Discover Eden project report

The Sensory Trust worked in collaboration with the Eden Project on an exciting project kindly supported by the ReDiscover Fund, a joint venture between the Millennium Commission, Wellcome Foundation and Wolfson Trust.

We were very pleased to be written into the bid to work with Eden on this project. The project brings science issues, ideas and ethics alive using humour, charm and honesty to engage all ages, abilities and a wide range of interest groups. The project is about science and its relevance to people’s everyday lives.

The project involved the design and creation of several new exhibits, an overhaul of existing exhibits (due to higher visitor numbers than first anticipated), and educational resources to include accessible information.

The Sensory Trust was involved in all the aspects of the project although our main focus was to develop the diversity packs. It was written into the bid that Eden would develop educational packs which would focus on the two main project themes, GM crops and Intellectual property rights. The educational packs will make provision for teacher-lead tours at Eden, and also provide links to resources that can be used within schools without requiring a visit. Eden also felt that this resource should be available for all visitors to the site and so developed the diversity packs.

The diversity packs are there to inform the visitor of all the new developments that have recently taken place such as the new educational building - The Core, and the exhibits produced through ReDiscover along with information on partnership projects. Often the subjects covered by Eden are new to people or complicated, well communicated information in a range of formats allows the visitor to gain a deeper understanding of the issues.

We have tried to include the widest range of visitors in the development of the diversity packs. The packs are available in English, Easy English, Braille, and Large Print with image descriptions, French, German, and Japanese. We were very fortunate to work with Cate Detheridge from Widgit (a pictorial language for people with learning disabilities). Cate translated the packs into widgit in both a full symbol version and a symbol supported set and even developed some activity packs to accompany the packs. If you would like to know more about widgits please follow the link below to the Widgit website.

The Diversity packs were designed to be both hard copies for the Eden site and down loads from the Web. We have worked with a wide range of people to create the packs and are very pleased with the results. The Packs can be found in the café in the Core or at the Eden Access desk in the Visitor Centre. They can be downloaded from the Eden and Sensory Trust websites