Balancing Enlightenment and Experience in Interactive Exhibition Design

This paper presents insights from a collaborative design research project, in which a zoological aqua park in Denmark integrated multiple gamified digital installations in their new exhibition design. We document how these designs are in a tension between allowing game-based interactions, and the didactic communication about facts in the exhibition. We study the implemented solutions based on qualitative interviews with visitors, and with quantitative data from the backend game analytics of the installations. From triangulating these data sets we show how attempts to deliver purely fact-based information through didactic design elements fail to succeed in engaging the visitors, while stealth learning sparks enlightenment about the subject matter. Our results suggest that this is true both in cases in which users fully understand and play through the intended interactions, as well as when more negotiated interpretations of the digital installations are performed. From this our contribution are guiding principles for the balance, between experience and enlightenment in gamified exhibition designs.