A general trend of museums and cultural heritage institutions besides digitizing their collections is to involve the public more and at various levels. Technology plays an increasingly important role in this involvement. Developments we have observed in museum experience design, include trends towards 1) dialogical engagement of the public; 2) addressing crowds as audiences; 3) the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) technology in museums; and 4) designing for museum systems and institutional ecologies instead of for individual museums only. In this one-day workshop we especially focus on exploring the implications of museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, and of museums increasingly becoming part of connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By means of a tangible game we will brainstorm about future opportunities and challenges, cluster and evaluate them, and suggest future work.
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A case study of the Markiezenhof Museum.
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This article describes how the 4 period rooms of the city museum in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom were redesigned using storytelling and how this design has been received by visitors. For this redesign, rooms were reframed as sets of the story of Marie Anne van Arenberg, Marquise of Bergen op Zoom, and the objects as props to stage her story, which was full of secrets and of unexpected turning points. The visitor is enticed to discover cues to unlock these secrets in order to get a grip on her story while exploring the museum space. This is however not a treasure hunt, nor simply a game, but an exploration in which visitors are invited to discover and to create meaning and a journey into what matters to them. To this end, they have indeed to resort to their own frame of reference and to their personal life story in order to come to a narrative closure at the end of their visit. We used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to understand the visitors’ lived experience, both emotionally and sensorially at different moments and situations during the story-driven experience and to understand how the chosen design helps tell the story and how visitors use their personal context and frame of reference to make sense of it.
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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.
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This introductory chapter contextualises and reflects critically on theemerging trends characterising the evolving social role advocated by museums insociety, with an emphasis on museum experiences as vehicles for change or trans-formation. It looks at transformation by adopting a systemic perspective, anchoredin the transformative potential of the experiences that museums offer to visitors, andthen zooming out to turn attention towards the way recent changes in the socio-political and cultural context reverberated in structural and functional changes insidethe museum and connected institutions and communities. The chapter is structuredalong a series of questions, starting by unpacking a rationale for transformativeexperiences and why they are worthy of attention at this particular moment (Why),then focusing on what we mean by transformative experiences in the context ofmuseums (What), on particularities of design approaches and supporting technolo-gies for crafting transformative experiences (How), and closing with reflections onthe meaning and significance of it all, for the museum, the visitor, diverse audiencegroups and society as a whole (For whom and For what). The final part of the Intro-duction then reviews these themes once again, narrating how they are woven in thebook narrative.
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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.
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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.
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