Paper at Nordmedia 2013, Oslo Aug. 8th-10th.

1. Playful Museums
mobile audiences and exhibitions as game
experiences
Nordmedia 2013
Kjetil Sandvik, associate professor, Department of Media,
Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

2. The main point!
• Communicating ’museum stuff’ is about telling
stories
• It is about engaging the users in the storytelling
process (participation)
• It is about creating a storytelling device which can
be played with, manipulated, changed (co-
creation)
• A constructivist approach towards knowledge and
learning
• Mobile and networked media represent new
possibilities and challenges for this kind of
communication

3. 3
Purpose
The Playful Museum:
• Audiences are not just participants but co-
creators through collective learning processes
(uses of creative potential, focus on the
experience dimension)
• Media do not just serve as means for
communicating knowledge, but as creative tools
for knowledge creation and learning processes.
• Based on a experience-focused and
constructivist approach to learning and
knowledge communication

4. Trust No-one!
• A new type of city walk in Kolding: augmented
reality game for tourists
• Experience the rennaisance buildings, streets
and squares mapped onto the present day city
by the use of AR browser on the mobile phone

5. Project scope
• Mobile phones (smart phones) used for
communicating culture
• Fiction used for communicating history
• Experiments with Augmented Reality (at low
costs)
• Creating an unorthodox city walk:
– instead of an exhibition about renaissance
Kolding, we let the renaissance pop up in the city
space
• The audience as participants and co-creators

6. Augmented
Reality crime
fiction?

8. The crime scenes…

12. Interface
Introduction/manual
Map
Episodes
Layars of information
Guessing who the
killer is

13. Summing up
• The interplay between mobile media technology and
physical places is a potent tool when it comes to
meeting the challenges and potentials put forward by
digital, mobile media to museums when it comes to
creating new and engaging experiences which are
based on collaboration, participation and co-creation.
• Digital augmentation of physical places makes us see
things in new ways.
• Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not just
streets – they carry stories, they carry cultural meaning
which audiences through the gameplay and the
interplay between the physical space of the city and
the mobile media may acquire, discuss, investigate and
relate to in a playful and creative way.

14. Visit the project on Facebook…

15. Project participants
• Kolding Libraries
• Kolding City Archive
• VIFIN – knowledge center for integration
(Vejle)
• Dept. of Media, Cognition and
Communication,, University of Copenhhagen
• Knowledge center for Children and Youth
Culture, VIA University College

16. Relevant literature
• Robert R. Janes: Museums in a Troubled World. Renewal,
irrelevance or collapse?, London and New York: Routledge
2009
• Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook: Rethinking Curating. Art
after New Media, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press 2010
• Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine (eds.): Theorizing
Digital Cultural Heritage. A Critical Discourse, Cambridge
MA: The MIT Press 2007/2010
• Ross Parry (ed.) Museums in a Digital Age, London and New
York 2010
• Loïs Tallon and Kevin Walker (eds.): Digital Technologies
and The Museum Experience. Handheld Guides and Other
Media, New York: AltaMira Press 2008
• Nina Simon: The Participatory Museum, Santa Cruz CA:
Museum 2.0 2010