Infrastructure Before Output: How Museum of Toronto Built a Digital Ecosystem by Doing the Wrong Things First

Most conference talks about digital strategy focus on the answer. The ecosystem is in place, the team is aligned, the numbers look good. At a recent MuseumNext event, Davin Henson of Museum of Toronto offered something different: a candid account of the years between having a digital presence and having a digital ecosystem, including the wrong turns, the misleading metrics, and the sequencing principle that finally made the work hold together.

Henson had spoken at MuseumNext in 2021 and 2022 about content strategy and digital distribution. Those were honest talks, he said, but early-stage ones. This time he told the fuller story, structured as three phases and one principle: infrastructure before output, in that order.

Phase One: A Museum Without Walls

When Henson began consulting with the organization, it was called Myseum of Toronto and had no physical space. That was the plan, not a gap in it. The museum’s model was citywide programming: a month-long festival called Intersections that explored Toronto’s natural, cultural, and historic diversity; Wigwam Chichemaa, a floating Indigenous art installation and learning center docked on Lake Ontario; and immersive walking tours like Women of the Ward, which placed participants inside one of the city’s earliest multicultural neighborhoods.

The organization had no permanent collection and no objects of its own. It existed through its programming, and digital’s job was to promote those experiences and leave a record that they had happened. Henson’s role as a digital producer was content and distribution. You capture it, you shape it for the platform, you try to grow the audience.

Then came 2020. COVID pushed everything online, from panel discussions to virtual tours to recorded theatrical renditions of historical events, and the organization began to see what digital could actually become. Henson’s frame at the time was that digital equals content plus distribution. He wasn’t exactly wrong, he told the audience. He just couldn’t yet see what he was missing.

Phase Two: A Physical Institution Changing Shape

In 2022, two things changed. Henson joined as full-time staff, and Myseum opened a gallery space, mounting its first exhibition in a permanent location, 36 Questions that Lead to Loving Toronto. Exhibitions now set the rhythm of the organization, and a genuine period of experimentation followed.

Some experiments failed quickly. A short documentary series meant to accompany exhibitions proved too expensive and too slow to produce, so it was shelved. Other experiments seemed to succeed. Shorter, faster, more social content about the city and its history performed well, especially on TikTok, where high view counts and new audiences felt like proof the team was on the right track.

The problem, Henson admitted, was that these weren’t the right things to measure. When digital content performs independently, detached from exhibitions and programming and the institution’s actual work, it isn’t building anything. The content lives on its own, and the audience it finds doesn’t necessarily connect back to the museum.

There was a harder truth beneath the metrics. The team was working constantly and generating a great deal, yet couldn’t project what the next piece would do or connect the effort to the museum’s goals. Explaining the value of the work internally became difficult. Phase two ended with a content library that hadn’t been fully organized, metrics that couldn’t be fully trusted, and a digital program working harder than it should have to justify itself. Not a failure, in Henson’s telling, but not a foundation either.

The Structural Shift

What forced the change began with a new perspective. Rachel Hilton, who joined Museum of Toronto in mid-2024 as Director of Marketing and Operations, recommended something that seems obvious in retrospect: moving digital out of marketing and into programming.

Hilton recalled finding it curious that digital sat within marketing at all, given that the museum had originated as a museum without walls and was largely producing digital content. After a few months and several conversations with Henson, she concluded that the volume of digital work across the organization warranted its own entity, one recognized for its support of exhibitions, embedded in the culture of the museum, and given the resources it needed, whether budget or headcount.

The effects were immediate. Digital was embraced by the exhibition and program teams, and Henson’s team gained a voice in early programmatic and exhibition discussions, something Hilton doubts would have happened before. The board could now see how central digital had become and what supporting it would require. Hilton described the move as in line with what peer museums and galleries are doing, and necessary to the organization’s effort to professionalize and grow.

The 52: Proof of Concept

The exhibition that showed what real integration could look like was The 52, a multi-year project celebrating 52 historical and contemporary women who shaped Toronto. It began as a plan for a live performance, with 52 actors delivering 52 commissioned five-minute monologues. The plan pivoted, and in pivoting created the content backbone for the museum’s most ambitious exhibition yet, which opened in April 2025.

Simon Termine joined the team while The 52 was in production and described the scale of it: 52 monologues performed by 52 actors, coordinated by 24 playwrights, presented across 40 devices including tablets, televisions, and even a retro television set fitted with a media player for aesthetic effect. All 52 videos, in both horizontal and vertical formats, were subtitled for accessibility.

Launch was demanding. Keeping 40 devices in full operation, training visitor-experience staff, and making sure programming and educational content incorporated the digital elements well all took work. But the payoff was real. School groups moved through the exhibition learning Toronto’s history through portrayals of these women, an experience Termine found astounding despite the early implementation challenges.

For Henson, the significance was categorical. Here was video at the core of the exhibition itself, constituting it rather than supporting or marketing it. That distinction mattered more than almost anything that had come before.

Phase Three: Building Infrastructure

By 2024, when the organization became Museum of Toronto, the question was unavoidable: what actually needed to be built? The answer wasn’t more content. It was infrastructure, in three parts designed to work as one system.

The first was the website. The old site was built around marketing logic: news, events, social feeds. The new site rests on a different premise, that the website should be a platform for the museum’s stories rather than a calendar of what’s on. Because the museum borrows objects that go back when a show closes, the website became the place where stories and objects stay accessible long after exhibitions end. Multiple entry points, including a timeline, deep exhibition pages, and independent city-history stories, give different audiences different ways in, all arriving at the same archive. The website stopped being a place to publish content and became the connective tissue between everything the museum does.

The second was the digital asset manager. Phase two had generated years of content in different formats, stored in different places, accessible only to whoever had the right folder link. The team built a DAM with a real taxonomy behind it: consistent naming conventions, clear folder logic, one place where marketing, programming, and development could find what they needed. The payoff arrived almost immediately with TO You Don’t Know, which began as a marketing campaign the previous year. Short copy on signs across the city drove people to a map of stories, each expanded into a 90-second video. When the exhibition was built, those assets were already organized, tagged, and ready to use. Henson called this the unsexy part of digital ecosystem work, but the part that determines whether the content you’ve already made is actually findable.

The third piece is exhibition interactives. TO You Don’t Know, which opened in June as the museum’s ninth exhibition, represents its most intentional integration of digital across an entire show, considered from the beginning rather than added at the end. Some elements are straightforward, like QR codes bridging the physical space to deeper content on the website. Others are more experiential: a food-trigger table where lifting a Jamaican patty or a basket of dumplings plays a video on an overhead projector, audio triggers that activate as visitors approach, and a 65-inch interactive map for exploring more than 70 of the exhibition’s stories in the places they happened. The team even built a haiku generator, something they could never have prototyped without the infrastructure already in place.

Corrinne Chong, speaking from the curatorial side, emphasized early collaboration between digital and curatorial teams as the surest way to align objectives. Too often, she noted, interactives are treated as an afterthought, merely illustrative of an object, when purpose-driven interactives can substantiate an exhibition’s intellectual foundation. Early collaboration also solved practical problems. Objects the museum couldn’t procure were addressed through digital interactives instead. She singled out the haiku creator with particular pride, since it is thematically linked to the exhibition but also gives visitors a rare outlet to respond artistically and take something tangible away.

What They Learned

The principle Museum of Toronto arrived at, by doing the wrong things first, is that infrastructure must come before output, and the sequence matters more than most institutions think. For organizations generating content, seeing traction, and struggling to connect it to institutional work, Henson’s advice is that the answer probably isn’t more content. It’s building what the content needs to live inside.

The museum started with the website because it’s the only part audiences can see; until that’s solid, nothing else has a public face. The DAM came next because the internal foundation has to exist before a small team can be nimble. Exhibition interactives came last because they require everything else to already be there.

Henson was careful to note that other institutions will have different components and possibly a different order. An organization sitting on a large existing archive might organize that first. The questions are the same either way. What does the audience need to find first? What internal system makes that possible? What audience-facing experience requires both to already exist?

There’s a second reason order matters: capacity. Small teams can’t hold three major infrastructure builds in parallel without losing ground on all of them. Sequencing is about where attention goes. The team gave full focus to the website until it was stable, then moved to the DAM, then to interactives. That focus is what makes each piece not just technically complete but adopted, understood, and embedded in how people work.

Henson closed with the honest version of where Museum of Toronto stands: not done. The website just launched, DAM adoption is ongoing, and TO You Don’t Know is the first exhibition where everything comes together properly.

For the many institutions somewhere in the middle, with exhibitions and digital that aren’t quite one thing yet, his advice was not to produce more or move faster, but to stop and ask what actually needs to be built next. That question, and the honest answer to it, is what gets you out of the middle.

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Davin Henson from the Museum of Toronto spoke at the MuseumNext Digital Exhibitions Summit in July 2026.