From Sensory Feedback to Participatory Shaping in Museums

Most exhibitions are still designed around an assumed average visitor. This assumption is rarely visible, but it shapes who can stay with an exhibition, who becomes tired, who skips rooms and who quietly stops returning. For neurodivergent and sensory-sensitive visitors, exclusion often happens after entry: through sound bleed, unclear transitions, dense layouts, lack of recovery space and other sensory conditions that are difficult for museums to notice in time.
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This Master’s thesis in Interaction Design investigates how museums can make sensory experience visible, discussable and usable for exhibition-making. Fotografiska Tallinn is the industry partner and site of investigation, but the wider question is sectoral: how can cultural institutions learn from sensory friction before it disappears into silence, private coping, or late feedback?

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The research combined sensory shadowing with four neurodivergent visitors, nine semi-structured interviews with museum professionals and Research through Design through prototyping and testing. The fieldwork revealed a gap between embodied visitor experience and institutional decision-making. Visitors often adjusted, masked, avoided, or left without giving feedback, while exhibition teams lacked specific evidence that could help them act within real production constraints.

The design outcome is a tested visitor-facing touchpoint and a wider conceptual framework for participatory sensory learning. The framework includes a Sensory Brief before an exhibition, low-friction in-room feedback touchpoints during the exhibition and a future Sensory Library that could carry learning across exhibitions, spatial changes and staff turnover.
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The contribution is not a finished museum-wide system, but a tested entry point and a design logic for participatory shaping. In this thesis, participatory shaping means that visitors help reveal sensory conditions that are usually invisible to the institution. The thesis shows how interaction design can translate small situated signals into patterns that may help exhibition teams discuss, remember and shape future sensory conditions.

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