Digital-Spektrum Project

About the Project

The main objective of Digital-Spektrum project is to provide museum staff with digital skills and expertise to design inclusive museum experiences for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

One of the main priorities of the Digital-Spektrum project is to promote inclusion and diversity in all fields of education, in this case, educational experiences that take place in museums. Museums are now known as cultural and education hubs that promote inclusion and diversity (ICOM,2022). In order to concretize this goal, supporting and encouraging museum digital transformation is fundamental. Digital technologies are indeed powerful tools to design personalised, adaptable, flexible, and diverse educational opportunities (European Council 2021/C 221/02, 2021) that ensure accessible forms of learning to all. Thus, this project identifies developing digital readiness, resilience and capacity as another priority.

However, there is evidence that museum staff, those who welcome visitors, who design museum spaces and exhibitions, those who interpret the collections and communicate them, are not equipped with adequate digital skills (Poce, 2019; Commissione Europea, 2017; OCSE, 2018). Another priority for this project is to improve the competences of educators in museums in this regard, both for ensuring inclusive and accessible museum experiences for visitors with ASD, both for developing employability opportunities for museum staff, who need to acquire new skills to keep up with the society demands. Through the realisation of activities focused on Object-based Learning, Digital Storytelling and digital technologies for well-being, the concrete objectives that this project aims at achieving are training museum professionals to understand and master digital skills and be able to apply them to the enjoyment and enhancement of cultural heritage; developing professional skills for museum staff in the field of inclusive design of museum spaces and educational experiences; and promoting knowledge on ASD visitors and how to engage with them among museum staff.

Finally, Digital Spektrum aims to design a toolkit of methodologies and digital tools to be used by museum staff to make museums more autism-friendly.