Personalise the Museum Experience trough and Abstract Dialogue between Visitors over Time

How to improve the visitor experience in a participatory museum? The DIY-Archive was part of the permanent exhibition of the van Abbe Museum. In this archive you can browse cabinets with artworks. You can handle the artworks and create your own composition out if it: really have a curator experience.

For this collaboration the van Abbemuseum asked me to research how the DIY-Archive could get an increased visitor rate. Furthermore I was specifically interested into making the experience of the DIY-Archive more personal.

To do so I proposed a system which allows the visitors to present a title with their self created exhibition in the DIY-Archive. The title can be used to share their personal story, interpretation, reasoning, opinion etc. about the exhibition they made or are encountered with.

The aimed effect of the concept is to create a reflective dialogue between visitors of the DIY-Archive, for both the visitor who makes the exhibition as for the visitor who comes in next and tries to understand what the story/context was that is described with the title.

In this process I had to consider very different values of various stakeholders. E.g. the curator, museum direction, volunteers and visitors. Through an empathic and human centered design process I was able to create a subtle intervention.

To ensure a good fit of the design with the company I considered a full implementation of the proposed design. The final result was a complete Product-Service-System which considered short-term (pilot) implementation to full remodeling of the room itself.


Design Project


Individual Project


2016 - 2017 | 5 months | M1.2.