Digital arts, culture & heritage: visitor experience

On 11th May the Tech4Good network gathered to hear Sue Bush, Emma McFarland, Claire Morewood and Viki Johnson, to network and to highlight any calls for collaboration. 

 The speakers looked at the ways the arts, culture and heritage sectors can scale digital experience, and to create more meaningful visitor engagement through the pandemic, from strategy, innovation, digital archives to AR/VR.

The Speakers

Sue Bush is Creative Director and Owner at Touchpoint Design, the Bath-based design agency. Sue focused on Navigating your brand towards the new ‘normal’,  including the strategic and tactical opportunities available for cultural and heritage organisations during this time. 

Emma McFarland is head of the Innovation Lab at the National Gallery Innovation Programme and she runs studio eMC. Emma focused on the process of innovation, methods of radically embedding new ways of working across the organisation and with external collaborators, and most importantly, co-designing with visitors. 

Claire Morewood is is a freelance video game designer and artist with a scientific background in geology and palaeontology. Claire focused on her involvement in the upcoming Virtual Natural History Museum, a project developed by palaeontologist Dave Marshall. The V-NHM aims to provide a fun and easily accessible online resource for some of the world’s vast digital museum collections, which are currently difficult to access by members of the public.

Viki Johnson has been working in augmented and virtual reality for over two years, creating experiences to bring heritage and cultural locations to life with modern technologies. Viki talked about some of the interactive experiences she has worked on, what worked well, and some of the unexpected hurdles faced during the projects.