Blending into the White Box of the Art Museum

Mixed reality applications can enrich museum exhibits and make them more attractive to an audience of adolescents. However, in the design of such applications, we face a myriad of possibilities and little guidance on how to choose between (early) alternatives. In this paper, we explore the notion of experience blend - which could act as an aesthetic governing the design of mixed reality experiences. We present an effort to operationalize experience blend and illustrate its use in the design and evaluation of an application for an art museum. Stakeholders in the project assumed that in order to reach out to adolescents an exciting experience was needed, deviating from education and breaking with the hidden rules of the art-museum, our user study showed that adolescents favored a blended experience. This suggests experience blend may be a helpful aesthetic in the design of other mixed reality experiences.