Designs for learning in museum contexts

This article presents a new theoretical and methodological way of studying museum visitors’involvement and meaning-making at a museum exhibition. Our approach drawspredominantly on a design-theoretic and multimodal analysis of learning and communication.This approach is mainly concerned with a) the design aspects of learningresources; b) the learners’ engagement and communication; c) their way of transforminggiven signs to produce (redesign) their own representations in relation to d) personalengagement as well as a specific areas of knowledge. Multimodality pays special attentionto the interplay between different modes in communication. In the article, we use adesign-theoretic, multimodal approach to analyse visitors’ engagement. This is done byfilming the visitors in pairs to see how they walk through the exhibition, where they stop,what they talk about and how their conversation develops. They are also given camerasso they can take photos of those parts of the exhibition they find especially interesting,Afterwards, the visitors are asked to draw a map of the exhibition and they are also interviewed.We also present a model of how to categorize forms of engagement