Speculative interiors for museum artefacts: The decontextualise to decolonise (D2D) project

Decolonisation in museums is an urgent and evolving discourse that challenges dominant historical narratives, interrogates Western authority over cultural artefacts, and seeks to restore voice and visibility to marginalised communities. In Britain, museums continue to hold vast collections acquired through imperial extraction. Their displays often obscure these colonial origins, reframing artefacts as universal heritage under a Eurocentric gaze. As Abungu (2019) notes, decolonisation requires structural change, rethinking display, interpretation, and who is authorised to tell these stories. Ahamed-Barke (2024) sharpens this provocation by claiming that “to decolonise is to decontextualise”. Decolonisation, then, extends beyond repatriation to disrupt museological frameworks themselves—unsettling hierarchies, reconfiguring spatial strategies, and imagining new relationships between artefacts, communities, and institutions. Within this dialogue, interior architecture and design education emerge as critical sites of intervention. Museums are constituted not only by their collections but by their spatial narratives; if space is socially produced (Lefebvre 1991), it can either reinforce colonial authority or open possibilities for plurality. The Decontextualise to Decolonise (D2D) project, developed at the University of Brighton in collaboration with Brighton & Hove Museums, tested these ideas pedagogically. Final-year students re-sited and re-presented artefacts from the museum’s collection through speculative design as a method of re-worlding (Dunne & Raby 2013). These proposals were not intended to be built but to provoke reflection and critical imagination, questioning existing spatial orders and envisioning alternative futures that challenge dominant epistemologies. The interventions acted as spatial and epistemic provocations, asking: If this artefact did not live in a glass case, where might it belong? What alternative rituals, landscapes, or communities could hold it? The project culminated in public outcomes: A QR-coded museum trail, a Lightning Talk series, and a curated book of student work. Student proposals foregrounded themes of reparation, reanimation, healing, access, and plurality, revealing a decolonial impulse to reimagine the museum as a living, contested space where cultural memory and authorship are renegotiated. Pedagogically, D2D positions students as co-authors and world-builders, demonstrating the potential of live institutional collaboration in design education. For museums, it redistributes curatorial authority, opening space for plural authorship. More broadly, D2D affirms interior architecture as a decolonial tool and proposes decontextualisation as a transferable methodology, applicable beyond museums to commercial, domestic, and civic contexts. Future research asks who holds the authority to re-situate displaced artefacts and how this power can be ethically shared between designers, institutions, and originating communities as part of an ongoing act of re-worlding.