Design Patterns to Enhance Teens’ Museum Experiences (original) (raw)

Designing Mobile Museum Experiences for Teenagers

International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 2022

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in the International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship following peer review.

Co-designing Gaming Experiences for Museums with Teenagers

07th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation (ArtsIT ’18), 2018

Museums promote cultural experiences through exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially teenagers. Throughout this paper, we discuss teenagers as an important group to be considered within the Children-Computer Interaction field, and we report some techniques on designing with teens, in particular, arguing that participatory design methods can involve teenagers in the design process of technology for museums. For this purpose, we conceptualized, designed and deployed a co-design activity for teenagers (aged 15-17), where teenagers together with a researcher jointly created and designed a medium fidelity prototype. For this case study, participants were divided into groups and invited to think and create games and story plots for a selected museum. All the prototypes were made by the participants with the support and guidance of the researcher and the Aurasma software, an augmented reality tool.

"This Is Nice but That Is Childish": Teenagers Evaluate Museum-Based Digital Experiences Developed by Cultural Heritage Professionals

CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Fun and Games and Gamification (CHIPLAY EA ’19), 2019

To contribute in filling in the gap regarding experiences targeted at and evaluated by teenagers in museums, we involved 78 teenagers aged 16-19 to test three different gamified tours developed by cultural heritage professionals from the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal. The digital tours can be described as follows: 1) expositive-through which teens become aware of a scientific library in the museum; 2) gastronomic-teens are exposed to curiosities and recipes regarding a selection of marine species exhibited in the museum; 3) digital manipulation-manipulated characters (image and voice) guide the visitor through videos of the marine species in their natural habitats. We report on measuring the teenagers' overall experience with each of the prototypes, particularly their engagement with the exhibition, the usefulness and usability of the prototypes, as well as their feelings and emotions at the end of each tour. We report on lessons learned from the evaluation of these prototypes as well as which approaches and mechanics engaged the teens the most.

Cultural Heritage Professionals Developing Digital Experiences Targeted at Teenagers in Museum Settings: Lessons Learned

32nd British Human-Computer Interaction Conference (BHCI ’18), 2018

Teenagers have been identified as an audience group that is often excluded from museum curatorial strategies. One strategy to counteract this problem is to involve cultural heritage professionals (CHPs) in the design process of museum based digital experiences targeted at teens. In this paper, 12 CHPs from a local natural history museum took part in a co-design activity over 20 hours, aiming to create and deploy digital tours for teenagers aged between 16-19. We present the three prototypes that derived from these design sessions. These were then tested by both 12 CHPs and 12 teenagers separately, and we report on lessons learned from the evaluation of these prototypes by both groups.

Lessons Learned on Engaging Teenage Visitors in Museums with Story-Based and Game-Based Strategies

Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage

While museums are designed to engage and interest various audiences, teenagers are often a neglected segment. Without digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain exciting and relevant to a young, tech-savvy audience. Games can benefit museums by fostering positive attitudes towards museum spaces and creating more joyful destinations to promote meaningful informal learning combined with entertainment. We developed a dual-gamified mobile experience targeted at teenagers, for the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal: a story-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Turning Point) and a game-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Haunted Encounters ). These strategies were studied in depth with 159 teenagers (15–19 years old) to understand how gamified strategies might enhance their user experience in a museum. On one hand, game-based strategies, in which game mechanics predominate, can catch a visitor's attention by displaying ...

Designing Interactive Technologies for Interpretive Exhibitions: Enabling Teen Participation Through User- Driven Innovation

Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT 2017, 2017

The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. Adopting a user-driven innovation framework along with cooperative inquiry, we report and discuss a case study that has been designed to involve users in the ideation of interpretive experiences for a local museum. Working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Funchal, this contribution will present and discuss co-design sessions that were aimed at participants with ages 15 to 17 and where they were asked to ideate an interactive museum experience. As a result of the co-design sessions, we have found several design patterns. We have grouped these patterns into four categories that express the interests of a teenage audience; these categories are: " interactions " , " gaming " , " localization " and " social media ". Our findings suggest that teenagers value interactive technologies when visiting museums and that user-driven innovation plays an important role when involving this specific audience in the design of user experiences for museums.

Mobile Games for a house museum

Convergences - Journal of Research and Arts Education

The paper discusses a formal didactic activity in a higher education context, which brought to the design, development, and testing of thirteen Location-Based Mobile Games (LBMGs) for the Bagatti Valsecchi House Museum. The activity involved BSc Design students in developing and testing interactive solutions aimed at reaching out to the "under 35" community of the museum with engaging and entertaining experiences. For this purpose, the stakeholder group of the museum experts was also involved in co-designing the solutions. On the one hand, this study focuses on the beneficial approach of involving Design students in the multiple roles of designer, player/visitor, and target audience. On the other hand, it looks at those aspects that may turn LBMGs into a means for engaging and entertaining museum visitors' experiences. We focus on four LBMGs (out of thirteen) that the museum selected to be tested with their younger community, highlighting those elements that emerged as...

An unlikely seamless combination – future curators designing museum experiences towards the desires of actual teenagers

DIGICOM - International Conference on Design and Digital Communication, 2017

This paper describes a user-driven innovation study conducted with teenagers of Madeira Island to probe their desires for technology aided experiences inside a natural history museum. After gathering the results of the sessions with 43 teens (15-17 years old), such results were shown to 17 students of museum curatorship course at the local university (average of 26 years of age). These students enrolled in the Master in Cultural Management were required to design an experience targeting the teenage audience desires and preferences. Subsequently, a comparison between the results found in both groups was made in order to assert if the curators of tomorrow are prepared to design meaningful experiences for the teens of today, who will be the future adult audience.

Analysing Texts and Drawings: The Teenage Perspective on Enjoyable Museum Experiences

32nd British Human-Computer Interaction Conference (BHCI ’18), 2018

The contribution of this paper is centred around the qualitative data research conducted from several co-design sessions deployed with 155 teenage participants aged 15-19. The participants were asked to ideate a mobile museum experience that they would enjoy by writing and drawing about it. For this paper, we go over the thematic analysis applied to the results gathered as well as reporting the challenges faced and our attempts to overcome them. However, this work is still preliminary and will make use of this workshop to improve it.

MuseumScrabble: Design of a mobile game for children's interaction with a digitally augmented cultural space

Mobile technology has created new possibilities for location-based playful learning experiences. This paper describes the MuseumScrabble mobile game, aimed at children visiting a historical museum. The game requires that the players should explore the museum and link abstract concepts with physical artefacts using a mobile device. The focus of this paper is on the interaction design process and the subsequent observations made during field evaluation of the game. Design principles that guide the development of such a game are presented and concern playfulness, learning, social interaction, physical aspects of the game and flow between physical and digital space. We explore how these design principles are reflected in the study and how problem-solving strategies and collaboration and competition patterns are developed by children in this multi-player educational game.