Interpersonalizing Intimate Museum Experiences

TL;DR

This paper explores interpersonalization strategies in museums where visitors create or control experiences for others, fostering intimacy and interpretation, and discusses design insights and challenges for implementing such social, personalized museum visits.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of interpersonalization in museum experiences, contrasting it with traditional personalization, and analyzes its design, social dynamics, and implications for museum engagement.

Findings

Interpersonalization enhances social engagement in museum visits.

Visitors create personalized experiences for others, fostering intimacy.

Design challenges include balancing visitor interpretation with museum perspective.

Abstract

We reflect on two museum visiting experiences that adopted the strategy of interpersonalization in which one visitor creates an experience for another. In the Gift app, visitors create personal mini-tours for specific others. In Never let me go, one visitor controls the experience of another by sending them remote instructions as they follow them around the museum. By reflecting on the design of these experiences and their deployment in museums we show how interpersonalization can deliver engaging social visits in which visitors make their own interpretations. We contrast the approach to previous research in customization and algorithmic personalization. We reveal how these experiences relied on intimacy between pairs of visitors but also between visitors and the museum. We propose that interpersonalization requires museums to step back to make space for interpretation, but that this then raises the challenge of how to reintroduce the museum's own perspective. Finally, we articulate strategies and challenges for applying this approach.