Designing for open-ended playful explorations in Museum and Gallery spaces

What happens when we design museum and gallery experiences without determining in advance how visitors should explore, interact or play? Join visiting Danish co-design researcher Associate Professor Sune Gudiksen for a participatory workshop exploring how open-ended play can create new possibilities for visitor experience, co-exploration and meaning-making in museums, galleries and cultural spaces. We’ll begin by taking a playful journey down memory lane, drawing on our own experiences of play to uncover what makes an encounter exploratory, surprising, social or open-ended. Sune will introduce his Play Pendulum model and share examples from his research and collaborations with museums and cultural institutions. From there, we’ll turn the session into a shared laboratory. Drawing on participants’ experiences across museums, galleries, curatorial practice, education, design and research, we’ll explore and map different forms of playful engagement and collectively identify emerging characteristics, tensions and possibilities. Rather than arriving at a fixed answer, we’ll create provisional visual maps, typologies and provocations that can become starting points for future experimentation and collaboration. Come ready to remember, play, map, question and imagine what museum and gallery experiences might become when we leave space for the unexpected.