Satisfying personal needs at the museum: The role of digital technologies

Abstract

This paper investigates how museum visitors use digital technologies to mediate their general meaning-making process about artworks and other information they encounter throughout their museum experience. Concluding from a case study at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, this study suggests that visitors use digital technologies as a vehicle for satisfying one or more personal needs. In order to gain control over their experience, visitors used not only digital technologies provided by the museum but also their personal technologies. The article argues that both museums and visitors will derive great benefits by understanding the ways in which people process multimedia messages and by implementing these principles of multimedia learning into the design of digital technologies at museums. The data also suggest that museums should especially support visitors in using technology with which they are already familiar and embed it in the museum experience.