Playing games with Tito: Designing hybrid museum experiences for critical play
This work addresses the problem of enhancing visitor engagement and critical reflection in museums, particularly for contested heritage, but it is incremental as it builds on existing perspectives without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackled the challenge of designing hybrid museum experiences that combine critical play and hybrid design to engage with contested heritage, resulting in the identification of key challenges such as visitor behavior norms, artifact roles, and curatorial authority.
This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges.