A Probe-Based Approach for Designing Inspirational Services at Museums

Our MESS (Museum Experiences and Service Science) project views a local museum as a place not only for communicating the fact and knowledge about exhibited objects with the visitors, but also for inspiring them. We have designed and set up design probes in a museum exhibition as a way to investigate how visitors got inspired at a museum. The applied design probes include LED-lit candles and a tea ceremony house for viewing old Japanese paintings, an improvisational dance workshop for appreciating an abstract modern-art sculpture, and an improvisational drama workshop for reading old family correspondence. The study has led us to identifying a set of features for inspiration, and moreover, revealed that curators and museum administrators in turn got inspired by the representations produced by the visitors through their engagement in museum experience.