Part of the EU Horizon 2020 ‘Gift project’, this was a collaboration with Blast Theory to explore the design of meaningful visitor experiences for museums. Our Gift app employed the approach of interpersonalisation in which would visitor would design a personalised tour or another, typically a friend of loved one, by choosing up to three exhibits and then recording personal messages about their importance to the other. The receiver would then explore the museum, find the exhibits and experiences their messages. Studies showed how this approach led people to make ew meaning as they viewed exhibits and themselves through another’s eyes.

Papers

Ryding, K., Spence, J., Løvlie, A.S. and Benford, S., 2021. Interpersonalizing intimate museum experiences. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 37(12), pp.1151-1172. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2020.1870829

Spence, J., Bedwell, B., Coleman, M., Benford, S., Koleva, B.N., Adams, M., Row Farr, J., Tandavanitj, N. and Løvlie, A.S., 2019, May. Seeing with new eyes: designing for in-the-wild museum gifting. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300235