MobileMuseum: Smart, Portable, and Borrowable Museum Displays to Explore Interaction Patterns and Public Engagement
Alaa Nousir, Lee Jones, Flora Lin, Tom Everrett, Sara Nabil · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
We explore how smart, portable, tangible, and borrowable museum displays can be used to expand museum outreach, and provide tools for measuring user engagement. Our prototype, MobileMuseum, is a portable museum display on wheels, housing digitally-fabricated replicas of artifacts from a national science and technology museum. To track interactions without cameras, we embedded photo and magnetic door sensors and RFID tags and antenna. Our deployment study was carried out for 2 months and included 4 different locations (2 recreational and 2 educational). Data collected from 6 sensors, 261 hours of field observations, 17 filled questionnaires, and 14 interviews helped us understand interaction patterns. Qualitative and quantitative findings revealed that self-monitored interactions encouraged deeper open-ended exploration. Social sharing increased among people in groups while lower foot traffic increased engagement duration. We present generalizable opportunities for self-monitored Interfaces that lends themselves to social circulation, ‘honeybee-effect’, ‘order effect’, and ‘leftovers’ from users.