Cool Course: Digital Design for Museum-Based Learning

In a Brooklyn pop-up museum this spring, featured exhibits included a t-shirt from Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour, a playable mini-drum set, sheet music from Samurai Champloo, and a Super Smash Bros. game cartridge—all items that tell the story of the role music plays in media and culture. Admission was free with an NYU ID and enrollment in a particular NYU Steinhardt course.

The short-lived Sound and Music Museum was the brainchild of graduate students in NYU’s Digital Design for Museum-Based Learning course, who were given just 30 minutes to create it for a class assignment. During the class session, students assumed the roles of curators, designers, writers, and tour guides for the museum, and also acted as visitors who toured and engaged with their own exhibits.

“As a museum studies major, I am familiar with museum structures and operations, but this fast-paced, small-scale exercise revealed the complexity and unpredictability of museum work,” said student Whitley Hsu, who was assigned the role of tour guide for the day.

Taught by Adjunct Instructor in Administration, Leadership, and Technology Barry Joseph, an industry professional who has worked with museums such as The Field Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, the course encourages students to embrace digital elements in engaging with visitors. 

Throughout the semester, students discuss and critique various uses of apps, games, social media, and augmented reality in museums and experiment with how to incorporate those tools into their own designs. In the Sound and Music Museum pop-up, for example, visitors were given the experience of a “motion-activated” speaker that played music when they walked past (facilitated by a student hidden in the background with a Bluetooth-enabled controller).

For inspiration throughout the semester, the class takes field trips to museums throughout New York City, meeting with staffers who offer insider perspectives on different exhibits’ origins, interactivity, tour design, and digital elements. This semester, the students visited ARTECHOUSE (meeting with an NYU student whose work was on display), The Museum of the City of New York, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Joseph says that the trips help students understand each museum’s goals and provide real-world examples of how staff navigate challenges and constraints.