Journey to the Centre of the Museum: Cognitive, Object and Introspective User Experiences in a Design Museum

Sammanfattning: This thesis applies an ethnographic approach to investigate museum visit practices, which shape user experiences in a design museum. Specifically, it explores individual users’ meaning making processes through the embodiment of thoughts and lived experiences. To frame the study, it takes on a phenomenological approach to investigate how the body, self, space, and objects relate with each other in the phenomenon of museum going. Four main questions guide the paper. First, why do users go the museum? Second, how do users interact and navigate the museum? Third, how do the senses influence the users’ interaction and navigation practices? And fourth, how do users create meanings of the different museum affordances that facilitate lived experiences? By using phenomenology as theory and a bricolage of qualitative methods, it becomes possible to uncover the relationship of users’ previous knowledge in setting the trajectory and navigation practices for their journey to and within the museum. This includes how they navigate and orient themselves in space. It can be argued that different users have different experiences in the same museum, but this study clearly identifies the touchpoints in the user journey where disparities in user experiences occur due to asymmetric stimuli and associations. Moreover, thickly describing what users see and feel in the museum can contribute in the growing field of user-centered design and cultural administration and enable similar organisations to understand how users experience the such institutions or leisure spaces.