Using today’s digital tools to tell the stories of the past
As the world and almost everything in it is transformed by digital technology, from vehicles to shops to shoes, museums too are going through similar changes that will enhance visitor experiences and meet modern expectations and lifestyles.
For the younger generations, or Millennials and Gen Z, digital technology is as central to their lives as the air they breathe, so it’s increasingly important for museums to prepare to engage their younger audiences.
So important is digitisation in the cultural sector, in fact, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport released a policy paper this year titled “Culture is Digital,” which professes the important role that digital technology is set to play in everything from theatre to heritage architecture to museums.
The Network of European Museums, said of the UK report: “Tech companies are collaborating with cultural organisations and practitioners to create new experiences for audiences, often exploring the boundaries of new technology at the same time.” It is encouraging that the museum sector is thinking of new engaging ways to reaching their audiences.
Examples of this can be seen around the world.
A good example of classic artworks being digitised and re-contextualised is from the National Museum of Singapore, which transformed 69 drawings from the William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings — into 3D animations. The Story of the Forest is a stunning piece of work, and a smart move that helped breathe life into artworks commissioned almost 200-years ago.
Cooper Hewitt’s Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, is taking a much more immersive approach to the visitor experience, particularly with its, aptly named, Immersion Room, which “uses digital and projection technologies to bring the museum’s collection of wallcoverings, the largest and most significant in North America to life.” Visitors there can also view hundreds of high-resolution digitised wallpapers and see them projected at floor-to-ceiling scale on the walls around them, as well as — and perhaps more importantly — create their own designs that also appear on the surrounding walls. It is a fully immersive experience, and part of the new wave of digital museum experiences that people will come to expect as a matter of course.
In Paris, this summer, the country’s first digital museum opened, run by Culturespaces, which specialises in immersive art displays. Tellingly, the space, which is in a former foundry, exhibited classics by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt while young up and coming artists can experiment with Artificial Intelligence.
In London, the Tate is now offering a guided smart device experience so visitors can find their way around their vast collections. It was one of their visitors’ biggest pain points — what should they see? The smart device experience contains short-form audio triggered by beacons within each hall of Tate’s galleries, including interviews with artists and collection curators, to give visitors an additional layer of contextual information about individual pieces of art. Not only can visitors now spend more time looking at the impressive artworks in the gallery, the experience also gives audio directions to guide to the next piece of the tour.
Indeed, savvy museum curators are racing to dream up new, innovative ways of engaging visitors. Augmented reality is one of many ways in which museums can help connect people to their collections and overall experience. Why simply walk around a museum, when an augmented reality experience could enrich the visit with a focus on education? The possibilities are endless.
Moving beyond the tour, to a retail experience
This culture transformation, however, should not simply be a migration from a screen-less analogue experience to a mere selection of fancy digital tablets or Instagrammable rooms and stop there.
Ultimately, the whole organisation and role of a museum is somewhat changing and museums will have to develop new strategies for digital transformation that include customer experience, content development and even marketing that are more typical of the retail industry than of the cultural sector if they want to engage and interact with the next generation.
