MONA didn't try to make the line for its most popular exhibit move faster — it made sure v

Museum exhibits with strictly limited-capacity viewing rooms create an unavoidable bottleneck: only so many visitors can be inside at once, and the standard solution — a physical queue — forces visitors to stand doing nothing for the entire wait, turning what should be a highlight of the visit into its most frustrating part. Faster-moving queue management (more staff, better line design) can shorten the wait but can't eliminate the fundamental cost of standing in a line with nothing else to do.

MONA, working with experience design firm Art Processors, reframed the problem: rather than trying to make the line itself move faster, they aimed to make the physical line unnecessary altogether by tracking a visitor's real-time position anywhere in the museum and only summoning them to the exhibit exactly when it was their turn.

MONA's app-based 'Queuer' system, part of its 'The O' visitor app, placed guests into a virtual queue for high-demand exhibits without requiring them to stand anywhere — it estimated wait time based on each visitor's actual location and movement through the museum, could pull nearby visitors ahead of farther-away ones to keep the exhibit continuously filled, and deliberately delayed the summons notification if a visitor was mid-meal at the museum café or bar, only pinging them once they'd finished eating and resumed exploring.

Eliminated the line by tracking visitors' location and movement, summoning them only when their turn neared, and delaying alerts during meals.

Estimating wait time based on each visitor's actual location and movement, and deliberately delaying the summons notification if someone was mid-meal at the café, meant the system converted what would

The mechanism depends on visitors actually having other activities available to fill the wait time with, a venue with nothing else for visitors to do while waiting would gain little from location-awar

When a limited-capacity resource creates an unavoidable wait, the fix isn't necessarily making the line move faster — it's removing the need for a physical line at all, by tracking who's waiting and n

In its first year of operation, the Queuer saved visitors a combined total of over 1,798 days of what would otherwise have been time spent standing in physical queue lines, converting that wait time into time visitors spent doing things they'd already chosen to do — eating, drinking, viewing other exhibits — instead of standing still.