Design Methods for Museum Media Innovation. Enhancing Museum User Negotiations by Discursive and Material Explorations of Controversies

Museums increasingly pursue digital innovation by collaborating closely with creative industries, cultural institutions, researchers, digital designers, museum users and the like. In this chapter, we scrutinize two collaborative design processes in terms of how discursive and material design methods enhanced negotiations regarding the museum user. These enhanced negotiations informed the design of museum media, namely a digital platform for collecting user-generated content and digital exhibition apps. Against this background, we come to the conclusion that collaborative design of museum media benefits greatly from design methods that explicitly explore controversies and their socio-material negotiations.