Across the expo floor and in-between moments, the hallway run-ins and evening mixers, there was a shared urgency humming beneath the formal panels and friendly handshakes. Museums are changing. Fast. And not just in their programming or spatial design, but in how they see their role in society. What used to be a slow, careful sector is shifting into something far more agile, more ambitious, and frankly, more radical.
This year, it wasn’t about the flashiest hardware or the biggest collections. It was about mission alignment, longevity, and trust - and how cultural institutions can reassert themselves as essential public infrastructure in a time of digital fragmentation and collective burnout. The conference felt like a patchwork of experiments and provocations trying to address a fundamental truth: if these places are to remain relevant, they must become more human, more nimble, and far more porous.
That comes with responsibility: to build experiences that listen as much as they speak, and to distill complexity without flattening meaning. And this begs the question: How?
Great Design Makes Difficult Ideas Reachable
One talk that stuck with me is "Making Complex Science Accessible to All", delivered by the talented leadership at Atelier Brueckner. It traced the reimagination of the MIT Museum and the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) as case studies in using design to demystify scientific knowledge. For MIT, the mission wasn’t to simplify science, but to open doors and invite everyday people into subjects once deemed too technical or too abstract. In CNPEM’s case, it was about building an environment that serves as an emotional catalyst for students and scientists to innovate. Both missions—translating complexity into clarity without compromise—sits at the heart of what we believe great experience design can do. It’s not just content delivery. It’s the distillation of mass information as an act of equity.
You Can't Design Depth Alone / Real Meaning Requires the Right Partners
Another standout: Susan Magsamen’s session on activating museums as centers for health and well-being. What’s powerful here isn’t just the research (though the neuroaesthetic findings were compelling), but also the possibility of museums becoming places that reduce isolation, enhance communication, and offer sensory healing in a hyper-fragmented world. What this calls for is interdisciplinary collaboration, pushing the museum to evolve into an integrated ecosystem. And that’s where specialized partners come in - to enable and bridge big, fragile ideas. This trend toward deep partnership showed up across the week. More and more, museums are seeking collaborators who bring domain fluency and design intelligence. Specialized doesn’t mean narrow. Rather, it means intentional, rooted, and responsive. We believe that the future of design is not full-service. It’s full-consideration.
Technology as a Quiet Collaborator
There was also a noticeable recalibration of what “technology” means in these spaces. The novelty is gone, and frankly, good riddance. What remains are smarter questions: Can this evolve with us? Can we train our staff to sustain it? Does this serve the story, or eclipse it? Modularity, maintenance, and mission alignment were recurring themes.
And yes, AI was everywhere. But not in the dystopian, museum-as-chatbot sense. The best conversations focused on augmentation. In spaces so deeply tied to truth, memory, and cultural trust, AI is a quiet instrument. And the institutions getting it right are the ones using it not to impress, but to empower.
What's Being Asked of Us
If there’s one through-line across all of this, it’s that museums are being asked to become braver (and more collaborative) in the face of immense complexity. These aren’t problems to solve with a touchscreen and a script. They require specialized partnership and rooted purpose - the kind of design process that’s less about making content look good, and more about making meaning land.
That’s the choice we have as Experience Designers, and we’re choosing the latter.
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