When we were invited in the spring of 2019 to speak at TEDxCatania, we’ll admit it – we were surprised.
What could we, a Sicilian start-up founded just two years earlier, possibly bring to an event whose brand is globally recognised for its ability to inspire?
The theme chosen for that edition was equally challenging and inspiring: “What if…”
In 2019, digital technologies – and museum gamification in particular – were making a strong entrance into the cultural heritage world (or at least, that’s how it seemed). It was the era of Pokémon GO, the mobile game that sent people walking through streets and into public and private spaces to complete their collection of geolocated Pokémon on the virtual map of the real world. Museums, too, were beginning to look to gamification as a way of interpreting and presenting their collections.
We started from two key reflections: the direct experience of our founder, Luna Meli, during museum education workshops with primary school children – whose first reaction had often been “now we’re going to be bored” – and the statement by the then director of the Louvre, who openly described the museum as a place that “is not cool”.
But if museums are not cool, if culture feels boring to those who will one day be responsible for safeguarding it, whose museums will we be visiting in 2050? Who will stop them from becoming huge storage depots?
Bringing back the emotional spark that museums can offer, using languages and formats from which museums have traditionally kept their distance, is the key to keeping them alive, everyday places.
We thought back to the experience of COMICON, the Naples comics fair, for which Panini had published a comic in Topolino (the Italian Mickey Mouse magazine) where Canova travels to Naples in search of inspiration.
We thought of Beyoncé’s music video filmed in the Louvre, which helped artworks other than the Mona Lisa enter the collective imagination of teenagers and young adults.
And, of course, we thought about what we were doing in Sicily: bringing play into museums to make them more engaging, stimulating and interactive, using the communication tools people already have in their hands every day – their smartphones.
Since that day in October 2019, the use of digital tools for enhancing cultural heritage has continued to advance. Today, 3D printing, mobile applications and visitor engagement tools that leverage 3D video and multimedia guides have become standard practice.
For anyone interested in revisiting the state of digital innovation in cultural heritage back in 2019, Luna Meli’s TEDxCatania talk is available on YouTube. Noi, lasciamo testo dell’intervento integrale originale, condividendolo liberamente, come libera per tutti dovrebbe essere sempre la cultura.