Abstract

Science museums are operating in an environment where the visitor journey increasingly begins long before someone steps through the museum doors. Audiences discover content through social media and AI, often making decisions about where to spend their time and money before they ever visit a museum website.

This presentation explores how the Science Museum Group is responding to this shift by placing audience needs at the centre of its digital transformation. Drawing on lessons from the Delivering Digital Reach programme, which significantly expanded the organisation's digital storytelling capabilities and online reach, the session examines how science museums can use digital content to support the delivery of our mission and reach new audiences with STEM content. We will also share how SMG is evolving towards a more joined-up audience model, linking content, websites, ticketing and museum experiences around a single audience journey. It will explore how digital content helps audiences discover the museum, how improved digital experiences can reduce barriers to visitation, and how insights gathered across these touchpoints can inform future service design.

Looking ahead, the presentation will consider the opportunities and tensions facing science museums as they seek to grow digital reach amongst new audiences. Topics will include emerging approaches to monetisation and partnerships, alongside the growing role of artificial intelligence in personalised experiences. As trusted public institutions, science museums have an opportunity not only to adopt new technologies, but to help audiences question them, understand them and engage with knowledge confidently in the AI era.

The session will offer practical lessons for museums seeking to connect online engagement with physical visitation, as well as balance public value with commercial sustainability.

Biography

Janey MacRae-Tym is the Chief Digital Officer for the Science Museum Group, where she leads the organisation’s digital team across platforms, content, data and AI. Her remit includes responsibility for the websites for each of the six sites in the Group along with the popular online collection and video content production. As the Group’s AI champion and advocate, she is dedicated to navigating how the organisation can unlock the full potential of this transformative technology.

Janey brings over 18 years’ expertise in technology-led transformation in marketing agencies, having shaped digital strategies for organisations such as Diageo, Unilever, and Barclays LifeSkills. Her experience sits at the intersection of digital innovation and customer experience, building digital platforms and products, content marketing and implementing AI programmes at scale for global brands.

A Chemistry graduate, Janey’s connection to the Science Museum is personal, rooted in fond memories of visits that sparked curiosity in the sector. She is honoured to now shape how technology can support the Science Museum Group's digital storytelling, ensuring the national collection continues to inspire a global audience.

Abstract

Science is not merely a collection of established facts organized in school textbooks. It is a culture of curiosity, a way of encountering the world by observing closely, touching and testing things for ourselves, and sharing questions with others. From this perspective, a science museum should be more than a place where completed scientific knowledge is displayed. It should be a place where science actually happens.

When visitors manipulate an exhibit, discover a result that contradicts their expectations, pose questions to scientists and science communicators, or compare interpretations with family, friends, and strangers, they are participating in the essential practices of science. Science advances through collective inquiry: observing phenomena, examining evidence together, questioning assumptions, and constructing better explanations. Scientific knowledge matters, but so does the social and intellectual process through which that knowledge is continually tested and revised.

This role becomes even more important in the age of artificial intelligence, when information and answers are available almost anywhere and at any time. The central challenge is no longer simply what we know, but what we are curious about, how we determine whether a claim is reliable, and how we develop our thinking through dialogue with others. From a scientist’s perspective, this keynote explores the science museum as a cultural space where people experience science with their bodies, ask questions together, and cultivate scientific habits of mind. It will present compelling reasons why, even in an age of unlimited digital knowledge, we still need to visit science museums: not merely to learn the answers that science has already produced, but to experience how better questions, stronger evidence, and shared inquiry can transform the way we understand the world.

Biography

· Assistant professor in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
· Postdoctoral associate in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Yale University
· Head of MoonSoul Graduate School of Future Strategy in KAIST
· President of Korean Society for Computational Neuroscience

· 2009, Young Global Leader (YGL), World Economic Forum (Davos Forum)
· 2010, Korea Science and Culture Award
· 2019, the Republic of Korea Order of Merit