We Went To “My Museum: The Museum as the Living Room of Society” Conference

This year’s Museum Conference, ”My Museum: The Museum as the Living Room of Society“, opened the discussion on the potential success of the Third Place model and explored how the museums could be places of intercultural dialogue, activism and community engagement.

Every year, the annual Museum Conference is getting bigger and better: it has now grown into a two-day event in Athens, with expanded international participation and a dedicated website. For the ninth edition of the conference, professionals from museums and cultural organizations, artists, civil society representatives, educators, activists, and students were invited to examine how museums can be places of intercultural dialogue, activism, and community engagement.

In the ever-changing field of attracting the audience, museums move from the point of inward management of cultural heritage to the state of their change into vibrant social, political and participatory spaces.

The IT department of Clio MuseTours participated in the workshop “Explore Digital Transformation in Museums with Microsoft” on November 20, 2019.

It was a hands-on exploration of museum case studies and applications framed in Microsoft’s Digital Transformation Framework for Museums and included the following parts:

1. Minecraft in Museums
2. Leveraging the Digital Transformation Framework for Museums to develop a strategy
3. Explore the end-to-end solutions and vision of Microsoft’s work with the Grand Egyptian Museum
4. Art Explorer, an example of Artificial Intelligence in action to knowledge mine museum collections

My Museum: The Museum as the Living Room of Society Workshops

Part 1:

• Minecraft: Education Edition can be used in the classroom to promote student creativity and engage them in the learning process. Students can recreate museum exhibits and sights, among others.
• Museums can likewise benefit from the sandbox environment of the game to create digital exhibitions.

Part 2:

Museums can use technology to enhance the visitor’s experience, starting at the moment they decide to book their visit, all the way to their time of visit.

Museums can use technology to focus on three pillars: visitor experience, museum administrative work, and security. The visitor benefits from an interactive experience using AR and VR. Museum administrators have tools at their disposal which can help achieve more efficient resource management.

Part 3:

In this context, the example of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which is expected to open by 2020, was presented.

Part 4:

The software can help create a vast database for museums by digitizing artworks and looking up metadata.

The ”My Museum” Conference took place at the Benaki Museum in collaboration with the U.S. Embassy of Athens, British Council Greece, Goethe-Institut Athen, and the Institut Français d’Athènes. 

We look forward to taking part in the conference next year!