Martijn van Schaik, Founder and Director, Broken Egg (Rotterdam, Netherlands)

Martijn van Schaik is the founder and director of Broken Egg, an international agency he has built and grown over the past 8 years, specialising in digital visitor engagement for museums, heritage sites, public spaces and universities.

He works at the intersection of culture, education and emerging technology, helping institutions create more interactive and meaningful experiences, both on-site and online. Every project starts with consulting, strategy, workshops and creative thinking before moving into experimentation and production. Rather than implementing technology for the sake of it, Martijn believes in starting small, testing ideas with real audiences and only scaling solutions once their impact has been proven.

Together with a multidisciplinary European team, he works extensively with emerging technologies such as AI, XR, gaming and interactive media, combining technical expertise with a strong understanding of visitors and cultural organisations.

Beyond client work, Martijn develops international hackathons, university collaborations and knowledge-sharing initiatives that connect the cultural and educational sectors. His work has received European financial support, including funding supporting the expansion of Broken Egg's team in Portugal.

He is a CTA 30u30 alumnus and currently mentors the programme's next generation of cultural innovators.

His ambition is simple: challenge traditional thinking, share knowledge and turn technology into meaningful, lasting visitor impact.

Alexis Powilewicz, President and CEO, Paris Aquarium (Paris, France)

Alexis Powilewicz is President & CEO of Paris Aquarium, one of the world’s oldest modern aquariums and today one of France’s largest privately operated cultural and environmental institutions.

Since taking over the Aquarium in 2009, he has developed it into an informal education destination welcoming around 800,000 visitors each year. Located in the Trocadéro gardens, Paris Aquarium is home to 13,000 animals, including sharks and one of the largest jellyfish collections outside Japan, across 4 million litres of water.

Alexis has always been strongly interested in how innovation can transform the visitor experience. Alongside the Aquarium’s scientific and educational mission, he actively explores new technologies, digital experiences and experimental formats that can create stronger interaction between visitors, culture and the natural world. His approach is highly pragmatic: experiment, understand how audiences respond, and use technology where it can genuinely strengthen engagement and learning.

Before joining Paris Aquarium, Alexis worked for the City of Paris, including within the Executive Office of its Secretary-General, where he was responsible for environmental affairs and human resources.

A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, Alexis is also deeply involved in the cultural sector. He is a collector of Chinese and Japanese art and serves as Secretary-General of the Friends of the Musée Guimet.

Bridging Worlds through Immersive Experiences: the Future of Digital Visitor Engagement

At Broken Egg, we specialise in Digital Visitor Engagement, whether that happens online or physically at a location. We work with cultural institutions such as the Aquarium of Paris, Crystal Bridges and the Belvedere Museum to explore how technology can make visitor experiences more interactive, relevant and memorable.

Over the past 5 years, the Aquarium of Paris and Broken Egg have worked together on roughly 6 different projects and experiments, ranging from immersive digital worlds and Roblox to augmented reality, including one of the first institutional experiments with Google Maps AR.

The approach behind these projects has remained consistent: start with education, workshops and experimentation, test ideas with real audiences, learn from what works and what does not, and only then decide what should scale. Interaction is always at the centre, with the aim of connecting digital experiences to the physical visitor journey rather than treating them as separate worlds.

In this session, Alexis Powilewicz and Martijn van Schaik will turn that shared experience into a conversation rather than a traditional presentation. Together, they will look back at the projects that succeeded, the ones that did not go as expected, the challenges encountered along the way, and the discussions that happen behind the scenes when an institution decides to experiment with unfamiliar technologies.

The conversation will also explore how digital experiences can help cultural institutions reach younger audiences without excluding existing visitors. From gaming and Roblox to AR and other experimental technologies, the focus will be less on the technology itself and more on what these experiments taught us about audiences, engagement and the role of the institution.

At the heart of the session is the relationship between institution and agency. Long-term experimentation requires trust: the ability to test ideas, acknowledge when something is not working, adapt quickly and keep exploring together.

Rather than presenting only success stories, this session will offer an honest look at what we have learned through years of experimentation and where we believe the future of visitor engagement may be heading.