Erik Kristiansen

Mediated co-construction of museums and audiences on Facebook

This article asks how we should research museum communication with audiences through social media. We argue that museums and audiences co-construct one another on social media, and we explore how particular modes of communication and discursive genres serve to generate mutual online positionings. Based on in-depth analyses over three months’ Facebook communication at nine Danish museums and applying theories and methods from discourse analysis, we offer an analytical model of social media communication; and we examine how processes of co-construction are established, upheld, modified and developed. We find that museums and audiences alike largely co-construct one another along familiar lines of institutional authority and that more dialogic modes of interaction mainly result when museums harness audience knowledge resources. We put our results into perspective in terms of recommendations for museum professionals that offer a sobering empirical corrective to the often celebratory claims made to the de-stabilizing of institutional authority and control wrought by social media.

Design Games for In-Situ Design

The mobile culture has spawned a host of context-based products, like location-based and tag-based applications. This presents a new challenge for the designer. There is a need of design methods that acknowledge the context and allows it to influence the design ideas. This article focuses on a design problem where an in-situ design practice may further the early design process: the case of designing a pervasive game. Pervasive games are computer games, played using the city as a game board and often using mobile phones with GPS. Some contextual design methods exist, but the author proposes an approach that calls for the designer to conceptualise and perform ideas in-situ, that is on the site, where the game is supposed to be played. The problem was to design a creativity method that incorporated in-situ design work and which generated game concepts for pervasive games. The proposed design method, called sitestorming, is based on a game using Situationistic individual exploration of the site and different types of game cards, followed by a joint evaluation of the generated ideas. A series of evaluations showed that the designers found the method enjoyable to use, that the method motivated idea generation, and that using in-situ design influenced their design ideas.

Designing Scientific Creativity

On one hand, information systems design demands the creativity of art; on the other, it demands the methodical rigor of science. An emphasis on design rigor can diminish our attention on design creativity. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the creative and the methodical aspects of design, and propose a novel, generic design approach that invokes creativity by provoking divergent thinking and context in the design processes while retaining the analytical and methodical aspects. Using design science research, we study the utility of this generic design approach by using it to develop a game design method named site-storming. From this specific case of a design method we explore if we can design an explanatory design theory of scientific creativity. Our results show that creativity and science may coexist in a creativity method, but that the method only delivers, if they are balanced correctly.