Service co-design to envision the transformation of museums

This paper presents an ongoing European project developing new services to make the cultural heritage accessible and engaging for older people with disability, even beyond the museums’ walls. A group of stakeholders including museum operators and experts, older adults, healthcare professionals, designers, technology providers, and accessibility experts were involved in reflective and hands-on activities to develop a vision of barrier-free cultural experiences. Scenarios of future services were defined following a co-design methodology developed during the project and applied in collaboration with several museums and care homes in 5 European countries (Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal, Switzerland). They include digital technologies available in the project allowing tactile explorations of artworks, descriptions provided by avatars using various European sign languages, accessible contents for blind and visually impaired people etc. The scenarios were clustered in 3 Service Delivery Models metaphorically named “The Bag”, small and portable objects to bring the cultural heritage outside the museum, “The Box”, a display case containing diverse tools and multimedia contents to perform creative laboratories at day-care centres and nursing homes, and “The Screen”, a virtual experience of cultural heritage sustained by expert tour guides working remotely. The co-design methodology and the resulting outcomes are described in detail in the paper. The project serves the purpose to support the innovation of the cultural sector beyond the digital transformation: indeed, the new services are not limited to the adoption of key enabling technologies, they rather address new areas of intervention outside the traditional cultural contexts, and new audience engagement strategies.