Anyone can innovate!

With one foot in the history of innovations, and the other in interactive learning and accessibility this project explores a contemporary development of museums through digitalization, new technology and non-excluding co-creational participatory processes. The project explores a new type of museum concept that strives to create an immersive, interactive and informative experience through the combination of the solution-oriented and playful elements from “Escape rooms” with traditional museum strategies and the use of virtual reality. The usage of virtual reality in museums puts high demands on the technology, something which could pose a challenge to museums. In this project it is investigated how this challenge can be bridged and how virtual reality can become an important complement to the museums of the future.

With the initial standpoint in the role of the museum as a public place for education and meetings this project aims to create an understanding and a curiosity around the innovation process, innovation history and forgotten innovators. The project aims to create a method that defuses the notion of incomprehension with the innovation process and highlights the iterative nature of innovation, a method that raises and encourages the innovative spirit of the visitors and also conveys the message “anyone can innovate!”. This means that an innovator can be anyone, anywhere, anytime. It is simply someone who have, or has had a problem to solve and then has sought the solution to it. With the project the point is also made that a multidisciplinary approach and education combined with experience and an understanding of the innovation process are important tools in reaching a solution.

The innovation that is the focus for this prototype is the development of heating techniques, and through the help of virtual reality the participants travel through time to solve the heating challenges of different eras by cooperating and combining the skillsets of different characters.