Designing mobile museum experiences for teenagers

ABSTRACT

While museums are often designed to engage and interest a wide variety of audiences, teenagers are a neglected segment. This article describes a set of findings that aids in designing enjoyable interactive experiences inside natural history museums for teenagers (15–19 years old). For this research, 223 teenagers have been involved through co-design sessions and testing of Augmented Reality prototypes (130 of these teenagers took part in a focus group as well). This work also involved 3 museums from Portugal, 12 cultural heritage professionals, and 17 master's students as sources of information who took part in different research studies. Through qualitative analysis, the findings from the studies provide a strong foundation to inform and inspire work within the emerging research field concerning museum offerings and the current teenage generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• museum experience
• playful interaction
• teenagers
• visitors
• user experience
• co-design

Acknowledgements

The work reported in this contribution has received funding from ARDITI (Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento da Investigação Tecnologia e Inovação) under the Postdoctoral Grant M1420-09-5369-FSE-000002. Our gratitude also goes to the students and teachers from Madeira Island and the University of Porto. In addition, we would like to thank the staff from the Natural History Museum of Funchal for their timely support and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Geolocation Information

This study was conducted on Madeira Island and in Porto city, Portugal.

Notes

1 The confidentiality of participants was maintained in the following manner: The data and consent form was kept separate. The consent forms were stored in a locked locked location on the ITI/LARSyS property and will not be disclosed to third parties. By participating, participants understood and agreed that we might use the data and information gathered during the study. To protect their privacy, each participant was assigned a code number, and the collected data was recorded by this code, not by the participant’s name. Their participation was voluntary. They were free to stop their participation at any point. Refusal to participate, withdrawal of their consent, or discontinued participation in the study did not result in any penalty or loss of benefits or rights to which participants might otherwise have been entitled.

2 Unfortunately, the HP Reveal (formerly Aurasma), an extended reality platform by HP, shut down its services and products after two years of being in business.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ARDITI (Agência Regional para o Desenvolvimento da Investigação, Tecnologia e Inovação): Grant Number M1420-09-5369-FSE-000002.

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Cesário

Vanessa Cesário is a Research Scientist. She focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research in cultural heritage sites and participatory design methods. Her scientific work has been published in many international conferences and journals in HCI, Museums, and Interaction Design.

Valentina Nisi

Valentina Nisi is Associate Professor at IST, U. Lisbon, Adjunct Faculty at HCII Carnegie Mellon, founding member of the Interactive Technology Institute, LARSyS. She researches Expanded Realities experiences to bring awareness to social and environmental issues through games and storytelling.