Service co-design to envision the transformation of museums

This paper presents an ongoing co-design project to develop new services to make cultural heritage accessible and engaging for older people with disability, even beyond the museums’ context. A group of stakeholders including museum staff, older adults, healthcare professionals, designers, technology providers, and accessibility experts were involved in reflective and hands-on creative activities to develop a future-based vision of barrier-free cultural experiences. The project serves to support the innovation of the cultural sector beyond the digital transformation: indeed, the new services are not limited to the adoption of key enabling technologies, rather they call for new areas of intervention outside the traditional cultural contexts, for new organisational cultures and new audience engagement strategies.