[In this essay on his website, Thor Martin Bærug argues for the incorporation of technology design features that encourage users to overlook the role of the technology in their experience, i.e., that are more likely to evoke presence. The focus here is on museums, but the ideas certainly can be applied more broadly. –Matthew]

How We’re Building Museum Technology That Gets Out of the Way

By Thor Martin Bærug, Advisor, Strategist and Analyst in Digital Media & Products
November 5, 2025

There’s a photo making rounds on social media. It’s the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – that magnificent vaulted corridor lined with Caravaggio masterpieces – and it’s full of young people hunched over their phones.

The usual commentary follows: Kids these days. Phones ruining everything. Can’t they just look at the art?

But I see something else entirely.

I see the exact design problem we’re trying to solve with Walkie Talkie.

The Phone Paradox

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about museum technology: we’ve spent two decades making phones more essential to the museum experience while simultaneously making them more intrusive.

Download our app. Enable Bluetooth for beacons. Scan this QR code. Read this digital label. Activate the AR experience. Post with our hashtag. Engage with the touchscreen. Share your visit. Position yourself at the selfie spot.

Every single one of these asks pulls visitors’ attention away from what they came to see and into the screen.

And then we wonder why people are staring at their phones in the Louvre.

But there’s another layer here. Those young people are both consuming content on their phones, and they’re producing it. Taking selfies, Filming reels, Choosing filters. Writing captions. Posting to Instagram/TikTok. Checking likes. The phone isn’t just mediating their experience of the Louvre; it’s in some cases become the point of the visit itself.

This is where museum technology intersects with something much larger and harder to solve: the social media imperative to perform and broadcast experiences rather than simply have them. Museums didn’t create this behavior, but we’ve certainly encouraged it with “Instagram-worthy” exhibitions and hashtag campaigns.

The question becomes: can technology play a different role? Can it enhance presence rather than enable performance?

What We Got Wrong

The museum tech industry made a fundamental miscalculation by assuming the problem was access to information. If we can just get more content, smarter functions to access that information, more interactivity into visitors’ hands, we can create better experiences.

But information was never the bottleneck. Attention was.

Standing in front of a Caravaggio should feel like a conversation between you and four-hundred-year-old genius who understood light and shadow better than almost anyone who came after him. Adding a layer of technology to that encounter is useful only if it deepens that conversation without demanding to become the conversation itself.

Traditional audio guides and guided tours got closer to this ideal than apps ever did. There’s something fundamentally right about audio as a medium for museums – it allows your eyes to stay on the art while context arrives through your ears. The problem was everything else: the queuing, the clunky hardware, the predetermined routes, the limited content, the sanitization concerns, the ongoing maintenance and production costs!

So museums started building apps. Surely that would fix things?

It didn’t. Apps created new friction: download barriers, storage space, Wi-Fi requirements, notification interruptions and ongoing maintenance and development.

The Screen Time Trap

The photo from the Louvre captures the core tension: phones are now an integral part of most museum visits in one way or another, but they’re terrible masters of attention.

When you’re reading text on a screen, you’re not looking at the painting. When you’re trying to master navigating an app interface, you’re not present with the space. When you’re encouraged to mediate your experience through social media, you’re not in the experience at all – you’re managing technology.

This isn’t a moral failing of visitors. It’s a design failing of the technology we’ve built.

What Audio Actually Does

Audio has a unique property among media: it exists in parallel with visual attention rather than competing for it.

When you’re listening to someone tell you about the symbolism in Caravaggio’s “The Entombment,” your eyes can stay on the canvas. You can follow along with the narration: “Notice the diagonal line that runs from Christ’s hand down through the figures…” and actually notice it, because you’re not trying to read that sentence while also looking at the painting.

Audio doesn’t ask you to choose between information and presence. It allows both simultaneously.

This is why the audio guide never really died, despite two decades of “disruptive” museum tech. The format is fundamentally sound. Everything around the format was broken.

Building Technology That Disappears

With Walkie Talkie, we started from a simple premise: the best technology is the technology you forget you’re using.

No app means no download friction, no storage negotiations, no updates, no permissions, no notifications, no temptation to drift into other apps. Just scan a QR code and audio starts on your device. Your phone becomes nothing more than a conduit – a thin technical layer between the story and your ears.

The interface is deliberately minimal. We’re not trying to “engage” you with our platform. We’re trying to get out of the way so you can engage with the art.

This is harder than it sounds. Every product person’s instinct is to add features, create stickiness, measure engagement, optimize conversion. But museums don’t need sticky platforms. They need ones that blend seamlessly with their exhibitions.

The Real Innovation

The genuinely hard problem we’re solving isn’t technical – it’s philosophical.

We’re building a platform whose success is measured by how little visitors think about the platform itself. If someone leaves the Louvre and remembers our interface, we’ve failed. If they leave and remember the Caravaggio, we’ve succeeded.

This requires constant discipline. Every feature request gets filtered through the same question: does this help people spend more time looking at cultural artifacts, or more time looking at screens?

Multilingual audio? Yes – it removes the need to read translated text panels.

AI-generated narration? Yes – it allows museums to create content quickly, which means more art gets context.

Social sharing features? Maybe not – that’s asking people to perform their experience rather than have it.

Gamification? Definitely not – that’s asking the interface to become the point.

What We’re Actually Building

Walkie Talkie is an attempt to rebuild the audio guide for the smartphone era without importing all the baggage of app-based thinking.

It’s web-based because websites don’t demand downloads or updates—they just work.

It’s audio-first because audio respects visual attention.

It’s deliberately simple because complexity is where attention goes to die.

It uses QR codes because QR codes are the closest thing we have to magic: point your camera, content appears. No typing, no searching, no thinking about technology at all.

The goal isn’t to make museums more “digital.” It’s to make museums more present. More human. More focused on the encounter between person and art rather than person and interface.

Back to the Louvre

So when I see that photo of young people on their phones in the Grande Galerie, I don’t see failure. I see possibility.

Those phones aren’t the enemy. They’re already there. They’re not going anywhere. The question is what role they play in the experience.

Right now, they’re pulling attention away from the Caravaggios. They’re mediating the experience through interfaces designed to capture and hold attention.

But they could be doing something else entirely. They could be whispering context into visitors’ ears while their eyes stay on the canvas. They could be offering translations that remove language barriers without requiring anyone to look down. They could be completely forgettable – just a technical bridge between centuries-old art and contemporary audiences.

That’s not a phone problem. That’s a design opportunity.

And that’s what we’re building.

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Walkie Talkie is a web-based audio guide platform for museums and cultural spaces. No apps. No hardware. Just stories that enhance rather than obscure the art. We’re currently working with institutions across the Nordic region, with expansion into other European and international markets underway. Try it for free at https://walkietalk.ie/.