Where We May Be Headed
MUSEUMS ON DEMAND
Museums and science centers, and any organization that provides informal education experiences, all seek to awaken their audiences intellectually to their content, connect to them emotionally, and empower them behaviorally. Expanding digital ecosystems in pursuit of these goals is helping to drive an evolutionary step for the role of museums in society, which holds the possibility of deeper, more consistent, and more meaningful integration into visitors’ daily lives.
Anything
Content from different disciplines, subject matter areas, and knowledge bases no longer needs to be siloed. Through interdisciplinary links and connections to everyday life, science can illuminate art, history can interpret the natural environment, etc. The modality of the experience can take on many forms and range from absorptive to participatory.
Anywhere
Content is available to those who are unable to visit the museum and is available anywhere there is a connection to the internet at home, work, play, on the road, etc. Content can be contextually based upon a specific situation or location almost anywhere in the world.
Anytime
Content can be circumstantial—available whenever the need or interest arises as triggered by activities, conversations, events, physical context.
Anybody
Content-based experiences can be shared with others who are with you or who are located elsewhere. The experiences themselves may be authored by an institution, partners and collaborators, members of the audience, or any combination thereof.
Implications for the Visitor Journey
On-demand access to visitor engagements means that the visitor journey could transform from a traditional pre-visit / visit / post-visit model to ongoing, repeating, episodic engagements. A new visitor journey model might emerge, cycling between physical and digital “visits,” nurtured by an ecosystem of digital engagement opportunities. In this new visitor journey model, pre- and post-visit engagements transform into ongoing interactions.
In this new visitor journey model pre and post visit engagements transform into ongoing interactions.
“…museums should seek to create episodic digital experiences coinciding with timed physical experiences that create a sense of urgency and increase repeat visits. An evolving digital narrative that can be replayed and present key events, or periodic “reveal” moments that are tied to physical artifacts only on view on specific dates, should be a key strategy. This approach provides episodic experiences, creates demand for a physical visit, allows replay to catch up, and, through social media alerts, can be delivered literally into the hands of the museum audiences via their mobile devices.”
— Nik Honeysett, The Digital Awakening
Photo by Martin Adams
Here’s a Question
Museums traditionally provide a place where visitors can muse together. Ever-expanding communication channels empower museums to provide a forum for musing together regardless of what the subject might be, where we are at a given moment, what time of day or night we wish to do it, and with whom we wish to do it. Might the museum become both an activity as well as a place—a verb and noun?
It takes a village…
I wish to acknowledge how the thinking expressed here has been informed by countless conversations, readings and project efforts with clients and colleagues from past collaborations, and other contributors to the field who have made their thoughts public.