With online museum experiences now emerging, a transformation is unfolding as the digital and social is interwoven inside and outside the physical site of the museum. The museum experience stands at a precipice leading us to question how museums might move beyond conventional applications of social media (as push media) towards dynamic digital innovative methods to enhance co-creative social futures. How can the social and participatory affordances of social media be deployed to facilitate co-creative spaces for engaging with museum content in ways that foster sociality and inclusion across physical and digital environments?

Responding to this problem, the aim of Museum Digital Social Futures is to address the question:

How can we learn from the pandemic by connecting digital innovation to social practices that extend beyond the physical site of the museum to imagine new forms of socially-engaged situated media practice as part of the user experience journey?

This project coalesces codesign and ethnographic methods using Audience Living Labs to map situated media practices as core to museum experience. This requires that we not only focus on the museum context but also examine the household as a dynamic possibility space for engaging with museum content. Households will become sites for ethnographic exploration, experimentation, co-creation and play to provide in-depth understandings and transferable techniques that expand the future of museum audience experience.