Mike Kuniavsky on museum experience design

Adaptive Path co-founder Mike Kuniavsky (blog) held a talk recently about the role that technology can play in helping history museums communicate their core competitive advantage, which he determines to be authenticity. He also provided some examples of projects that he thinks used technology particularly well to do that.

“The history museum’s advantage relative to other activities is direct exposure to real artifacts and experiences. You provide the examples on which explanations of contemporary life, politics, industry, etc, are based. People’s understanding of “here and now” starts with “there and then.” You’re the there. […]

I believe that new digital technologies can greatly lower the costs of communicating the value of authenticity. In other words, they can tell you what makes the real thing REAL.”

His analysis uses four categories – explain, explore, extend and provoke – to organise all the projects he looked at in a benchmark and a downloadable presentation (pdf, 600 kb, 19 pages) contains four of them, one in each of the categories.

The conclusions (on page 18 of the presentation) are also worth a read.