Museum as multisensorial site: story co-making and the affective interrelationship between museum visitors, heritage space, and digital storytelling

The museum in the digital age is not only a storyteller telling a fixed story to visitors through curatorial design, but a story co-maker in collaboration with visitors’ experience in the space. Building on the understanding that the co-production of stories lies in the interrelationship between museum visitors, museum space, and digital storytelling, this research is interested in the construction of affective stories, specifically the question of how the affective environment for such storytelling is understood and formed. By examining the Palace Museum, the heritage museum located on the heritage site of the Forbidden City, Beijing, we consider how the heritage space becomes a performative event, and how the virtual space acts as an extension of the physical site. We explore the quality of this heritage museum experience, which has implications for how heritage museums can harness and make practical use of the affective interrelationship within the designed museum space.