Designing museum spaces from the user experience

Abstract

In the current context, museums are particularly focused on offering visitor-oriented services. Understanding the user's behaviours, needs, and motivations is of fundamental importance in defining interactions and personalised services that make the use inclusive.

Current experiments, digital technologies and new practices of “spectacularity”, which generate “digito-corporal” experiences of the user, are shaping the functions and objectives of artistic knowledge for cultural spaces, becoming an integral part of the work of designers and researchers in this field.

Interactive installations and cutting-edge technological products are widely used in museums to improve visitor experience, enrich the content of museum exhibitions and diversify narrative forms to offer dynamic, immersive and multisensory visitor experiences.

Through a human-centric approach, the article proposes to explore the multidimensionality of the design of museum spaces for the visitor experience, deepening the concept of an immersive and narrative environment and the physical and perceptive involvement of the visitor in the interaction with the space and the exhibited objects.

Through the analysis of approaches and models present in the literature on the design of the visit experience for exhibition spaces and concerning the selected case studies, some forms of physical and technological interaction of visitors in cultural contexts will be explored in order to identify guidelines for the design of museum spaces centred on the user and the "space-user" relationship.