The goal of this thesis is to design a digital media solution that can improve the visitor experience at the Van Gogh Museum by improving the visitor flow through the permanent exhibition galleries of the museum. By understanding the current visitor experience at the Van Gogh Museum, looking at goals and motivations of different visitor categories to the museum and looking for literature on museum visiting phases, a design concept was created. The final design concept consists of an interactive surface, placed at the beginning of the exhibition. Visitors can use this surface to personalize their own multimedia guide. This personalizing is done by adding topic related content to an existing story structure. This ensures all visitors follow a logical story through the exhibition but receive additional content on topics they find interesting. The design makes use of the individual goals of visitors, by letting them compose a unique and meaningful museum visit that fits their personal goals. Because visitors have composed a museum visit themselves, the museum has the opportunity to create an optimized visiting path for each visitor, while keeping in mind both the experience of the visitor and the available capacity throughout the museum.

The graduation project is about personalizing the multimedia guide (abbreviated as MMT) of the Van Gogh Museum. The personalization goal is to facilitate future visitors to engage with the collection and maximize the meaning of visiting the museum based on visitors’ diverse concerns. A model is brought up during the project and can describe four popular concerns of the adult visitors at this museum, which are about “understanding Van Gogh”, “learning art techniques”, “enjoying an aesthetic experience”, and “finding out the landmarks”. The concern model contains two parts for each concern: the first part collects the typical minds-on behaviors and terms for each category, and can be used to identify each visitor’s concerns; while the second part contains the facilitation design principles and examples for each category, and can be used to inspire the new content designs for each concern type. It’s also found out that, the core of the personalized product/service system is to collect enough data from the visitors, identify their concern(s) with the help of a robust backend algorithm, and then present selected content to the visitors. A MMT can be called as a personalized MMT as long as it can collect data from visitors, and select one content out of many according to their data input, but with a premise that the content should be relevant to the identified concern. After several design iterations, 17 design principles were generated for guiding the data input and content output design. An embodiment design was made as a personalized MMT example. The final design requires visitors’ interested terms in their daily life and collects them through a concern quiz which will be presented to the visitors at the beginning of their visit; their input will be calculated by the backend Bayesian network, and then ten personal highlights and some personal activities will be selected for the visitors immediately; visitors can see their personal highlights on a digital map and use it for their actual visit; they will also receive invitations of some personal activities from their conversational MMT assistant during the break. All the interaction happens only on the MMT screen. The embodiment design was tested by eight participants from TUDelft who role-played four different charterers in the Van Gogh Museum and visited the permanent exhibition with a Wizard-of-Oz prototype. The evaluation result is positive, which means the final concept can achieve the personalization goal in the desired way.