Work It Out! Application-based Tech as Fitness Circuits for Cultural Institutions Engaging in their Local Ecology

Cities need to know how their cultural institutions related to each other; yet these institutions themselves struggle to understand what their niche can and should be in a city (Kloosterman, 2014). However the public often implicitly ‘knows’ the role of a particular cultural institution within an urban ecology; increasingly this knowledge is made manifest on a variety of digital apps and social media platforms (Budge, 2020; Moreno-Mendoza et al., 2020). Cultural institutions can learn from visitors and other institutions by utilizing digital apps to view area content offerings and attendance patterns at cultural events. Such knowledge could assist cultural institutions in navigating exogenous shocks, as they would better know their role within their local urban context should such a shock occur (Janes, 2020). Additionally, apps could be considered as another, albeit digital, environment to engage the public; there is a wealth of research relating to attraction, perception, and expectancy theory that could be drawn upon when both constructing and gleaning insights from apps (Berlyne, 1951, 1954; Bhandari et al., 2017; Feather 1982, 1992; Feather & Newton, 1982). This paper seeks to explore the role apps can play in assisting cultural institutions in understanding their role within an urban ecology, and what challenges remain when using such digital infrastructure. This paper seeks to disseminate these formative considerations as part of our work on The Circuit: A Platform for Increasing Access to, Deepening and Researching patterns of Family and Adult Participation in Informal Science, a National Science Foundation-funded project (Award No. 1906998).