Supporting group coherence in a museum visit

Fosh, Lesley; Benford, Steve; Koleva, Boriana

Abstract

Visiting museums as part of a group poses the challenge of managing engagement with exhibits while preserving group cohesion. We respond to this by reconfiguring the social dynamic of visiting with an experience designed specifically for groups, that invites the group members themselves to design and ‘gift’ interpretations to one another. We present a trial of this experience with groups of family and friends at a museum. We show how groups managed and configured themselves during the visit, revealing the strategies involved in maintaining different group behaviors. We discuss how our design accommodated different visiting styles by making objects social and scaffolding rather than directing the group experience. We interpret our findings to frame group coherence as a flexible and configurable phenomenon within CSCW.

Citation

Fosh, L., Benford, S., & Koleva, B. (2016). Supporting group coherence in a museum visit.

• Conference Name: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16)
• End Date: Feb 3, 2016
• Publication Date: Feb 27, 2016
• Deposit Date: Feb 29, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 29, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Museums, Collaboration, Visiting, Mobile Guides, Gifting, Groups, Coherence
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/775028
• Related Public URLs: https://cscw.acm.org/2016/index.php
• Additional Information: Published in: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. New York : ACM, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3592-8. doi: 10.1145/2818048.2819970