Playful Museums

mobile audiences and exhibitions as game experiences

Nordmedia 2013

Kjetil Sandvik, associate professor, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

The main point! • Communicating ’museum stuff’ is about telling

stories • It is about engaging the users in the storytelling

process (participation) • It is about creating a storytelling device which can

be played with, manipulated, changed (co-creation)

• A constructivist approach towards knowledge and learning

• Mobile and networked media represent new possibilities and challenges for this kind of communication

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Purpose

The Playful Museum:

• Audiences are not just participants but co-creators through collective learning processes (uses of creative potential, focus on the experience dimension)

• Media do not just serve as means for communicating knowledge, but as creative tools for knowledge creation and learning processes.

• Based on a experience-focused and constructivist approach to learning and knowledge communication

Trust No-one!

• A new type of city walk in Kolding: augmented reality game for tourists

• Experience the rennaisance buildings, streets and squares mapped onto the present day city by the use of AR browser on the mobile phone

Project scope

• Mobile phones (smart phones) used for communicating culture

• Fiction used for communicating history

• Experiments with Augmented Reality (at low costs)

• Creating an unorthodox city walk: – instead of an exhibition about renaissance

Kolding, we let the renaissance pop up in the city space

• The audience as participants and co-creators

Augmented

Reality crime

fiction?

The crime scenes…

Interface

Introduction/manual

Map

Episodes

Layars of information

Guessing who the

killer is

Summing up

• The interplay between mobile media technology and physical places is a potent tool when it comes to meeting the challenges and potentials put forward by digital, mobile media to museums when it comes to creating new and engaging experiences which are based on collaboration, participation and co-creation.

• Digital augmentation of physical places makes us see things in new ways.

• Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not just streets – they carry stories, they carry cultural meaning which audiences through the gameplay and the interplay between the physical space of the city and the mobile media may acquire, discuss, investigate and relate to in a playful and creative way.

Visit the project on Facebook…

Project participants

• Kolding Libraries

• Kolding City Archive

• VIFIN – knowledge center for integration (Vejle)

• Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication,, University of Copenhhagen

• Knowledge center for Children and Youth Culture, VIA University College

Relevant literature • Robert R. Janes: Museums in a Troubled World. Renewal,

irrelevance or collapse?, London and New York: Routledge 2009

• Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook: Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2010

• Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.): Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage. A Critical Discourse, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2007/2010

• Ross Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age, London and New York 2010

• Loïs Tallon and Kevin Walker (eds.): Digital Technologies and The Museum Experience. Handheld Guides and Other Media, New York: AltaMira Press 2008

• Nina Simon: The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz CA: Museum 2.0 2010