The Future of Natural History Museum Digital Archives
Part 1 in my project documentation series The Future of Natural History Museum Digital Archives
How might we design a digitised archive of Natural Science collections that engages and inspires non-scientists for generations to come?
Natural History Museums around the world are digitising their science archives to preserve cultural memory and support scientific research. The digitisation process is feeding into databases that are of direct value to people studying biodiversity and species extinction. In Europe, 115 Museums are digitising their Natural Science Collections in a unified effort to create an open and accessible database for researchers. However, the digitised archive’s cultural value to non-scientists is still undefined. Museums have yet to explore a format for digitised archives that supports education and engagement from the wider public.
For my final project at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, I will be imagining how the future natural sciences archive might use mixed reality to engage and inspire non-scientists. I will ground my research in the Natural History Museum of Denmark’s current effort to digitise and exhibit their butterfly collection. The Danish Museum is part of the wider European effort to create a common database, but they are also beginning to plan for the future of digitisation in a way that supports ongoing engagement from the wider public. How are people engaging with the Museum’s current exhibit on the Butterfly archive? How else might we imagine bringing knowledge around butterflies to life? My process will also include a landscape analysis of current mixed reality museum experiences, and a broader investigation into the myriad of ways non-scientists are connecting to and drawing inspiration from our multi-species natural world.
Questions guiding my design process are: How might we design a digitised Natural Sciences collection that helps non-scientists to learn about and feel inspired by our multi-species world? How can we leverage mixed reality to make biodiversity and species interconnections tangible?
The Design Challenge
Designing a digital archive that engages non-scientists is a challenge because it requires working with historic specimens from centuries-old collections. Especially in Europe, Natural History Museums have obscure origins. Many present day collections began as Renaissance Cabinets of Curiosities, filled with relics from the travels of naturalists and amateur ethnographers. Picture shelves and shelves with plant and insect specimens, dissected parts of animals preserved in glass jars, relics from archaeological digs, fossils, and weapons from faraway lands.
Present day Natural History Museums are finding creative ways to spark engagement around the oddities of the archive in their physical exhibits. For example, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin houses a Wet Collection with 30 million specimens preserved in wet glass containers.
The physical collection’s setting, lighting, and arrangement make it an appealing, albeit odd, destination for any visitor. But how does this translate to the digital space? Can a non-scientist still look at a digital inventory of snakes in jars and feel transported, or even interested?
The Natural History Museum of Denmark has also created an engaging setting around the physical specimens in its museum. The recently opened Butterfly exhibit brings samples from the 2 million-specimen collection out into the public. Visitors are invited to view specimen samples, learn about butterfly biology and finally are invited into a special room where they can experience the live digitisation process. To balance the “still life” with movement, the exhibit entryway features butterfly projection art installation from Dark Matters Studio. Yet, the question remains: how can we create engagement around digitised butterfly specimens for non-scientists beyond the exhibit space?
Over the next two months, I will be researching, designing, and prototyping approaches to the future of the digitised Natural History Archive. I will use Medium to share my progress, process, and prototyping.
