Participatory design at the museum

Ozchi, 2010

We address the challenge of creating intersections between children's everyday engagement and museum exhibitions. Specifically, we propose an approach to participatory design inquiry where children's everyday engagement is taken as the point of departure. We base our discussion on a design workshop -Gaming the Museum -where a primary school class was invited to participate in exploring future exhibition spaces for a museum, based on their everyday use of computer games and online communities. We reflect on the results of the workshop, and broadly discuss the everyday engagement of children as point of departure for designing interactive museum exhibitions.

In this paper, we present the Child-to-Child method (C2C) for co-designing with children for children. The method is illustrated using a design case, where an interactive space for young children in Children's Museum was designed. A three dimensional interactive books are envisioned and explored with children, and consequently embedded into the "Book Nook" exhibit. This interactive environment, intended for young children aged 3-5, was developed and prototyped by an intergenerational design team. The paper reflects upon challenges and opportunities provided by working with C2C method and presents results of preliminary investigation of an interactive space design that employs a novel concept of a 3D book. Further, we argue that C2C method is indeed a participatory design method for, with and by children.

Involving children in the design process in the context of exhibition settings is a relatively new and unexplored field. We address the challenges of constructing and evaluating a design framework involving children when developing an interactive exhibition. In this, we draw on informant design, participatory design, cooperative inquiry, and child development research in order to adapt the design framework to children. The proposed framework was applied and evaluated on the case of the PULSE exhibition project at the Experimentarium Science Center. Altogether, six children aged six to eleven participated in three workshops based on the design framework. The analysis and discussion of the findings resulted in three design proposals for the exhibition. Furthermore, the study showed that the framework had the potential to engage children in participatory design within an exhibition context. The evaluation of this study indica tes possibilities and challenges for future research and for designers to be aware of when designing with children for interactive exhibition environments.

07th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation (ArtsIT ’18), 2018

Museums promote cultural experiences through exhibits and the stories behind them. Nevertheless, museums are not always designed to engage and interest young audiences, especially teenagers. Throughout this paper, we discuss teenagers as an important group to be considered within the Children-Computer Interaction field, and we report some techniques on designing with teens, in particular, arguing that participatory design methods can involve teenagers in the design process of technology for museums. For this purpose, we conceptualized, designed and deployed a co-design activity for teenagers (aged 15-17), where teenagers together with a researcher jointly created and designed a medium fidelity prototype. For this case study, participants were divided into groups and invited to think and create games and story plots for a selected museum. All the prototypes were made by the participants with the support and guidance of the researcher and the Aurasma software, an augmented reality tool.

This paper examines how the evolution of the Museums place in society has defined how it engages with it's audience, and observes that this relationship has become increasingly interactive. The paper goes on to criticise this focus on "interactivity" being wrong for the productive engagement that would suit the Museums' goals far better. To further this idea, the highly productive culture of play and games in general are analysed, focusing on contemporary computer games, and the atmosphere of irreverence present in Modding communities. In conclusion, the paper asserts that this culture of irreverence could be the key to audiences productively bouncing off voices of cultural authority such as museums.

Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Interaction design and children - IDC '07, 2007

In this paper, we describe the application of a participatory design methodology with children, developed within the context of an informal educational institution, specifically the National Gallery of Art in Athens, Greece. A group of 11 year-olds spent part of their summer learning about art conservation in order to design an on-line art education program targeted to children of their

2016

In 2014 Videogames in the Museum [1] engaged with creative practitioners, games designers, curators and museums professionals to debate and explore the challenges of collecting and exhibiting videogames and games design. Discussions around authorship in games and games development, the transformative effect of the gallery on the cultural reception and significance of videogames led to the exploration of participatory modes and playful experiences that might more effectively expose the designer's intent and enhance the nature of our experience as visitors and players. In proposing a participatory mode for the exhibition of videogames this article suggests an approach to exhibition and event design that attempts to resolve tensions between traditions of passive consumption of curated collections and active participation in meaning making using theoretical models from games analysis and criticism and the conceit of game and museum spaces as analogous rules based environments.

Mobile technology has created new possibilities for location-based playful learning experiences. This paper describes the MuseumScrabble mobile game, aimed at children visiting a historical museum. The game requires that the players should explore the museum and link abstract concepts with physical artefacts using a mobile device. The focus of this paper is on the interaction design process and the subsequent observations made during field evaluation of the game. Design principles that guide the development of such a game are presented and concern playfulness, learning, social interaction, physical aspects of the game and flow between physical and digital space. We explore how these design principles are reflected in the study and how problem-solving strategies and collaboration and competition patterns are developed by children in this multi-player educational game.

Mobile technology has created new possibilities for location-based playful learning experiences. This paper describes the MuseumScrabble mobile game, aimed at children visiting a historical museum. The game requires that the players should explore the museum and link abstract concepts with physical artefacts using a mobile device. The focus of this paper is on the interaction design process and the subsequent observations made during field evaluation of the game. Design principles that guide the development of such a game are presented and concern playfulness, learning, social interaction, physical aspects of the game and flow between physical and digital space. We explore how these design principles are reflected in the study and how problem-solving strategies and collaboration and competition patterns are developed by children in this multi-player educational game.

Abstract In this paper we analyze two different trends that have informed technology for learning in cultural institutions during recent years: one more established trend, supporting the information consumption metaphor and the other one, emerging recently, that invites visitors to participate in the process of culture creation. We discuss then game design as an example of participatory activity and we identify its learning dimensions.