Designing Disgust - Why do we feel the need to judge?

To discover local museum audience perceptions, motivations and behaviour, a broad range ‘survey’ approach was design and conducted. This included on-line and off-line surveys, the latter focussing on children's drawings of the future museum. The analysis took a holistic view, from pre-visit expectation building, through to post-visit support and community engagement. This informed a practical exhibition design phase, which created several prototype interface elements to evaluate how the emergent ideas could be incorporated in future museum design. This was then reported back to UK Innovate as well as the project partners, to inform their specific museum re-design project.

We asked members of the public, including children, what they would like their local museum to be like in the future. The answers were then used to design a new type of museum exhibition, which was installed in Worthing Museum and Art Gallery for testing.

Local museum audiences do not want isolating experiences, instead preferring to have social experiences where digital information augments the physical artefacts without the need to wear or use any additional technology. This was confirmed in a prototype exhibition in Worthing Museum & Art Gallery that used projection mapping to display conceptual information on physical objects. The system used commercial of the shelf components, that could easily be reused, re-purposed and deployed en-mass in a museum setting, allowing for a combined digital / physical museum experience (as defined by the survey results) rather than isolated pockets of digital interaction that are independent of the museum's collection.