A mobile interactive exhibition about sustainability for children

Abstract

Project goal

The goal of this project is to design an immersive interactive experience inside an electric truck for Museon for pop-up locations at schools aimed at preteenagers to inspire, activate, and make them care about nature and sustainability. The experience should be made accessible to children from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

The project consists of 2 phases, a research phase and design phase.

Research phase

During the research phase, two user research has been done. The first a context mapping session is done to understand how preteenagers perceive sustainability. It was discovered that their focus is mostly on nature, and they know the basic principles if a behaviour is good or bad for the environment. Often when asked for reasoning it is missing or wrong. The second were expert interviews, with the goal to learn more about how to design for children in the museum setting. Museum educators at Museon were interviewed. Information transfer is important when designing for children, they should enjoy the experience and therefor the experience should be designed to fit their identity needs. A design framework consisting of design principles, personas, design goal, interaction vision, and creative vision has been made using the information of the user research.

Literature research has been conducted to understand how to educate children about sustainability. According to Janssen et al. (2019) an approach to educate children about wicked problems is providing them with the perspectives of different stakeholders which should improve their systematic thinking and is necessary to solve complex issues. Literature research also has been done to better understand how to design for museum experiences. According to Bär and Boshouwers (2018) it is essential to design a story which the visitors can go through. The 9 experience journey steps have been adopted as blueprints for the final design to create a good story.

Design phase

The second phase is the design phase, creative sessions has been done to design a theme, exhibits, camper layout, and thematic objects. The final concept is a campervan experience in which the visitors make a journey along the Rijn. The camper is relevant to preteenagers as it reminds them of holiday and adventure. The experience consists of introductions using iconic objects of traveling to immerse the visitor, exhibits designed to fit the identity needs of the different personas to make the experience enjoyable, and an educational message with the educational approach of Janssen et al. (2019) where the children make sustainable choices after every exhibit and revealing how this affected their environment in the end of the experience.

The design phase ends with an evaluation done with preteenagers visiting Museon. A paper prototype has been used to walk the visitors through the exhibition and using the PrEmo tool (2007) as a discussion tool to understand how they feel about the exhibits. The exhibits were rated positive, and the educational message was seen as insightful for the children. Making their own choices and seeing how it effects the environment made it easy to understand the bigger system connected to the chosen sustainable behaviour.