Creating Strong Cross Media Concepts for Museum Exhibitions

Abstract: In this paper I argue that, in an effort to create novel cross media exhibition concepts, museums should use service design. By realigning their organizations and embrace the fact that what they are offering is indeed a service, they can gain a new outlook and generate new ideas about how to create novel cross media exhibition concepts. I also suggest that treating the exhibition in a similar way that film studios treat franchises could help shift the mindset and make it cross media-centric. In order to arrive at these conclusions I performed an observational study and conducted qualitative interviews with museum professionals working in various museums in Sweden. The observational study was designed to get a grasp of the current state of digital artefacts in Swedish museums whereas the interviews were aimed towards identifying attitudes as well as knowledge of current opportunities and obstacles. The observational study taught me that instances of rich, meaningful interactions with ties to an overall concept was not common, and that there is definitely opportunities to think differently about delivering these types of distributed user experiences. The interviews gave me a greater understanding of the intricacies of the field of cultural preservation and museums, as well as insight into some of the reasons why things are the way they currently are. Using service design to align these organizations could perhaps aid with some of these reasons.