Critical Digital: A Taxonomy to Classify Digital Integration in the Museum Domain

The evolution of the information and communication ecosystem has led to significant changes in the museum visitor’s behavior and expectations, as they now manifest a desire for participation, collaboration, and sharing – suggesting the corresponding need to readjust the institution’s discourse and communication approaches through digital integration. Despite the inherent qualities of digital media, they can be presented in various platforms, interfaces, and devices, contributing to the lack of consensus and consistency in the terminology used in academia and among designers, technologists, programmers, and developers, resulting in numerous classification proposals. This condition tends to hinder a practical and, most importantly, insightful and critical appropriation of digital technology among museum professionals. Therefore, a three-dimensional taxonomy is proposed. The first dimension – virtualization – is created based on the reality-virtuality continuum and allows assessing possible variations and compositions of real and virtual objects. The second dimension – observation distance – is focused on the formal design contours of video displays, such as the dimension and positioning related to the user. The third dimension – interactivity – classifies, based on types of interaction, the extent to which users actively modify the content in a mediated environment in real-time. Each interdependent dimension is divided into six discrete classes. This tripartite classification system streamlines the main qualitative characteristics within different digital mediation systems, serving as a theoretical framework for digital integration centered on sustainability, accessibility, inclusivity, critical thinking, and individual subjectivity during the museum experience.