
All these activities are designed to be fun and interactive, and you can engage in them quickly and singly or go round the whole room putting a lot of thought into all your answers. Young kids can imagine the spaceship and the fictional world, adults can see through to the consultation exercise at the heart of things. It works on every level, from the silliest to the serious. And it's also a flexible process, where the questions can change as the museum gather a solid body of evidence on one topic and move on to another. If you want to be part of the in-depth data gathering you can get further involved with focus groups. (If you are an author, or run a book group, the museum would like to hear from you.) But if you just want to add your favourite fairytale that's useful too.
Despite its universities and international reputation Oxford also has its share of low literacy rates, and part of the Museum's brief is to inspire a love of stories in children who don't much like reading. One of the ways they do this is to read part of a story and then make that story come alive, quite literally. They recently got some children to read a bit of Harry Potter and then play Quidditch with the Oxford University Quidditch Team (yes, there really is one). It is this leap from words on a page to the ideas and worlds that they conjure up that gives voracious readers their love of reading. And this is exactly what the museum has done in the Ever After project: take a conceptual mission and give it a reality, make a steering group into just that, steering a spaceship as well as the future of the museum.
The project runs from Friday 10th February 2017 through to the Autumn, and you'll be able to catch up with the mission at any point on the blog. To help with funding bids the first round of data will be gathered up and sent off in July. Meanwhile, of course, there are lots of other things going on at the museum too - storytelling, animation workshops, author interviews, a whole lot of half term shenanigans, and another exhibition opening soon on the theme of illustrations. And the cafe and shop are still bright, warm, welcoming and full of cake and literary-related treasure.