This paper presents findings from a study carried out as part of BigPicnic, a European Commission’s Horizon 2020 project. BigPicnic brought together members of the public, scientists, policy-makers and industry representatives to develop exhibitions and science cafés. Across 12 European and one Ugandan botanic gardens participating in the study, we surveyed 1189 respondents on factors and motives affecting their food choices. The study highlights the importance that cultural knowledge holds for understanding food choices and consumer preferences. The findings of this study are discussed in the wider context of food security issues related to sustainable food choice, and the role of food as a form of cultural heritage. Specifically, the findings underline the importance of the impact of food preferences and choices on achieving sustainability, but also indicate that heritage is a key parameter that has to be more explicitly considered in definitions of food security and relevant policies on a European and global level.

This article examines the interaction between visitor motivation and in-museum visitor behavior. The authors postulate that, in order to understand this aspect of the dynamics of museum visiting, we need to view the motivations to visit the museum as lists compiled by individual visitors but also as part of wider lists of reasons for visiting that exist in society—which they refer to as cultural itineraries. Self-report methods have been used to capture patterns of motivation that emerge across the data, which in this case were used to examine their relation to visit strategies as manifested by visitor pathways through the London Zoo. Visitor pathways were captured through the novel use of mobile location-sensing technology which offers distinct opportunities in this context that have been unexplored in audience research. The combination of standard research methodology and automated location tracking used in this study allowed us to indentify two distinct visit strategies that directly relate to social groupings with different motivations: (a) groups with an education/participation motivation, who visit exhibits only, and (b) groups with a social event motivation, who spend a considerable amount of time on nonexhibit related activities and socializing with other family members and friends.

The current food system is unsustainable and no longer able to cope with the challenges caused by climate change and consumer behaviours. In this context, agroecology, with its commitment to crossing disciplinary boundaries, has been endorsed as one of the main approaches to the creation of a sustainable food system. Despite this, the integration of the social research on food has not been evident enough in agroecology as a discipline. To be sure, studies related to foodways, food traditions, and, more recently, food heritage have long been present, and have provided important insights into the social and cultural aspects of food. However, there appears to be little convergence between this body of research and the mainstream agroecology literature. This paper aims to address this disconnection between the sociocultural and environmental aspects of the food system, and to propose ways of moving forward. We argue that knowledge about food heritage can be a catalyst for the achievement of agroecology’s vision for whole-system transformative change, and a moving towards global food security and nutrition. Using the agroecology framework of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and looking at the examples of the subak system in Indonesia and the EU-funded BigPicnic project, we employ the elements of ‘co-creation and sharing of knowledge’, ‘culture and food traditions’ and ‘human and social values’ as entry points for the creation of sustainable transitions of the food and agricultural systems.

Museums increasingly develop exhibitions through collaboratives, a trend that demands the investigation of novel ways to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the documentation of knowledge gained. Current knowledge management technologies and tools can support such cross-organisational activities, yet they are limited in that they do not adequately cater for the particular requirements of this activity. In this article we show how the Mirror Knowledge Management System (MKMS), specifically designed to support collaborative exhibition development around a three-dimensional web-based environment founded upon the communities of practice concept, can facilitate geographically distributed collaboration and advance exhibition development practice. Through user studies we identify the key elements of the MKMS that add value to face-to-face interaction or enhance existing collaborative exhibition development practices. Moreover, we show how the MKMS supports professional development and on-the-job training, both recognised as highly desirable features in this setting.

Despite an increased interest in how societies produce, present and interpret the past, empirical studies of how people make sense of and use the past in their everyday life are less common in public history. This paper explores how people use material culture to make sense of their recent past by (re)constructing personal, family and community histories both in museum exhibitions and through everyday engagements at home. We use two case studies:The West Indian Front Room – Memories and Impressions of Black British Homesexhibition at the Geffrye Museum, London, and the homes of six families of Albanian heritage in Athens, Greece. In both cases, objects play a key role in mediating and reflecting identity and meaning-making.