MCN 2024

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.