The brief was to visit the Design Museum’s Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition and further explore museum and exhibition augmentation through digital tools and technology.
My approach was to do some research on the major contemporary trends and conversations about museum design, and expand on that by suggesting practical applications.
Museum ID magazine’s 2019 study The #FutureMuseum Project: What will museums be like in the future? offered a number of insights on what museums of the future should or will be ‘forced’ to do in order to respond to societal and technological changes. Below is a selection of my three key topics of interest plus my responses:
1. Experience-driven and people-centred or experience-driven and people-centred individualized shared experiences 2.0
“Museums that cling to traditional, authoritative models will lose audiences on a dramatic scale to new types of experience-driven, guest-centred organizations that we can’t even imagine today”
Dana Mitroff Silvers,
Founder + Director, Designing Insights / Editor, Design Thinking for Museums
- Using AR, museum visitors could invite friends and family to their own version of a collection, exhibition or tour.
- Media could be imported and remixed with existing exhibits from either personal or public libraries to create unique alternative narratives.
2. Recovering our human sensibilities or recording our human senses and sensibilities
“The goal of museum education in the future will be to curate experiences that reconnect visitors to their shared humanity”
Diana Chen,
Lecturer at MoMA, New York / Independent Art Advisor
- Capturing visitors brain waves, sensations and body responses to artworks and ‘playing’ it back to sensory impaired or remote groups
- Using technology to engage ‘overlooked’ or impossible to replicate sensations like taste and smell
- Measuring heart rate and pulse in response to an item and using the metrics or visualisations for social interaction: i.e. location-based dating apps, fan discussion groups, generative art etc.
3. Museums as agents of change
“Now is the time to transform the roles that museums serve within our communities, envisioning them as living institutions and active spaces for connection and coming together, for dialogue and difficult conversations, and for listening and sharing”
Mike Murawski,
Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum
There is a growing need for an automated more objective, open-source (i.e. wiki-style) way of cataloguing and presenting subjects. Similar to wikipedia.org, items/subjects should also include references to ‘controversial’ aspects reflecting contemporary ethical concerns such as, but not limited to gender dynamics, exhibit provenance, sustainability, institutional funding etc.
Conclusions/suggestions
- Think about the audience as co-creators and co-curators of the exhibition
- Use technology to engage with the body as a whole and make use of the resulting data to stimulate more meaningful human connections
- Use automation and open-source databases to generate a more complete, honest and inclusive conversation with the audience