Designing Online Platforms for Cultural Participation and Education: A Taxonomic Approach

Museums preserve the cultural heritage and aim at providing study and education as well as enjoyment for the general public. In pursuing their missions, museums are increasingly concerned with making these experiences digitally available. Therefore, they start to use online platforms that make cultural objects publicly accessible, and therefore allow discussing cultural issues and provide cultural and educational participation. However, as there is little consolidated knowledge on features of such platforms and limited resources of museums, they face challenges in achieving their missions through a platform. In order to overcome this, we (1) review and synthesize related literature and online platforms and (2) present a taxonomy of how online offers leverage cultural participation and education. In doing this, we seek to enable platform designers and museum professionals in making informed decisions in terms of how the ‘museum experience’ can be supported/complemented through online platforms.