Making Dinosaurs Dance : A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums

This book takes the readers behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovated visitor digital engagement through a public-facing iterative design process while highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world.

Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums takes the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on the author’s six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital Design - user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up – then applies them through case studies across a range of topics: Combining digital experience design with physical museum assets in a guided format, featuring Crime Scene Neanderthal (CSN), a youth co-designed and facilitated in-Hall experience that invited museum visitors to use a mobile app and other tools to investigate a science-based mystery. Game-based learning, featuring three case: a tabletop games (Pterosaurs: The Card Game), mobile games (Playing with Dinos), and commercial off-the-shelf games (Minecraft). Mobile augmented reality games, featuring MicroRangers, which used AR to invite visitors to shrink to microscopic size and explore the Museum to combat threats to global biodiversity.XR experience design, featuring case studies about 360 videos on paleontology and virtual reality projects about ocean life. Science visualizations, featuring Galactic Golf, an astro-visualization that addressed the topics of mass and gravity through a round of mixed reality Martian golf; interactive science visualizations that invited visitors to hold CT-scans of bat skulls in their hand; and Finding Flamingos, a youth program focused on how Conservation Biologists protect endangered flamingos through GIS mapping and predictions software. In addition, the book explores related topics at institutions in Greece and France, and from Washington, D.C. to California.