Experience Development Insights

Experiences should deliver on the promise of your destination, precinct, museum or gallery. The keys to success are driven by creating or reinventing meaningful, informative and compelling experiences that engage and immerse the visitor. This is especially important for museums and galleries, be they indoors or in the landscape.

It also means creating moments of surprise and delight, inspiring curiosity and finding ways to integrate and share the visitors’ perspective.

In essence, it is no longer about being curators but instead being creators who:

Build a community and invite their audience to be an active participant
Step beyond the building, including through incorporating user generated content
Shift from the static or transactional to the immersive and experiential
Connect visitors in a more personal way (personalisation), leveraging their interests, their memories or stories
Utilise new technology, such as virtual reality, for authentic storytelling and reimagining reality

In today’s world, there has been a transformation shift in experience design, which is a response to the changing motivations and behaviours of travellers. It is described in the following diagram. There is further information in Global Trends: Experiences over Destinations

That was then

Escape

Consume

Guides

Commodity
Meet Locals

Accessable to Some

Once in a Lifetime

This is now

Immersion

Create

Masters

Personalised
Build Relationships

Inclusive and Safe For All

Lifelong

Inspiring examples of best practice:

National Museum of Finland

The National Museum of Finland uses virtual or augmented reality, arguably the hottest technology trend happening with many of the leading museums of the world, to help people step inside a painting or Parisian artist’s studio. Imagine the wonder if we could create an experience that allowed people to time travel back to Gondwanaland and roam around the Outback with ancient Australian megafauna.

MONA Mine Shaft Exhibition

The move from curation to creation is demonstrated by the MONA (Hobart, Tasmania) ‘mine shaft’ exhibition and Swan Hill’s Heartbeat of the Murray laser lightshow. Closer to home, in Canowindra, simple projection transformed grain silos into giant aquariums and created the illusion that some of the town’s earliest residents such as the Grossi - fish who lived in the area 360 million years ago - were alive and well and swimming in the river.

Download our fact sheet: Critical success factors in interpretation and experience design and delivery.