MCN 2024

Meet with MCN's Community Partners in the Harrison Lobby. You can connect with representatives from:

• Art Processors
• Bloomberg
• C&G Partners
• cogapp
• ForumOne
• Pratt
• Tessitura
• Zetcom

Join us to kick off MCN 2024 with remarks from the Spencer Museum of Art and MCN board and conference team. 

Since 2020, MoMA no longer offers print materials such as maps and brochures to onsite visitors. In their place, the Digital Product team at MoMA developed a Digital Visitor Guide to provide these and other onsite resources, such as audio, to visitors. The first iteration of the guide was put together quickly in the early days of the pandemic, and was a simple collection of links to existing online content and digitized versions of print materials.

Since then, user research and visitor feedback has highlighted some ongoing challenges that visitors face during their onsite experience and the ways MoMA’s digital materials fell short of alleviating them. PDF resources are difficult to use on a mobile device, and tedious to update internally. Exhibition listings are insufficient for visitors who are either not sure where to start, or looking for specific artists or works on view. The first version of the guide was also not built with accessibility standards in mind.

With these learnings, the Digital Produce team embarked on a process of designing, testing, and iterating on a number of new features and enhancements, such as an interactive map, floor-by-floor previews of exhibitions, galleries, artists and amenities, a streamlined audio experience, self-guided tours that cater to different interests, and an improved search experience for various types of onsite content.

This talk will cover the initial research that exposed these challenges, walk through the product design process of developing these new features, discuss insights and adjustments arising from rapid onsite testing that followed each iteration, and share quantitative metrics that outline the impact of all these changes. We’ll also discuss ideas for future features and improvements for the guide, as well as thornier challenges that we’re still exploring solutions for.

Though our discussion will not focus heavily on the technical aspects of our solution, we will briefly touch upon some important points such as geolocation, building a web-based onsite map without relying on an app or third-party software, and connecting the guide to our content management system to ensure exhibition, location, and artwork data is automatically kept up-to-date.

Artificial Intelligence has rapidly emerged as a transformative force in the museum community. As museum professionals, understanding the basics of AI and its implications to our industry is crucial. This presentation provides an overview of AI and delves into the various opportunities, challenges, and serious concerns that we must face together.

AI can offer the museum community tools from enhancing the visitor experience to improving how we do our business. AI-driven efforts can revolutionize how we do our work and foster innovation. However, AI in museums raises ethical concerns, especially regarding visitor data privacy and information biases. Equally important, over-reliance on AI might diminish the human touch, risking the loss of authentic, trusted connections museums aim to foster. There are real concerns about AI as it can distort, misrepresent, or oversimplify complex historical and cultural narratives. If not properly trained or contextualized, AI will perpetuate biases or misunderstandings. As museum professionals, it's our responsibility to approach AI with a balanced perspective, harnessing its potential while being mindful of its implications. Collaboration, continuous learning, and open dialogue will be key as we navigate this intersection of technology, innovation, and culture.

What is Digital Content? How do we create policy and strategy for digital without common definitions and a shared framework for managing digital content? How do we prioritize and resource digital content to support our institution’s mission and strategic goals?

To help answer those questions, cross-departmental teams at the Smithsonian set out to research and inventory digital content types, connected systems, and workflows. The project differentiates between digital content and digital assets, emphasizing that not all digital content holds long-term institutional value. Digital assets are specifically identified for their ongoing usefulness and significance to the SI. The project involved extensive stakeholder engagement, including interviews and surveys with 102 staff members across 32 units, covering diverse roles such as collections, conservation, research, content production, and data analysis.

The gap analysis section addresses the challenges in harmonizing collections data, managing born-digital collections, and ensuring effective digital stewardship. Recommendations include developing systems for aggregate collections data, providing sustained funding for essential digital systems, and creating tools and training for content transfer and management.

This session will highlight how we went about researching and communicating findings, as well as prompt attendees to consider the types of content they engage with in their day-to-day work, ensuring that valuable digital assets are effectively preserved, accessed, and utilized across one’s organization.

30min: presentation
Background on the project, process, and findings.
Links of resources, final report, and supplemental materials will be made available to attendees.
15min: group exercise and Q+A
We will invite users to contribute questions and add their own digital content types via QR code form to display real-time submissions.
We may also invite guests into our Systems Diagram Miro board.

Meet other MCN attendees with some speed networking! A facilitator will guide attendees through a series of breakout conversations. Share with fellow attendees where you're from, what you're curious about, and more—just be quick!

In this 15-minute presentation, Katy Long and Gabrielle Santas will offer a real-world case study of how a small "start-up" museum has been able to leverage new digital technologies to start building out meaningful experiential and immersive content via a free-to-download app (designed by Spellerberg and Associates) that allows visitors to access 5 audio-first walking tours across San Francisco and Los Angeles. They will discuss the challenges encountered in building the CalMigration app and the Migrant Footsteps tours, and consider how this type of digital-first museum offers new opportunities to connect with different less traditional museum audiences, as well as the potential for Augmented Reality to help create on-site exhibits. They will also talk briefly about their expansion into 360 video as a means to connect with remote users.

What if our museum workflows encouraged us to be caring, compassionate, intentional people? What would our emails, file folders, purchase orders, scopes-of-work, and contracts look like? Let’s start by looking at speculative examples created by the workshop hosts. These tangible objects that participants can hold and feel, read and look like they were transported from the future. Once we discuss what those design fictions imply about the future museum workplace, we’ll imagine our own present-day museums with digital workflows that operate in service of not only our institutional goals, but also our staff well-being along the way.

This session will invite participants to envision a near(ish)-future scenario in which museum workers have a sense of well-being at their jobs: they feel valued, cared for, and part of a collective, cooperative team of colleagues. We’ll walk participants through some exercises designed to stimulate creative thinking about how digital tools might be helping those museum workers maintain that well-being. Then we’ll return to the present and think about what we might do today to begin building those systems for tomorrow.

Our goal with this session is to encourage people to think optimistically and creatively about how digital platforms might be of benefit to make work a place of psychological safety and community. Working in nonprofits that are (at least nominally) focused on visitors’ experiences, many museum workers feel encouraged to put their own needs aside to ensure visitors are centered. We propose to help reorient participants at this session to approach their work centering their own well-being to pave a more sustainable path toward meaningful visitor experiences, as well.

A website redesign is never just a fresh coat of paint: a new digital home on the web provides opportunities for institutions to reintroduce themselves from the ground up. This session encompasses a series of lightning talks that explore website redesign projects across a range of American institutions and content areas. Including projects at all stages of development, the panel explores each institution’s goals for shifting their brand, expanding their audience, or solving existing problems for their users.

For Glenstone, a website redesign provides an opportunity to reintroduce the institution after the completion of a large-scale renovation. The collection will be digitized and a new content strategy will be employed to humanize the sometimes-intimidating vibes that contemporary art institutions can have.

The Smithsonian Transcription Center, undergoing the first website redesign in its decade+ history, is seeking to adjust to pandemic-initiated changes in the digital volunteering landscape, respond to the needs of a growing and diversifying volunteer community, and rebrand to reflect their status as a premier digital offering of the Smithsonian Institution.

After 10+ years of working with a custom CMS and a third party developer, the Bullock Museum is in the process of migrating and redesigning their website in an open source platform. Originally funded with very different content goals in mind, they are redesigning their website through the lens of a new mission, content strategy & sustainability plan, and a realistic look at what they can upkeep and scale long term.

When the web site for the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum launched in 2023, its goals were simple: capture emails and sell tickets. Since then, it has accumulated content: press coverage, a virtual museum, a special events calendar, and more. As the Museum approaches the start of its second year, the web site needs to offer a more seamless way for visitors to explore the Museum and a more developed “voice” that expresses its character.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History was prompted by a need to replatform an aging Drupal website, and undertook a two-year project to revisit aspects of the site which reflected 20 years of piecemeal web development. The museum re-evaluated the site’s architecture, design, and features and improved communication of the museum’s newly-articulated mission and values, along with strategic content and branding updates.

The Huntington is currently undergoing an iterative process to reskin and develop a series of priority new features and integrations to update its flagship website, huntington.org. This exciting project follows on the heels of The Huntington’s adoption of a new five-year strategic plan and updated mission statement, along with a comprehensive brand and brand strategy project, resulting in recommendations related to voice and tone, messaging guidelines, a style guide, graphic design, and overall look and feel.

The concept of accessibility is simple in theory. You just need to ensure that people with disabilities can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as people without disabilities. It’s much more complicated in practice, as we’re learning at the Getty.

Automated accessibility reports and checklists can get your application to a minimum standard, but they don’t always capture the complex user interactions and the organizational structure of a website. For instance, using IIIF, our users can zoom in to admire the strokes of a brush on a canvas. But how can we make those dynamic HTML canvases accessible and navigable for users who may not be able to see our image viewer? Well-structured HTML provides our users the ability to navigate a site without the use of a mouse. But how do we develop well-structured HTML when we’re stitching it together from multiple sources? How do we resolve conflicting structures in our applications from external libraries and our shared component system? And how do we maintain structure over time when we’re constantly making changes to our codebases across teams?

By reflecting on our successes and challenges in meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provided by W3C this session will outline how cultural heritage organizations can better provide online services to people with disabilities.

Our session topics will include:

1. Maintaining document hierarchy and preventing accessibility regressions when composing pages with components and complex data structures
2. Defining best-practices for improving the accessibility of complex user interactions
3. Promoting awareness of web accessibility concerns across teams

The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum served as the “client” for DePaul University’s Game Development II course, where students develop skills in game design and development through the creation of a 2D digital game designed from a set of client based restrictions. Students visited the Nature Museum, learned about the collections and education programs, and toured the space to be inspired by local animals. The university students developed the games for an elementary school student audience, but were also learners themselves as they studied the habitats, diets, and behaviors of the focus animals for their games. Nature Museum staff answered content questions and provided feedback on the games in progress. The result was 6 nature-focused, web-based games built in Unity, including custom animations, sounds, and game mechanics. DePaul and Nature Museum staff are continuing collaboration on how these games can be shared out and what future iterations of the collaborative partnership could look like. Some of the games are available to be playing on the Nature Museum website: https://naturemuseum.org/nature-inspired-digital-games

Innovation fuels progress. This session explores the “magic sauce” behind successful museum tech projects. We’ll dissect some GLAM tech success stories, look at what drives innovation: user needs, emerging technologies, fails, and a sprinkle of creative disruption.

We’ll also see how a culture that embraces calculated risks, manages frustration, and celebrates the rewards of pushing boundaries helps innovation, exploring ideas for staying ahead of the curve by identifying the next cutting-edge advancements (surviving the current ones!) and fostering a psychologically safe environment where groundbreaking ideas can take off.

Getty developed Quire, an open-source, multiformat publishing tool, to solve our institution’s digital publishing challenges and to help smaller, less resourced museums solve theirs. From the beginning, the Quire team has collaborated closely with our Getty Publications colleagues to achieve publishing goals and gain insight into how non-technical staff use and understand the tool. This is helpful, as a large percentage of Quire’s community is made up of editors, curators, academics, designers, and others who don’t possess deep knowledge of coding or web development.

As a tool, Quire was designed to be flexible, extensible, and sustainable, which necessitates a more exposed work environment. Rather than an intuitive GUI, Quire users are confronted with navigating the command line, working in Markdown and YAML, and sometimes even using (gasp!) GitHub. While this might feel like second nature for developers, it represents a very different and often intimidating way of working for content creators.

In this 15-minute case study, we’ll talk about the lessons we’ve learned using a technologically nuanced tool like Quire with a Getty Publications book editor. Using a 600-object collection catalogue as an example, we’ll discuss the drawbacks and benefits of switching to a digital toolbox and how that change impacts departmental workflows. We’ll also share how the Quire team seeks to make the challenges of working digitally more approachable to non-technical users and discover what it means to find a common language in the process.

Every museum has a digital strategy, whether it is formalized or ad-hoc. The challenge is to make that strategy useful and meaningful. This session presents three case studies that showcase approaches to making digital strategy operational and useful as museums look for new digital initiatives and innovation. The Spencer Museum of Art focused on the creation of a digital plan that operationalizes well thought-out institutional goals, and incorporated museum- and campus-wide input, and sought guidance from digital leaders across the museum sector. The Arizona State University Art Museum started from a broad assessment of where they were, and what peer institutions had done, in order to plan how to proceed. The Yale University Art Gallery approached planning after completing a major digital project, reflecting on what the project’s twists and turns said about the organization as a whole, and exploring how they might better plan for digital initiatives in the future. At Yale, digital strategy is an ongoing activity, managed by a cross-departmental team. In each case, digital planning is operational. It is focused on doing: where to start, what to do next, and how to measure and learn from doing. As such, digital planning bridges the visionary strategy with the nuts-and-bolts and day-to-day.

In 2017 Greg Albers and Kathryn Cody sent out a survey and held "An Ideal #musetech syllabus" a highly participatory session at MCN 2017 where participants built what they thought were the core needs for students studying #musetech. Seven years later, and the landscape of what is needed may have changed, certainly much has changed in the #musetech landscape since 2017. The team (Max Evjen, Suse Anderson) intends to replicate the participatory experience (survey sent to the #musetech community, and participatory MCN session) that led to to this output, so we can draw upon the current trends that the #musetech community sees that emerging professionals, as well as fellow staff, should know about digital in museums.

One of the challenges that digital technologies have made manifest in cultural heritage organizations is that there is more stuff than most staff have the time, attention or ability to devote to. In the past, before networked computers and compendiums of information like Wikipedia (or Amazon) changed people's expectations of what can and should be taken for granted, the cultural heritage sector dealt with this problem by hiding it in a flurry of words and never letting anyone see all the things stacked on shelves in the backroom. But people's expectations have changed and coupled with the calls for open access around our collections suddenly all that stuff, much of it uncataloged and unresearched, is seeing the light of day without much context. This session will discuss the organization and technical challenges that these new realities present emphasizing the questions surrounding the use of generative and artificial intelligence systems to address the cultural heritage sector's perennial "content deficit" and what many of the concerns about their use say about the sector itself.

With the approaching end-of-life of Drupal 7, our ongoing challenges of managing separate websites for museum visitors and online collections, the construction of a new physical museum, and an impending rebranding, it was clear that we needed to reevaluate the overall architecture of Gilcrease's online ecosystem. In this session, we will present a case study and share the lessons we've learned from the decoupled migration of the Gilcrease Museums Online Collections.

You might be wondering, what exactly is a decoupled website? What benefits, drawbacks, and compromises did we encounter during the transition to a new website architecture? What are our plans post-launch? We will address these questions and many more.

We'll share relatable experiences and obstacles that small to medium-sized museums often face, demonstrating the strategies we used to “lift and shift” the website migration while balancing innovation with budget constraints and timelines. Throughout this process, we aimed to minimize technical debt and adhere to a reasonable timeline, despite the temptation to add new features. Sometimes, we resisted; other times, we had to compromise.

We will also share key technical highlights such as:
- A brief high-level overview of the Gilcrease collections systems architecture including TMS, Library, and ArchivesSpace custom integration with DAMS and collections website.
- Overview of the Piction to Drupal integration and delta sync.
- Building, serving, and presenting IIIF manifests with Drupal and Clover IIIF.
- Enhancing performance and SEO with decoupled architecture.

In August 2022, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) at Newfields was awarded a Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the comprehensive redesign of their online collection, including a complete overhaul of the underlying infrastructure. The project, Open and Integrated: Redesigning Newfields’ Online Collections, will be completed in August 2024, resulting in the expansion of Newfields’ existing online art and historical collections into a single, integrated collections portal (https://collections.discovernewfields.org/). In addition to the delivery of art collection data and assets, the integrated collections portal will serve as an access point to the IMA’s full exhibition history, archival collection descriptions, item-level information, and digitized audio and visual materials from the Indianapolis Museum of Art historical and exhibition files, the Indianapolis Museum of Art archives, and Stout Reference Library artist files. The goals and deliverables of the collections portal redesign—led by a cross-departmental team—considered a variety of technical approaches, ethical considerations, and sustainable practices that have been central to this two-year project:

In this session, Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs & Intellectual Property, will provide attendees with an introduction to Local Contexts (https://localcontexts.org/), whose Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels “offer Indigenous communities a tool to add cultural and historical context and cultural authority to cultural heritage content in their own local digital heritage archives as well as in digital archives, libraries, museums and other digital repositories globally.” Following this introduction, Anne will detail Newfields’ implementation of Local Contexts’ Notices and Labels within the museum’s CMS and how that cataloged information is presented to increase understanding and respectfully care for the IMA collection while grounding Indigenous rights.

The recent advancement and integration of AI’s advanced language models (LLM) in higher education, culture, and art institutions offer transformative potential for museums and galleries with permanent holdings of art and material culture items. This session explores an innovative project undertaken by Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, MA, to develop and record audio descriptions for its online collection using ChatGPT 4, when it became available in 2023.

The project required a structured methodology that combined AI's impressive efficiency with diligent human oversight. The museum envisioned this initiative to primarily enhance its digitized collection's accessibility for visually impaired visitors, but the benefits and impact have proven to be multi-dimensional. The Mead uniquely engaged undergraduate students in the roles of reviewers, editors, researchers, and narrators, empowering them to refine AI-generated content, check fact accuracy, and adjust the composition and style of the descriptions according to the pre-set guidelines. By increasing online discoverability and providing experiential learning opportunities, the outcome proved to be beneficial for both the museum and the students and faculty involved.

By presenting this case study, I aim to highlight the innovative uses of AI in museum collections and provide valuable insights into the collaborative possibilities between museums and institutions of higher education.

I hope to inspire other museums and educational institutions to explore similar collaborative initiatives with far-reaching impact, enhancing learning and accessibility across their campuses, constituents, and communities.

Technology teams are as diligent as they are curious. They manage tech stacks that reach across audiences and departments to service ticketing, websites, online stores and more. At the same time, they’re keen to learn from how other organizations manage these systems. Often these conversations unfold under the guise of vendor or platform assessments or in back channels as we all just want to know: “how’d they build that?”

“Show Off Your Stack” is a 45-minute session that will connect technology users, admins, and decision-makers around this central question. We’ll look closely at the tech stacks powering the MIT Museum, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and SFO Museum. We’ll discuss key issues related to building, configuring, and maintaining these systems including:

• Integrations: When and how do we connect APIs, message queues, data hubs, and other streams of information?
• Re-platforming: How do organizations evaluate the efficacy of existing platforms and what happens when we make the call to replace them?
• Value: What are the central/foundational systems in a stack? How do they inform an organization’s overall approach to digital strategy?
• Data Governance: How should we handle and govern data to ensure security, compliance, and integrity across the organization?
• Tools: How do we develop and adopt focused tools (as opposed to one-size-fits-all solutions that meet the specific needs of our organizations?

The session will end with a call to action for documentation. In 2020, David Nunez started the Museum Online Expression Research spreadsheet.

This is a wonderfully through and incredibly useful crowdsourced resource that consolidates information on tech stacks for organizations across the world. Our group will work through the summer and early fall to review and standardize the data and update fields. We’ll share those updates with attendees and invite them to contribute to the document.

Tech stack maintenance may not be the flashiest or the trendiest work, but it is essential. Our panelists and case studies we’ll talk candidly through the intricacies of this work. And together, we’ll create a resource to empower organizations to make informed decisions, foster innovation, and enhance the visitor experience.

Engaging young audiences in museums is key to sparking their creativity and deepening their connection to cultural heritage. By integrating immersive technologies, in-person visits can evolve into interactive adventures, enticing young people with captivating learning experiences.

In this session, explore how the V&A Learning team uses design-led participatory practices to develop their public programmes. Discover two compelling case studies showcasing how digital try-on experiences have elevated visitor interactions with museum objects, creating memorable and educational moments for young audiences.

Diva of Tomorrow: A Digital Costume Try-on Experience
The V&A hosted a try-on experience where visitors could wear digital garments created by talented young fashion designers, inspired by the V&A Diva exhibition. This event resulted from a month-long Digital Fashion Course for a cohort of young people aged 18 to 26. A design brief challenged students to celebrate the creativity of iconic performers and to create a digital costume that reflects their vision of the 'diva' identity.
Throughout this course they were introduced to new digital technologies to help them envision, investigate, and realise a digital outfit with a focus on sustainable practice and digital innovation. 
At the showcase, students presented their work to the public, explaining their creative process from inspiration to final design. Visitors were able to experience the digital garments first-hand through augmented reality filters and see themselves as Diva Characters on the museum’s large screens.

Drop in Design: Digital Tal-nori was a family-friendly engagement activity for visitors at the V&A South Kensington. Inspired by the Hallyu! exhibition, the V&A Families team worked with Seoul-based creative studio, Commoners to design an AR experience. This case study will unpack the V&A's approach to platforming creative technologists as well as inspiring creative confidence in young visitors.

This talk will give an overview of the creation of the Judy Chicago Research Portal, a cross-institutional collaboration to provide access to the archives of a prominent feminist artist on one website. Judy Chicago is a ground-breaking feminist artist who has been active as an artist and an arts educator since the 1960s. Her archives are held at four different institutions: two large university libraries and two museums in different parts of the country. These organizations formed a collaborative to create an online portal, hosted by one of the large university libraries, where selections from each of their distinct collections are accessible to researchers, scholars, curators, educators, and students through an easy-to-use interface. A fifth institution, a private foundation, which holds a complete collection of Chicago’s prints, also contributed records. The project represents a model for collaboration, iterative development, and improving access and discoverability for both feminist art archives and for collections at smaller institutions.

The partner organizations were united in ensuring that the unique history of feminist art and the artist’s significant contributions to this unique field were not lost in the archives. Through the portal’s inviting and welcoming interface, primary documents—artworks, photographs, manuscripts, and correspondence—from the artist’s 60-year career are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Rather than being sequestered in multiple archives, The artists’ papers and artworks are easily available to inspire and educate new generations of students, artists, curators, and researchers. This includes collaborative curricula from her Feminist Art Program. By providing free and widely available access to educational materials on feminist art, our poster supports The Global Campaign for Education’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (inclusive & equitable education) and Goal 5 (gender equity, empowering women and girls).

We have developed infrastructure to support a network, that includes implementing a Drupal portal, setting up static and dynamic data exchange, and designing search and discovery tools that can effectively navigate aggregated content. This work was challenging, and we are ready to discuss how we scaled the infrastructure to accommodate the growing volume of digital assets and the evolving needs of the user community.

In addition, the presentation will cover the various aspects of building a comprehensive network in collaboration with others. This includes negotiating shared objectives, coordinating digitization efforts, and establishing process flows to manage and expand the network over time. The Judy Chicago Research Portal will serve as a practical example of this process, highlighting the importance of clear communication, mutual respect for each partner's unique contributions, and a shared commitment to the project's overarching goals.

Exploring AI and machine learning in art museums often feels like an exercise in separating hype, achievable near-term value, and potential long-term game-changers. In this presentation, the National Gallery of Art will share how that pursuit is playing out after 18 months of pilots with cross-functional teams in two priority use cases, with lessons learned to date and plans for the way ahead. First: after initial work to scan, run optical character recognition (OCR), and analyze exhibition response wall cards and visitor comments, the team found that an AI-powered chatbot built within the network helped quickly find insights among thousands of comments, unlocking new value from qualitative data. Second: as a part of ongoing transformation in exhibition planning and operations, machine learning helped mine a decade of data to predict attendance curves and gauge what drives audience engagement. The data science team will present data visualizations, predictive modeling techniques, and methods for natural language processing and chatbot development, while members of visitor experience and evaluation will share findings, time savings, and future plans from these two initiatives. Recognizing that the value of analytics projects is measured by the decisions and outcomes they inform, the session will address how the results are used and future plans for plugging into business processes, with relevance to any museum and an invitation to participate in ongoing analysis, benchmarking, and collaborative data culture across museums.

Imagine museum interactives that combine the durability and flexibility of digital with the satisfaction and tactile learning of physical objects. Today’s museums have learned to rely on the ease and content flexibility that digital platforms offer but interactive screens have become ubiquitous and an analog dial telephone is suddenly strange and intriguing. How could we ever go back to the traditional diorama? This session will explore “phygital”: what happens when we combine digital and physical interfaces for museum engagement. Phygital includes AI overlays but it also includes alt controllers where visitors can use physical objects to control digital environments. You’ll hear from designers and creators using digital/physical interfaces to wash digital boats, play the digital drums and redirect digital water. Join us as we explore the possibilities of combining digital and physical into engaging interactive experiences.

The Kansas City Museum aims to be the “Home of the Whole Story.” But what does that mean when you design interactive media experiences? Since 2022, KCM and G&A have been working together to meet this challenge.

KCM engaged G&A to design a suite of experiences specifically aimed at youth: one welcomes them to discover the lesser told stories of the former mansion throughout time; another shifts their perspective on Kansas City’s development to see it through the lens of those who inhabited it; a third takes students on first-person narrated journeys through generations of marginalized groups and neighborhoods to understand how Kansas City has been shaped both by structural forces and the communities who live there.

The process of developing these pieces has been beautifully humbling and non-linear. We have had extensive conversations with representatives of communities that have experienced historical harm and exclusion–and those conversations have upended our assumptions about our design goals. We have conducted onsite user testing with our target audience–which has compelled us to think about their needs in new ways. And we are doing deep research to inform the pixels that create the collective visuals to ensure they properly convey the perspectives we are trying to represent. We have asked ourselves questions like: How do you design a map when the very understanding of a map differs by group? How can a virtual tour make a Gilded-era mansion feel more welcoming? How do you create a composite character to stand in for a group’s diverse experiences while remaining authentic?

This session will focus on three areas:
Why the Kansas City Museum has made a commitment to using restorative practices and it embeds the methodology in its everyday operations, exhibits and programs
How G&A approaches restorative design through all of its capabilities - content, visual design, user experience and creative technology
The critical role of user testing

We will also invite the audience to provide feedback on our work.

Enjoy a strolling reception through the Jayhawk Welcome Center, Spencer Museum of Art, and KU Natural History Museum. This session begins at 4:30 pm, shortly after the last session. No separate registration or ticket is required.