Multi sensory museum experiences Comment
I think most people would agree that, apart from fulfilling the role of protecting and preserving the collections, museums should also constantly search for change and social involvement. The trend of museums getting more and more social and participatory is clear to both the museum and public, but “how to” remains an important and difficult question to answer. From the various attempts of different museums, it appears that for a lot of time what the museum staff and specialists think might not be what the public really wants. There usually are misfits between the expectations of the two groups. The museums are able to realize problems at a more theoretical level, but they might not be able to come up with good ways to solve them. For example, visitors enjoy narratives through not only visual/audial texts but also through multi-sensory inputs. Museums like the Met had an audacious attempt of letting the visitors handle artworks, but it inevitably compromised them. Technologies like AR/VR and AI are promising in making museums more interactive, but they still need to be more advanced in order to merge with the museum system. However, the involvement of technology alone cannot make visitors feel more engaged, it’s more of a problem of how to best utilize certain technologies, making them a great fit for visitor participation. Technology itself is better to seem to be invisible serving as better medium for valuable content.