Schedule

What happens when digital experiences stop feeling like add-ons and start become embedded in the exhibition itself? This presentation explores Our Wondrous Planet at Melbourne Museum—a gallery designed to inspire awe and a sense of interconnectedness with the natural world.

Through a behind-the-scenes look at the interactive game Forever World, we’ll unpack how creative and technical decisions resulted in inspiring curiosity for our visitors, encouraging positive change and creating digital experiences that feel seamlessly embedded in the physical space.

AI promises a great deal for museums and frightens them in equal measure. Drawing on three exhibitions built with real collections this talk offers field notes on doing it responsibly: the safety problems we encountered, how we overcame them, and how to build a more literate and clear eyed approach to AI in public spaces. Including techniques for training models on cultural heritage material.

The three projects for discussion include colorisation of WW2 era archival photographs at Grini Prison Camp with Kunst Lab in Oslo, “Talking to the Past” at Melbourne Knowledge Week 2021 recreating the voice of William Buckley from his 1836 memoir, and “Imaginary Friends” at WA Museum Boola Bardip where performance artist Danielle Freakley and children used AI to bring drawings of their imaginary friends to life to be projected onto Perth’s buildings after dark. Running through all three is the single principle that AI proposes, the curator verifies — and audiences are not misled.

Can an exhibition recognise you and adapt in real-time? At the world’s most interactive Media Museum, fifty exhibits create a personalised journey using facial recognition and a unique ‘Media Profile’. In this session, we reveal how a central “Experience Operating System” manages thousands of visitors without distracting from the physical experience. Learn how we use frictionless tech to automate inclusion, deliver digital souvenirs, and transform passive observation into active self-discovery. Discover how to tell a personalised story to each visitor.

What does it take to make knowledge felt in the body, not just land in the mind? We’ve spent years embedded alongside ecologists, archaeologists, and scientists, and what we’ve found is this: By supporting learning through experience, we help audiences grasp ideas and stories not only intellectually but with their senses, encountering ideas from unfamiliar vantage points. In this session, we share the methods and moments of wonder from that process. How do you make an audience feel something they didn’t know they were missing? How does technology serve a story, rather than steal it? Come with us into the fieldwork, the collections, the research as we explore new forms of culture, interrogate our relationship with the world around us and leave a glittery slug trail as we journey through the cosmos.

Hertervig’s Mysteries was an exhibition at Stavanger Art Museum where children’s interpretations of Lars Hertervig’s painting Old Pine Trees (1865) informed both concept and design. The exhibition was created as an immersive installation, inviting visitors to step into Hertervig’s forest landscape. By foregrounding children’s perspectives, the project explores how alternative approaches to art can foster new, inclusive and sensory museum experiences.

Meaningful digital innovation does not always mean new tools — it often means using existing ones more strategically. This session demonstrates how the thoughtful development and reuse of assets, including the ESRI StoryMaps platform, can drive innovation in environments with reduced funding and limited staff capacity. Using Bison: Standing Strong and the Bison Roadtrip as case studies, presenters share practical, proven methods for turning one digital project into sustained, multi-platform outreach that maximizes impact while minimizing cost and labor.

Museums have never had more technology available, or more pressure to use it. This talk offers a simple, durable framework for deciding where it belongs and where it doesn’t, so that every screen, sound, and space works in service of wonder rather than against it. You will leave able to look at any project and know whether it deepens the experience or gets in its way.

How do you modernize critical museum digital exhibit systems without disrupting the visitor experience? This session explores how the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is upgrading the backend infrastructure that powers its digital exhibits. From replacing legacy/outdated technologies to introducing containerized systems and real-time monitoring, this work ensures reliability at scale while supporting millions of visitors each year.

Learn how to approach modernization in a live museum environment, make the case for change, and implement upgrades that improve both operational stability and long-term sustainability.

What would someone ask a plant that was thought to be extinct until 1980, or one whose ancestors were growing even before bees, flowers and dinosaurs? In a two-month experimental exhibition, Cambridge University Botanic Garden partnered with Nature Perspectives to explore how AI can help people connect with the plant kingdom. Using an AI chatbot, visitors at the Garden could initiate conversations with twenty rare and fascinating plants. With the ability to ask any question at their own pace, visitors could have a unique and personalised experience, discovering the science and stories behind the living collection.