Designing for Young Visitors’ Co-composition of Doubts in Cultural Historical Exhibitions

This paper reports from a design experiment that investigated how social media may introduce new types of participation in museum exhibitions. We used the perspectives of assemblage and co-composition as frameworks to rethink participation in museums. The design experiment's aim was to give visitors an experience of the uncertainties and doubts of historical knowledge creation by inviting visitors to participate in solving dilemmas and filling gaps in the reconstruction of a Viking boat. We introduced three design concepts in our lab-based exhibition experiment—collecting, reflecting and sharing—to capture the social interactions and collaborative media production that enacts the exhibition assembly. We conclude that visitors’ reflections may evolve through participatory activities of collecting and sharing, and social media may open possibilities for new types of interpretation and learning activities in museum exhibitions.

► visitor participation in cultural historical museums social media and ► mobile phones as means for visitors enactments of exhibits enactments ► and co-composition in museum exhibitions as related to multimodal ► practices outside museum exhibitions as processes of action and ► interaction