The digital museum as a third space: Giving shape to conceptualization

Abstract

MOdE - Museo Officina dell’Educazione is a virtual and multimodal museum. It is multimodal not due to the presence of different languages, but also the presence of different action spaces. The museum has exhibition rooms, documentation but also “blank” rooms, where the visitor can assemble materials that are already in the museum or collected in their own informal contexts, to produce meanings. The museum therefore becomes a third space in that formal and informal contexts are hybridized and new artifacts are constructed - thus proving that it is generative. This work seeks to draw the attention to the function of the MOdE blank rooms as active spaces that contribute to the production of common threads that can be used to overcome the fragmentary nature of current contexts and the identities that they house, whilst also highlighting how hybrid spaces, third spaces, are the keys to education in a complex society.