Making Smarter Museums Through New Technologies

Smart technologies have a significant potential to impact people's behaviors thanks to their ability to increase access to different resources (Kaartemo and Helkkula, 2018) and the ability to influence technology-based encounters (Mele and Russo Spena, 2019). With the use of smart technologies, people are able to use and/or deliver a smart service based on their interaction with digital tools that perform, in an automatic and/or semi-automatic manner, tasks and objectives that traditionally required human intelligence (Huang and Rust, 2021). Nowadays, advancements in technologies have profoundly changed the formats and characteristics of many sectors, including the cultural one, with reference to museums. Accordingly, a new concept of the museum is emerging. The concept of a “smart museum” is associated with a clash of different cultures and the promotion of new ideas and projects, as well as innovative artistic solutions, aesthetics, feelings, and experience. More precisely, a smart museum is a specific application of building intelligence in the field of culture and expo; it is more scientific, more standard, and more specific, and the goal is clearer (Wang, 2021).

Consistent with these premises, there is a need to investigate how the smart technologies’ development impacts the museum experience. Therefore, this chapter aims to deepen the theme of smart technologies in the museum environment, to describe the elements and the main dimensions capable of impacting both visitors’ perception and their overall experience. This chapter is characterized by two sections. The first one regards a theoretical study on the theme of intelligent technologies or “smart technologies”, highlighting how the introduction of digitization processes has changed the museums’ formats and characteristics. The second section analyses the application of intelligent technologies in smart museums looking at national and international best practices. The authors analyze the use of smart technologies to a) increase people's knowledge and skills in providing intelligent service in cultural heritage, b) promote the involvement of visitors and improve their experience. Technology-mediated cultural services complement day-to-day operations but do not eliminate the need for traditional face-to-face interactions. The findings show that visitors increasingly lose the role of passive users to play an active role in the co-production of museum experiences. Specifically, smart museums lead to cognitive and engaging learning, touching, feeling, and experiencing different emotions, encouraging a return to the museum, inviting to learn, and shaping one’s personal experience. In this information exchange, both visitors’ knowledge and experiences come into play, laying the cultural foundations on which the visitor museum experience is built. The presented case studies show that a smart museum makes its cultural heritage knowledge usable and creatable by both classes of users: museum visitors and museum professionals. This chapter contributes to the current academic debate on defining museums as a smart environment where visitors can acquire cultural heritage content by interacting with the surrounding environment and the smart objects included in it.