Improving visitor flow at the Van Gogh Museum

Abstract

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.