Designing Interactive Technologies for Interpretive Exhibitions: Enabling Teen Participation Through User-Driven Innovation

Abstract

The active involvement of teenagers in the design of interactive technologies for museums is lacking further development. Adopting a userdriven innovation framework along with cooperative inquiry, we report and discuss a case study that has been designed to involve users in the ideation of interpretive experiences for a local museum. Working in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of Funchal, this contribution will present and discuss co-design sessions that were aimed at participants with ages 15 to 17 and where they were asked to ideate an interactive museum experience. As a result of the co-design sessions, we have found several design patterns. We have grouped these patterns into four categories that express the interests of a teenage audience; these categories are: "interactions", "gaming", "localization" and "social media". Our findings suggest that teenagers value interactive technologies when visiting museums and that user-driven innovation plays an important role when involving this specific audience in the design of user experiences for museums.

Design Patterns to Enhance Teens’ Museum Experiences

“…We follow our framework presented in (Cesário, Matos, Radeta, & Nisi, 2017) to engage teenage audiences in the design of interactive experiences for museums. We engaged 155 teenage participants in a single session of multiple co-design short bursts, gathering teens' ideas about their values concerning engaging museums visits.…”

“…3.2.2. Co-design session155 participants in total were divided into 46 groups, and given two different working sheets per group(Cesário et al, 2017):…”

Teenage Visitor Experience: Classification of Behavioral Dynamics in Museums

“…To better understand teenagers' preference when visiting museums, we adopted a user-driven innovation framework [10] along with a cooperative inquiry approach that positions participants as "design partners" [22]. This combination resulted in a co-design framework [17] that involves teenage users in the ideation of mobile experiences for their local museum, bearing in mind the use of mobiles. In 13 workshops of 90 minutes, we harnessed teenagers' experiences and ideas as valuable sources of information and inspiration to understand how museum visits could be enhanced from the teenagers' perspective.…”

Analysing Texts and Drawings: The Teenage Perspective on Enjoyable Museum Experiences

“…We follow the framework presented in our previous work (Cesário, Matos, Radeta, & Nisi, 2017) to engage teenage audiences in the design of interactive experiences for museums. We designed for a single session and engaged 155 participants in short bursts of co-design sessions to end up gathering ideas to be examined later for trends, as employed in ideas concept generation of Hakkila and colleagues (Hakkila et al, 2016).…”

“…The students were involved in a 45-minute codesign session. For this co-design process, the students were divided into groups (total of 46 groups) and given two different working sheets per group (sheet A and sheet B, Figure 1) (Cesário et al, 2017). Sheet A contained three spaces to be filled by the group participants regarding the general idea behind the whole experience: 1) Narrative: what is the narrative underlying the experience?…”