Imagine you were a museum professional and had a toolkit to create interactive installations in a matter of hours rather than months: what would you make?
Some of the heritage professionals that tried meSch made: a vanity desk to explore the women’s liberation in the 20th century; an interactive hologram of a prehistoric biker; a one-person teapot telling the story of WWII widows; an interactive stethoscope to listen to the many stories of an object.
Since the early 90s cultural heritage professionals have been using digital technology to make their collections more interesting and engaging to visitors. However, the high technical expertise needed has prevented them from being fully involved in the creative process limiting their role to that of the client in a tender rather than a creative force in visioning, experimenting and trying out ideas.
meSch lowers the threshold of the technical knowledge needed to prototype interactive installations. A toolkit, conceived like a set of Lego blocks, provides interactive elements that can be combined in different ways; a online editor enables heritage professionals to describe how multimedia content will be delivered to visitors via the kit when assembled on the exhibition floor. With its ease-of-use, meSch challenges cultural professionals to be creative and empower them to prototype their ideas.
Through a co-design process that involved several museums and heritage institutions across Europe, the meSch team has developed a hardware and software platform that uses the emerging Internet of Things and Cloud Computing to support the creative process of conception digitally-augmented objects and interactive spaces: when the visitors manipulate those objects or move in those spaces, then multimedia content is presented offering immersive and engaging experiences that respond directly to visitors’ actions.
A wide catalogue functions as an inspiration and a starting point: these proved “recipes” of interactive installations developed by others can be reused, changed and adapted for a different heritage. To an existing recipe, museums can add their own content and create novel interactions that better represent their heritage and their original ideas.
In a series of workshops in the Netherlands , Ireland, and in Sheffield , over 40 heritage professionals have created interactive installations in just two days, starting from an object they liked, through to ideas to prototyping and testing.
meSch has received a number of recognitions from different international bodies:
- awarded the Werner Weber Award 2nd place at EuroMed 2014;
- included in New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report - Museum Edition: in 2015 as a pioneering example of the Internet of Things in museums; in 2016 as an example of addressing the challenge of adopting technology in museums.
- selected as EU Innovator in Cultural Heritage 2018.
- used by the Italian Department of Culture (Ministero dei Beni e delle Attivita' Culturali) as example of innovation in its 2019-2021 plan for Digitization and Innovation in Museums
