MCN 2026

Museums have produced video and media for decades—but what does it mean to design media that sustains voice over time?


In an era shaped by AI-generated content, rapid platform change, and evolving expectations around access, the question is no longer only how voice is captured. It is also how voice is mediated, translated, maintained, and trusted. This session examines how digital systems and human processes shape how museums represent the voices of artists, people, and communities.


While many institutions create subject-based videos, these projects are often treated as one-off assets tied to a specific exhibition or platform. This case study reframes media as infrastructure: a network of decisions across production, interviewing, editing, captioning, interface design, playback, and maintenance. Together, these decisions determine how voice is experienced, accessed, and understood.


Drawing from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s Artist Voices video series, developed as part of the museum’s 2026 expansion reinstallation, this session explores how museums can design media systems that preserve the integrity of voice across in-gallery video stations, web platforms, social media, and future reuse. The series focuses on living artists, where voice is collaborative but shaped through many stages of production. Interviewing, editing, pacing, translation, captioning, and platform design all influence what is shared, emphasized, and sustained.


The session will give particular attention to the representation of Indigenous voices within artist-centered media, including mini-documentaries featuring artists Nicholas Galanin and Lily Hope. In this context, sustaining voice requires more than recording an interview or presenting an artist’s words. It requires attention to agency, authorship, cultural specificity, and how institutional editing can either preserve complexity or unintentionally flatten it. The framing of questions, filming relationships, and edit decisions all shape how Indigenous perspectives are carried forward.


A video may begin as a conversation, but it reaches audiences through layers of editing, translation, accessibility, design, and institutional decision-making. These choices shape meaning, access, and trust.


The session will also address practical decisions that support sustainability, including dual-language open captions, standardized media formats, multi-platform design, consistent playback, and coordination between content, design, technology, and installation teams. These choices show how accessibility, consistency, and technical planning are essential components of ethical digital interpretation.


Attendees will leave with strategies for designing digital media as durable systems rather than isolated outputs, with approaches for balancing authenticity, accessibility, longevity, and audience trust.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is defined by its relationship to the communities and people who are connected to the museum’s collection. Though the museum’s collection of Native items is the largest in the world and contains many artistic and cultural masterpieces, we strive to let visitors to our museum understand that each of these items is a starting point to cultural understanding. As a museum of living cultural history, the NMAI has unique challenges to meet our visitors where they are, provide an engaging experience and to help develop new understandings about Native peoples. We hope to have visitors think about the museum as defined by a collection of relationships as much as a collection of items.

In this short presentation, Daniel Davis and Melissa Shaginoff will present their work on the Welcome Media project that seeks to highlight the diversity, hemispheric scope and most importantly the centrality of collaborative relationships that are necessary to build the trust with Native communities who teach us how to present their culture and to care for the items in our collection. The Welcome Media project is a series of short films that will show daily at our museum in Washington DC and in New York beginning in the fall of 2026. The films were designed to be interchangeable allowing the museum to add additional stories to the cycle in the future. Through findings from an ongoing visitor study by HG and Co, we learned that most visitors appreciated knowing more about the Museum’s relationship with Native communities. The study found that a few visitors expressed skepticism that these relationships were truly deep and authentic, and we feel the Welcome Media project should help to resolve these lingering doubts.

At a time when social media’s engagement obsession has made it feel like the truth no longer matters and the use of artificial intelligence has given rise to mistrust of science and expertise, this project will emphasize the real time commitment to building relationships with our Native and non-Native constituents. We believe that by showing how the museum works and allowing visitors to hear directly from contemporary Native people, visitors that experience our museums will have a greater trust and in what they learn during their visit. Further, by realigning visitor’s expectations and helping them to realize that they are part of a network of connection through the items they see on view, they can have a richer and more impactful experience that may change how they see Native people today.

In this presentation, we will present data from our visitor studies testing messages and understanding our visitor’s expectations, explain the development of a modular film cycle that can be revised and adjusted in the daily screenings, profile how the team made decisions about which communities to feature and show clips from the final media products.

This session will look at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC)’s first 3D virtual tour as a case study for how museums can leverage technology to increase the longevity of short-term exhibitions while also enhancing the digital experience through community-centered interpretation and input.

In 2024, APAC opened its first exhibition in nearly 10 years called Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond, curated by Sojin Kim with support from Adriel Luis and Mia Owens. Sightlines was open from September 2024 to November 2025 and focused on the impact Asian Americans had on the physical and cultural landscape of Washington, DC. 

The featured stories highlight examples of cultural production that interpret elements of Chinese, Korean, and Javanese heritage and express coalitional Asian American and BIPOC identities. These are presented in displays of artwork, material culture, images, and other graphic material drawn from Smithsonian collections as well as shared by local lenders, including community members and repositories such as the DC History Center and the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.

In order to preserve this exhibition in a dynamic and engaging way, we sought to create a self-guided 3D tour where visitors could explore the gallery as if they were physically there. To enhance their digital visit, the virtual exhibition was embedded with exclusive interviews from community members who loaned or had connections to objects shown in the exhibition. There are 27 individual audio clips throughout the virtual tour, full transcripts, and related resources for visitors to take a deeper dive into topics mentioned in the interviews. 

By attending this session, attendees will learn more about the overall exhibition, the internal discussions had to greenlight the 3D virtual tour, the design and technical decisions made to ensure longevity of the tour and exhibition integrity, and the community care necessary to ensure its success. There will be a brief portion at the end on how we've activated the virtual tour for educational purposes already and the reaction from community members, educators, and students. Lastly, there will be a sneak peak of our upcoming 3D Tour for APAC’s newest exhibition - How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories.

Museums have explored XR in different forms, from AR tours and VR exhibitions to immersive games, WebXR, and digital storytelling experiences. But many projects still struggle to move beyond novelty, short-term pilots, or one-time funding. For small and mid-sized institutions especially, the challenge is not simply adopting immersive technology, but choosing approaches that are meaningful to audiences, responsible to the stories being told, and sustainable for teams over time.

This session introduces a practical “XR pressure test” for evaluating museum XR ideas before major resources are committed. Adapted from cross-platform immersive learning work in cultural storytelling and education, the framework begins with a Spatial Necessity Test: what can audiences understand through embodied presence, participation, or spatial context that they could not understand as well through text, images, video, or a traditional website? From there, the talk expands into a series of planning questions around audience value, interpretive responsibility, accessibility, platform fit, maintenance, and long-term institutional capacity.

Using brief examples from social AR, VR learning environments, and AI-assisted production workflows, the session will show how museums can distinguish between XR concepts that are strategically justified and those driven mainly by novelty. It will also address common risks in museum XR planning, including platform dependency, unclear success metrics, limited accessibility, content that requires careful cultural context, and pilot projects that are exciting at launch but difficult to sustain.

Attendees will leave with a lightweight decision framework they can bring back to planning meetings, grant conversations, vendor discussions, or internal strategy sessions. A take-home “Museum XR Pressure Test Worksheet” will help teams decide whether an XR idea should be built, simplified, postponed, or reframed into a more sustainable format.

Trust is not built by content alone. It is built by the systems that shape how content is commissioned, interpreted, delivered, and sustained over time.

This case study examines Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge, a major exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and recipient of the 2026 Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Museums. The exhibition addresses one of the largest workplace human rights violations in Canadian history, telling the story of how more than 9,000 2SLGBTQI+ members of the Canadian Armed Forces, RCMP, and federal public service were investigated, harassed, and fired by the Canadian state.

As exhibition lead responsible for design and integration, I worked across artistic collaboration, survivor testimony, interaction design, and institutional systems to build an experience audiences could trust. That meant more than producing compelling media. It required aligning commissioned artworks, voice-driven interactives, accessible design protocols, and narrative architecture into a coherent framework that could hold trauma, complexity, and public scrutiny without collapsing into spectacle.

For MCN’s theme of Trust & Longevity, this session argues that trust in museum technology is inseparable from governance, accessibility, and care. Voice interfaces, immersive media, and artist-led commissions can deepen engagement, but only when supported by ethical decision-making, inclusive design, and infrastructure built for endurance rather than novelty.

Drawing on this project and related work in voice interaction, inclusive design, and enterprise digital governance, I will offer a practical framework for using technology to support difficult histories in ways that are credible now and sustainable over time.

You work with dozens of brilliant colleagues, all with amazing ideas about how technology might revolutionize your organization. You also want to sleep sometimes. How do you choose what to work on?  How do you prioritize?  How do you say no to the chief curator? 

At Getty, we’ve spent the past three years building a process to help us answer these questions and provide a framework for digital decision-making. We’d like to share with you the Digital Governance process we’ve put in place, what we’ve learned, and how we moved (at least closer) to transparent, inclusive, collaborative decision-making, and how we continue to evolve that process as organizational needs, technologies, and expectations evolve.  Also—AI governance! 

David Newbury and Britt Scholnick will share how we developed the framework, both from a strategic and practical level, how we’ve iterated over the past 18 months, and where we expect it to change in the future. We’ll discuss balancing IT and Digital needs, the value of discovery processes, how we consider capacity planning, and the importance of happy hours to team building.  And we’ll share how governance can function not (only) as a gatekeeping mechanism, but as a living system that supports sustainability, transparency, and builds institutional resilience.

In our museum, traditional wall interpretation provides the vital foundation of our guests’ experience. However, when planning our digital interpretation, our team is always asking: What can digital do that is different? This session explores creating “MTMDs” (Magical, Tactile Media Devices)—physical objects with digital content that guests interact with in ways that feel anything but digital. By focusing on what digital does best—recreating sensory "time and place"—we can provide a richer, more multi-dimensional experience.




Phase I: More Than Voiceover (William Gropper Exhibition)

Our exploration began by moving beyond the lecture-style audio tour. For an exhibition on William Gropper, we developed a "contextual soundscape" to sit alongside the curatorial text. By re-recording period-accurate union songs and dramatic re-enactments of Gropper’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, we provided the emotional high stakes of the period, allowing visitors to hear the history they were reading about.

Phase II: The Tactile Bridge (The Mucha Record Player)

We expanded this approach for our exhibition Timeless Mucha by introducing a custom hi-fi record player cabinet powered by RFID technology. This device allowed guests to listen to the music of albums whose cover art was inspired by Alphonse Mucha’s work. By using familiar, tactile hardware, we reduced placed the digital tech in the background, and put the guests tactile experience in the foreground. 

Phase III: Immersive Simulation (The Miró TV Time Capsule)

Our most recent project, a glowing 1950s television set for Miró and the United States, represents the synthesis of these strategies. To provide a unique experience of the 1940s–60s, we engaged a woodworker to build a period-accurate cabinet that matched the original furniture of our museum. On this TV, each channel represents a year Miró visited the U.S., allowing guests to "channel surf" through collages of cultural touchpoints like the Space Race and the Civil Rights Movement. Accompanied by a 1950s-style “TV Guide” handout, the interactive was placed in our Welcome Gallery to serve as an inflection point, drawing guests into the exhibition narrative the moment they enter the building.




Conclusion: Throwing Your Hat Over the Wall

Innovation in museum tech often requires "throwing your hat over a wall" that is too high to climb—committing to a project before you fully know how to execute it. These projects involved a multitude of firsts for our department and institution from programming Arduino boards to coding in Python and using Touch Designer. We argue that the most impactful museum experiences come from making mistakes and "building rockets to see if they explode". By diversifying the modes of interpretation we create an inclusive environment that recognizes the unique strengths of both the written word and the sensory interactive.

For an upcoming exhibition on the artist Piet Mondrian, MoMA is using digital technology to present conservation research that unfolds some of the major narratives and questions of the exhibition: how did Mondrian's migration to New York affect his art; why did he revise and double-date artworks that he had 'finished' in Europe; and what does it mean to make a painting, in his words, "more Boogie Woogie". This work has involved a number of creative challenges: Technical, very specific research findings need to be moulded into engaging narratives that can be appreciated by a broad range of audiences, satisfy different preferred learning modalities, and navigate areas where knowledge is theoretical and incomplete clearly. In an age rife with digital misinformation, it is especially important that museums speak to people effectively and confidently. This session will cover the creative and educational approaches we took to address these challenges and excavate for visitors another fascinating layer of Mondrian’s life and work.




We’ll also speak to some of the considerations from the design and technology perspective. Using AI-assisted rapid prototyping to minimize development time, creating reusable templates that are easy for content creators to deploy, building in flexibility in the form of modes and overrides that allow the interactive to serve the bespoke needs of particular narratives or exhibitions.




Though the Mondrian interactive is the star of this particular session, we’ll also speak to our broader effort to develop our suite of digital interactives - publications, chronologies, 3d views, geographic stories, music, conservation stories and more. We’re also looking into a system of lightweight experiences like trivia and treasure hunts made for special events. Our ultimate aim, like many of our peer institutions, is to be able to build a sustainable roster of digital interactives that can disseminate knowledge, delight visitors, and be adaptable enough to tell the many, many stories that need to be told at our museum in a sustainable way.

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Unites States, the central @Smithsonian social media team was tasked with creating 250 pieces of content with an emphasis on video. To meet this ambitious goal, they have been building new workflows across internal communications teams to tell stories across 21 museums, research centers, and the National Zoo.  

First, the team expanded beyond social media. The central Office of Public Affairs formed a working group that includes members of the marketing, press, social media, web, and 250 communications teams. Presenters will cover how responsibilities have been divided (and conquered) and how the strategy has been rolled out to garner internal buy-in across the institution.  

How do they tailor content to specific channels and platforms? In a multi-channel strategy where all channels matter, how do they handle internal competition? Who participates in the planning and editing process? How do they measure success? 

By diving into specific video series, presenters will explore these questions and share lessons learned.

This case study offers a closer look at this year’s wildly successful short-form Museum Rizzler video series, created by the National Gallery of Art’s social media team. We’ll discuss the right way to lean into a trend, balancing humor and art history, and the logistics of delivering content in a nimble and responsive way. The presentation will also address practical considerations including cross-team collaboration, approvals, production timelines, and risk assessment when participating in fast-moving online conversations. By sharing lessons learned, performance insights, and examples from the series, this session offers a framework for museums seeking to participate authentically in internet culture while maintaining institutional values and audience trust.

For the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), the answer is clear: increase in-person visitation and help the museum reach its goal of one million annual visits. But like many institutions, Mia’s website was not originally designed with that level of strategic specificity. It functioned as a broad information resource—useful, but not intentionally structured to drive visits, guide decisions, or build ongoing relationships with audiences.




In this session, Mia and Forum One share how they are approaching the challenge of rethinking the website’s role as part of a broader, cross-functional system. The work began with detailed end-to-end service blueprinting, mapping visitor journeys across digital and physical touchpoints to understand how marketing, content, staff interactions, and technology systems intersect to shape the experience. This process surfaced critical gaps: moments where interest is generated but not converted, and where no single team owns the full journey.




Building on this foundation, the team is applying a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) approach to focus on what visitors are actually trying to accomplish—such as planning a visit or discovering events. By defining these jobs, the team can better understand the systems required to support them and identify targeted opportunities to reduce friction and improve outcomes.




The session includes an interactive mapping activity where participants will map a visitor journey and the systems that support it, making visible the cross-functional nature of their own organizations. From this shared view, presenters will introduce a practical approach to identifying small, testable improvements tied to specific moments in the journey.




As institutions develop a clearer understanding of user pathways and patterns, they unlock new opportunities to experiment with growth loops—designing experiences that encourage repeat visits, sharing, and deeper engagement over time. Rather than optimizing for one-time interactions, this approach supports more intentional, repeatable audience growth.




Attendees will leave with a framework for approaching their own work: not as a one-time redesign effort, but as an ongoing, iterative process for improving systems that support real-world outcomes.

Over the course of more than a year, a cross-functional team from the Getty including data engineers, catalogers, and frontend developers coordinated remotely with our counterparts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The remit was simple: How do we surface the ways our collections connect? Given that our collections are both modeled in linked open data, specifically Linked Art, given that our technical stacks are aligned, and given that both institutions promote open collections often and publicly -- what could we actually do that practically demonstrates our shared commitment to open standards? After months of planning, the collaboration culminated with an in-person, hands-on prototyping session. The point was to explore, focusing on what was lightweight, likely ephemeral, and leveraged existing resources and expertise. 

The process ended up helping us shine a light on core institutional concerns: using shared data models in real-life; authority, branding, and UX issues; organizational differences across institutions; and just how collections ought to live outside our own museum contexts. This talk touches on what we can learn (and unlearn) when we go beyond talking about data models and start building a working app from scratch alongside an unfamiliar team.

What does it take to navigate last-minute resistance on the eve of a collections-wide portal launch after two years of planning and execution? How do you avoid the derailment of an already moving train?

In mid-2025, The Huntington launched a pan-collections portal that combines our three collecting divisions —the Library, the Art Museum, and the Botanical Gardens— into one cohesive discovery platform on our main website.

The objective was straightforward and in-line with our 5-year strategic plan: create a simple, navigable, and accessible online space for casual users to explore all our collections without having to navigate three separate formal research sites. Although the launch of this discovery portal took nearly two years of planning and execution, at the midnight hour, we experienced a near mutiny from our curatorial teams who were unaware of and expressly displeased with the need to consolidate cataloging and metadata practices to a cross-divisional level. They felt like they were losing control over the collections they're responsible for, and they didn’t like that. 

This is a case study of how the discovery portal team had to quell anxieties and problem-solve our way into proceeding with an imminent launch, despite objections.

We will discuss the development and execution process, where things went wrong, and the steps we took to address these last-minute concerns and build trust among our internal users, particularly our curators.

We will also cover what sustainability looks like after implementation: governance, clear decision rights, documentation, and a workable path to raise issues, so problems aren’t solved ad hoc—or by the loudest voice.  Attendees will leave with a fresh perspective on how disagreements, especially at the most critical moments, are opportunities for positive change and encouragement in team building and trust-building.

How do you modernize critical exhibit systems without disrupting the visitor experience? This session explores how the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is upgrading the backend infrastructure that powers its digital exhibits. From replacing outdated technologies to introducing containerized systems and real-time monitoring, this work ensures reliability at scale while supporting millions of visitors each year. Learn how to approach modernization in a live museum environment, make the case for change, and implement upgrades that improve both operational stability and long-term sustainability.

When the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014, its digital exhibit systems were built using technologies that were appropriate at the time but have since become outdated. Over the years, these systems have remained central to the visitor experience, supporting some of the most meaningful and interactive elements of the Museum. However, maintaining reliability and performance at scale has become increasingly challenging. This session focuses on how we are modernizing the backend infrastructure that powers three core interactive exhibits: the Memorial Exhibition interactive, the Signing Steel Kiosks and Projected Map, and the Last Column interactive. These experiences allow visitors to engage deeply with the stories of victims, leave personal reflections, and explore artifacts connected to first responders and recovery workers. The goal of this modernization effort is not just to replace outdated technologies, but to ensure long-term stability, scalability, and ease of management. I will walk through how we evaluated the existing systems, identified risks associated with legacy components, and prioritized upgrades while keeping the exhibits fully operational. A key part of this work involves moving to a containerized architecture using tools such as Docker Compose. This shift allows us to standardize deployments, improve system reliability, and reduce the complexity of maintaining multiple applications. In parallel, we are modernizing our content management capabilities, making them accessible so exhibit staff can more easily manage and update digital content without heavy technical dependency. Another important focus is observability. By integrating modern monitoring and logging tools, we now have real-time visibility into system performance and usage patterns. This not only helps us proactively address issues but also provides valuable insights into how visitors interact with these exhibits. Throughout the session, I will also discuss the practical side of this work—how to build a case for modernization within a museum setting, how to balance risk and continuity, and how to execute technical upgrades in a live, high-traffic environment.

The best exhibit technology disappears. A visitor reaches for a screen, a button, and a story unfolds. That invisibility requires, in practice, a set of architectural decisions that many museum platforms never make — decisions that determine not just who can experience an exhibit today, but whether the system holding it together will still hold up after exhibits rotate, content changes, audience needs shift, staff turns over, and the vendors you launched with are no longer the vendors you have.

At the Obama Presidential Center, we treated accessibility and longevity as architecture problems. The result is a centralized exhibit platform powering the OPC's digital experiences. It spans cloud-based content authoring, a MongoDB-backed exhibit API, on-premises Docker services, and a fleet of devices — touchscreen kiosks and dedicated accessibility UXP devices — all drawing from the same content and event model. Every device, whatever its form, is a client of the same system. The visitor at the touchscreen and the visitor at the UXP station are not having parallel experiences maintained by separate codebases. They are having the same experience, delivered differently. Accessibility decisions in museums are often mistaken for content decisions — alt text, audio descriptions, alternative formats. These matter, but they are downstream of something more fundamental: whether the system itself was designed to serve more than one kind of visitor.

This didn't emerge from the architecture. It is the architecture.

Building the suite of services taught us that the decisions with the deepest impact on accessibility and longevity are rarely the visible ones — and that getting them right early is what makes everything else possible. The unglamorous choices about how content is shared, how devices communicate, and how much the running exhibit depends on live infrastructure turned out to be the choices that had the most impact.

This session is a case study in those decisions — how we made them, what they cost, what they produced, and what we would do differently. The OPC had dedicated engineering resources that many institutions cannot count on. We don't want to paper over that. But the principles that guided us are not proprietary, and the questions they answer — who can access this, and will it last — are ones every institution is already living with, whatever their stack.

I hope to leave attendees with a clearer sense of what trustworthy exhibit infrastructure can look like, and a vocabulary for advocating for it in their own contexts.