Curio is software, made in partnership with museums, designed to make it simple to create, deploy and manage, touchscreen interactives within the museum. The idea is that these can be made in-house, without needing any specialist technical skills.
Generally speaking, each interactive is centered on a hero image. This can be a single object, or image; a collection of items (such as in a display case); or something quite different like a map of the area. For that central image, we ask you – “what’s so special about this?”. You answer it by selecting areas to highlight, and telling the visitor stories about the highlight using your preferred medium (audio, text, images, video). When you’re happy, you publish it to a touchscreen for your visitors to enjoy.
For the visitor it means there’s authentic story-telling available on simple-to-use touchscreens.
“It’s like plonking a passionate expert beside every object; and asking them to spend all day, every day, telling visitors what’s so special about this thing – we know visitors adore that – and we know that’s not practical. A Curio created experience allows exactly that.”
By making the creation process simple, we’ve taken the power away from the software providers, and put it into the hands of the museum staff who know their content and their stories best. For visitors, there’s simply nothing better than hearing an expert tell you a great story. It’s what visitors will talk about over dinner that night, and recall over years ahead.
Once you’ve made an interactive you can publish it to a touchscreen, and then you change it as often as you like from your desktop. That means you can respond to current events, talk about what’s on today, create stories for specific visitor groups, and be the responsive agile institution that many aspire to be, but find it hard (expensive) to achieve.
Finally; it works. We have done studies of an object before and after a Curio interactive was installed (in a busy museum foyer) and the visitor interactions, which included detailed observations of the object, photographing it and interacting with the touchscreen more than doubled.