Walking around to grasp visitor experiences

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

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

This interactive workshop will entail short presentations on what an experience is, an introduction to the walk-along method and what exhibition designers can learn from it, as well as an interactive part where participants will try out the method.

Experimentarium is a unique setting for this workshop, since the research team from the University of Ålborg who will be introducing the method carried out many hours of walk-alongs at the science centre.