Designing In/For/With the Museum 2: Developing Immersive Experiences
by Alan Hook. In this second part in a series of posts, I look at principles for designing immersive experiences for museums.
Developing Immersive Experiences for Museums
One of the key areas of work for this project has been looking at current and future skills needed for the museums sector, and the particular design constraints that developing for museums brings. For me, as a designer and maker, I think there are some important design constraints that shape working with museums.
These are drawn from over 15 years experience working with Museums and the Tourism sector running Hack Days, events for Museum Computer Group, CultureTech and developing interactive and immersive experiences for both regional and international museums.
Stability
Whatever is produced needs to work and be stable. This means that there needs to be care in how the experience is put together and the technologies employed. Developing experiences that are hosted elsewhere, outside the museums physical and digital infrastructure, or rely on the continued operation of a company or product can be really problematic. It’s great to have an imaginative and engaging immersive experience but it can’t rely on the company that produced it staying in business. The museum sector have seen a large uptake of virtual tours, but they are often developed using systems and technology owned by someone else. If the market falls out of these, then they may not work.
Useability
The digital, interactive or immersive experience should use as little specialist equipment and have low barriers to entry for users. Museums are for everyone, and an experience should be able to be easily accessed by all age groups, from the family with young children on an educational day out, to the visitors from University of the Third Age that are using exhibits as a reminiscence space. They should try to be seamless, easy to navigate and intuitive.
Sustainability
The experience should be able to update easily so that the museum, with some media production training, can develop it further and refresh the content. The development should be a framework to populate with museum specific content. It is important that the project is sustainable by the museum staff themselves, or that they know how to update and manage the experience.
Durability
The experience needs to be able to take some punishment. It might have large amounts of users accessing it at the same time but not crash. This often means that apps are great because they are accessing information already on the device but, because of pitfalls discussed above, aren’t great for sustainability.
Building a Design Brief
These are all core elements to thinking about developing a project, the spec and the brief to develop new digital experiences for museums. I am working with Prof Elizabeth Crooke (project PI) and her students on the MA in Museum Management at Ulster University to develop a project that draws on their skills, expertise and knowledge to find an approach to creating a digital output for a post-covid museum landscape that is stable, usable, sustainable and, ideally, durable.
In part 3, I will explore some of these ideas in practice.