In the past decades, museums have become places that do not only conserve and store artefacts, but also provide visitors with education and entertainment. They are now challenged to become open, collaborative and creative spaces. In this paper we describe a participative event, involving both visitors and museum actors during a threeday hackathon in order to create digital artefacts for museums, among them tangible experiences. We describe the specific methodology created for the event, based on maker movement and rapid prototyping, and some of the resulting prototypes. Finally we draw the lessons of this experience and the possible implication of this methodology for the context of helping museum staff and visitors to personalize the visit, thanks to tangible user interfaces.
Guiding the visitors within the museum based on their
personal preferences is one of the answers considered by
museums in order to re-emphasize the collections, provide
enjoyment and make the learning more progressive. Indeed,
visitors will not seek the same experience in the museum
depending on whether they are accompanied and by whom,
how much time they have, their mood or their previous
knowledge about the subject. Some museums have started
working on personalizing museum visits. For instance, in
the European project CHESS [
Designing exhibitions generally is a collaborative work between curators, exhibition designers and conservators, who usually do not have a high technical knowledge. In this context, previous works [9] proved that tangible interactions are well fitted to help the creation process, even more if the public is included in the process.
Museums also have a cultural and societal duty as they are
parts of the commons—the cultural and natural resources
shared by all members of a society. Some museum workers
and public individuals—inspired by the Peer-to-Peer,
OpenContent and Do-It-Yourself movements—are trying to
move the lines for a more horizontal access to the culture,
for the opening of the cultural content and for a more
participative management of museums’ collections. One of
the manifestations of this movement is the cultural
hackathon Museomix, an international event created in
order to modify the vertical and segmented vision of
cultural institutions and to include people in the creation of
museum exhibitions. During three days multidisciplinary
teams create new museum experiences, based on new
technologies and a methodology inspired by participatory
design [
The work presented in this paper is part of a larger project in which we aim 1) at helping museum staff create, manage and transmit personalized adaptable itineraries for their visitors, and 2) at providing the museum visitors with a personalized museum experience. Our project is conducted in direct collaboration with different French museums and science centers such as Cap Sciences and the Cité du Vin in Bordeaux, as well as the City of the Ocean in Bidart and Musée Saint Raymond in Toulouse.
In this paper, we are going to provide, as a first step, feedbacks and thoughts about Museomix as a concrete example of participatory museum design. We first describe the methodology used during the event, present some of the resulting tangible prototypes, and then draw some conclusions about this experience and its contribution to our global project.
MUSEOMIX
Museomix is an international annual event, created in 2011
in Paris by cultural institution workers, collaborative design
experts and museum lovers. Its baseline is “people make
museums”. During three days, and in various museums
around the world (18 museums in 2016), individuals from
various expertise fields (graphic designers, communicators,
software developers, makers, content specialists, and public
experts) work together in order to create one prototype per
self-constituted team of six people that usually have never
met before the event. They are supported by various
volunteers: staff from the hosting museum, content experts,
technology specialists, facilitators, computer science
students etc.; as well as various technical tools: a fablab (for
fabrication laboratory)—a small-scale workshop offering
digital fabrication—and a “techshop” the resource center
for all kind of hardware (Kinect, Arduino, computers,
screens, video projectors, Makey-Makey®…). On the last
day, museum visitors are invited to experiment the resulting
prototypes. In seven annual editions, more than 160
prototypes were created and documented on the Museomix
website http://www.museomix.org/prototypes2/.
Methodology
The Museomix methodology is inspired by participative
and user centered design methodologies [
The second day is dedicated to the refinement of the idea
and the early realization of the prototypes. Each participant,
depending on its profile, gathers the resources necessary to
the realization of the prototype. For example, the computer
scientists go to the “techshop” to collect the needed sensors
or hardware (and learn how to use it if necessary). The
industrial designers start making plans of the installation
and go to the fablab to ask for feasibility and needed
materials. At this step, the teams are doing numerous
iterations, depending on available materials, the technical
feasibility and time constraints (the prototype must be ready
to test on the third day). At the second day evening
meeting, they present the scenario of use of their prototype,
from the visitor’s point of view.
On the third day, they finalize and document their
prototypes. In order to detect potential problems, a “crash
test” is conducted by some volunteers. These tests help to
highlight the technical and ergonomic problems soon
enough, identify the missing resources and allow the team
to cut off some functionalities in order to have a working
prototype for the visiting hour. At four pm, the general
public of the museum is welcomed to test the prototypes.
Sometimes, the prototypes remain in the exhibition for a
few days, in other museums they are disassembled
immediately. All prototypes are documented on the
Museomix website, under the Creative Common license, in
order to build them again easily. After the event some of the
museums choose to make some prototypes permanent.
Prototypes
Among the 168 prototypes produced during the seven
Museomix editions, some of them are of special interest for
the Tangible and Embedded Interaction field, falling into
two main themes: immersive experiences and interactive
objects.
Multi-sensory and immersive experiments
A very recurrent wish among teams is to create
multisensory and immersive experiments for the public. The
scenarios are different each time to adapt to the museum
object, but the underlying technology always relies on the
same principle: embedded sensors triggering lights, video
projections and sounds. The visitor is going to hear a
conversation between August and his wife when
approaching their statues, to listen to persons living in 1913
using the exhibits on a daily basis when approaching the
objects, to hear the stories of the inhabitants at different
ages when approaching the corner of a cloister, and so on...
In “Momix”, as shown on video [7] and Figure 2a, the
visitor lies down next to a mummy on a cardboard
sarcophagus to feel the size and proportion of the real one.
When his head is detected by a proximity sensor in the
cardboard, he listens to the story of the mummy next to him
through a speaker and videos are projected on a ceiling
above his head. The teams often use storytelling to immerse
the visitor in the context and give extra information about
the subject, but they sometime also use embedded
interactions to offer the visitor to play and create. For
example with “prehistopiano” (see video [
Interactive tangible objects
Other prototypes are about manipulating objects, whether
replicas created for the experience, thanks to the fablab
laser cutter and 3D printer, or more rarely the real museum
object itself. For example, in “Museocyclette” [
Lessons learned and improvements The organization of several editions of Museomix, and its exponential growth around the world, showed that people are eager to take part in collaborative and creative processes in museums; and that museums are more and more willing to innovate and give space to collaboration. The public affluence on the third day of Museomix events confirms this appetite for innovation in museums. The mind changing goal of Museomix is then fulfilled.
Another positive result is that the methodology allows
creating real prototypes that can be tested by end users in
only three days. Sometimes they are not fully functional but
the most important result is the idea and its transmission to
the general public, with the help of some “Wizard of Oz”
technique [
In the last sections, we saw that numerous prototypes differ
on the story they tell (adapting to the museum theme) but
are very similar on their interaction principle (embedded
interaction and tangible objects interaction for TEI related
prototypes) across the years. Only few prototypes were
truly innovative, which is also one of the goals of the
Museomix event. Several explanations can be found: 1) the
participants know some previous works and want to test
them themselves, 2) the event duration is too short to dig
into more original ideas, and the first ideas coming out in
the brainstorming are kept: the productivity loss in
brainstorming groups is also a well-known problem [3], 3)
the teams are not very aware of the possibilities offered by
the available technologies (like Myo Gesture Control
Armband, Leap Motion, Occulus Rift etc.) and rely on
already known or easy to apprehend uses of the
technologies. More technological opportunities were
thought to foster creativity, but finally it appears that they
lead to confusion. The time-constrained format of the event
cannot be changed without changing the whole concept; but
the technological confusion could be fixed by providing
less different technologies, sticking to “low tech”
(cardboard, sensors, lights and speakers), documenting
better the possible uses and providing sample code. The use
of scientific result like [
On a methodological point of view, there is also a drawback in the recruiting method. In order to be sure that each team can build a (quite) complete and testable prototype, the participants have to fall into one of the six categories defined by the Museomix process, but this reduces the call to museum or digital communities. Moreover, the call for participants is published on websites or social media by people working in the museum environment, and reaches most of the time people already working in or for museums. As a consequence, this excludes mechanically the “classical” visitors, the very user at the center of the participative design methodology. For the next editions of Museomix, some local communities are thinking about some adjustments to better include the general public in the event. One first step could be to add workshops besides the hackathon main event to make visitors experiment the “mix” concept themselves. Alternatively, the event format could be deeply changed to have also “classical” visitors participate in the hackathon, replacing some of the six types of specialists. The missing skills in the teams could be provided by volunteers as support functions (as currently the facilitators, the fablab volunteers or the museum experts).
CONCLUSION In this paper we described Museomix, a three day open and participative hackathon that takes place each year since 2011 in several museums around the world. We presented its specific methodology, a mix of participative design and maker movement, we described some resulting prototypes of interest for the TEI community and we highlighted some limitations and possible improvements for the next event organization. It is now clear that tangible interactions are pertinent to use in museum context. However, it also shows that the very constrained format of the event, in time and methodology, might limit highly the possible contributions which in the end are often similar and not so innovative. Thus, we want to explore the use of tangible interactions to help museum professionals design personalized itineraries in their museum exhibitions and guide the visitors along them, in a less restrained context. Museomix was truly inspirational for our overall project, and we hope that we can adapt some of its methodology to our future work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to Anke Brock and Nadine Couture for the careful and benevolent proofreading and to Celia Picard and Mustapha Derras (Berger-Levrault) for the support.