A story of immersion: The design and production process behind the storytelling of immersive museums and art exhibitions

Gradually, museums have been reflecting on the kinds of exhibitions they create and consequently, shifting their approaches as far as exhibition design is concerned. Visitors’ criticism and demand to move away from passive, encyclopaedic with curatorial authority exhibitions, to ones that engage visitors and place them at the centre of focus has ignited this change in exhibition design. For this reason, museums have begun to experiment with the exhibition design and look for new ways to engage and intrigue visitors. A way to do so is by employing immersive approaches together with strong storytelling which can create memorable experiences and redefine the user experience. However, despite the increased adoption of immersive exhibitions, the design and production process behind such exhibitions has not been investigated in-depth yet, with scholars reporting that the accounts of designers and experts who are not part of the museum team are rarely taken into consideration in studies. Thus the research combined the narratives of interviewed experts and identified a design and production model consisting of five phases (initial, concept, design, production, and opening phase), which extends our understanding of the creative process for immersive exhibitions, while simultaneously denoting changes in contemporary exhibition design in general, due to the wide integration of immersive approaches in nearly all exhibitions. The research also revealed the changed dynamics of a detailed and expanded two-sided production model which requires the close collaboration of multiple experts. Nonetheless, the proliferation of the roles required in exhibition design and production has been filled by external collaborators, and the museum team has not expanded to include all those new roles. Finally, the creative process is not technology-driven since the development of a leading story lies at the heart of the identified model and informs the overall process. Therefore every exhibition is a story, and immersion is being used as a way to enhance the storytelling and engage and submerge visitors in what they experience.