Dear Joanna,
Thank you for your great talk! I really enjoyed your discussion on various factors involved in designing period rooms. Thinking of a hybrid approach to education and experience and the need to go beyond the rigid perception of authenticity to respond to the needs of here and now, I wonder if you could share your reflections on the impact of the recent move towards digital museums on the visitor's/viewer's experience of period rooms and how/if the period rooms should adjust.
Thank you,
Solmaz
Dear Solmaz,
Thank you so much for your question. The move to digital offers huge possibilities for visitors' experiences of period rooms, particularly hybrid digital / physical experiences. There are obviously opportunities to use digital technology to reconstruct the original architectural environments that rooms were in, or to reconstruct 'original' furnishings, but to my mind one key potential benefit is in offering alternative approaches, thus challenging the 'time-capsule' concept and presenting change over time, but perhaps also in presenting speculation: ideas we have about a room's history but for which we lack evidence. It also, critically, offers opportunities to connect period rooms with lived experience, be that through film, AR, oral histories and more. I think we will see much more of this as we move forward and I think it has great potential to help create multi-layered meanings that will enrich the experiences of period rooms.
Thanks and best wishes,
Joanna
