Interpersonalizing Intimate Museum Experiences
This research offers a new approach for museums to design engaging and personalized visitor experiences, particularly for pairs of visitors with existing intimacy, by contrasting it with traditional customization and algorithmic personalization.
This paper reflects on two museum visiting experiences, 'The Gift app' and 'Never let me go', which used interpersonalization where one visitor designs an experience for another. The study found that this approach can create engaging social visits where visitors make their own interpretations.
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.