Opening Museums

We approach the theme of “opening museums” from a point of view where digital technologies can be used as tools to facilitate vistor-museum and visitor-visitor interaction. We look at “interaction”, as in how to encourage visitors to become interactive participants, following the theory that human communication is based on dialog and exchange. On the other hand we also refer to interactive technologies and suggest how museum visitors as users can intervene in computing processes through various interfaces. Our objective is to reflects on how attitudes in museums are changing, how visitor expectations are changing and how we as designers and artist, considering both opportunities and challenges of digital technologies, can design visitor experiences for museums with open attitudes.

In this this book we acknowledge that the role of museums are changing, we address visitors as participants rather than passive consumers and recognize that a manifold of visitors need diverse approaches to engage with museums. A selection of projects is presented in this book adapting ideas that emerged during our research and in a "Opening Museums"-workshop. In addition we present examples of how related projects have been realized by others in various museum environments to bring forth opportunities as well as design challenges to consider when digital technologies meet museums and visitors.

We included co-design workshops into our research process to acquire understanding of how we as potential visitors reflect on museums. In the workshops we discuss how museums can open up as institutions through more interactive and participatory practices. Through examples we review affordances and challenges of designing for museum environments. The workshops also includes an creative part, either in form of brainstorming and conceptualizing ideas or by going one step further and building prototypes.