Give visitors a reason to look again

What does this image mean to you?

For a lot of people, it's just a canvas of blue: their first introduction to an artist named Yves Klein, who became famous for paintings, and later sculptures, dominated by one extraordinarily intense ultramarine he trademarked as International Klein Blue.

Spend a little time with his story, though, and things get more interesting.

Klein didn't simply like blue. He became fascinated by the idea of colour without boundaries, and spent years developing a pigment formula that could hold onto the intensity of raw ultramarine once fixed to a canvas.

And he didn't stop at canvases. He covered sculptures in it, staged performances using nude models as "living paintbrushes," , and even staged a now-famous photograph of himself leaping from a building into the street below.

Look at the painting again. Suddenly, there's a lot more to talk about.

The artwork hasn't changed. What changed is what you know about it.

That's the power of interpretation. Museums and galleries are full of stories like this. Interpretation gives us a way into an artwork, object or place we might otherwise walk straight past. It reveals the people behind a collection, explains why something matters, or simply gives us a reason to look again.

Digital guides make it possible to put those stories into visitors' hands at exactly the right moment. But for many organisations, that's also where the idea starts to feel daunting.

Where are all those stories going to come from?

The stories might already be there

When you're thinking about launching a digital guide, it's easy to imagine everything that needs to happen first. Scripts need to be written. Audio needs to be recorded. Videos need to be produced. Every object needs a description.

What started as a simple idea becomes a major interpretation project, and getting started keeps sliding down the list. But starting from scratch isn't the only option.

The stories you need may already exist somewhere within your organisation. They're in podcasts, exhibition videos and curator talks. They're sitting in old social posts. And often, they're stories your staff tell visitors every single day. Here are three places to start.

1. Repurpose what you've already created

Start with an audit, not a blank page.

Podcasts. YouTube videos. Artist interviews. Recorded talks. Articles. Social content. Education resources. Exhibition catalogues.

When the South Australian Museum launched its digital experience with Pladia, their team repurposed stories from an existing podcast to help populate their audio tour. Rather than commissioning an entirely new body of interpretive material, they brought stories they'd already told into a new context, right beside the objects they were about.

Repurposing doesn't mean dropping a 45-minute podcast into your digital guide wholesale.That podcast might contain five brilliant two-minute stories. A recorded curator talk might have the perfect introduction to a gallery. An Instagram Reel might already explain an artwork better than anything you'd commission from scratch.

The opportunity isn't necessarily to create more. It's to find new ways to use what you already have.

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2. Capture the stories your people already tell

Some of the best interpretation in your venue may never have been written down.

Your front-of-house teams know which objects people stop at, what children find fascinating, which stories get a laugh and what visitors consistently want to know more about. Ask them one simple question:

What's your favourite thing to tell a visitor?

Then ask your curators, artists, educators and conservators the same thing. And don't assume the answer needs to become a script. Take a microphone and walk through the gallery with someone who knows it well. Ask questions. Let them talk. Capture their enthusiasm. You can always edit the conversation afterwards. A relaxed two-minute explanation from someone who genuinely cares about an artwork can be more compelling than a perfectly scripted voiceover.

The goal isn't perfect production. It's giving visitors access to perspectives they wouldn't otherwise hear.

Pro tip: Free tools like Auphonic can automatically clean up recordings with noise reduction and audio levelling.

3. Let the spaces do the talking

You don't need a piece of interpretation for every object in your collection.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can give a visitor is context: What is this gallery about? Why have these things been brought together? What should I notice as I move through the space? A short audio or video introduction can explain the theme behind a collection, exhibition or gallery, giving visitors a new lens to understand everything they encounter afterwards.

Give visitors the bigger picture first. Start with the story of the space, then layer in individual objects over time. It's a far more achievable place to begin.

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Start with ten stories, not a thousand

A digital guide can make interpretation available throughout your venue, across formats and languages, directly on a visitor's own device. But that doesn't mean everything needs to be ready on day one.

Start with one gallery. One tour. Ten stories. Or the podcast you recorded two years ago that contains some of the best stories your organisation has ever told. Put them in front of visitors. See what they engage with. Learn from it. Then build from there.

The most valuable stories aren't necessarily the most highly produced. They're the ones that offer a perspective visitors can't get anywhere else.

It's perspective.

A curator explaining why they've always loved an overlooked artwork. A conservator revealing something a visitor would never otherwise notice. A front-of-house team member sharing the story they've told hundreds of times. An artist describing what was happening when a work was made. These are perspectives visitors can't get from a wall label alone.

Art and culture give us ways of understanding ourselves and the world that go beyond facts and information. Interpretation gives us access to the human stories, ideas and perspectives that surround them.

In an age of increasingly abundant AI-generated content, those genuinely human perspectives may become more valuable than ever. So don't wait until you've interpreted everything.

Start with the human stories that are already there.

Ready to tell your stories?

Your venue is already full of stories worth sharing. Get in touch to chat about how Pladia can bring them to life with your own digital guide.

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