Explorative Museum Experiences: a collaborative experience design process for explorative museum exhibitions

This disseration is based on the results of a three-year long PhD study at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University. The dissertation consists of six original papers as well as a framing text with the dissertation's research question, research design, theoretical foundation and summary of contributions. In the produced work, I expand upon 'Museum Exhibitions as Exploration Spaces'. Through this research project, I have approached the challenges posed to museum institutions by the experience economy from an experience design perspective in collaboration with a smaller Danish museum. I explore potentials of learning through explorative experiences by asking the question: How can principles of IT-based experience design guide design, implementation and evaluation of an explorative museum exhibition? Through this research, I have applied principles of emergent narratives to the exhibition design in order to create a space for exploration, making the users active participants in creating their own experiences and narratives to encourage informal learning instead of passively receiving predefined and structured narratives.