Museum of Access and Assistive Technology

The Museum of Access and Assistive Technology was founded by Charlotte Joanne, its founding curator. It was never going to be a museum of objects. A collection of canes, Braillers and screen readers behind glass would be dead matter, the kit without the wearing. What it preserves is what each device was like to live inside: the cane as an extended nerve, the screen reader's voice as the texture of an ordinary day. It is a museum of phenomenology, prosthetic experience given a building.

Which explains the staff. Ruth, Iris, Adaeze and Tamsin are not custodians of things. Experience has to be witnessed, told, situated and walked alongside, or it is lost the moment the body that had it is gone.

The dog goes in a case anywhere. What the dog was like only survives if someone builds the room.

Its café, by the long window, is where people in the CharliVerse stop for coffee, bump into each other and hold small meetings. dice arrives there straight from somewhere else and leaves before everyone has finished; Lucy Love-Child reports on the wars.

Behind the scenes

The museum is described in "The Einstein of the Knicker Drawer", part of Street Philosophy at Blind Ant. Its café appears in the canon of the Found Girls.