Lived: An Experiential Curation Platform for Museums
A software platform that helps museums and galleries design visitor journeys around art as a felt, unfolding experience—sequencing space, pacing, and interaction to maximize emotional engagement rather than just displaying objects.
Concept
Lived turns Dewey's core thesis—that art's value lies in the complete, lived experience it produces in a perceiver, not merely in the object—into a practical curation toolkit. Museums and galleries use it to map and design exhibition flow: pacing between works, transitional 'rest' spaces, lighting and sound cues, prompts on a companion mobile app, and moments of anticipation and resolution that build toward an aesthetic climax. The platform combines a curator-facing design canvas with optional anonymized engagement sensing (dwell time, foot-traffic heatmaps, opt-in app interactions) to measure whether visitors are having a coherent, absorbing experience versus passively walking past. It outputs concrete recommendations—reorder these rooms, add a contemplative pause here, layer this audio narrative there—so curators can iterate on the experience as a designed whole.
Why now
The abstract frames Dewey's work as the most influential treatment of the formal structure and characteristic effects shared across all the arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature—and as essential reading for artists and collectors seeking a deeper perspective on aesthetics. That cross-medium, experience-centered framework maps directly onto today's experiential-economy pressures on cultural institutions, which compete with immersive entertainment for attention. Sensors, indoor positioning, and mobile companion apps are now cheap and mature enough to operationalize 'experience design' that the book argues for conceptually.
AI assessment
A philosophically-inspired museum experience-design platform with a genuine concept but thin, non-empirical evidence and a small, budget-constrained buyer base.
- Evidence strength 1/5
- The sole source is a 1934 philosophy book described via a brief Indonesian abstract—no empirical or converging research linking 'experience design' to measurable visitor engagement gains.
- Market pull 2/5
- Museums and galleries are a real but fragmented, slow-moving, and budget-constrained sector that rarely funds new software experimentation.
- Novelty & moat 3/5
- Foot-traffic sensing and companion apps already exist, but framing them into a Dewey-grounded experiential curation toolkit is a moderately fresh packaging.
- Feasibility 3/5
- The design canvas, sensors, and app are technically buildable, but generating validated 'reorder these rooms' recommendations that actually improve emotional engagement is unproven and hard to measure.
- Wedge clarity 2/5
- There's no sharp entry point against incumbent exhibition designers and consultants, and cultural institutions are notoriously hard, slow customers to penetrate.
- Simplicity / focus 2/5
- It bundles a curator design canvas, sensing/heatmaps, mobile narratives, and AI recommendations into a broad platform rather than one focused product.
Scored by AI against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity). A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.
Who benefits
- Smithsonian Institutioncompany
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- Cuseumcompany
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- Bloomberg Connectscompany
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- Tatecompany
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Research it builds on
- Art as Experience (1934)John Dewey · 2026 · 5233 citations