Exploring affordances through design-after-design: the re-purposing of an exhibition artefact by museum visitors

ABSTRACT
Museums have increasingly focused on digital technologies and play as means to provide personalized, engaging experiences for their audience. Balancing educational and playful values is often conflicting. To address that conflict, museums often employ participatory design strategies. However, those strategies usually end after the deployment of those experiences, thus they do not accommodate for what occurs during actual use. In this article, we follow Light House, a research-through-design experiment of an installation that was developed using an iterative design approach which expands on actual use by deploying undetermined artefacts to support the discovery of novel interactions by visitors. Through our findings, we explore the “failure” of Light House to support the discovery of such interactions in relation to its educational character, but rather it inspired people to incorporate it in the activities supported by the surrounding space. Finally, we discuss the implications those discovered interactions in terms of potential re-design directions.