No doubt that ICT has found it’s way into museums. Everyday museum visitors around the world are met by audio guides, touch screens, mobile applications and so on, filled with text, sound, video, games and other contents with the intend to improve the museum experience. However, many museums lack the resources and know-how needed to develop ICT, and in order to go down the digital road, museums establish partnerships with ICT design companies where curators, educators and other museum professionals collaborate with external interaction designers, creative directors, developers and the like.
In recent years, a great deal of the literature and research concerned with collaborative ICT design practices at museums has focused on collaboration and co-design with users and communities, for instance building on the notions of the ‘participatory museum’ (Simon 2010). Even though this is an extremely important area to look into, I argue that collaborative design practices taking place between museums and ICT design companies deserve more attention. To collaborate across organizational contexts is not an easy task, but to do so and to succeed is vital for reaching creative and innovative results (Sawyer 2007; Skot-Hansen 2008).
The aim of the paper is to explore empirically some of the contextual challenges for collaborative design between museums and ICT design companies. This is done by analysing data from longitudinal case studies of two quite dissimilar Danish museum projects where the collaboration with ICT design companies played an essential role. Finally, I discuss the implications of the findings for future collaboration between museums and ICT design companies.
