2019, Article in monograph or in proceedings (HTTF 2019: Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019)Mixed reality applications can enrich museum exhibits and make them more attractive to an audience of adolescents. However, in the design of such applications, we face a myriad of possibilities and little guidance on how to choose between (early) alternatives. In this paper, we explore the notion of experience blend -which could act as an aesthetic governing the design of mixed reality experiences. We present an effort to operationalize experience blend and illustrate its use in the design and evaluation of an application for an art museum. Stakeholders in the project assumed that in order to reach out to adolescents an exciting experience was needed, deviating from education and breaking with the hidden rules of the art-museum, our user study showed that adolescents favored a blended experience. This suggests experience blend may be a helpful aesthetic in the design of other mixed reality experiences.
2018, Article / Letter to editor (Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol. jaargang, iss. nr, (2018))Using a designerly approach in projects within a wide spectrum of disciplines is increasingly popular. This paper describes a case in where the 1:10:100 design approach is used in a social sciences project and explores the mutual learning that took place. It discusses the added value of using design artefacts (prototypes) in the process and to what level these can be seen as boundary objects. Among the project partners there are two teams of social scientists (German and Dutch) that were collecting data and worked with abstract thinking processes and a design team who concerned about usability and intervened with design tools. The prototypes in the project are reviewed as boundary objects on three levels: to create common ground, to sharpen focus and as window into the future. The learning mechanisms that occurred (reflection and transformation) shifted the focus in the project from mining data on behalf of a community database towards a tool in which enterprising villagers can show their qualities and entrepreneurship.