NDF25 PROGRAMME
CONFERENCE - DAY 2
9:00 Day 2 Welcome
Join Dave Patten, a pioneering digital innovator with nearly 40 years of experience at Science Museum Group, UK, where he was responsible for developing and commissioning digital experiences in over 170 exhibitions. This talk traces a remarkable journey—from early experiments to cutting-edge interactive exhibits—offering insights for creators, technologists, and curious minds alike.
Dive into the origins with The Network (1995), a multiuser game that introduced kids to video conferencing, revealing the power of user testing.
Explore The Wellcome Wing (2000), a new extension to the Science Museum with nearly 200 networked exhibits, showcasing the thrills and challenges of pushing boundaries.
Discover Web Lab (2012), an award-winning Google collaboration that united physical and online visitors 24/7, mastering partnerships and beta launches.
Experience the Technicians Gallery (2022), an interactive led exhibition for young people, featuring digital exhibits with physical interfaces which allow visitors to be technicians. Highlighting the challenges of robust design.
The talk will also touch on findings from research carried out by Dave Patten, Ben Gammon and Bethan Ross in 2019 - Everything we know about visitors and digital media exhibits. With humour, wisdom, and some key takeaways from each project, this talk celebrates innovation, resilience, and the art of engaging audiences in a digital world.
Dave Patten has recently (June 2024) retired as Head of New Media at The Science Museum Group, UK, where his role included managing all aspects of new media and AV, from conceptual design, prototyping and production to project managing external developers and production companies. He has a background in electronics and computer science, and worked at the Science Museum nearly 40 years, developing exhibitions and leading development teams. He developed the technical systems for the Science Museum’s Wellcome Wing and Dana Centre, which opened in 2000 and 2004 respectively.
Recent work includes Web Lab, the multi-award winning collaboration with Google, Engineering Your Future, an interactive exhibition for teenagers on engineering and a secondment to Frost Science in Miami to help develop exhibitions and systems for a new museum which opened in 2017. As well as managing the New Media team spread across multiple sites at the Science Museum Group he also ran the Science Museum Groups Digital Lab Initiative which experiments in emerging technologies. Dave is now an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Science Museum Group documenting the museum's recent past from a non curatorial perspective.
The Utaina project is a collaborative project between Ngā Taonga, National Library and Archives New Zealand. Through mass digitisation we are preserving our shared audiovisual collections. This project is already having an impact beyond preservation, and is improving community access to audiovisual collections and taonga. This panel will discuss some of the ways an AV digitisation project opens access to communities across Aotearoa and some of the surprising things we’ve learned along the way.
Jessica Moran (she/her) is the Acting Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand. In this role she leads efforts to build, preserve, protect, and provide access to the Library’s collections and taonga. Her substantive role is Associate Chief Librarian, Research Collections where she is responsible for managing curatorial, digital collections, digitization projects, and archival processing for the Library. Since 2022 she has served as the project executive for the National Library and Archives New Zealand’s Utaina project.
Kate Roberts, Ngā Taonga: Kate comes from the New Zealand museum and library worlds, having trained as a conservator in Canberra in the 1980s and having worked at the Otago Museum, Te Papa, the National Library, Archives NZ, Puke Ariki, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Auckland City Libraries, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
While in Western Australia from 2014-2019, Kate volunteered at the Kimberley Language Resource Centre, writing their digitisation plan for archived audio recordings made over 40 years of linguistic fieldwork in the language-rich Kimberley.
At Ngā Taonga Kate is Project Executive for the Utaina digitisation project.
Louise McCrone is Director, Holdings and Discovery at Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand, responsible for mahi which includes description, preservation and access to archives. Louise has worked with audiovisual archives in a variety of roles for more than 20 years, including at the Film Archive and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Louise’s involvement with Utaina started at Ngā Taonga, and since 2020 she has been the key contact for Archives in the project.
10:30 Morning Tea
A statistics-based contemplation of collection sharing efforts from the Kōtuia ngā Kete project.
Collection-sharing website Kōtuia ngā Kete was launched by Te Papa’s National Services Te Paerangi in 2023, with the ambition to provide greater visibility of taonga held by collecting communities in Aotearoa. Two years in, this lightning talk will use some rudimentary data from the site to consider the fluidity of collections access and how we might now define a distributed national collection.
We will touch on some of the barriers to sharing collections, including attracting whare taonga and marae-based collections to participate. We will also consider some of the models which might support digitisation and collection sharing efforts.
All of this might just change our perspective of success.
The paorangi | impact of sharing collections collectively has benefits to communities that care for collections and those communities that they serve. By evaluating our goal of access to communities against the reality of delivering this service, this talk hopes to inspire the NDF community to consider how they can help support access to collections outside their own organisations.
Emma Philpott, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa: Emma is the programme lead for collection-sharing site Kōtuia ngā Kete and was the Product Owner for development of the website. She has spent the last decade at Te Papa working across sector support, content development and policy roles. She has previously worked for non-profit, charity and cultural sectors both in NZ and the UK. She is particularly interested in championing good practice and innovative solutions in the museum and gallery sector.
Archaeological data is a rich and unique source of information about Aotearoa’s history, providing tangible insights into people’s lives, the processes that affected them and the landscapes they occupied. This is why archaeological sites are protected by law, and why reports are required to be written on archaeological excavations. But these technical reports are (a) not that accessible to the general public and (b) not that user-friendly for future research. At Christchurch Archaeology Project, we want to change that, to make archaeological data – generally considered to be a public good – accessible to the public and useful to anyone who is interested. To this end, we built the (online) Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi (MoAŌ), to enable access to collections that would otherwise be hidden away (or lost forever, or stored in a way that is completely inaccessible). MoAŌ demonstrates the power of a relational database to bring the past to life by highlighting the relationships between people, place and objects. If nothing else, the amount of data we had to deal with and the short time-scale we built the museum in will take your breath away! We’ll outline the challenges we faced, the lessons we learnt, the solutions we arrived at – and the incredible opportunities that lie ahead.
Katharine Watson, Christchurch Archaeology Project: Katharine is an archaeologist with over 20 years experience in the field. She founded and ran Underground Overground Archaeology throughout the post-earthquake period in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She sold the company in 2017 and embarked on her PhD, which drew on the data about 19th century houses demolished post-earthquake to learn about why people built the houses they did and to better understand life in 19th century Christchurch. She was a 2023 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow and is on the board of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Hayden Cawte, Christchurch Archaeology Project: Hayden has been working as a heritage consultant for the last 20 years. He specialises in mining archaeology, pre-European New Zealand archaeology and urban archaeology, as well as the built environment. Hayden has an honours degree in anthropology, a post-graduate diploma in commerce, and a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Otago. He has attended University College London as a Marie Curie Fellow and the University of Cambridge as an Evans Fellow. He has also lectured at both the University of Otago and James Cook University, Australia.
Jessie Garland, Christchurch Archaeology Project: Jessie is an archaeologist and material culture specialist, co-founder of the Christchurch Archaeology Project and a PhD candidate at La Trobe University. She has worked as an artefact analyst in consultant and research archaeology around New Zealand since 2010, including six years in post-earthquake Ōtautahi Christchurch. Since 2018 she has been studying towards a PhD with La Trobe University, using the post-earthquake dataset to analyse the supply of material culture to nineteenth century Christchurch at a city-as-site level. In 2023-2024 she designed and oversaw the development and implementation of the Museum of Archaeology Ōtautahi database.
An international collaboration between the Tiapapata Art Centre, Puke Ariki, and the Museum of Stone Tools. The Museum of Stone Tools (MoST) partnered with Puke Ariki Museum to digitally and physically recreate a rare Samoan hafted stone adze. Using high-resolution images captured in New Zealand, MoST’s photogrammetry team overcame challenges to produce a detailed 3D model and a physical replica via 3D printing in Australia.
The replica travelled to Samoa for an adze-making workshop, serving as a reference for traditional crafting. This collaboration demonstrates how accessible digital tools can overcome barriers to cultural artefacts, supporting education, heritage preservation, and cultural revitalization across international borders.
Nicholas Setteducato: Nick is the Digital Engagement and Support Supervisor for the Cultural Enterprises Team at New Plymouth District Council, working with Puke Ariki Museum and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre. Nick graduated from New York University with a degree in visual arts in 2001, and he has spent the past 20 years working with collections in the film and GLAM industries in New Zealand and in New York City. Nick explores new tools such as virtual reality, virtual tours, and augmented reality, and he is focused on finding effective solutions to apply these innovations in a small institution across exhibitions, collections and education teams.
PROJECT COLLABORATORS:
Mark Moore, University of New England: Mark Moore is an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, and director of the online Museum of Stone Tools. His research explores how the evolution of hominin cognition—the way that humans think—is reflected in the way they organised their stone-flaking techniques to produce tools. Prof Moore applies his research by collaborating with Aboriginal communities to rediscover and reclaim the stone-working practices on traditional country.
Galumalemana Steven Percival, Tiapapata Art Centre: Galumalemana Steven Percival is a photographer and videographer with particular interest in Samoa’s rich natural and cultural heritage, the indigenous ecological knowledge of the Samoans, human rights issues in Samoa’s communal society, and religious freedom. Together with his wife Wendy, they established the Tiapapata Art Centre, a charitable trust promoting traditional and contemporary arts and crafts in Samoa.
Galumalemana is a revivalist heritage artist, and a professional photographer and videographer. Recognised for his research and advocacy of Sāmoa’s rich natural and cultural heritage, he has built up a body of work capturing the indigenous ecological knowledge of the Samoans. Interested in the impacts of globalization, he has also produced an extensive visual record of the social discourses in Samoan society, exploring such issues as climate change, health, and human rights, winning him the 2024 Samoa Human Rights Champion Award (Media). Together with his wife Wendy, a highly accomplished multidisciplinary artist and art educator, he established the Tiapapata Art Centre Inc., a charitable trust promoting traditional and contemporary arts and crafts in Samoa.
For over 20 years the Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA) Network has furthered the fields of new media art and digital culture in Aotearoa New Zealand, from legacy instruments such as mailman lists and discussion forums, through to more contemporary social media channels and forays in Web3. Meanwhile, the attention towards digital art has significantly shifted from its 90s and early dotcom boom obscurity, onto more recent tendencies via a global pandemic and NFT hypes that mostly resulted in local funding bodies and policy makers playing catch up, while global new media art scenes became more concerned with the conservation of born-digital work and the preservation of its carrier systems and machines.
This talk will present an overview of the past, present and future of Aotearoan digital arts, ranging from perspectives on historical genres and classification, to methods and tactics regarding the archiving of digital culture through taonga and assets, as well as the sociopolitical dimensions of its networked infrastructure.
Walter Langelaar, Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA) Network: Walter Langelaar is an artist/academic whose work in media arts and computational design questions our digitally networked cultures and infrastructure through artistic critique in varying dimensions, such as sculpture, installation, online performance and critical intervention.
Since 2024, Walter chairs the Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA) Network, a network researching the expanded field around media, new media, electronic and digital art.
The ADA Network enables communication between artists, curators, teachers, critics, theorists, writers and the interested public. ADA develops public understanding of digital art through its online forum, through publications and exhibitions, and by touring speakers, holding master classes and symposia.
The landscape of research and publishing has evolved far beyond traditional outputs. In the 21st century, research is driven by new expectations, particularly from funders, and increasingly takes place outside traditional academic settings. As a result, unconventional research outputs—such as reports, case studies, white papers, blogs, videos, podcasts, simulations, and datasets—are being created at an unprecedented pace. However, these valuable resources often remain hidden from formal indexing systems, making them difficult to discover and preserve.
Moreover, critical documents such as guidelines, performance data, manuals, community health needs assessments, health technology assessments, protocols, and methodology papers are often transient, leading to a growing problem of ephemeral citations and inaccessible foundational research.
This presentation explores a collaborative initiative between a researcher, an academic library, and a commercial publisher aimed at bridging this gap, to to further research on Social Cohesion in Aotearoa. Attendees will gain insights into how cross-sector collaboration can create a sustainable ecosystem for preserving and elevating research beyond traditional boundaries, fostering inclusivity and enabling researchers to build on a more complete and enduring foundation of knowledge.
Natalia Albert, Victoria University of Wellington: Natalia is a former public servant and current PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, focusing on government policies, social cohesion, and fostering peaceful coexistence within New Zealand’s growing and diverse populations.
She has over a decade of experience in the public sector, where she worked in a few key roles, including Principal Advisor at Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, supporting the public sector efforts to grow and improve the quality of diverse and inclusive practices across the system; and Programme Lead for the social cohesion policy that emerged from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 15 March attacks.
Julie Stevens, Coherent Digital: A dedicated librarian and publisher with extensive experience in digital preservation, Julie has worked on numerous projects focused on safeguarding ephemeral and at-risk media. Passionate about cultural heritage and inclusivity, she leads efforts to make marginalized voices and content accessible and discoverable in perpetuity.
When people want to check a fact or learn about something new, they often end up on Wikipedia. With its cited sources, community norms, and over 2 decades of work by volunteer editors, it’s resisted the enshittification of the rest of the internet.
If we want to get our collections and knowledge into more peoples’ hands, this is where to do it - but there’s a lot to do.
Hear about Te Papa’s approach to professional development for Wikipedia, and how building a community of editors is turning small individual contributions into a wave of opportunities and impact.
Lucy Schrader, Te Papa: Lucy is Kaitūhono Hora Raraunga | Digital Channels Outreach Manager at Te Papa, where she gets collections, data, and knowledge onto the wider internet, and a committee member of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand.
Auckland Museum has partnered with the University of Auckland to create a digital interactive public engagement experience that elevates the voices of the young people that contributed to the Our Voices study.
Our Voices is a cohort of 800 13-year-old participants enrolled in the Growing Up in New Zealand Study led by the University of Auckland that aims to capture the ‘voices’ of the young people in the study, using a co-developed digital platform to understand well-being from the young persons’ perspective. The key message for this exhibition is around raising awareness of youth perspectives on current issues and how the findings of the Our Voices study may have an impact in New Zealand.
Auckland Museum have worked closely with the Our Voices team and a creative partner, PHQ, to collaborate, design, produce and deliver this experience. This experience harnesses the power of digital tools to showcase the voices of young people and engage visitors with how young people across the motu see the world. This exhibition had a dedicated summer student as part of our internship programme who contributed to the evaluation of the experience to provide audience engagement insights included as part of this presentation.
Jessica Morgan, Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum: Jess Morgan is a Digital Experience Producer at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum where she plans and delivers engaging and innovative digital experiences for Auckland Museum’s diverse audiences. Jess comes from a development and arts background with a focus on creative digital works and experiences. During her time at Auckland War Memorial Museum Jess has produced and developed a number of digital projects in roles as a digital experience producer and developer.
Nick Yeats, Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum: Nick Yeats is an Interpretive Planner at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where he leads the content and interpretation of world-class exhibitions. He has worked in the Aotearoa New Zealand museum sector for the last decade and his experience is grounded in interpretation and audience engagement via exhibitions and education. He comes from a science communication background with a particular interest in experience development and multimedia storytelling. Nick is currently the chairperson of the Interpretation Network New Zealand, an organization that supports interpreters and visitor engagement professionals around the motu.
Born-digital files can be here one minute and deleted the next. This lightning talk will explore the challenges and realities of ensuring that our contemporary born-digital cultural heritage remains preserved and accessible into the future.
Valerie Love, Alexander Turnbull Library, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand: Valerie Love is Kaipupuri Pūranga Matihiko Matua Senior Digital Archivist and currently also Acting Digital Collections Team Leader at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
The Digital Directorate at State Library Victoria has been running Code Club for the past 18 months. Open to all library staff, the club aims to improve digital literacy, provide hands-on experience with GLAM-sector relevant technologies, and demystify emerging technology.
Code Club has evolved from monthly meetups focused on learning basic coding to its current offerings:
Weekly Code study groups for beginner-level coders
Standalone workshops, every 6-8 weeks that focus on specific technologies
A community of practice for staff who use coding in their work
Code Club also provides a space for discussing and developing proof-of-concept projects, and helping staff explore how digital technologies can be applied to their roles.
The club's biggest success has been its cross-departmental appeal, breaking down silos and fostering experimentation and discussion around relevant, emerging technologies.
Sotirios Alpanis, State Library Victoria: Sotirios brings over a decade of experience in the GLAM sector, having contributed to digitising millions of pages of archive material at the British Library, developing digital experiences at Cogapp, and most recently driving digital innovation at State Library Victoria. He is passionate about exploring thoughtful, interactive, and impactful applications of emerging technologies that enhance the understanding of GLAM collections, improve the work experiences of colleagues, and engage new and underrepresented audiences.
12:30 Lunch
Inheriting a heritage technology collection and an old telephone exchange with no specific brief, I will take audiences on a journey through the creation of the recently opened National Communication Museum (NCM). Conceived virtually during the COVID-19 lockdowns, I assembled a multidisciplinary team to craft a vision for a museum at the intersection of culture and technology. Framing the museum as a "machine for conversation," NCM positions visitors as nodes in an evolving, interconnected network. Using the tools of communication technologies, audiences are engaged in an active exchange, unlocking content through their gestures, actions, words, and choices. Bespoke chat interfaces connect visitors to the omnipresent and disembodied voice of the building, guiding them as they explore and select content that interests them. These interfaces display continually updating content that responds to central provocations such as: Do you code? What is the line between us and technology? and How do you navigate the unknown?
A heritage telecommunications collection forms the nucleus of the museum, providing a platform to explore cycles of innovation and obsolescence. Duplicate collection items are repurposed to create new interactives and artworks, where they are reinterpreted, augmented, and re-imagined. NCM's approach is experimental and adaptive, positioning the museum as a collaborative facility for ideas and exchange. Through prototypes, renders, installation footage, and final works, I will showcase some of the groundbreaking research we are leading, including training Leonardo.ai on our collection, spearheading commissions that challenge biases in emerging technologies, and employing the first robot citizen to lead our official opening proceedings.
Emily Siddons, National Communication Museum: Dr Emily Siddons is the Co-CEO and Artistic Director of the National Communication Museum where she leads the creative vision and development of this brand new museum. Previously she was Producer of Exhibitions at Museums Victoria, where she led the creative development and production of major exhibitions and experiences across the museum’s three sites. She has also held positions as Producer at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Associate Curator for Liquid Architecture and Public Programmer at The National Gallery of Victoria. Recently she completed a PhD at The University of Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts, exploring new models of engagement for museums in contemporaneity.
The Changeable Collection Program at the NMA is a key project initiated as a part of a multi-year, digital transformation initiative which articulates a decade-long vision to advance digital capabilities across the organisation and enhance the museum experience for visitors. At the core of this program is the recognition of the importance of developing frameworks that can re-conceptualise the museum’s approaches and activities to assess, care for, interpret and share NMA’s collections.
The NMA's changeable approach addresses the unique needs of all collection objects as dynamic, relational, and inherently changeable. This perspective aims to enhance our understanding, management, and care of such collections through a lens of positive change to ensure these objects can develop, evolve, and maintain their significance as time, contexts, and audiences shift.
In this presentation we reflection on:
The impact of embedding a philosophical approach and and building a specialist Changeable and Digital team to embed digital collection management practices and collaborative workflows
Initiating ten cases studies to embed practical strategies that map relational knowledge, expand preservation strategies and explore the use of new technologies to unlock narratives and methods for activation
Building upon the Museum’s community engagement strategies to embed two-way knowledge sharing, informed consent, community exchange and sustainable collaboration for both First Nations and non-indigenous collection
To ground our theoretical framework, we will present the methodological approaches we’ve developed via specific case studies such as our work with the Hetherington Family Collection (Mr. Squiggle and Friends) and the WLAN testbed prototype. In these case studies we explore innovative digital techniques such as 3D laser scanning and body motion capture to produce archival-quality data packages that enable production for a range of experiences for our audiences. We also reflect on our engagement and consultation processes with creators and communities to help us understand how a changeable approach can support and communicate intergenerational transfer of knowledge, performance and care practices, to not only enhance the museum’s operational effectiveness but also ensures that its digital transformation remains relevant and responsive to the needs of diverse stakeholders.
Candice Cranmer, National Museum of Australia: Candice Cranmer is currently the Changeable and Digital Collections Senior Officer at the National Museum of Australia. She was ACMI's first Time-based Media Conservator and has held roles across conservation and digital preservation at ACMI. She is the co-convener of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials special interest group ‘Electron’ and enjoys exploring innovative conservation methodologies and collaborative practices. Candice holds Undergraduate and Honours Degrees in Fine Art from Monash University and a Masters of Cultural Materials Conservation from the University of Melbourne.
PROJECT COLLABORATORS:
Asti Sherring, National Museum of Australia: Asti Sherring is the Manager of Changeable and Digital Collections at the National Museum of Australia and Honorary Senior Lecturer, Humanities, Arts and Social Science, Australian National University. She has completed a Bachelor of Media Arts (honours) from Sydney University and a Masters of Materials Conservation at Melbourne University. Asti has held positions as Time-based media consultant at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and senior time-based art conservator at The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Asti is currently undertaking doctorate research at Canberra University (in its final stages) which explores contemporary Museum theories and practices of digital, ephemeral, immersive, participatory and technological cultural heritage.
The impact of AI/ML technologies has had a huge impact on our society, and the GLAM sector, and will shape our future for years to come. Traditional archives and records practice and capabilities have never been more relevant, particularly in ontology and graph database modelling for AgenticAI, LLMs for GenAI, and Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). I currently represent Australia/NZ on the ISO Working Group developing the ISO standard for AI and Archives & Records Management. Setting standards provide a safe space for the GLAM sector to experiment, innovate and iterate our adoption of these tools. Having a considered and defensible approach, underpinned by standards, will have an enduring impact both in how we grow our GLAM practice but also on how we maintain the outputs of these technologies for future generations.
Stephen Clarke, InfoGovNZ: Stephen Clarke is an Information Management and AI Consultant, previously a CDO, and Chief Archivist of NZ. Stephen has co-developed ISO standards such ISO15489, ISO13028, and ISO16175. As an anthropologist he understands human systems, and as a technical expert he understands information systems, using technology to connect them is his mission. Stephen was on the NDF conference committee in 2006 - 08, and was the conference convenor in 2007, he remained within the NDF family as an elected member of the NDF board until 2012.
Our presentation will highlight the award-winning digital projection experience Te Kōtiu in MOTAT’s Aviation Hall. It will peel back the layers of this ‘world first’ aviation experience, building a picture of the process undertaken to incorporate new content, including pūrakau Māori, tūturu Māori art, and inspiring stories of wāhine Māori and Pacific aerospace trailblazers.
Narrated in te reo Māori and English, Te Kōtiu (meaning to swoop / North-West wind) transforms the visitor experience from observing to immersing in the storytelling of aviation. We set out to create an inclusive experience that extended on the offering in the Aviation Hall to showcase the importance of flight through a te ao Māori lens.
MOTAT worked with digital agency and principal partner Waxeye. We collaborated with cultural advisors and experts, including kaumatua Hone Martin, to showcase the extraordinary manu kuaka/godwit migration and flight formation, featured throughout the projection experience.
Digitised manu aute kite works by artist Nikau Hindin take flight in Te Kōtiu, contextualised within Māori design and navigation technology.
This thought-provoking presentation will include inspiring quotes and imagery to highlight the importance of collaborating with cultural experts and advocating for representation and the inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives.
Karla Bo Johnson, Exhibitions Content Development Manager, MOTAT Museum of Transport and Technology: Karla Bo Johnson is a content and exhibitions expert with more than 15 years’ experience developing exhibitions within museums, including the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Auckland Museum and MOTAT. Karla Bo has managed the content planning for exhibition projects across MOTAT’s two sites, including Te Kōtiu in the Aviation Hall. Karla Bo currently manages the team of exhibition content developers, working across MOTAT’s on-site exhibitions and digital content projects.
Rachel Bush, Senior Exhibitions Content Developer, MOTAT Museum of Transport and Technology: Rachel Bush has more than 7 years’ experience developing content for temporary and long-term exhibition projects. As lead content developer for Te Kōtiu, Rachel actively engaged with a range of subject and collection experts to showcase inspiring stories of Aotearoa aviation. With a background in video and TV production, Rachel is a skilled storyteller across a range of media and frequently creates innovative and engaging exhibitions for MOTAT audiences.
Jessica Gommers, Design Manager, Exhibitions, MOTAT Museum of Transport and Technology: Jess Gommers is a design specialist with 20+ years' experience working within museums and galleries in Australia and New Zealand. As Design Manager, Exhibitions, Jess manages all aspects of the design process for temporary and permanent/long-term exhibitions, across both MOTAT sites, including design direction and production.
Exploring how different types of iterative workflow can be used to create impact.
Focusing on two digital experiences Te Papa produced to increase impact for the exhibition Dinosaurs of Patagonia, we explore how different approaches to iterative workflow can be used to create impact.
Creative Production for Create a Dino interactive experience followed a robust, iterative, user-centric workflow, including a fully-fledged Google Design Sprint with key stakeholders and creative / technical teams. At key stages, we undertook robust focus group workshops and audience testing with 8-12 year old target audience groups for: Concept, Aesthetics, User Journey Experience Design, and Usability. The result was a highly engaging and ‘sticky’ experience meeting and exceeding our impact goals with target audience, and extending reach well beyond target audience demographics.
However, creative production for Patagotitan Herd Immersive Experience followed a different kind of iterative workflow. Rather than audience-centric workflow, the emphasis was on creative collaboration. Early iterative prototyping and testing, led to a wonderful amalgamation of creative animation, lighting design, spatial design, and colour. Although our focus was on aesthetics, to our great surprise, audiences engaged with the experience at a strong emotional level and in physical interaction at large scale. Even though no interactivity was planned, this turned out to be one of this highest impact experiences in the exhibition. Patagotitan Herd Experience reached levels of engagement far exceeding expectation through a ‘less is more’ approach. And yet, I believe that if we had initially aimed to achieve higher levels of impact though interactivity, at greater effort, budget, and intensive user-centric workflow, we still wouldn’t have achieved the resulting levels of impact observed through a less-is-more approach. It was such a privilege observing audience enthusiastically and energetically interacting with this ‘non-interactive’ experience.
Amos Mann, Te Papa: Amos Mann is a creative producer and experience designer with 25 years’ professional practice leading creative and technical teams within the museum, science, art, and cultural sectors, engaging and inspiring audiences nationally and internationally. He is a Digital Producer at Te Papa (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) where he produces interactive and immersive experiences. Amos also engages in creative practices across photographic art, filmmaking, writing, and composition. His Masters research focused on participatory art theory and practice, and creative music notation. Amos’s ancestors are Scottish (clan Buchanan), English, and Polish Jewish.
Artificial Intelligence is providing benefits in many areas of work within the heritage sector, from image analysis, to ideas generation, and new research tools. However, it is more critical than ever for people, with analogue intelligence, to ensure the integrity and ethical use of AI. Including real people can improve the use of AI by identifying potential biases, cross-checking results, refining workflows, and providing contextual relevance to AI-driven results.
News about the impact of AI often paints a rosy picture. In practice, there are many potential pitfalls. This presentation discusses these issues and looks at the role of analogue intelligence and analogue interfaces in providing the best results to our audiences. How do we deal with factually incorrect results? How do we get content generated that better reflects the diversity of our communities? What roles are there for physical, in-person experiences in the digital world?
Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems: Paul Rowe is CEO of Vernon Systems, an Auckland-based museum software company. Vernon Systems develops software for organisations and individuals that collect, interpret and share collections. He works with museums around the world to increase public access to their museum collection information. He is occasionally seen caving.
TU Delft Library is reimagining its iconic book wall into the Collection Wall, an interactive platform that harnesses digital innovation to inspire exploration, discovery, and serendipity. By integrating AI, data visualisation, and heritage collections, this project addresses the evolving needs of learners and researchers, linking physical and digital collections to broader knowledge networks.
The Collection Wall embodies impact by fostering inclusion and accessibility while advancing cultural and educational enrichment. Developed collaboratively with students and faculty, prototypes connect collections to trending topics in research, education, and social media. User feedback guides iterative design, ensuring the platform evolves with community needs while promoting sustainable digital practices. The project also actively explores ways to make digital experiences welcoming and engaging for diverse audiences.
My presentation will explore the Collection Wall as a tool for fostering collaboration, enhancing accessibility, and advancing knowledge-sharing across sectors. By sharing prototypes and co-design approaches, I aim to inspire dialogue on how digital innovation can create meaningful connections and lasting community benefits, contributing to the Paorangi / Impact theme of NDF 2025.
Alice Motta Maia Bodanzky, Delft University of Technology: is Alice Bodanzky is Project Manager at the TU Delft Library, where she leads the Collection Wall project and helps to shape the library’s digital transformation and engagement strategy. She is also a member of the Library Innovation board. Her background is in Design and in Media Technology, and her work explores new ways of converging the physical and the digital realm to design meaningful and captivating experiences.
No dilly-dallying, please. We all have jobs.
Even the humans have jobs in Antopia, where visitors are gifted an all-access pass to a bustling ant colony, allowing them to communicate using pheromones and become an active member of the colony.
Starting with our audience outcome hypothesis - that mirroring the behaviour and world view of ants with experiential mechanics leads to greater understanding of and empathy for the natural world - this session will outline how our collaborative museum superorganism combined interactive gaming technology, science and storytelling to shape, prototype and evaluate Antopia. We’ll look into how we built and iterated the experience in real-time and in gallery using innovations in technology and developed a tech platform for simplicity, interoperability, and operational reliability before revealing the ultimate spectrum of visitor responses to their ant colony experiences.
Antopia: Explore a World of Secret Senses is developed and produced by Museums Victoria and continues MV’s exploration of new approaches to the role of audience agency in museum experiences.
Hamish Palmer, Museums Victoria: Hamish Palmer is Creative Director, Exhibitions at Museums Victoria.
He leads cross-disciplinary museum teams in collaboration with creative sector partners to craft resonant visitor experiences that promote social cohesion and environmental sustainability through the delivery of Melbourne Museum, Scienceworks and Immigration Museum’s much-loved exhibitions and publications.
Hamish joined Museums Victoria in 2015 to establish the Experience and Interpretation team and shape visitor-focused exhibition development practice. He spearheaded a holistic approach to storytelling and experience design, underpinned by audience impact methodologies which has since become the cornerstone of MV’s production toolkit.
Richard Pilkington, Museums Victoria: Richard Pilkington is a multidisciplinary digital professional with 25 years of experience spanning from traditional to interactive media, complex AV systems, and technical systems management. Currently serving as Systems Lead for Technical Services at Museums Victoria, Richard blends creative vision and technical expertise to build and maintain the exhibition technology stack with operational reliability.
As Technical Project Lead for the immersive Tyama exhibition, and its follow-up Antopia Richard orchestrated the integration of advanced technologies— Spatial projection design, Game engine-driven content and interactive sensor fusion—that dovetail with the designed immersive experience.
He idealises seamless and robust human-computer interaction that excites and engages audiences.
Did you know 1 in 4 New Zealanders have a disability? That's 1.1 million people! Yet only 3% of kiwi organisations are meeting accessibility standards. Access is a key tenet in the culture and public sectors - can AI be the answer to making our digital assets more accessible?
This talk explores the benefits and pitfalls of AI in achieving accessibility. We'll look at real world cases of how AI can be used to help accessibility initiatives, and areas where we need to be weary. How can we leverage this new technology to increase access? Hint: it's not what you think!
Maia Miller, Aleph Accessibility: Maia is the Managing Director of Aleph Accessibility. An IAAP-certified web accessibility specialist, she brings a wealth of technical expertise and accessibility knowledge to the table. Maia has an innate ability to translate complex concepts into clear and easily digestible content. Her contagious enthusiasm for web accessibility is combined with a pragmatic, down-to-earth approach to product development, providing audiences with practical strategies for successfully embedding accessibility into their digital products.
15:00 Afternoon Tea
16:30 Conference Closing remarks, waiata, and karakia
16:45 Conference ends
Concurrent sessions at a glance
While registering for your NDF25 ticket, you’ll need to select which presentations you’d like to see during the concurrent sessions. Here’s an overview of the concurrent sessions for both days.
Speakers and details TBA.
