Designing interactive digital guides to increase teenagers’ engagement at science centers

Abstract

Science centers are known for educating people and creating engagement towards science related questions, questions which often are related to important issues in society. More and more, data visualisations are used to educate exhibition visitors, as well as engaging visitors with the ability of interacting with different visualisation installments. However, these data visualisations can become quite advanced and there is an identified challenge of lowering the threshold for people to interact and learn from such installments. One tool used for explaining concepts of exhibitions are audio guides, however, it seems these guides have been slow in developing to something more than just being an audio reader. At the same time, there is an identified gap in designing exhibitions for teenagers. Today, most exhibitions are designed towards either children or adults. In this project we have researched through design on how a digital guide can be designed to increase teenagers’ engagement to visualisation exhibitions. The project use a human-centred design approach (HCD) consisting of iterative processes of understanding and specifying the context of use, specifying the user requirements, producing design solutions, and evaluating the design. The research took place at Vislab, an exhibition of interactive visualisations for teenagers and resulted in a concept of digital guide that consisted of a smartphone game called VisQuest. The game is is about completing quests that require the visitor to interact with the exhibits at Vislab, and user tests show that the game successfully made teenage visitors stay longer at Vislab and enticed them to explore the exhibition. Through the design process of VisQuest, a set of key considerations for designing a digital guide at exhibitions for teenagers was identified. These included considerations on form and interface of a digital guide, a classification on quests in a gamified guide, a set of techniques to encourage exploration, and possible future research areas. The considerations contribute with knowledge on what one should consider in projects at science centers where one want to increase teenage engagement. They can be used both in its entirety, as well as for sub-areas within the field. The knowledge can also be used as a foundation for research on digital guides for teenagers in exhibition environments of advanced interactive data visualizations.