Barry Joseph

Barry Joseph is founder of Barry Joseph Consulting, a driving force at both the strategic and the tactical level in digital engagement, youth development and digital learning. For a dozen years, at Global Kids (a NYC-based after school organisation) then for six years at the American Museum of Natural History, Barry oversaw the strategy, design, and implementation of a slate of over 100 youth courses that applied the latest technology to engage youth to develop their skills and passions through youth media productions and design practices. He has also worked for over a decade with museums to innovate visitor-facing experiences through iterative design, with a particular focus on prototyping and evaluating cutting-edge visitor-facing experiences.

Most recently, as VP of Digital Experience at the Girl Scouts of the USA, he used tools of user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) to make complexity accessible, supporting the development of a seamless digital customer experience that increased retention and drove new membership. Along the way he has built many communities of practice still active today, like Games For Change and the Emoti-Con! Youth Media Fair, and launched many youth media projects and products. Barry has taught thousands of NYC youth and facilitated over a thousand hours of youth programming, including as troop leader of his daughter’s Girl Scout Troop. His first book, Seltzertopia, came out in 2018, and his next book – on digital design in museums – will be published by AAM in 2022.

He often writes about digital engagement on his blog Mooshme.org.

MuseumNext Museums, Games and Play Summit
Monday, 28 February 2022

Thirteen (or so) Ways of Looking at Gaming in Museums

This presentation will explore the horizons of games in museums to encourage their adoption into regular programs, products, and operations. It will solve for the equation Museums + Games = ? across a variety of lenses: accessibility; diversity, equity, and inclusion; digitization; intellectual property and licensing; the metaverse; partnerships; youth making games, staff making games; visitors playing games; producing games for the general public; eSports; educational games; games in exhibits, and more. This pair of presenters have together over a quarter-century of experience bringing digital experience design, including games, to two of the largest museums in the world: NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and The American Museum of History Museum.

Wednesday, 2nd March 2022

Failing Forward: 10 favorite Museum game Fails and what we learned from them

Four different Game Designers from the Museums and Culture space talk about games that failed to do what they intended to– and taught us all a lot about games in the process! We’ll choose ten of our favorite “unsuccessful” games and how the lessons from those games made museum game design better for all of us.

Full schedule here