Humanized museums? How digital technologies become relational tools

Digital technologies are acknowledged as tools to foster visitors' engagement. However, it has not been further investigated how digital technologies might be a medium for museums to rethink their relationship with visitors. This study enters this issue, acquiring the institutional perspective of the cultural institution in charge of designing digital relational experiences with and for visitors. The research applied the Co-Creation Framework (CCF) by Ramaswamy and Ozcan (2018 Ramaswamy, V., and K. Ozcan. 2018. "What is Co-Creation? An Interactional Creation Framework and Its Implications for Value Creation." Journal of Business Research 84: 195–205. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.11.027.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), to the museums' field, exploring: (i) how digital technologies enable new systems of interactions among museums and visitors; (ii) how museums rethink their relationship with visitors through these systems of interactions. We conducted a multiple case study on four Italian museums. The findings highlight the potential of digital technologies to 'humanize' museums in their relationship with visitors. This paper enriches the understanding of digital technology as a relational medium, to connect museums and visitors.