Please Don’t Make Me Use Your App

I have a contentious relationship with my phone at the best of times. Admittedly I'm fairly cheap so I tend to have older phones with a fairly limited data package. This means that it fills me with nothing but dread when a museum pushes that I should really download their app.

On the face of it it makes perfect sense. Why go through the expense of audio guides when everyone has a device in their pocket that can already do that.

Apps can also do so much more, you can stock as much information as you want on there including videos, interactive elements, links and resources. All of which can of course be accessed without actually being at the museum at all. The possibilities are endless.

Image of The MET App (Taken from Museum Strategy)

The problem is that your app isn't like that at all*. Firstly the Internet won't be up to snuff meaning that it will take forever to download and the pictures and videos won't really load. The information blocks to any particular exhibit also don't really tell me anything the plaque doesn't already and there nothing about that one artifact in really interested in.

There is technically the full museum catalogue available to me, but it's little more than a list of items titles with obvious descriptions and an identification number. Plus when I click to try and find out more the webpage it links me to is broken.

The story behind these apps is generally the same. At some point somebody important decided an app should be made and they allocated an amount of money that was too small to hire somebody who did it in a month and then it's hardly been touched since.

The problem is that apps are not something you can set and forget like information cards in a display. They are living things that need time, effort, and more money than most people expect. Otherwise the impression is that of an interactive space where half the exhibits have a paper ‘out of order’ sign.

A museum app can be a genuinely useful and transformative tool that adds enormous value. But to get to that point you need a fully dedicated app team that is probably outside the scope of all but the largest of institutions.

There is definitely potential for an ‘app first’ museum model perhaps with exciting missions objectives, personalized guided tours etc. This is the kind of thing being spearheaded by immersive experiences such as Phantom Peak but we need to be careful not to end up relying on the app that ends up non-functional.

This is perhaps a great use case for AI. I'm personally not an advocate for AI but within the controlled and limited environment of a museum and with a model that has been trained on the collection (and somehow made not to constantly lie) the idea of a personal AI museum tour guide ala Dan Brown's Origin is a possibility. But perhaps let's not get ahead of ourselves with that idea just yet.

* I mean, your app might be. But chances are it’s not.

Dragon Quest, David Hasselhoff, and Jurassic Technology

Earlier this week I led a discussion at the Association for Science and Discovery Centres’ 2025 Conference. Marking the 25th anniversary of the organisation they chose to focus the event around ‘the next 25 years’ asking what could and should change.

It might be no surprise then that in my session I chose to lead a session encouraging people to take their ideas to the absolute extreme and think of the wildest and craziest thing they could possibly do as a way of trying to break down boundaries.

The session focused around three particular places which I feel each offer a different potential for the future as well as my beloved Museum of Jurassic Technology which I promise I will wax lyrical about one day.

Pokémon Fossil Museum

I won’t say too much about the Pokémon Fossil Museum here as I've already done an entire blog on it. But I think that crossover events such as this and the Sealife Centre X Animal Crossing are a great way to draw in a crowd that might not normally attend.

This needs to be done consciously, in a world where fortnight crossovers are commonplace to kids it can be exciting but we need to be careful to not throw out the baby with the bathwater and lose any actual context or educational use.

David Hasselhoff Museum

In the basement of a hotel in Berlin is a tiny one room museum dedicated to David Hasselhoff. It contains a few artifacts such as Baywatch Merchandise and assorted photographs. There is also a scatter collection of ‘Hoff Facts’ about his life and career.

All in all it’s actually not a very good museum and could do with a bit more story telling and coherent themes. But it offers a different way of looking at things. Why should museums only exist as large institutions that you go out of your way to visit? Why not have lots of small educational spaces dotted around that you can stumble across as part of your regular day to day.

Image of the Inside of the David Hasselhoff Museum (Image from Wikipedia)

Dragon Quest Island

I’m excited about immersive experiences and new tech. I’ve worked on digital and VR museum projects before and think there’s a lot we can do with learning spaces.

Perhaps one of the most developed of these experiences that doesn’t rely overwhelmingly on staff is the Dragon Quest Island in Japan. It uses a system of RFID chips and a central computer to allow you to walk around a fantasy village based on the hugely popular video game franchise.

Entrance to Dragon Quest Island (Taken from Awaji Resort)

This allows you to interact with the various screens placed around the park to battle and level up, you can find objects in the physical environment and then ‘pick them up’ by using your RFID wristband which then makes them available in future battles.

This kind of tech is being tried out in lots of new and interesting ways i’d love to explore but one of the key ones that i’ve seen within a museum context was in the Berlin Global. Here guests were given a wristband and when walking between rooms in the museum had to make a choice about which door to walk through where each was an answer to some question such as “I value security over freedom” or “I value freedom over security”. This was recorded onto the wristband and would then be printed out at the end.

These are just a few possibilities for where museums could go in the future and to me they form a part of mixed tapestry of potential. I don’t know what the future will look like but i’m hoping that it will be interesting.