In this time of digitalisation, upcoming emerging technologies, such as mixed reality and artificial intelligence, create numerous of possibilities to make things more exciting or easier to understand. This is something you also see in museums. More and more museums use emerging technology to optimise their user experience with for example augmented reality, virtual reality, applications for way-finding etc. Especially for historical museums it is an opportunity to bring dull data to life.

In this document, I will research the opportunity for Grachtenmuseum that emerging technologies like augmented reality and artificial intelligence help transform static, yet interesting history, into a more visual experience.

Problem

Grachtenmuseum has a permanent exhibition “The Amsterdam Canals” about Amsterdam’s history through 400 years. It tells visitors a lot about the expansion from the canal belt, located in the center, to how the city is today. Though the audiovisual tour has acclaimed reviews from its visitors, people are still curious to know more about the residents of Amsterdam, from the 17th century until now.

“I would like to know more about peoples lives and how the culture evolved” Visitor of Grachtenmuseum

What’s charming about Grachtenmuseum is its location at Herengracht 386, in a real canal house that functioned as a home from 1665 up until 1924, before transforming into an office and later a museum. The director of Grachtenmuseum asked historians to research all the previous residents of the building. This resulted in historical data consisting off 88 pages, thus there are a lot of stories to tell, but the problem is that it lacks visual elements. The museum doesn’t own a lot of relevant paintings of portraits or, for example, crockery.

*“I would like to know who you had to be in order to live in this house. For example, what their social status was, family backgrounds, what kind job the residents had etc.”

Visitor of Grachtenmuseum*

“We would like to teach the visitors about the stories of earlier residents of the building in an engaging way, but the current data we have now is very static and missing physical elements”

Martijn Bosch, director of the museum