Making Magic: Designing for Open Interactions in Museum Settings

Abstract

This paper describes three interactive artefacts created for a children's exhibition intended to encourage creativity and allow educational opportunities to emerge naturally through playful exploration. We describe five sensibilities that were used to inform our designs: considering artefacts as resources and scaffolds for imaginative engagement, rewarding extended investment, facilitating requisite unpredictability, encouraging an imaginative orientation to participation, and permitting multiple loci for interaction. Based on observation of how our interactives were used by the public, we discuss how our approach facilitated "open interactions" in a manner that was sensitive to the museum context, favoured a mix of materialities, and manifested a subtle mix of participation and designer autonomy.