Pladia and the Future of Museum Experiences: When Technology Meets Curatorial Vision
Image credit: Courtesy of Pladia.
Museums are full of extraordinary things, cared for and shared with us all. We often hear that art is for everyone, but in practice, that ideal is constantly challenged. Barriers can be obvious, ticket prices or complicated text panels, but they can also be subtle, like assumptions about what visitors already know or whether they have the time or confidence to really look at an artwork. And whenever museums talk about improving accessibility, there’s often an underlying fear that adding new tools will somehow water down the experience.
So, the question becomes: how do we protect the integrity of art while making museums genuinely welcoming for all? And how do institutions connect with audiences who navigate a world shaped by constant notifications, short attention spans, and screen fatigue? Real engagement doesn’t just happen. It needs to be intentionally designed.
Many people across the sector are now taking this seriously. They’re not trying to replace curators with flashy digital add-ons. Instead, they’re building thoughtful tools that respond to how visitors move through museums and make choices. Art Processors, known for its human-centred approach to digital design, has been central to this shift. Their newest platform, Pladia, reframes what a museum interface can be; not an app layered over the experience, but a tool that quietly supports each visitor in finding their way and love for art.
To understand how this approach developed, we spoke with Nic Whyte, Founding Principal of Art Processors and Co-Founder of Pladia. His insights trace the path from early experiments at Mona to a platform designed to reshape digital engagement globally.
Pladia’s origins sit within the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), where Whyte and the Art Processors team spent years studying visitor behaviour, spatial perception, and how people receive information. “I've been working with David Walsh since 2006,” Whyte recalls. Before Mona opened, they were deep in data visualisation and collection management, until Walsh asked whether they could remove wall labels entirely. That question led to The O, a device given to every visitor, before smartphones could offer anything similar.
The O changed how people encountered the museum. It removed the clutter of wall labels, encouraged navigation by instinct, and brought in playful ideas like the now-iconic “love” and “hate” buttons. As Whyte says, “Seeing that you're allowed to love and hate an artwork is quite disarming. It includes you in the conversation.” The O also provided unprecedented insight into visitor behaviour; what people read, how long they lingered, what they skipped, giving curators a level of audience understanding they had never had before.
But even successful innovations bring unexpected challenges. When virtual queuing was introduced to replace physical lines, visitors became anxious instead: Will I get there in time? Will I miss my place? This revealed a different problem. This shaped a core philosophy: technology can solve problems, but it can also create new ones, so design must anticipate and adapt.
Image credit: Courtesy of Pladia.
Another important discovery was that not all friction is bad. In a world of ultra-efficient navigation, museums risk flattening the experience by making movement too straightforward. The team realised that blue-dot navigation (like Google Maps) made people compliant rather than curious. At Mona, staff instinctively gave directions using artworks as markers: “Head toward the large black painting, then turn left at the mirrored room,” keeping visitors connected to the environment. Sometimes they even returned to works they’d passed too quickly, worried they’d missed something. Wayfinding became part of the exploration. This idea shaped one of Pladia’s fundamentals: visitors should orient themselves through the art, not around it.
Traditional museum apps often treat artworks as isolated points of information. Pladia takes a broader view, recognising that visitors experience museums as sequences – shifts in space, light, sound, architecture, and curatorial rhythm. Meaning isn’t just in the object; it’s in the room, the placement, the relationships. Pladia enables museums to create thematic paths, layered interpretations, and multiple entry points into their collections. As Whyte explains, “In the end, it's not about the technology, it's about how it can serve the narrative, the storytelling, the visitors’ accessibility needs, their language preferences… while still keeping them engaged with the artwork and with the museum itself.”
Pladia was also designed to meet museums where they are. Digital capacity varies dramatically: some institutions have entire teams, while others work with limited budgets and aging systems. The platform grows with the institution; it can simply begin with wayfinding to expand the storytelling, and over time include multilingual access and analytics, avoiding the all-or-nothing traps that have undone many digital projects.
Accessibility was another priority. Although Art Processors has a long history of building sophisticated apps, Pladia is a progressive web app to make onboarding easy and compatible across devices. It also responds to screen fatigue. The “raise-to-listen” feature, for instance, lets visitors hear content without looking at their phones, keeping their attention on the space around them.
Image credit: Courtesy of Pladia.
Museums today must balance many conflicting truths: visitors want autonomy and meaning. They want guidance, but not too much. They want to explore freely without feeling lost. They want depth without overload, access without oversimplification. Pladia is designed for that tension, built not to dominate the visit, but to fade into the background. As Whyte puts it, “true simplicity is not about the absence of technology, but the absence of unnecessary things.” Instead of juggling apps, PDFs, wall labels, and conflicting instructions, visitors can focus on the experience itself.
Ultimately, Pladia shows what becomes possible when digital tools are built with observation, empathy, and curatorial collaboration. Rather than detracting from the museum experience, they can enhance it. They can open doors, deepen engagement, and support the integrity of cultural spaces.
As museums continue to evolve, the goal isn’t to choose between the physical and digital worlds, but to weave them together, so visitors can connect with ideas, with each other, and with the artworks that shape our shared imagination. Art is for everyone. Pladia simply helps ensure the experience lives up to that promise.
