Deepening Visitor Engagement with Museum Exhibits through Hand-crafted Visual Markers

Abstract

Visual markers, in particular QR codes, have become widely adopted in museums to enable low cost interactive applications. However, visitors often do not engage with them. In this paper we explore the application of visual makers that can be designed to be meaningful and that can be created by visitors themselves. We study both the use of these markers as labels for portraits that link to audio recordings and as a mechanism for visitors to contribute their own reflections to the exhibition by drawing a marker and linking an audio comment. Our findings show visitors appreciated the use of the aesthetic markers and engaged with them at three levels -physical placement, aesthetic content and digital content. We suggest that these different levels need to be considered in the design of future visiting systems, which make use of such markers, to ensure they are mutually supporting in shaping the experience.

Automatic Museum Audio Guide

“…Mixed solutions combining positioning and image recognition can also be found [38]. On the other hand, in [39,40], "artcodes" were scanned instead with the same objective. However, [41] provided an extensive analysis of the untapped potential that this type of mobile museum guides may have had to improve visitor experience, considering both the technical aspects and visitors' perception.…”

Participatory Memory Making

“…[9], carried out co-design sessions with designers, heritage professionals, scientists and developers with an aim to create a 'Do It Yourself' toolkit for cultural heritage professionals to be able to configure tangible installations in heritage sites. Ali et al [2], presented how they used handcrafted markers created by the visitors during the exhibition, which they claim enhanced the experiences of the visitors when linked to audio content -compared to use QR code markers. In their project, they recruited the participants once the exhibition was already set up, but the participants were not involved in the initial design of the exhibition.…”

“…Interactive installations in museums have been applied mainly to existing collections to make them more engaging to the audience [9], for the visitors to contribute to the exhibitions instantly [2], or to increase children's creativity and explore new education avenues [53], and augment the current exhibitions and spaces in the museum [57]. These forms of engagements require us to reconsider the position of audiences inside exhibitions, and to turn our attention to participatory engagements, and how new forms of cultural heritage can be co-created based on the audience's everyday experiences [27,45,47].…”

Exploring relationships between museum artefacts through spatial interaction

“…Instead, we chose to adopt Artcodes (previously known as Aesthticodes) [13] as the technology to represent artefacts on the map. Users of the publically available Artcodes app [2] can scan stylized visual markers ("artcodes") to reveal digital content, as demonstrated in a museum setting by Ali at al [1]. Unlike QR codes, there is much more aesthetic freedom in artcode visual representations, to the extent that stylized representations of the original artefacts can themselves serve as the code (e.g.…”