Teenage Visitor Experience: Classification of Behavioral Dynamics in Museums

Teenagers' engagement in museums is much talked about but little research has been done to understand their behavior and inform design. Findings from co-design sessions with teenagers suggested they value games and stories when thinking about enjoyable museum tours. Informed by these findings and working with a natural history museum, we designed: a story-based tour (Turning Point) and a game-based tour (Haunted Encounters), informed by similar content. The two strategies were evaluated with 78 teenagers (15-19 years old) visiting the museum as part of an educational school trip. We assessed teenagers' personality in class; qualitative and quantitative data on their engagement, experience, and usability of the apps were collected at the museum. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data show personality traits mapping into different behaviors. We offer implications for the design of museum apps targeted to teenagers, a group known as difficult to reach

Their memory:exploring veterans’ voices, virtual reality and collective memory

This paper focuses on the virtual reality (VR) project Their Memory and details the development and evaluation of virtual reality environments and experiences with respect to its impact on young people (14-35 demographic) with the narratives of veterans in Scotland. As part of the AHRC Immersive Experiences program, Their Memory was created to explore how game design techniques and immersive technology could be used to enhance existing historical research and enrich narratives to bring expansive experiences to hard-to-reach audiences. The project worked directly with the veterans’ charity, Poppyscotland, to create an environment and experience that would resonate with new audiences, and explore documentary and storytelling techniques for the commemoration of war and conflict. The design of the project evolved through co-design sessions with veterans and young people and culminated in the creation of a short, thought-provoking, narrative-driven experience. The VR experience enabled players to connect with the memories of veterans in Scotland and exploring the different conflicts or situations they experienced and how they make sense of them. The project brought together cross-sector expertise to research how immersive experiences can help memory-based organizations in engaging with wider audiences, raise awareness, and diversify current learning outputs. The paper details the design and development of the Virtual Reality project, through co-design, and how this engaged the audience and evolved the experience created. The paper includes a summative evaluation of events conducted with schoolchildren to assess the project and concludes with how the project evidences impact upon audiences and the potential for both technology and the experience

Involving the museum visitor community in designing exhibits

Museum and other cultural heritage practice increasingly recognizes the value and importance of involving local communities in the design and delivery of the cultural services they access. Commonly, where exhibits are concerned, museums and other organisations will make use of expert panels drawn from particular demographics to evaluate exhibits in structured moderated sessions. This paper considers how the design and evaluation might be done in a more integrated participatory fashion and presents some experiences of protoyping sessions conducted on the museum floor. Our findings lead us to argue for more consideration of the value of co-design workshops on the museum of gallery floor with visitors

Enhancing the museum experience with a sustainable solution based on contextual information obtained from an on-line analysis of users’ behaviour

Human computer interaction has evolved in the last years in order to enhance users’ experiences and provide more intuitive and usable systems. A major leap through in this scenario is obtained by embedding, in the physical environment, sensors capable of detecting and processing users’ context (position, pose, gaze, ...). Feeded by the so collected information flows, user interface paradigms may shift from stereotyped gestures on physical devices, to more direct and intuitive ones that reduce the semantic gap between the action and the corresponding system reaction or even anticipate the user’s needs, thus limiting the overall learning effort and increasing user satisfaction. In order to make this process effective, the context of the user (i.e. where s/he is, what is s/he doing, who s/he is, what are her/his preferences and also actual perception and needs) must be properly understood. While collecting data on some aspects can be easy, interpreting them all in a meaningful way in order to improve the overall user experience is much harder. This is more evident when we consider informal learning environments like museums, i.e. places that are designed to elicit visitor response towards the artifacts on display and the cultural themes proposed. In such a situation, in fact, the system should adapt to the attention paid by the user choosing the appropriate content for the user’s purposes, presenting an intuitive interface to navigate it. My research goal is focused on collecting, in a simple,unobtrusive, and sustainable way, contextual information about the visitors with the purpose of creating more engaging and personalized experiences

Att bevara spelens arv med videointervjuer: En fallstudie om Finlands Spelmuseum

“Digitala spel är i färd att försvinna” är ett uttryck man ofta hör idag. Spelutvecklare, samlare och entusiaster har nu längre än ett årtionde oroat sig över att inte kunna köra och spela gamla spel. Då museer börjar spara spel i sina samlingar, är de intresserade av konserveringsmetoder utöver dem, som behåller spelen spelbara. Eftersom dessa metoder inte ännu analyserats, återstår många obesvarade frågor gällande spelens kulturarv. Denna artikel underlättar definitionen av olika sorters museiobjekt inom spelkonservering. Den är en analys av 14 videointervjuer, som Finlands Spelmuseum utfört med finska spelutvecklare år 2016. Syftet är att analysera spelutvecklarnas presentationer av sina spel, och hur dessa diskussioner motiverar intervjuernas värde för museer. Den avslutande diskussionen beaktar hur dylika intervjuer ter sig som ogripbara museiobjekt. Artikelns slutsatser är värdefulla för alla kulturarvsorganisationer intresserade av spelkultur och dess bevaring

Living and Learning With New Media: Summary of Findings From the Digital Youth Project

Summarizes findings from a three-year study of how new media have been integrated into youth behaviors and have changed the dynamics of media literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge. Outlines implications for educators, parents, and policy makers

Serious Games to Enhance Education. Play, Technology and Archaeology in a Spanish museum

Serious games are a powerful resource in the teaching-learning process in formal and informal learning settings since this kind of activity motivates participants to take part actively in their own learning process. Within informal learning environments, they serve to improve their pedagogical role, which is sometimes difficult to be perceived by users. Nevertheless, serious games play another equally important role in museums, Art galleries or Science centres: engaging part of the surrounding society with this kind of institutions. This paper describes a “serious game” using new technology that includes Information and Communication Technologies and 3D digitized models to be played in informal learning settings. It aims to enhance their didactic role and look for social engagement. An experimental experience was carried out in the National Museum of Roman Art (Mérida, Spain) to attract and retain a specific group of people, teenagers, reluctant to visit archaeological museums most of the time since they considered them boring places. Finally, this experience served to assess the applicability and versatility as an educational resource of the game scheme proposed

Enhancing the visitor experience in museums with Augmented Reality

The so-called "one-size-fits-all" experiences do not apply to most of the museum visitors and this research addresses the compelling need of customized experiences in museums contexts.One of the audience groups that is often ignored by museums is the age group of teenagers since the segmentation is usually made between children and adults and there is little customization for the teens' generation. At the same time, studies have shown that this age group appears to be disinterested in what museums might offer.This project aims to ameliorate this problem by providing guidelines to museum practitioners of how the interest of teenagers towards museums could be increased through the integration of AR and QR Code Technology.The investigation took place in the Customs Exhibition of the Alfandega Transports and Communications Museum. A non-linear technology-mediated experience was developed to reinvigorate the exhibition. This experience integrated mobile Augmented Reality and QR Code technology with storytelling and gamification elements, specifically customized for the age group of teenagers.Regarding the development of this experience, the first prototype of the experience was assessed by experts in experience design, visitor studies, gaming, storytelling and design and then was re-designed according to the guidelines given by them.So, alongside with a validated customized experience, there are developed some guidelines that refer to how mobile AR and QR Code Technology can be used in a museum context to enhance the experience of the age group of teenagers. Thus, this research will contribute in lessening the gap that exists for empirical studies in museum literature in the area of visitor experience and specifically for the target group of teenagers