How Do You Make People Care About an Object? What Museums Can Learn From Their Most Talked-About Objects

A muddy cap, a Van Gogh, a painting on day release. Here is how six museums turned things in cases into things people care about.

Museums are built around objects. Visitors, on the whole, are not. They come for experiences, for people, for a feeling they can’t quite name. That gap is one of the oldest problems in the sector.

In a recent article for MuseumNext, writer and consultant Anna Faherty put it plainly: museums habitually start with objects, but the most affecting stories are about people. An object on its own rarely makes anyone care. A person, a problem or a question attached to it often does.

So how do you close the gap? Not with longer labels. The museums below found other routes: honesty, mystery, personal connection, surprise, scale and shared authorship. None of them needed a blockbuster budget. All of them started with an object and ended with an audience that cared about it.

Here are six principles drawn from their work.

1. Let the audience in on the uncertainty

Museums tend to present objects as settled facts. A date, a maker, a place. But certainty is often the least interesting thing about an object. The questions are where the story lives.

London Museum learned this with a knitted cap. A mudlark named Alessio pulled it from the Thames foreshore, caked in mud and turned inside out. The first assessment said Tudor. The style matched, the museum held dozens of comparable caps, and other finds nearby pointed the same way.

Then the conservation team got to work. As the cap dried, a second colour emerged in a chequered pattern around the brim. The museum holds somewhere between 70 and 80 Tudor knitted caps, and every one appears to be a single colour.

The cap was not Tudor after all.

By then the museum had already said publicly that it was. Social media producer Xuxa Kidd told the Museums & Social Media Summit the team had three options: brush it under the carpet, pretend it never happened, or bring the audience along for the ride. They chose the third. Shot on an iPhone in an afternoon, the content reached 1.1 million views.

The lesson: a mystery, a mistake or a debate gives an object a plot. Visitors don’t need you to be infallible. They want to watch you find out.

Try it: pick an object whose dating, attribution or use is contested. Tell the story of the argument, not just the conclusion.

2. Make the object about the visitor

Faherty’s first storytelling question was: who is the story about? One answer museums rarely try is the person standing in front of the object.

The Van Gogh Museum tested this with a pilot called Date Your Painting. Visitors answered a short questionnaire in the audio tour. An AI model then matched them to an artwork and generated a personal audio story explaining why the two belonged together.

Curator of education Jolein van Kregten and digital education product manager Fenne de Beer shared the results at the Museum AI Summit. The recipe had three ingredients: the visitor’s own answers, verified facts about the artwork and artist, and a quote from one of Van Gogh’s letters. De Beer was matched with Church in Nuenen, a painting she says she would never have chosen. The story led her to notice themes of transition and quiet change in a work she’d otherwise have walked past.

The team was candid that it didn’t land for everyone. Only around 55% of visitors said they felt a deeper connection to the painting. That honesty is itself useful: personalisation opens a door, but it doesn’t guarantee anyone walks through it.

The lesson: people pay attention to things that seem to be about them. A personal hook can make an unfamiliar object feel chosen rather than assigned.

Try it: you don’t need AI. A “which object are you?” trail, a family activity sheet or a social post asking followers to pick their match can do the same job.

3. Give people a question to chase

Faherty wrote that tension is what makes us want to reach the end of a story. One of the simplest ways to create tension around an object is to pose a question visitors want answered.

Argentina’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires found an unusually playful one. The Artois Probability, a collaboration with Stella Artois and creative agency GUT Buenos Aires, started from a quirk of brand history. The brewery that became Stella Artois opened in Leuven, Belgium, in 1366. Over the following centuries its beer spread across the same Europe the old masters were painting.

So the team asked: when beer appears in an old master painting, could it be an Artois? Working with the brand’s historical archive, they built an algorithm that cross-referenced art history with brewery records. Each painting was given a percentage probability that the beer on the canvas was an Artois.

The result, presented at the Museum AI Summit 2026, became the museum’s most popular interactive experience to date. Visitors were looking closely at centuries-old paintings, hunting for tankards and jugs, because they had a reason to.

The lesson: a question turns passive viewing into active looking. It doesn’t have to be a serious question to send people back to the object.

Try it: find a detail that repeats across your collection, such as a dog, a hat or a drink. Build a trail or game that asks visitors to spot it and wonder about it.

4. Take the object somewhere unexpected

A gallery wall strips an object of its context. Sometimes the most powerful thing a museum can do is put that context back, or invent a new one.

The Sainsbury Centre in Norwich does this with Day Release, a series of short scripted films presented by Beatrice Prutton, Digital Communications and Creative Curator, at the Museum Digital Summit 2026. In each film, an artwork leaves the museum for the day and becomes a character in its own right.

In the first, Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait of P.L., No. 2, a portrait of his lover Peter Lacy, visits the Colony Room Club in Soho, the drinking den where Bacon spent much of his life. There it meets a young man who struggles to show affection to his boyfriend in public. Bacon’s own story becomes a way into what has and hasn’t changed for LGBTQIA+ people across the decades. A second film follows Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1932) to a playground in Castleford, the town where Moore was born.

The films pair each artwork’s history with characters facing parallel struggles today. Viewers don’t need to know who Francis Bacon was to recognise the conversation happening in that bar.

The lesson: context is a story. Placing an object back in the world it came from lets audiences feel its meaning rather than be told it.

Try it: ask where an object would go if it had a day off. Photograph it there, film it there, or write its diary entry.

5. Find the one story in the many

Large collections face the opposite problem to a single star object. With millions of items, nothing stands out. The answer is to pick one, and tell its story well.

The Natural History Museum in London holds 80 million specimens. Jennifer Pullar, the museum’s Science Communications Manager, told the Digital Collections Summit 2025 that this also means at least 80 million stories. For decades most of them sat behind the scenes, available only to researchers. Digitisation is changing that.

Pullar’s best example was a milestone. When her team digitised its six-millionth specimen, it was Calosoma sycophanta, a jewel-toned beetle that preys on invasive caterpillars. In the process they found something new: no one had previously recorded the species feeding on adult moths. A routine cataloguing job had produced a scientific discovery, and a story with a hero, a twist and a reason to care.

The lesson: scale is impressive but abstract. One specimen, one discovery or one person makes the whole collection feel real.

Try it: use milestones, anniversaries and “object of the week” slots to spotlight single items. Ask what each one reveals that the others don’t.

6. Let someone else hold the pen

Faherty’s second question was about point of view. Whose perspective is the story told from? For most of museum history, the answer has been the museum’s own.

The Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle is nearly 150 years old. It has spent recent years working with Beacon Films, a production company that supports disabled and neurodivergent filmmakers. Together they are reshaping what interpretation can look like, and who gets to make it.

In the latest phase, two groups of Beacon Films creatives worked with the museum in distinct but connected ways. The resulting films and installations sit in the galleries and online. The project even turned the lens on the building itself: the museum carries the Hancock name, but whose story has it really been telling?

Kate Holden, Learning Officer at the museum, and Andrew Coats and Zosia Feher of Beacon Films shared the work at the Museum Digital Summit 2026. Coats put its success down to the trust between the two organisations. That trust is what allows the museum to hand over authorship rather than simply consult.

The lesson: a new voice brings a new story, even to an object that has sat in the same case for decades. Co-production also brings new audiences who see themselves in the result.

Try it: invite a community group, a youth panel or a local creative to interpret one object in their own medium. Display their version alongside, or instead of, the official label.

Objects don’t speak for themselves

It’s tempting to believe a great object will do the work on its own. These six museums show otherwise. A knitted cap became a sensation because the museum admitted it was wrong. A Van Gogh nobody would have chosen became someone’s match. A Bacon portrait went for a drink in Soho.

In every case, the object stayed the same. What changed was the story around it: an uncertainty shared, a visitor placed at the centre, a question posed, a new setting, a single specimen singled out, or a new voice handed the pen.

None of these approaches needs a big budget. Most began with one object, one team and one good question. As Faherty put it, it’s a matter of choosing which stories to tell and how.

Want to hear stories like these first-hand? Every case study in this article was shared at a MuseumNext virtual conference, from the Museums & Social Media Summit to the Museum AI Summit and Museum Digital Summit. Explore our upcoming events and learn directly from the people doing the work.