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.

Sune Gudiksen is Associate Professor in co-design in conjunction with experiential-interaction design and head of the five year research and development programme Playful Attractions at Kolding School of Design, Denmark. This programme started in 2022 and have up to this date included 10 funded collaborative projects with the cultural-experiential sector – Museums, Libraries, Experience centers, Galleries etc. He has led several national and international EU-funded projects "Hope & Despair" with seven museums across the German-Danish Border, "EU Gamify" with Universities and creative industries from five countries and "Moving Museums through play" with six visiting sites from the National museum in Denmark. He has edited books such as "Framing Play Design", "Gamification for innovators and entrepreneurs" and upcoming 2027 Routledge book “Museum Play: Concepts, Design and Audiences”. He has published more than 50 scholarly publications focusing on play, design, creativity, and cultural-experiential institutions.