Elizabeth Walker

Dissertation: Museums in Bits: Digital Design from 1990

My dissertation sets out to explore what museums can do for digital design and, conversely, what digital design can do for museums. The potential and problems presented by digital design, described by Times critic Tom Dyckhoff as the ‘virtual spot where the human meets the artificial’ for museums, are examined in three ways.

Firstly, digital technology seems to offer the potential of perfect and infinite memory and, as such, provides a great service to the museum, our common sites of national memory. Yet this capacity is tested by what some have called the prospect of a ‘digital dark age’, in which many recent digital artefacts are becoming inaccessible as the software with which they have been made becomes obsolete. How should digital design best be collected and preserved in our museums? Secondly, I ask what are the implications for museums that choose to use the Internet as a means for preserving and disseminating their collections? And finally, I investigate how digital design interactions are reshaping the museum environment. By considering the fortunes of diverse institutions, from new spaces like Will Alsop’s The Public in West Bromwich to centres of tradition like the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it is clear that digital design promises not only different kinds of experiences for the museum visitor but also has the potential to change how our memories and history are formulated, maintained and shared.