Design Patterns to Enhance Teens’ Museum Experiences

Abstract

Teenagers are an understudied group within the Interaction Design and Children community. Museums and cultural heritage spaces offer solutions for young children but do not target teenagers in particular. Teens, are a large pool of potential museum audiences. They should be given a "voice" and involved early in the design process to maximize chances of involvement in the museum practices and offers, hence, it is crucial to study their interests and desires to deploy a high quality and enjoyable product. For these reason, we deployed several co-design sessions with a total of 155 teenage participants, in order to understand how would they prefer to engage with museum tours. The authors, based on Madeira island (Portugal), used the Natural History Museum of Funchal as a case study. The participants were asked to ideate a mobile museum experience that they would enjoy. Through qualitative analysis, we gathered insights regarding six main themes that they reported as prompts in order to visit the Natural History Museum of Funchal, such as 1) gaming, 2) interactions, 3) localization, 4) social media, 5) aspects of the museum studied, and 6) photos. These findings are preliminary and still need testing and validation.

From children to seniors: is culture accessible to everyone?

“…In addition, previous studies have focused on the importance of creating programs in cultural institutions for one specific target group of visitors and developing approaches for their engagement. For example, those aimed at people with some kind of disability such as Alzheimer's disease or dementia (Camic et al, 2016;Rosenberg, 2009;Windle et al, 2018), ethnic minority groups (Le and Fujimoto, 2011), different age groups including children (Birch, 2018;Song et al, 2017;Eluyefa, 2017;Musacchio et al, 2015;Curtis and Chavez, 2013;Jung et al, 2018;Andre et al, 2017;Kalumpahaiti, 2018), teenagers and young adults (Ces ario et al, 2018;Lattarulo et al, 2017;Shrapnel, 2012;Fors, 2013;Tajt akov a and Arias-Aranda, 2008) and seniors (Traboulsi et al, 2018;Bernard and Rickett, 2017;Avellino, 2016). However, there are no studies that compare the compatibility of cultural offer with the needs of different age groups, noticed by Boži c et al (2018), where the authors propose more research on the cultural needs and preferences of different age groups of cultural visitors in Serbia.…”

Teenage Visitor Experience: Classification of Behavioral Dynamics in Museums

“…The results of the co-design sessions (see [13,14,16]) suggested that teenagers particularly appreciate mobile experiences that include novel technologies, in particular Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR); they are also keen to share their experiences via social media; they favor options for different tours to engage with different content; and suggest a mix of stories and games (they proposed games with treasure-hunts, competition, timeout and collection strategies; and stories that give the opportunity to become protagonists of the experience, engage directly with the exhibits and connect to it emotionally when possible). All these elements that emerged as important in the creative phase were taken into account in the design phase discussed next.…”

Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace: Haunted Encounters, a Museum Experience to Engage Teenagers

“…According to formal studies about teenage preferences regarding museum engagement, Cesário et al [8,9] identified that teenage audiences particularly appreciate mobile experiences that include 1) Gaming and storytelling aspects, 2) Interaction elements, 3) Social media connections, and 4) Museum and exhibits relevant information. To contribute in filling in the gap regarding teenage engagement in museums, we designed the Memories of Carvalhal's Palace dual experience, geared towards better understanding teenagers' preferences and needs in museum contexts.…”