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Health & Well-Being

From pilot to policy: what Europe’s new culture declaration means for museum health and well-being

In June 2026, the EU’s three main institutions put culture’s benefits for health and wellbeing into a shared political commitment for the first time. For...

Why Museums Matter for Mental Health and Well-Being

Doctors are prescribing gallery visits. Care homes are receiving museum collections. People living with dementia are reliving Eurovision classics with a mobile museum. Here is...

How sound archives opened up new ways to support wellbeing

Partnerships within Unlocking Our Sound Heritage turned archive recordings into creative encounters, with lessons in accessible participation and culturally relevant programming.

How Portsmouth Museum Took Art to the Parks, Cemeteries and Communities That Needed It Most

What does meaningful community engagement look like when you strip away the grand budgets and the elaborate programming? For Portsmouth Museum & Art Gallery, it...

Museums and Climate: Why Cultural Institutions Belong in the Conversation

From exhibitions that turn industrial heritage into hope to galleries built for climate grief, museums are finding their voice on the defining issue of our...

Beyond Sustainability: How IMMA Is Learning to Think Like a Living System

What if the goal wasn’t to reduce a museum’s impact, but to actively improve the conditions for life? At the Irish Museum of Modern Art,...

How the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Made Sustainability Everyone’s Job

Through a transdisciplinary internal team called GU-Zero, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has turned environmental action from a specialist function into a shared institutional practice —...

Collecting Social Media in Museums: Six Approaches and a First Step

Try to imagine studying the Renaissance without its art. Now imagine a historian in 2126 trying to understand our era without hashtags, viral videos or...

Should Your Museum Start a Podcast? Lessons from Getty

Zoe Goldman never planned to become a podcast producer. Her background is in art history, not journalism or audio production, and she is the first...

Co-Producing Museum Films with Disabled and Neurodivergent Creatives

How the Great North Museum: Hancock and Beacon Films are reshaping what museum interpretation can look like — and who gets to make it. What...

How the National Gallery of Art Built a Video Story Around Elizabeth Catlett

A multi-platform video strategy built around artist Elizabeth Catlett shows how documentary storytelling, time-lapse filmmaking, and digital installation can turn an exhibition into a living,...

Virtual & Augmented Reality

How Museums Use Augmented Reality: Projects and Lessons

Imagine unlocking hidden histories or revealing invisible artworks in everyday places. These are just some of the possibilities that museums are exploring with Augmented Reality,...

How Museums Use Virtual Reality: Examples and Practical Lessons

Virtual reality can help museums reconstruct a place, show an object at a different scale or invite visitors into a story. The examples below explore...

Reconstructing Belarusian Jewish Heritage in VR: The Wolpa Synagogue

How can we preserve a cultural heritage that exists only in scattered memories, fading photographs, and fragmented stories? The Belarus Shtetl Project offers an innovative...

Visions of Nature: How NHM Uses Mixed Reality to Imagine 2125

The Natural History Museum in London announced an innovative mixed-reality experience, Visions of Nature, for 24 October 2024. This cutting-edge exhibition, developed in collaboration with...

From Tagging to Togetherness: How Art UK Turned a Digital Tool into Real-World Connection

A simple artwork-tagging tool has become the starting point for friendships and a renewed pride in place. At the Digital Collections Summit 2026, Art UK’s...

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....

How a Museum Put History on the School Menu

What if the most effective way to get students engaging with history wasn’t a lesson, a worksheet, or even a museum visit — but lunch?...

Artificial Intelligence

How Qatar Museums Built an AI Tour That Actually Reaches Visitors 

Plenty of museums are experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI), but far fewer have progressed past the pilot stage to deliver something visitors actually use. Qatar Museums...

How AI Turned a Museum’s Masterpieces into a 600-Year-Old Mystery

When Argentina’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes opened its doors to an algorithm, a beer brand and a question nobody could quite answer, the team...

When Students Know More Than Teachers: AI in Museum Learning

When most institutions talk about bringing AI into education, the instinct is to hand students the tools and watch what they make. The Victoria and...

We Sent 400 Visitors on a Date With a Van Gogh. Here’s What We Learned

The Van Gogh Museum built an AI feature that matched people to a painting and told them a personal story about why they belonged together....

Why Museums Matter for Young People: Lessons from Amsterdam to Singapore

Teenagers are swapping phone numbers at the end of a museum workshop. A young person who barely left home for three years is pitching their...

How the Empathy Museum Brings Personal Stories into Schools

The Empathy Museum invites visitors to listen to personal stories while walking in shoes that belonged to their tellers. In her MuseumNext presentation, Andréa Buoro...

Making Museums Accessible to Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors

Museums have a duty to cater to people with a wide range of needs and this includes visually impaired people. This is not a small...

Museum Learning

How a Museum in Rural Wyoming Reaches Students with Virtual Field Trips

For more than a decade, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West has run live virtual field trips that bring its galleries, collections and educators...

From Field Trip to Career Path: The Taubman Museum’s School Partnerships

Most museums measure their relationship with schools in hours. A visit, a tour, a workshop — then the bus pulls away. The Taubman Museum of...

How Tate Schools Designs Digital Art Resources with Teachers

What happens when a national museum stops asking “how do we make our collection available online?” and starts asking “what do teachers actually need?” The...

Conservation Classroom: How a Zoo Built a Digital Collection for Learning

When we think of digital collections, our minds usually go to objects: artifacts, documents, photographs. But what if a collection wasn’t made up of things,...

Museum Marketing

How museums can adapt their content to short-video formats

For a growing share of your potential audience, the first encounter with your museum is a vertical video they did not go looking for. It...

One object, one iPhone, one afternoon: How London Museum went viral

Helen Maher and Xuxa Kidd told the 2025 Museums & Social Media Summit how a muddy knitted cap pulled from the Thames became their most...

Eye Catching Museum Logo Design

From Nike’s “swoosh” symbol to the iconic Apple logo, brands know that a strong identity is essential to their success. The same is true for...

What Happens When You Set an Artwork Free? The Sainsbury Centre’s Day Release Project

What if a museum’s most powerful act wasn’t bringing people through its doors, but sending its artworks out into the world instead? At the Museum...

How Museums Can Keep Crowdfunding Supporters Involved

Did you know that museum crowdfunding is more than just a way to raise funds? For many institutions, it’s the start of building meaningful, lasting...

How Auckland Museum Built Membership During the Pandemic

Launching a new initiative is never easy, but doing so during a global pandemic is an entirely different challenge. Christiane Pracht, Membership Manager at Auckland...

How Nationalmuseum Built a Donor Circle for Conservation

How do you bring forgotten masterpieces back to life? For Sweden’s National Museum in Stockholm, the answer lies in an innovative donor initiative that bridges...

How the Tank Museum Turned Online Fandom into Income

Is traditional philanthropy enough for museums to thrive in the modern era? At the Tank Museum in Dorset, the answer lies in a bold shift...

Why We Need Museums Now More Than Ever — The Importance of Museums

In today’s uncertain times, museums can act as an anchor in the storm. To those who aren’t as passionate about the power of museums as...

School Groups, GDP, and Our Community Interdependence

“No one thought it strange that a boy and a girl, each carrying a book bag and an instrument case and who would normally be...

Do Children Dream of AI Sheep in Museums? (not nightmares)

To begin, two recent stories I’ve experienced about the (non-linear, unpredictable, anything but simple) relationship between children and youth with AI in the museum context...

Museums as “hyperinstitutions”

The technological advances of our time and the rapidly accelerating development of artificial intelligence should have the undivided attention of the museum world. The potential...

Ten Creative Programme Ideas for Adult Museum Audiences

Why should kids have all the fun? Museums have an incredible potential to not only educate adults, but also engage and entertain them. Through using...

Paws and Patrons: Planning a Pet-Friendly Museum Visit

What do Airbnb, Instagram, and your local museum have in common? Potentially, a growing audience of dog lovers who can’t bear to leave their furry...

What Museums Can Learn from the “Bravecation” Travel Trend

Travel habits are changing, and many people want exciting, hands-on experiences wherever they go. Museums have long opened doors to different worlds, and there is...

Five Ways Museums Can Build Community and Belonging

Museums face a world shaped by rapid technological advances, shifting social priorities, and a growing focus on well-being. These changes are opportunities for museums to...

Games and Play in Museums: Examples and Design Choices

Explore museum play projects, from role-playing and Minecraft to gallery puzzles, with practical questions about audiences, testing and evaluation.

Craft Lab: Digital Woodworking at Crystal Bridges

How Crystal Bridges and Broken Egg developed a digital woodworking experience for Craft Lab, with different designs for gallery and online visitors.

Immersive Role-Play at the Hellenic Museum

How the Hellenic Museum and MedusaRPG used Greek mythology, performers and existing galleries to create Mysterion: Descent Into Hades.

The Secret of the Dome Stars: Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Family Game

How Louvre Abu Dhabi tested The Secret of the Dome Stars with families, simplified its story and kept gallery artworks central to the game.

Exhibition Design and Interpretation

Infrastructure Before Output: Museum of Toronto’s Digital Ecosystem

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...

How Antwerp’s MAS Built a Martial Arts Exhibition with Local Clubs

The MAS team saw an opportunity to connect Antwerp’s martial arts communities with the museum. In Antwerp, a hyperdiverse city where martial arts of every...

YOU:MATTER: Building an Immersive Exhibition in Bradford

What happens when you take a city’s health data, mix it with the origins of the universe, and hand it over to a group of...

How the National Gallery Designed the Imaginarium for Slow Looking

When The National Gallery turned 200 it asked itself a question few institutions dare: how do you celebrate the past without being trapped by it?...

Museum Shop Trends: Five Ideas to Test

Five practical ideas for museum shops, from responsible sourcing and local makers to online shopping, events and collection-led wellbeing ranges.

Museum Shop Sunday: What It Is and How to Take Part

Find out when Museum Shop Sunday takes place, who organises it and how museums can plan events and promotions that support their work.

Museum Gift Shop Ideas: Three Ways to Reach New Audiences

Practical museum gift shop ideas for working with local makers, developing a distinctive range and welcoming shoppers beyond exhibition visitors.