1. NordiCHI workshop: Design for Audience Engagement
Copenhagen, Denmark, October 14th 2012
Audience participation in
museums: Game Design as
Learning Activity
N.Yiannoutsou, N.Avouris, C.Sintoris
University of Patras, Greece

2. Meaning making in the
museum
According to the constructivist
perspective (Hein, 1998) the active
role of the visitor is essential in the
museum learning experience
The visitor constructs meaning through
the interaction as opposed to the
passive consumption of information.
Games may play an important role in
this setting

3. Museum games: interaction
with exhibits
In many museum games artefacts are
treated as a set of disconnected and de-
contextualized objects (Klopfer et al.,
2005) e.g. cut out letters

4. Audience Participation in
museums
The proliferation of mobile technologies and
social media has supported the creation of user
generated content, examples:
Tagging: unstructured text associated with objects
Debunking, criticizing: arguing against other peoples’
ideas, tags etc.
Recording personal stories: personal memories
associated to a museum object
Linking objects or categorising: grouping of objects or
associating them (e.g. card sorting, museumscrabble)
[M.Ridge, Everyone wins: Crowdsourcing games & Museums, MuseumNext, May 2011]

5. Engagement through
connecting to personal stories

6. Engagement for serving the
community: citizen curator

7. Engagement through
building personal narratives
Franklin Remix project
A playful yet somewhat irreverent
cartoon created by a middle school
student early in the. The Philadelphia
School, Philadelphia, PA, March, 2006
Fisher and Twiss-Garrity,
Remixing exhibits: Constructing
participatory narratives with on-
line tools to augment museum
experiences.
http://www.museumsandtheweb.com

8. Audience engagement
…through
building their
own games

9. SFzero:
community
created
games
e,.g. “Install a door in a public place,” a group
of SFZero players constructed Doorhenge
in Golden Gate Park.
http://www.participatorymuseum.org/chapter8/

10. Game content editor: a tool
to build games by the
players for a group of linking
games [ work in progress]
• MuseumScrabble
• CityScrabble
• BenakiMuseumScrabble

11. Game content editor
(google+ app)
Rubén Muñoz and Christos Sintoris, 2012

12. CityScrabble
A B C

13. MuseumScrabble

14. BenakiMS

15. Final note
participatory activities such as game
design when scaffolded by
technology and integrated in
museum activities can offer rich
learning experiences
They reserve for the visitor the role
of collaborator and partner and
entail the creation of an enduring
relationship with the museum

16. thanks
hci.edu.gr