We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go , one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step-back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum's own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach.
This paper presents an exploration of play design as a relational strategy to intensify affective encounters during an art museum visit. Theoretically, the paper presents a foundation emphasising the relational aspects of designing playful museum experiences. Based on a detailed and contextual analysis of a mobile web app entitled 'Never let me go', designed to be used in art museums, we show how the app and infrastructure catalysed affective encounters and put the relations between the players, the architecture and the exhibited artworks into motion. In our analysis, we highlight four ways through which the players' experiences were intensified. Finally, we discuss the potential and concerns arising from working with relational play strategies in the design of affectively engaging museum experiences, emphasising emergence, intimacy, ambiguity and trust as key elements.
This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges.
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