Visitor Research Toolkit for Museum Catharijneconvent

Abstract

The project aims at designing a visitor research toolkit for Museum Catharijneconvent, a museum of religious art in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The project includes exploring a new experience of attending visitor research and the supplementary toolkit for MCC staffs to conduct it. The project would also be a practice of utilising two museum experience related theories, the Falk & Dierking’s identity-related motivations and Relevance by Play.The project is conducted following the double-diamond design process model. The research phase is for Diverge and Converge, including 3 main research tasks in parallel. 1. Interviews and context mapping are conducted to learn the context of MCC and the condition of visitor research. Based on the result, visitor research for finding inspiration for the theme of a temporary exhibition is chosen to be the focus in this project.2. Online questionnaires and interviews are conducted to learn visitor’s opinions about visitor research of museums. The result revealed that visitors have relatively positive attitudes towards the museums they visit. They regard an interesting experience and feedbacks as incentives of attending visitor research. 3. Interviews were used to learn MCC staffs’ attitudes towards the two theories and find out their possible roles in this project. Falk & Dierking’s identity-related motivations could be embedded in the toolkit as MCC staffs are familiar with it. While Relevance by Play might help the design of new visitor research experience directly in this project.Building upon this, the design goal was formulated:Design a toolkit for visitor researches to find inspiration for the developing temporary exhibition and provide visitors with a participatory museum experience through the visitor research during their visit in MCC.The exploration and ideation phase was for Develop, to discover different design possibilities. With ideas gathered from creative sessions, 3 primary concepts were generated. After a quick evaluation with stakeholders, one of the concepts was chosen for further development. For Deliver, there are 2 phases, Concept development and Validation & iteration.The final design concept turns the visitor research into an interactive mini-exhibition which can attract visitors. It includes a designed visitor journey of attending the visitor research, a tentative space for its conduction, a platform for visitors to share opinions and a management platform for MCC exhibition team to monitor the research.For validation, user tests were conducted with potential visitors and MCC staffs. Walkthrough video of the desired visitor’s journey was used to help testers to understand the context and experience of attending the visitor research. Interactive prototypes of the interfaces of the sharing platform and the management platform were used to test their usability. SUS, UEQ, 7-point Likert Scale and interviews were combined to gain feedback. Then a quick iteration was made based on the result. Finally, a discussion was given about the contribution, limitation and suggestion for further exploration and development.Overall, the project is an explorative practice of a new way of visitor research for Museum Catharijneconvent and a practice of utilising Relevance by Play.