Museum professionals create exhibitions that tell stories about museum objects. The exhibits are usually arranged to reveal the relationships between them and to highlight the story being told. But sometimes objects are in fixed places and cannot be re-positioned. This paper presents a solution to the problem of how to tell conceptually coherent stories across a set of fixed artworks within the grounds of a museum and to reveal relationships between them. A study was conducted in which QR codes were used to provide access, through mobile devices, to online information about artworks. A notion of conceptual coherence and coverage of artworks was used to construct online story trails linking artworks to each other based on overlap of key story features such as setting, people and themes. Visitors were free at all times to follow their own path through the museum grounds and choose which objects they wanted to stop and engage with. The QR code trail was evaluated on an outdoor art trail at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Analytics of page access were used to identify how often visitors scanned QR codes and to what extent, once they had visited the online information about an artwork, they were likely to follow the story links.

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How do you interpret generations of memories of deprivation and disease? How do you embody a period of history when workers finally decided to stand up for their rights, even if it meant hunger and suffering for their already impoverished families? This was the aim of Living the Lockout, a pop‐up heritage experience in 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin, a tenement building almost unchanged since the last tenants moved out. The objective was to create an authentic and meaningful offering for multiple audiences, but especially locals who still lived in the area, and the tenement ‘diaspora’—those who had been transplanted to suburban social housing in the 1950s, and those who had left Dublin in search of a better life and scattered all over the world. The interpretation centered upon a situated drama performance in which the actors ‘lived the Lockout’ and asked the crowd ‘what would you do?’ This performance was received with huge critical acclaim. The project website comprised multiple interactive features including a daily blog, many posts of which were crowdsourced both onsite and online. This paper seeks to fully analyse and understand the success of the project by examining visitor feedback and social media engagement. There is a special emphasis on how the project reached atypical museum audiences. The findings will have meaning for museum professionals seeking to evolve their museum agenda into that of transaction and mutual engagement.