Designers return home to Tauranga to speak on potential museum

Celeste Skachill and Clayton McGregor shared their experience of working on successful museum exhibitions. Photo/ John Borren

Two successful designers have returned to Tauranga to share their experience of working on some of New Zealand's most successful exhibitions and provide advice on moving Tauranga's museum project forward.

Clayton McGregor and Celeste Skachill spoke to the Taonga Tauranga group, local residents who support the museum project, yesterday morning.

Involving young people in the process of potentially having a museum in Tauranga and understanding what type of content would attract them was one way of enriching the project, the pair said.

Skachill, who attended Katikati College, owned her own design business in Wellington and was also a tutor at Massey University.

She said other museums such as Te Papa often struggled to attract young people, therefore Tauranga had an advantage of starting a new project.

"This is an opportunity to start engaging the young people of Tauranga. It's about finding out their expectations of what a museum should be and involving them in the process," she said.

McGregor, who attended Tauranga Boys' College, had more than 20 years of museum, gallery, exhibit and visitor design experience.

He said having a museum in Tauranga would show a statement about the "development and maturity" of the city.

McGregor left Tauranga in 1989 and moved to Wellington to pursue his design career.

With so much growth the city was experiencing, McGregor said it was important to support local talent and keep it in the city.

The pair had worked on a number of Te Papa's most successful and well-known museum exhibitions including Bug Lab and Gallipoli: The scale of our war.

Skachill said working to develop the Gallipoli exhibition, which was a collaboration with Weta Workshop, was "incredible".

Convener of Taonga Tauranga, Peter McKinley, said through co-creation the pair had actively involved the people they were designing for, to create some of Te Papa's most loved museum experiences.

"Their story is a great example of how the Tauranga museum could evolve."