Contemporary museums are consumed as an experience of producing and distributing cultural content through various platforms across real and virtual worlds and creating meaning with the visitors. It means that today's museums have a much larger area to...
Contemporary museums are consumed as an experience of producing and distributing cultural content through various platforms across real and virtual worlds and creating meaning with the visitors. It means that today's museums have a much larger area to be dealt with compared to modern museums, which have storytelling limited to the physical exhibition space and audience scope. The management of a multi-platform, communication with various types of visitors by each platform, and the creation of a cohesive museum experience through the integration are new challenges for the 21c Museum. Nevertheless, many museums are still wasting new platform areas such as social media, YouTube, and mobile by using them as one-dimensional public relations channels or by reusing the same content. In this way, first of all, the development of new potential visitors who are not interested in museums is limited. Secondly, it is not easy to offer new values to existing visitors. Moreover, thirdly, it is hard to say that non-exhibition platforms contribute to the creation of meaning for visitors in that they are exhausted for marketing purposes. Therefore, this study recognized the need for multi-platform storytelling in museums and intended to propose transmedia storytelling that systematically distributes stories on multi-platforms and induces active media crossing and participation by users through narrative connectivity between platforms as an effective strategy.
First, through the theoretical study of the 21c museum environment and transmedia, the necessity of multi-platform storytelling in contemporary museums is identified. As an alternative, a systematic story distribution technique of transmedia storytelling that leads to a bricolage, procedural, and participation-oriented user experience cab be effective. Subsequently, the structure of transmedia storytelling was organized in three aspects: 'multi-platform, story distribution, and user participation' to prepare a theoretical basis for case analysis and guidelines.
Based on this, a multi-platform project that tried a transmedia approach focusing on physical exhibition was selected as an example, and grasped the actual aspects and strategies of the museum site through "First Step: Transmedia Storytelling Structure Analysis" and "Second Step: Transmedia Storytelling Attribute Analysis.“
Based on the analysis results, guidelines for utilizing transmedia storytelling for museums were presented. First, the Multi-platform Configuration and Application Guidelines set out the criteria that make up the media platform and proposed two development orientations based on the project's objectives and size. Second, the Story World Construction Guidelines sorted out the two ways to distribute stories across multiple platforms and provided bridge selection criteria for each story's nature. Third, the guidelines for user participation element planning proposed strategies using the main points and community platforms in the user participation planning. Also, as a final step in the study, the transmedia storytelling plan centered on the exhibition of the National Iksan Museum was presented as an example.
Significantly, this research has provided a theoretical and empirical basis for verifying the effectiveness of transmedia storytelling and utilizing it as an epic expansion method utilizing the museum's multi-platform to expand the museum's experience and ensure its competitiveness in the cultural content market. The "Guidelines for Utilizing Transmedia Storytelling at the Museum" derived from this study are expected to be used as a reference approach in activating the museum's media platform and planning for storytelling.