Enhancing museum experiences

Abstract

Executive summary Visiting a museum is not only about the unique collection or the information available. Visiting a museum is about the visitor. Without them, what would be the point of putting a collection on display? Exhibitions are only as relevant as they are experienced to be. In line with this thought, the graduation project presented in this thesis centres on design for museum visitor experience enhancement. Specifically, the usefulness of digital technologies in allowing visitors to experience a museum in new valuable ways is focused on as an emerging key driver for museum experience design. A conceptual framework was proposed for (re-)designing museum exhibitions to expand the visitor experience, enabled by technological add-on features. The applicability of this guiding framework by exhibition designers in the field was illustrated with a proof of concept, developed for the case of a fictional museum exhibition on pre-Columbian adornment artefacts. These results were achieved through a design process consisting of phases of contextual research, practical research, development, evaluation and discussion. In the contextual research phase, the involved stakeholders were identified and described, and studies were conducted on the principles of museum experience, the potential uses for digital technologies in enhancement, the role of gamification in effectuating visitor participation in tech-enabled learning interactions, the state of the art of digital technologies considered for the development of add-on features, and finally the financial confines and dependencies to development typical for the museum sector. The practical research activities, these being an observational study in a museum and a generative session with museum visitors, served to validate prior findings and complement these with additional insights gathered. The proposed conceptual design framework and corresponding proof of concept would be developed through a bottom-up 'Research through Design' process, iteratively building upon knowledge acquired through progressive development. The proposed designs would be evaluated with the involvement of target stakeholders, contributing to further validation of the proposed designs as well as additional considerations for concept design processes. Further recommendations for development of the proposed designs and for exhibition design more generally, as well as the limitations of the study presented in the thesis, are presented as a follow-up. The project was concluded by stating the need for the proposed framework to be used by exhibition makers in real-life design settings in order to learn more about potential adjustments to the framework to better support exhibition design processes.