Everyone remembers a moment when history truly becomes immense and personal. Not having grown up with the internet, my moment only struck once I stood under Brunalleschi’s dome in Florence, well into my twenties. Now, we don’t need to stamp our passports to experience history over, under, and all around us. Legacy institutions are using technology to rethink how to engage and inspire us, creating truly borderless experiences. Museums and libraries are going through a rebirth, using their collections and archives in new ways for new audiences.
I recently spoke to YuJune Park, a designer, speaker, and educator with deep expertise in creating hybrid physical-digital experiences in the cultural heritage sector, to get her thoughts on this renaissance and what the future holds.
Park co-founded Synoptic Office, an award-winning design consultancy that partners globally with leading cultural, civic, and business organizations. Fast Company, the Webbys, Design Week, the Art Director’s Club, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts have all honored the studio’s work. Park is also an Associate Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design. In 2022, Creative Review selected Park for their Creative Leaders 50 list, celebrating global leaders advancing their field.
Below is our conversation, (edited for clarity and length).
Why are experiences and interactivity critical in engaging audiences with history?
The study of history can often be perceived as something distant or irrelevant to daily life. Digital experiences, when done well, have the potential to make history more accessible and immediate. They can immerse audiences in historical narratives through multi-sensory engagement by breaking barriers between the past and present, connecting singular narratives to broader ideas, and moving outward from there to other sources of knowledge. Ultimately, the past shapes the conditions of the present. How can we situate ourselves within the history of ideas?
The best educational digital experiences can promote active learning over passive consumption by interweaving content and interaction, past and present, and singular narratives to broader themes and perspectives. They help you see and experience a new perspective, challenging points of view and prompting you to reflect on how you see the world and where you sit in the history of ideas.
The Brooklyn Public Library: The Book of HOV
The Brooklyn Public Library recently put on an amazing exhibition on Jay Z. The exhibition website was an incredible piece of design that featured a mix audio rendered in beautiful ways. The exhibition lead to a huge surge in new library memberships.
In what formats are we seeing digital interactivity expressed?
It is an extraordinarily exciting time to work at the intersection of education, arts, and digital design. We are seeing cultural institutions creating hybrid, digital, and physical experiences. They are truly becoming borderless institutions, opening up access to knowledge to the broadest possible audience.
Digital interactivity is being expressed through online exhibitions and virtual museums, digital installations/exhibits, AR, VR, websites, apps, and games—all with the goal of digital storytelling. These products enable the audience to physically experience art and history—whether it’s a historical artifact, painting, or piece of music—and learn more about the context of the work through multimedia experiences. They invite audiences to engage deeply with the work, experience it, and learn more about its origin and the ideas it represents.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Unframed & Replica
The Met has also been doing some interesting work with The Met Unframed, a virtual space offering immersive access to digital galleries and augmented realities of iconic Met masterpieces.
The Met Replica is an initiative that allows you to scan the physical artwork in the museum and then it comes to life on your phone through AI.
Following the news of V&A’s launch of an interactive website for adolescents, Mused, and the National History Museum’s major installation plans for interactive exhibitions aimed at 8-14-year-olds, why are we seeing organizations target younger audiences this way?
A museum’s mission is to share the transformative power of knowledge about the human condition and the world to the widest possible audience—through art, history, science, music, and more—in a way that invites us to see anew. However, many teens might perceive these institutions to be stodgy and unwelcoming. Or worse, many may feel as if they do not belong. Layer those perceptions on top of other factors: The first is that Generation Alpha is digitally native; the second is that the Internet is flooded with questionable sources of knowledge, and many sites are unsafe or do not meet the broadest accessibility standards.
Amid that perfect storm lies an opportunity. Digitally engaging websites such as the V&A’s Mused can invite the broadest possible audience—there is no need to travel or pay an admission fee—to interact with “5,000 years of human creativity across the V&A collection.” By interweaving contemporary culture with history, teens can explore the human condition and new perspectives enabled by engagement with the arts.
Digital experiences can be utilized in and outside of the classroom. They also have the potential to transform passive learning into active learning through prompts, questions, and spaces for writing and reflection that can often lead to a deeper understanding of content. Digital exhibitions and discovery sites can also create personalized learning journeys and meet all kinds of learners (visual, auditory, read/write, or kinesthetic) where they are and support learning differences by meeting robust accessibility standards.
From your experience as Associate Professor of Communication Design at Parsons School of Design, what makes digital interactivity appealing and accessible to younger audiences?
Teen audiences are already digitally fluent. They are used to hybrid learning experiences. The best digital learning experiences utilize immersive multimedia and prompts to encourage deeper engagement with ideas. That being said, I do not believe digital interactivity is a panacea for all challenges in education. The value of in-person experiences, peer-to-peer, and community building in the classroom is critical. In an ideal world, these digital experiences work hand-in-hand with in-person learning. In a few years, it’s possible to imagine a world where students will have an AI-powered learning assistant to supplement in-person classroom education.
The New York Public Library: Insta Novels
This was not a history-focused project, but a few years ago, Mother New York did an amazing project for the New York Public Library where they put entire novels into Instagram stories. They essentially hacked Instagram stories to become a digital bookshelf. Here is a great video about the project.
Why is it so crucial for young people, in particular, to connect with art, design, and ideas from history? How does design play a vital role in making these things accessible and memorable?
Engaging with the history of ideas is essential to understanding contemporary culture. The ideas we dialogue with today have precedent—they are born from and are in dialogue with historic ideas and the past’s social, cultural, and economic conditions. We must engage with these ideas to better understand ourselves and the world we live in today. Design is pivotal in transforming data into knowledge, increasing engagement, deepening understanding of content, and making learning more accessible and equitable.
The 90s are back! (Particularly our enjoyment of technology). How has this impacted museums’ transition into the digital space? The elephant in the room is, of course, AI. How are you thinking about deploying fast-evolving AI technology in the exhibition space?
We should realize that the methods and technologies like machine learning and image recognition that are part of AI have been with us for some time. They have already been deployed behind the scenes in a variety of different ways. We should never lose sight of the fact that exhibitions are about curation and storytelling and that any technology, from static wall text to AI, serves those goals. Because AI excels in working with large amounts of data, the technology opens up opportunities for visitors to peel back the layers of an exhibition and engage more dynamically in the information that is summarized and surfaced in an exhibition.
Online Collaboration+ Tool, Figjam
Design studio Figma is using AI in thoughtful ways for Figjam, a creative notetaking, organising, designing platform, which is actively used in a lot of classrooms.
Speaking of fast-evolving, any advice for organizations, institutions, and brands on future-proofing their interfaces against rapid technological change?
While interfaces change quickly, there is a lot that institutions can do to future-proof their content and data, which are at the heart of every organization. Future-proofing means adopting a technology stack that separates data, business logic, and presentation from each other. All technologies will need to be upgraded and replaced eventually, but it is about maximizing their lifespan and allowing these updates to occur over time.
Legacy brands and museums can be slow to change and adopt new ways of seeing and doing. What misconceptions do organizations have about creating meaningful, impactful, and long-lasting experiences, and how do you help them overcome these?
The most common misconception we see is that all the digital work has to come out as one big bang. That can feel very overwhelming. We often advocate for an incremental approach that allows the organization to grow alongside its digital properties.
If you had a crystal ball, what would it reveal about the next five to ten years of digital interactivity? What’s your biggest hope based on what you know of our growing capabilities?
If we take history as precedent, predicting the future of interactivity is tough. For instance, who knew that the Internet (first confined to the desktop screen) would be a key driver for mobile computing and, by extension, the interfaces we interact with daily? In this vein, we think generative AI will have a similar but bigger transformative impact.
Banner image from The Met Unframed.