Museums, Playful Engagement, and Digital Technologies

Museums all over the world are grappling with how to respond to the constant influx of new technologies into the marketplace, workforce, and home. While there is a clear need for science and technology museums to explore new technologies as subject matter, things get murkier when it comes to museums using them as tools. What can and should museums do with artificial intelligence (AI)? Virtual reality (VR)? Blockchain? This course begins with audience engagement and then looks at how technologies can help or hinder us in reaching our audiences. Using a framework of playful engagement, we explore four interrelated concepts central to creating compelling experiences: sensory immersion, emotional evocation, narrative transportation, and gameful participation. This course combines research and examples from inside the cultural sector with current research from diverse fields like neuroscience and human computer interaction, where new insights on these techniques are being generated. For each of these concepts, we also explore the ways that new technologies intersect with them and offer us opportunities for deeper audience engagement.