Designing Performative, Gamified Cultural Experiences for Groups

Envisioning cultural institutions as "social places", where the visitors can "create, share, and connect to each other around the cultural heritage content" (as defined by Nina Simon), we explore how to design cultural group experiences that combine personal moments of reflection to social encounter. In previous work we proposed a storytelling game where visitors conceive and narrate stories about the artworks, orchestrating group interactions according to the game phases. Playtesting with physical materials revealed promising potential, cultivating theatrical narrations, lively discussions and fruitful social interactions. Here we present a mobile-based, group experience design for gamified cultural visits with performative elements, leveraging the trajectories HCI framework. We highlight the key role, interface and space transitions encountered in the experience and we elaborate on the adopted design choices, while we reflect on main challenges and future directions.