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Future museum experience design - crowds, ecosystems and novel technology

The museum world is rapidly changing from being collection-centred to being community-centred and for the public. Apart from broadening access to collections through, for example, digitisation initiatives, new ways of involving the public more meaningfully and at various levels have emerged. Experiences inside museums have become more engaging, by extending the experience beyond the physical visit, or by involving the public in various forms of crowdsourced stewardship of collections. In this book, we explore the design implications that go along with these developments, all concerned with diversifying and making the engagement of the public in museum experiences more rewarding. We focus on the design implications associated with museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, on experimenting with novel technologies and on conceiving experiences embedded in connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By looking at and reflecting on trends, we attempt to sketch a picture of how future museums will change and, particularly, how they will relate to their public as a result of responding to or embracing these trends.

Digitally enriched museum experiences – what technology can do.

The recent pandemic crisis, coupled with the rapid development of new technologies, has shown what new opportunities exist for designing enriched museum experiences. In this article, we collected the experience of six Dutch design agencies that are known for their portfolio in applying new technologies to museum experiences, also internationally. We start by clarifying the concept of museum experience design. Then, we discuss the role technology can play in designing museum experiences. We first review the types of technology that were mostly used in museums in the pre-Covid period and clarify the purpose of their use. Subsequently, we elaborate on the trends that design agencies see as the most important developments emerging post-pandemic and reveal the dreams they have for future applications of technology in museum experiences.

Relevance by play: an integrated framework for designing museum experiences

The notion of relevance is often used as a concept to be considered for making a museum matter to its visitors. The term, however, is rarely operationalized for use by designers, practitioners, or scientists in their work on museum experiences. We propose an integrated framework for designing relevant museum experiences, in which we distinguish between four stages of seeding and growing relevance in new audiences, called “trigger”, “engage”, “consolidate” and “relate“. The framework proposes to see designing for relevance as developing ways of integrating meaning-making, play and acceptable visitor effort across all these stages. It is intended to provide sensitizing concepts for use in further research on designing for relevance, as well as in design-related activities such as crafting requirements for new museum experiences, analyzing existing museum experiences and developing new museum experiences.

Experiential factors predicting the short-term impact of a museum visit

We investigate the experiential factors predicting the short-termimpact of a museum visit. Two recently developed frameworks wereused: the Dimensions of Visitor Experience (DoVE) framework byPacker et al. (2018) and the experience impact framework by Duerdenet al. (2018). We employ a survey method, collecting data from 523respondents over a year. The results of a SEM analysis reveal thatreflection and joy significantly enhance memorable impacts of thevisit, while sociability plays a smaller, yet still significant role. Reflectionalone significantly and largely influences perceived meaningfulness,and both sociability and reflection significantly contribute to transfor-mative impacts. This research provides valuable insights for museumsto design experiences that enhance their impact on visitors, therebydemonstrating their value to stakeholders and supporting museums’financial sustainability.

Service design

Van de flaptekst: Service design - het ontwerpen van dienstverlening verbetert bestaande diensten of ontwerpen geheel nieuwe. Daarbij wordt gekozen voor een andere invalshoek: creatief onderzoekend en gericht op de ervaringen van individuele gebruikers. Dit is een eindpublicatie van het prgramma Innoveren in Dienstverlening. In negen verschillende projecten werden door creatieve bureaus methoden van service design toegepast. Van dit boek is ook een Engelstalige versie beschikbaar.

Involving the crowd in future museum experience design