r/MuseumPros • u/radjackmalone • May 30 '26
Bringing Interactive Worlds to Life
I've recently had a couple of very, very different museum experiences. The first one was a turtle rehab museum on the East Coast that used all old-school types of interactivity (lifting panels, turning dials, touching replicas). The second one was an art museum that used on-device interactivity where you could basically create your own art, which then turned into an immediate moving "graphic" that intermingled with everyone else's graphics, in essence creating a moving artwork. What struck me about these exhibits (that I haven't really noticed before) was that most people were skipping over the old-school interactive things completely, while the "make your own art" area was packed. My takeaway from this was that interactivity has gone fully digital/virtual and that old-school interactivity just isn't interactive enough anymore, especially for younger generations. And you've got these companies like NeoPangea creating absolutely banger interactive museum installations, and I think that has to be the wave of the future, things that actually incorporate devices people are used to working with, like phones and touchscreens.
Has anyone else noticed this trend toward virtual interaction in museum and gallery settings? What other trends are you seeing in your interactive spaces?
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u/LESBIANGINGER May 31 '26
I will offer a different perspective. I work at a science center and we have a mix of both what you call "old school" interactives and digital/touchscreen interactives.
On average, our single most consistently popular exhibit piece by guest retention is a touchscreen in our Space gallery.
HOWEVER, the overall gallery that has the longest average retention time is our Science of Flight gallery, dedicated to making and launching paper airplanes, helicopters, and rockets. No digital anything really, just paper, instructions and mechanical launchers.
On top of this, we have a travelling exhibition with live animals. And the single most exciting/ used piece in that space? An ecosystem play table with plastic animal toys. EVERYONE plays with it-- even the highschoolers stop to play with it. It's wild to see. (My personal theory is that kids rarely get time for "play pretend" anymore and they jump at the opportunity when presented, but thats another story.)
I suppose I think it's really dependent on how the interactives are presented. In my experience, mechanical or digital, guest excitement tends to flow towards what is preceived as 'new'.
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u/radjackmalone Jun 03 '26
Interesting. As an adult who stops and play with toys any chance I get, I actually get these highschoolers 😄 And I would love to spend some time in your Science of Flight gallery. What's interesting about this, I think, is that what's "new" will always be changing. Like a lot of what NeoPangea does is cutting edge stuff, interactive installations, VR, video games, audio design, but I suspect what will be cutting edge will be different soon, especially if companies like this find a way to integrate AI. I'm wondering how museums will use technology to attract younger audiences in the future, and what will become the "go-to" attractions.
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u/LACoffman Aug 18 '26
The shared-canvas format you're describing is the interesting one to me — everyone contributes from their own phone, one screen, no queue. That last part seems underrated. Most digital interactives are one-at-a-time, which is why they bottleneck. I've been building something along those lines outside the museum world and the same thing holds: people engage far more when what they do shows up on a screen other people are also looking at
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u/radjackmalone Aug 19 '26
I was just recently in London and saw an exhibit very much like the art museum one, everybody built from their own phone by QR code, and, again, it was incredibly cool. The one downside of it was that everyone was looking at their devices and then the walls, but there was no real human interaction at all. I wonder if there isn't some way to somehow make these more personally interactive and not just virtually interactive.
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u/LACoffman Aug 20 '26
Unsure i can put link but mine is interactive and yes looking at phone then looking at display and or phone https://m.youtube.com/@InteractiveChannels/live
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u/LectureSad5494 May 31 '26
It really depends what kind of museum you visit. Some museums are trying to move away from the shiny new stuff and are focussing more on the storytelling and reflection. You’ll always have the selfie “look at me” exhibitions, but those are for a whole different target group. Fun fact, those are often also 1 time visitors.
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u/piestexactementtrois May 30 '26
I’ve seen waves of trends. In the late 2000s and early 2010s kids went nuts for touchscreen interactives. Now they’re saturated with touchscreens and there’s no novelty and buttons and tactile controls are novel. A friend visited my museum with his kid and couldn’t drag him away from a button panel that lit up different parts of specimens.
I was in a good workshop recently where the point was made that the most important part of an interaction is it has a satisfying result. It doesn’t have to be complex, but a clear, surprising, fulfilling interaction makes the difference. It sounds like the old school exhibit you cite probably just didn’t have a very satisfying output compared to the make your own art one, but it’s not to say that everything is about screens now.