An Evaluation-Driven Design Process for Exhibitions

Abstract

Museums and science centres are informal education environments that intend to engage visitors with their exhibits. We present an efficient design process that allows an improved working relationship between museum practitioners, exhibition designers, and visitors. Its principles and a graphical representation are based on the Engagement Profile from previous work. Curators and designers evaluate the qualities of exhibits using the engagement profile while visitors inform the design process by answering a standardised questionnaire. Elements of the design process were evaluated using an educational game at the science centre Engineerium. This study was based on the responses from over five hundred visitors to the science centre. As an outcome, the science centre received valuable information of how to improve the exhibit. Further, one iteration of the design process was implemented in practice. First experiences show that our method will practically support the work of museum practitioners and exhibition designers.

Strengthening Tourists’ Engagement in Guided Hiking and Trekking

“…The mean value of the mean values for all eight categories was -0.04, which is close to zero. As a comparison, similar studies that have been performed in science centres and museums [5], gave a positive value of about 0.4. From this, we inferred that the participants did not expect modification of the trekking tour setup.…”

“…Its dimensions represent the degrees of competition (C), narrative elements (N), interaction (I), physical activity (P), visitor (user) control (U), social aspects (S), achievements awareness (A), and exploration possibilities (E). The Engagement Profile was used as a tool in the design process to create and evaluate exhibits [5]. A modification of the Engagement Profile has been developed to characterise a robotic teaching assistant [1].…”

“…Further, it can be used to consider changes on-site when there are indications that the tourists' engagement might become too low. We use similar graphical representations as for the original Engagement Profile [5], where coloured arcs and areas are placed in slices of a disk. Each slice represents one of the eight dimensions.…”

“…Project partners were Expology AS, Norsk Regnesentral (Norwegian Computing Centre), The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, The Norwegian Maritime Museum, Engineerium, and the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. For information about the project, we refer to the project base entry at the Research Council of Norway [17] and previous publications [1,[5][6][7][8]24].…”

Strengthening Engagement in Science Understanding with Learning Trails

“…As these students may have diverse learning agendas and prefer diverse ways of learning (such as reading, interacting with others, touching and doing) [4], science centres offer a diversity of exhibits that can be explored during the visit. Science centres such as NTM have the ambition that the design of their exhibits [6] should address factors such as learning outcome, learning styles, levels of engagement, and context.…”