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The past fifteen years have seen museums and galleries moving from concerns about whether they should be ‘doing digital’ to how to maximise the effect of their own ‘digital strategies’ to enhance visitor experiences. Today, especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic, museums are spurred to use digital even more innovatively and purposefully to engage their audience.
The Digital Specialism module thus fits in well with this greater picture. We started with a week looking at different approaches of digital application in museums, from gamifying visitor experiences to assisting museums like the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to incorporate universal design – making it accessible to everyone. As we discussed, applied and critiqued these approaches, we started to imagine what we ourselves might do similarly or differently when doing digital design. We were then introduced to our genuine museum ‘client’ – Northampton Museum and Art Gallery (NMAG) – who has undergone major redevelopment and is due to open in early 2021.
The module concluded with a week-long Design Sandpit, in which we developed our tailor-made digital designs for NMAG, using the ‘design thinking’ process, namely a human-centred approach. Despite (rather ironically) all the digital challenges of switching between MS Teams and Miro, and through hours of brainstorming, we finally filled the Sandpit with ideas, based on the needs of the users identified by using personas model. We came up with two final products, an interactive membership programme and an interactive mini games app, both aiming at diversifying audiences as well as generating income (which we all recognised as very important).
At the end of the day, I believe that everyone who selected this module, or as we called ourselves, the “Digital 7”, would agree that these three weeks were intense, yet rewarding.
The Design Sandpit on Miro
The Digital 7 and our amazing lecturers
Written by Winnie Poon
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