Rethinking Museum Space: Interaction Between Spatial Layout Design and Digital Sensory Environments

Over the past decade, there has been a growing awareness of architectural and spatial design in the functioning of museums and the creation of distinctive visitor experiences. This issue has itself become more complex as digital technologies offer new potentials to mediate between museum content and visitors, and in particular technologies which have the capacity to amplify senses and facilitate interactive, whole body, immersive and sensorial experience. The paper will explore for the first time the role of spatial layout in the sensory environments created through digital media in museums. Among the key questions raised are: how are they integrated into the museum itinerary spatially and conceptually? In what kind of spaces are they installed and how do they relate to them? Are they arranged so as to exploit key spatial properties? We investigate these questions initially through the identification and review of existing experimental projects, and then through the in-depth study of examples of the museum work of two well-established creative studios which combine architecture and interaction: Jason Bruges Studio and United Visual Artists. The analysis is based, on the one hand, on interviews with the designers involved in their creation and, on the other, on syntactic concepts and techniques. By looking in parallel at the work of the two studios, from their first installations until now, and through syntactic analysis, we unravel the way these projects become integrated in the museum, both in literal terms (spatial positioning) and in metaphorical (curatorial practice). The analysis shows that as these works become with time more symbolic, they also become less intrinsically spatial and their experience less dependent on movement. More interestingly, it brings to surface aspects of the design of digital sensory environments which have a relation of correspondence with syntactic properties, such as integration, and types of space. Having shown that space plays a key but variable role, the paper ends by proposing a model for the spatial understanding of these novel technology-mediated experiences and for rethinking museum space.