Walking around to grasp visitor experiences

The concept of experience is ‘hot’ in the field of museums and science centres. Science centres are part of the experience economy and as such platforms for experiences. Science centres design for user experiences. But what is essentially an experience, and how can we gain insight into visitors’ subjective and personal experiences?

This workshop revolves around an innovative methodological approach for studying and evaluating the visitor experience. The mobile walk-along method is a hybrid between interview and observation. It enables the evaluator to get detailed information on how visitors experience while interacting with, seeing, hearing, feeling and touching the exhibits.

The interactive workshop will cover both short presentations on what an experience is, introduction to the walk-along method, and what exhibition designers can learn from walk-alongs, as well as an interactive part where workshop participants will try out the method. The Experimentarium is a unique setting for this workshop, since the research team from the University of Ålborg has carried out many hours of walk-alongs at Experimentarium.