Exhibiting Emotion: Capturing Visitors’ Emotional Responses to Museum Artefacts

The museum provides the perfect setting for the convergence of culture, reflection, personal connections, and communication, and many museums supplement these visitor experiences through the use of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems. While there has been past HCI research on various combinations of these four areas, the overall goal of this study is to explore the emotional links museum visitors make while encompassing all four areas through the use of engaging HCI technologies. This paper reports on the results of a study carried out at the Powell-Cotton Museum, a local ethnographic museum located in south-east Kent, UK. Using structured interviews and thematic analysis, visitors’ emotional responses to museum artefacts were analysed. Findings suggest that when given the task of providing emotional responses to artefacts, visitors are motivated to find meaningful and personal connections.