Interactive museums: empowering visitors’ engagement

In recent years, a new global trend is changing our perspective of looking at museum design and experience. The emerging changes are transforming the static exhibition displays into interactive exhibitions to enhance the visitors’ engagement. As a result of new trend, Museums designers are shifting towards creating an experience with dynamic edutainment installations. This paper identifies the importance of such upcoming trend and aims to explore design elements that allow the visitors to investigate, engage and understand exhibitions/ displays through creative means. The main objective of the paper is to invent these design elements that affect the users’ engagement with the museum spaces and evolve a ‘smart museography practice’ with the help of digital technology. The paper will contain introduction to the smart museums and summaries on the digital means that achieve these. An online survey will be carried among the curious visitors to gauge their interest and expectations from such smart interactive museums. An experimental study will be performed in Design studios at University of Bahrain for proposing interactive tools/techniques that engage the visitors and render them edutainment. The paper will conclude as a framework / guideline that assist the conversion of static spaces of Bahrain’s museums into more dynamic edutainment spaces. This framework will also outline the elements of museum exhibits that prompt visitors’ interaction and engagement that blur and blend the fine line between education and entertainment.