The project aims at designing an engaging art experience outside the Van Gogh Museum (VGM) for young people. The experience should achieve the design goal of triggering young people’s interest in Van Gogh and his art through experiencing the connections between his personal stories and his painting style and technique in a mixed-reality environment. Before defining this design goal, research was conducted through literature review, context and user research (Contextmapping), and existing XR products analysis. Through literature review, the factors of relevance and participation of enhancing engagement and their relation to emotional connection are found. It provides a clear objective for user research in the VGM context - figuring out the desired content of the museum for young people and how they would like to interact with the content. Specific qualities of interaction and desired content are figured out based on the needs of young people. Among all through mixed reality technology, mixed reality is selected due to its potential to enable diverse interaction and be more accessible by the target group. Based on insights gained from the research phase, the design goal and design criteria are formulated, validated, and prioritized based on the results of a questionnaire. In the ideation phase, ideas are generated and prototyped from both technological and context perspectives, which lead to three important results: Feasible design elements by MR, the understanding of the essential aspects of MR, and a structure of four phases of interaction that help build the design elements into a complete journey. A converging concept is created, tested, and discussed with participants and clients with all the insights above. The insights result in a content structure, providing a logical way of organizing content during the experience through layered information with a coherent storyline. It reduces the cognitive effort needed to process the information so that it engages young people more. Based on the structure of four phases of interaction and user test insights, the final concept is created. The interactive prototype is built with Java, a programming language. The prototype is used for the final concept evaluation. The concept is then evaluated and validated by both the field test and the control test, using observation, questionnaire, and interview combined to evaluate to what extend the design achieved the design goal and criteria. Limitations and recommendations for improvements are discussed at the end of the evaluation chapter. Overall, the design is an interactive art experience (installation) that brings the content of VGM to the public environment, approaches young people, and triggers their interest in the connection between Van Gogh’s stories and art with Mixed reality.

Vincent van Gogh, one of the most important figures in Art history, left the world not only his art, but also a large number of letters. The letters bare the first-hand witness of his unique life stories and precious insights about his art. Dedicated to the works and stories of Van Gogh, the Van Gogh Museum (VGM) wants to redesign the current letter gallery in the museum, aiming at creating personal connections between visitors and Van Gogh. To achieve this, multiple user research activities were conducted, based on which three design strategies of the letter gallery were defined. Then a design concept of the gallery was generated. There are three scopes of the research: "personal connection", "personal connection with Van Gogh", and "connecting with Van Gogh in the VGM letter gallery". To address these scopes, a group session, two rounds of visitor interviews, a Van Gogh fans interview and a letter booklet research were done. With the research insights coming together, the author generated the model of "layers of connections with Van Gogh" which illustrates that in order to achieve personal connections with Van Gogh in the letter gallery, the design strategies can be: 1. Trigger visitors' interests in letters through art; 2. Hit visitors' focus points by layering the information; 3. Encourage further exploration of the letters after visitors leave the gallery. Then, how to realize such design strategies? The author proposed a concept of the gallery, consisting of six parts: 1. Introduction; 2. Trailer; 3. Interactive programme; 4. Narrative structure; 5. Online content and 6. Link to VGM multimedia guide. The design explorations mainly focused on "part 3 Interactive programme" and "part 4 Narrative structure", with three concepts generated for each of the two parts and followed by visitor evaluations. After the design explorations, the final concept was presented, consisting of part 1~4. Part 1 Introduction shows the letter themes in the form of stamps, to make the information easier to understand. Part 2 Trailer consists of projections of a painting and a letter quote of the same theme which switch every 10 seconds, to trigger visitors' interests in more letter contents that they will see next. Part 3 Interactive programme give visitors a quick opportunity to engage with the letters without diving into the whole story. In this programme, users can create their own letters using Van Gogh's letter pieces and send the digital letters to someone by scanning a QR code by their phones. Lastly, part 4 Narrative structure presents the selected letters in six life phases of Van Gogh. The four parts together aim to satisfy the three design strategies and the needs of visitors in different engagement levels.