“The Hidden Museum: Performing museum spaces through digital technology”
The project “the Hidden Museum”, funded by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, reflects the recent, new strategies of museums to improve the visitor experience, using the digital development of communication tools. Smartphones and applications are part of the new interactive media, which can be used to reach an audience and make them feel involved, by intervening in a user’s daily life.
The application “Hidden Museum” aims at using digital technology to encourage visitors explore the museum in more details, and go to places they would normally avoid or forget about. This more fun and playful interaction with the visitors enable them to raise their perception of the museum, through an experience which can be seen as a enjoyable game, where visitors can discover new places, new displays of the museum, thanks to the geolocalisation of the application (iBeacons system).
The project is still going under experimentation, and the creators have experimented it for a month in situ, with testing sessions at the museum, collecting feedbacks from participants and reporting their findings on their website. They are interested in how the integration of digital technology influences their engagement with the museum, and if it influences positively their behaviour within the museum.
The different articles published on their website (category: “the Hidden Museum”) are very useful in order to see the progress of the project and all the steps they have taken until now. They explained, for example, how they first started to conceptualise the application, and what requirements were, for them, essential to ensure its success, or what were their ideas for the design and the characters within the application. Some articles have been written by the museum’s staff, trying the application and have shared their impressions.
During the Festival of Education, on 10th June, speakers from Bristol Uni, and Bristol Museum will present the project and draw on their experiences to explore the relations between education, digital literacy/experience, and the place of museums.
Reflections on Cultures 