Angelos Floros

Presented: Serious Games Development Insights, MED programme KnowinG, Technological and Cultural Park, National Technical University of Athens, June 27 – July 1, 2011

The workshop was organised by the Technological and Cultural Park of the NTUA, the Business Innovation Center of Attika and the Attica Prefecture, together with the NTUA Multimedia Laboratory, and brought together young scientists and makers around serious games in education and business.

This talk takes the question to museums.

Museums are unusually well suited to designing visitor experiences, because they can build on the two features that make learning work: active engagement — how a person takes part — and personal agency, the visitor's own control over what they do next.

The argument is made from architecture. What connects the design of physical space to the design of multimedia in virtual or augmented space is that both are arrangements of attention. Museum design already works with spectacle and with participation, which is precisely what allows intelligent interaction to be introduced into it.

Which turns the theory around: active learning does not simply describe what happens to a visitor. It makes the visitor's experience a new interactive pattern within design theory itself.