Social Media as Resource for Involving Young People ...

60 International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 6(3), 60-80, July-September 2014

Social Media as Resource for Involving Young People in Museum Innovation: A Cultural Studies Approach to Co-Design Dagny Stuedahl, Section for Learning and Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway & Department of Education, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Sarah Lowe, School of Art, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

ABSTRACT This paper takes root in how social media represents a new framework and form of communication and how designing for the meditated encounters with these media require interdisciplinary perspectives from both cultural studies and interaction design. The authors argue that involving young people with social media as a participatory tool requires that designers take into consideration how visual interpretation, social semiotic, semantic and spatial practices are inherent in everyday social media usage. The authors report from a design research project where the media sharing software Instagram was used to explore how everyday users in an urban environment would relate to cultural heritage data. The authors propose a cultural studies based focus on the semiotics of mediation as a potential design based research methods that fit with participatory practices with social media. Keywords: Communication, Distributed Museum, Instagram, Social Media, Youth Participation in Design

1. INTRODUCTION Engaging young people with social media through co-design means to understand their cultural practices. The call for a realignment of “digital,” “media”

and “design” literacies to accommodate this new generation are manifold (Burdick & Willis, 2009; Giovannella, 2012; Prensky, 2012). Social media has garnered special interest because of its sharing means, inviting to question how

DOI: 10.4018/ijskd.2014070104

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International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 6(3), 60-80, July-September 2014 61

social software may serve to inform experiences of living in neighborhoods, communities and cities (Hochman & Manovich 2013). Young peoples cultural and social practice and how it relates to new forms of meaning making, learning and identity shaping has brought new perspectives into social studies and educational sciences (Ito et al 2010; Baym 2010). However, these same social practices also challenge aspects of technology development, innovation and design. Social media illustrates the ubiquitous integration of technology into people`s everyday life. This requires innovations in public institutions, museums and initiatives for young people to involve perspectives and understandings from multiple disciplines. The active use of these media, the negotiation of meaning ongoing in these media and the changing relationship between producer and viewer are part of cultural and social practices that change the landscape of design (Sanders & Stappers 2008). This calls for perspectives that particularly have been raised from cultural studies. In design, these mediated aspects are requiring designers to re-think methods in parallel with social media as a means for including users in design projects. It has been argued that user participation should be understood as both the means and the outcome when designing venues for usable and meaningful interaction and participation with media (Lievrouw 2006). Thus, designers have to master an ongoing communication practice so that the design set up is performed in ways that engages younger audiences and serves to motivate participation (Lowe

& Stuedahl 2014). This shifts design beyond a focus on social media as simply tools for engaging users and into exploring agency and cultural expressions as motivations for younger audience engagement (Mainsah & Morrison 2012). The aim of this paper is to explore how designing with, and for, social media use is a highly cultural endeavor requiring multidisciplinary approaches to address these aspects. We focus specifically on cultural expression and discuss how perspectives from cultural studies may be valuable for design projects aiming to engage young people’s participation. We describe here a co-design experiment exploring the use of the photo sharing application Instagram within the setting of museum communications. The research project’s overall objective was to examine how the distributed museum (Bautista & Balsamo 2011) could relate to young people within the context of the city, how young people would relate with museum content with their mobiles and how future mobile communication may be designed. The experiment made a principle choice of using existing platforms that already gather young people, to secure that the project grasped the context of their everyday life. Instagram was chosen as a design space to explore how future mobile museum communication may be connected to everyday activities, based on the amount of already shared images from the city on this platform. And especially from the Akerselva River our location for the experiment. The design experiment thus was challenged by questions concerning how a design space could be set up to engage



young people through their everyday digital setting. This extended the design object from focusing on mobile museum communication along the chosen site, into design focusing on how museum content may relate to everyday life in general. During the project we identified the following design challenges related to young people`s cultural expressions that will be discussed within a cultural studies perspective: 1. Challenge - Semiotics of par ticipation: For designers to engage in participatory activities within social media communities, a sensitivity to not only the ongoing social dynamics but also the cultural practice that is shaped through performing with signs, semiotic, imagery and the resulting identities is required. Cultural studies perspectives may help to frame this performative, symbolic and social sense making levels of signs and codes that characterize online communities. To engage young people by relating to their cultural practices, this semiotic language becomes a central tool to use for facilitating their engagement; 2. Challenge - Digital and physical engagement: For designers to understand social and mobile media sharing of images, it is essential to understand the simultaneous relationship between both digital and physical experiences. Imagery is a material and place-based constant directly tied to place. Within Instagram, a digital layer is introduced that involves new forms of

interpretation closely aligned to the intertextuality existing between online representations and physical use, creating a newly distinctive experience. It became essential to understand how people used digital imagery and production of signs in relation to their place-based practices and performances. In this way the design experiment called attention to the complex intertwining of social and cultural layers that are inextricably embedded in the use of social media. Therefore, our overall research question asks how design methods may be informed by perspectives from cultural studies to meet young in their mediated settings and to explore future possibilities of these media for the distributed museum.

2. YOUTH PARTICIPATION IN INNOVATION Beyond the fact that children and youth are an emerging user group of digital technologies and do represent the future market (Druin 2002), there is also an issue in facilitating young people to reflect upon how technology and digital media is not neutral and given. Iversen (2005) argues that young people have activity systems that should be analyzed on their own basis and explores how a socio-cultural framing of young peoples inclusion can benefit from participatory design techniques – given that designers account for their theoretical conception of young people and their world as independent. One central aspect in



this approach includes a special interest in what drives young audiences to engage in particular situations that not only function within the designed surroundings, but also through what they bring to the situation (Dindler, Iversen & Krogh, 2011). Focus has been put on understanding the role of young people`s values in order to engage them in the design process (Iversen, Halskov & Leong, 2012; Iversen & Smith, 2013). This has important implications for the outcome as designers may misjudge their knowledge of this user group assuming that since they were once part of it they are able to fully understand it (Machniak, 2014). In participatory design (PD) interest has grown in understanding how design may serve as a means capable of opening up spaces for empowering users to question democratic futures and building one’s own capacity for change to meet with innovation processes (Botero & Saad-Sulonen, 2008; Di Salvo, 2009; Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2010). These perspectives are highly relevant for youth involvement and connect well with recent attention in PD on social technologies as alternative sites and tools to support participation in design processes (Diettrich et al. 2002, Lievrouw 2006, Brereton and Buur 2008, Følstad et al 2012, Reyes and Finken 2012). Here, social media is seen as a possibility to open up participatory design processes to everyday people, revealing the relationship between design and use, and making visible how design is actualized through usage (Hagen and Robertson 2010). While these perspectives are central for

involving youth with social media, they do focus less on the aesthetic aspects of social media participation, which a cultural studies perspective may help to illuminate.

2.1. Cultural Studies and Participation in Design Cultural studies provides a focus on culture as practice and problematizes social interactions as related to questions of power and politics. This includes visual signs; images and semiotics that make meaning by both resembling and differing from the things they refer (Hall 1997, Hebdidge 1979). The semiotic perspective on social interaction includes a focus on cultural expressions that are not only shared but involve contrasts, resistance, oppositions and tensions (e.g. de Certau 1984). This is relevant to studies of cultural expression in social media based communities, and for understanding participation in cultural activities. It includes understanding participation as involving acts of tensions and oppositions to peers, context or environment. These perspectives become central when designing for young audience engagement in activities in cultural institutions, such as museums, that are dependent on engaging to remain relevant to this audience. They also become relevant for planning design experiments with activities that appear engaging from a youth perspective. Cultural studies brings forward a focus on how aesthetics, narrative and rhetoric play a role in digitally mediated communications (e.g. Liestøl, 1999; Morrison, 2003). This includes



how semiotic resources become an integrated part of multimodal production and understanding of expressions and concepts (Kress & van Leuwen, 2001); how elements of different sign systems are combined to give meaning to multimedia authoring interfaces (Bardzell 2007); how people combine style and photos to give texture to their entries (Cohen 2005); how features of media build both genre and social practices that users may recognize (Miller & Shepherd, 2004; Liestøl, 2005); and how cultural context influences textual production and mediation in design (Morrison & Skjulstad, 2010; Skjulstad 2007). These representational, mediated and performative aspects of digital artifacts that cultural studies raise (Morrison et al 2010) suggest the mediating artifact is an issue in design, referring not only to text and media types but also to what the designed artifact signifies and communicates symbolically and how this relates to the social and cultural practices of sense making. With these aspects cultural studies perspectives can assist in setting up design experiments that bring in young peoples voice, and invite them into design and co-creation on their own terms.

2.2. Engaging Young People in Museum Innovation with Social Media Contemporary re-conceptualization of museums include efforts to build new relationships to society and thereby new relationships with the museum visitor (Vergo 1997, Davies 1998), taking the museum beyond the walls and grounds of

its physical location (van Mensch 2005) into a distributed museum space that is not defined by any clear boundaries (Bautista & Balsamo, 2011). New scales and dimensions shape a continuum of visitor interactions with cultural heritage extending from fixed, physical and material locations in the museum to digital locations in mobile and virtual spaces. The distributed museum paradigm is related to the participatory museum (Simon 2010) introducing digital technology as a new opportunity for interaction with cultural heritage content. This extends the museum space and greatly shifts the implications for curatorial structuring in redefining the museum visitor experience. A fundamental change in museum design will require a move beyond providing a more or less attractive medium for presenting content (Macdonald 2007), into museum design as an implication for creating relations and making museum content relevant within a variety of social contexts. Museums have previously embraced mobile phones for their ability to enhance visitor involvement in cocompositional activities by for example, sharing photos (Arvantis 2005, Stuedahl & Smørdal 2011 a &b), to personalize and contextualize their museum visit (Kahr Højland 2011), or to support visitors in their social activities with peers (Hsi 2002, Walker 2008, Vavoula et al. 2009). Recently, museums have approached social media and the emerging amateur image-making, or “Photography 2.0” practices as a resource to expand visitor interaction with museum content (Galani & Moschovi 2010). Applications



such as Tumblr and Pinterest, and photo sharing databases such as Flickr, have given museums the opportunity to establish extended relationships with online communities of interest (Colquhoun & Galani 2013, Dalton 2010). Such media are used to engage visitors in the work of correcting, contextualizing, complementing, and co-curating photographic historical content and do help to increase the quality of museum`s own collections (Oomen & Aroyo 2011, Colquhoun and Galani 2013). More recently, the mobile photo-sharing application Instagram has been used in museums to provide visitors new possibilities of re-categorizing museum objects and re-configuring the exhibition environment through their own personal media (Hillman et al 2012, Weilman et al. 2013). Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in extending young people`s access to museum programs (Tzibazi 2013, Rosso 2010). This interest is sparked by studies showing that this visitor group find museums to be boring, didactic, unapproachable and in contrast to this group`s preferences for involvement and possibilities to share and compare (Kelly & Bartlett 2009). The challenges that young people`s participatory culture (Jenkins et al., 2009) pose to museum`s curatorial, educational and exhibition practices, have been highlighted by projects from within interaction design and design anthropology arguing that young visitors need to be involved at an early stage in exhibition development to secure their engagement (Taxèn 2005, Smith 2013).

In the following we describe how we involved these perspectives to engage younger populations in exploring potential possibilities for engaging with history along Akerselva River.

3. CASE STUDY: THE AKERSELVA RIVER PROJECT The Norwegian Museum for Science, Technology and Medicine, together with the Oslo City Museum and Oslo City Archive embarked on a project entitled Akerselva Digitalt with the objective of exploring mobile museum communication outside of the museum walls. More specifically, along the Akerselva river. The river is central for the industrial development of Norway, and the buildings and sites that lie along its path are physical reminders of the relationships between social history, industrial labor and energy production. Today, the walkway along the river may potentially give insights and understanding of the central cultural, economic and societal transformations in Norwegian society over the past 150 years. The museums have previously communicated this history by arranging city walks, allowing access to online portals with documented industrial history, published text books and participated in cultural events along the river. Building from a mobile audio guide, the museum invited researchers to explore possibilities for further development into a sociallydriven mobile platform that engages visitors through participatory activities.



The design research team focused on exploring how museum content may be staged for encounters with young people in city contexts who would perhaps not be intrinsically motivated to encounter the history in a physical museum space. Onsite research observations revealed the river walk to be a popular walking location where the mobile phone was used for photographing. Searching for digital activities related to this, we discovered several streams on Instagram where photos from river experiences were posted. The #akerselva on Instagram was a well-published stream gathering natural as well as social and culinary experiences along the river. We followed the #akerselva stream and analyzed the posting practices of liking and commenting and explored how the hashtags brought to bear an extra layer of meaning to each image. This gave us a preliminary understanding of the forms and types of engagement inherent to Instagram and how such engagement related to the activities of walking, strolling and experiencing the river for personal activity. We noted that the shared photos were primarily contemporary in observation, with the history of Akerselva serving only as the backdrop for such leisure activities. Following this analysis, we started an open-ended design process to iteratively explore how museum content could integrate itself into these social and cultural contemporary activities. The design experiment with Instagram was performed in two stages, a digital and a physical, each with a different focus; the digital stage explored the practices of publishing photos on

Instagram, while the physical stage explored how experiences with Instagram may relate directly to a physical location. First, we established an Instagram user called @akerselvadigitalt, and explored how images from the museum archives could take a meaningful role in relation to the semiotic conventions that we had observed. The physical installation was later set up at an event along the river, and included individual photo cards with QRcodes and IPAD’s providing access to our stream of published museum photos by @akerselvadigitalt. Both experiments were undertaken across a two-month period in September and October 2012, and we will in the following discuss how perspectives from cultural studies became central for accommodating young peoples engagement (see Figure 1).

4. CHALLENGE: THE SEMIOTICS OF INSTAGRAM The design experiment centered around how historical images from the museum could be posted in ways that both respected the existing practices of the stream while framing the historical images a communicative way within the stream. This required reflection upon how the social and semiotic levels of publishing, liking and following, framed participation in the stream. And how we, as designers, had to relate this to the institutional concerns accompanying the museum content. This involved making choices of photos, creating text prompts that would relate to the contemporary context of specific river locations, and creating hash tags that afford the photos



Figure 1. Creating an identity for @akerselvadigitalt was based on what was posted, how the posting related to the stream and the choices of hash tags. The Instagram stream #akerselva on the left and the stream of museum photos from @akerselvadigtalt user on the right.

social relevance. To enhance the social activities of each photo, the identification of semantic connections were required to compose hash tag clusters that internally would work in concert with the signification of the photo.During the first month, the experiment resulted in approximately 60 museum images posted by the research team to the stream. The study was based on multiple process documentation methods. In addition to notes of our own discussions during the experiment, we included observations, comments and reactions from followers on Instagram as empirical material, and

subsequent interviews with followers conducted over Instagram. In Instagram we encountered a challenge in that we had to translate and connect the institutional metadata of the archival images with the existing folksonomies that were connected to place in Instagram. Mixing such social tagging and folksonomies with the structured metadata of an institutional classification system has become a major discussion as institutional memory content mixes with the social processes of online communities (Trant 2009, Dalton 2010). It is in this mixing of curatorial content into



everyday amateur content, that arises a potential challenge for participatory engagement in Instagram. The museum content had to relate to existing practice of ‘hash tagging’, but needed to keep some of the archival information of the photos to remain meaningful and accurate. Meanwhile, we questioned whether the right choice of hash tags for an image could directly provoke or direct reflections onto historical issues. This required a translation of archival information into text and hash tags. Each published photo contained excerpts of the museum archival information including the year the photo was taken, the name of the photographer and the name of the photographed person, if the

archival information was available. If the photo had locational metadata, hash tags based on this information were created as well (see Figure 2). We also added a sentence or a prompting question relating the historical content to the present day. For example, one photo from the Seilduken textile factory from 1956, pictured Nita Larsen who had been a payroll officer at the factory from 1910 to 1940. We translated this archival data of Nita’s 30 years of employment into the number of days and hours at the same work desk, a concrete translation meant to strike a contrast with contemporary employment expectations. Today people hold several jobs during their labor lifetime, and stay-

Figure 2. #seilduken. Hashtags became a semantic tool for both outreach and a potential prompt to trigger historical reflections on labor conditions for workers in the factories that today contains schools and creative industry. As a prompting text we used the number of working hours, 112680 that Nita Larsen had spent at the account desk during 30 years of employment.



ing in one workplace for 30 years could signal stagnation as opposed to loyalty and steadiness, as it did in Nita’s time. We decided on a multifaceted structure of hash tags, to focus on the multiple variables between museum content and Instagram users. All photos were tagged to the #akerselva hash tag, the main Instagram-stream connected to the river prior. In addition, clusters of hash tags that drew attention to other themes related to Akerselva history were place related, such as “#seilduken”, one of the main factories – or to an historical phenomena, such as “#children labor” or “#osloactivism, #politicalprisoners, #russia”, or more contemporary themes such as “#mathallen (a new local food hall), or sites such as #akerselva, #brenneriveien, #vulkanoslo” (the burgeoning design community and environment for creative industry in Oslo). The choice of hash tags assigned to each photo poignantly address reflections upon the specificity of the photo in relation to time and place as well as to history. The hash tags of historical photos from the museum archive had to connect to existing folksonomies that youth applied to the same sites in their everyday social media presence. This was a matter of connecting the ongoing social practices of place-making in Instagram with the historical sites and the social histories along the river. The composition of each hash tag cluster was in this way also a matter of connecting and reconfiguring the mediated content with contemporary reflections, making it relevant for various streams and con-

sequently extending the distribution of the images. This design experiment illuminated the power of social semiotics via hash tags and descriptive texts that would affect the relationship to the archival photos chosen. Accommodating young people`s engagement, contributions and co-creation of the photo streams requires a design awareness that is deeply informed by knowledge of the social and semiotic character of practices of sharing, liking and following on Instagram. And thereby the cultural structures, systems and dynamics that participation on Instagram is dependent on. Understanding the intertwined social semiotic aspects of social technologies is not only a matter of analyzing peoples practices; the application of hash tags, prompting questions that engage, or create semantic connections is a matter of design for engagement. Engaging people in encounters with museum content outside a museum space reinforces the need for insight into these forms of engagement as such insight has to be acknowledged to succeed in setting up the design space in the first place.

4.1. Exploring Digital and Physical Engagement In employing Instagram, we opened a participatory and experimental space that equally examines the layers of personal, social, physical and digital interactions with the Akerselva river. However in the process, we uncovered a need for a design sensitivity in understanding the



physical ‘situatedness’ of Instagram users. How does the physical location relate to young peoples engagement in photosharing and in what ways could this then trigger them to reflect upon time and place? How can the historical sites along Akerselva be appreciated as part of the image activities on Instagram and why would young people even bother? How is the production and viewing of images a different relationship than experiencing place? And how can past narratives of people living and working in the buildings and enhance an appreciation of the sites today? While the ethereal quality of mobile digital space is less related to literal spatio-temporal properties, it does

offer the possibility of re-mediation and re-configuration that earlier computer based technologies did not. This includes new possibilities for combining the virtual and the real, where two sources of information generate a third, new type of knowledge experience. The digital experience still lies in the interaction, but comes to play in the interaction between the layers of digital representations and place (Liestøl 2010; Liestøl et al 2011). Young people`s digital imagery activities add yet another layer to these layers of representation by adding agency in making experiences and defining of place (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Young people visiting the installation at the Akerselva River accessed our Instagram photostream by way of QR-code cards and online IPADs hanging in trees at the river



To explore this physical engagement, we built an installation that provided access to our experiment’s online stream, @akerselvadigitalt. It was decided to carry out the installation as a performance activity at the yearly riverwalk, or Elvelangs, that occurs on 21.September, the evening of autumnal equinox. This event samples installations from artists, musicians and local people living along the river with up to 3000 people attending various parts of the 5-mile walk along the river. It is a very stimulating performative evening in which young and old visitors participate in various cultural exhibits and art performances along the river. This seemed like an opportune time to set-up an engagement

activity capitalizing on the interest of people in the environs of the river walk. The physical installation was arranged across three sites along the river to obtain various observable empirical clues on how social practice with historical content may play out in relationship to place. Our intention was to observe how young people’s situated use of Instagram occurs to define the potential points and sites that museum content can contextually connect to social place making activities in the city (see Figure 4). We found that our chosen physical installation sites were important in regards to awareness, attention and dwelling time. Sites with enough physical space to dwell naturally gathered

Figure 4. At the three installation points, iPads were available for viewing the photo stream in real-time (left), with cards with text prompts to encourage interactions by way of the QR codes



the most people. We also found that the Instagram photos printed onto physical, laminated cards exhibited within the installation seemed to require more descriptive text and a clearer prompting to act than the Instagram photos posted digitally on the mobile phone. While people stopped and explored our stream on the IPADS and discovered how the streams mirrored the event and the place, it was not clear to them that they were invited to contribute. Interestingly, it seemed that the solicitations articulated in our Instagram entries did not work well in crossing contexts between digital and physical interactions. This told us that translating the Instagram photo and hash tag text onto a physical form required another level of prompting – a physical invitation which set out verbatim instructions on what the user was to do in the interaction. Hence, the text on the physical laminated cards had to be designed with a clear and realistic idea of what kind of contribution people beyond liking and following in the way they normally would engage with Instagram in the physical and place-based context of the river walk. For example, ideally we would have liked people to contribute with contemporary documentation through photos mirroring the historical photos. But realized that this would require a deeper engaged community of followers that would contribute to museums collection development independently of the physical event. Hence, it seemed that our physical design set up required a clearer idea of how users could relate to the museum images with a meaningful immediacy.

The 3000 people participating in the walk constantly uploaded photos of their experiences and hash tagged them with the longstanding #akerselva stream (not the one created by the research team). It became difficult to identify contributions from walkers that may have responded to the prompts from the historical experiment during the event as opposed to those drawn by audiences own motivation to share their experience. By observing people interacting with the digital installations at the three different installation sites we recognized that the prompts to engage digitally by commenting or answering questions did not match the speed of images published on the stream. Staging a participatory design process that would engage people across both digital spaces and physical places simultaneously is highly dependent on how such examples of experience, place and agency are related. These are properties of social media that seem to be of central concern for engagement across digital contexts and physical places.

5. CONCLUSION Connecting design methods with young people’s everyday, cultural and social practices is a big and complex endeavor deeply rooted in assumptions designers bring to the design process. This becomes even more complicated within settings where the intention may be to develop relationships outside of welldefined contexts and places. In our case, shifting from the defined design space within a museum out into the context of the distributed, public and mobile



museum is an innovative endeavor that challenges design methods. This made apparent the need to involve theoretical perspectives and conceptual tools that would support an understanding of the everyday situations and practices that became the design space of the museum. It also became evident that involving the photo-sharing application Instagram in a participatory research approach to explore distributed museum communication requires new methods and techniques that take notice of the aesthetics of social media practices. In Instagram we identified the prominence of cultural expression, such as signs and clusters of hash tags as central for young peoples` mediation of located, situated and personal perspectives and interests. Digital representations and recordings of cultural heritage bring to bear enormously increased reproductive and productive capacities that alter the original production (Malpas 2008). Imagery, photography and the production of representations can also be understood to have been set free from the world, and used as a tactic to construct meaning in acts of authoring and spectating (de Certeau 1984). Based on this, we can understand digital imagery in Instagram as a tool for people to redefine, reconfigure and reconstruct place and time. In Akerselva Digitalt, we saw this through acts of uncoupling and reassembling the history with its physical place. For example an iconic historical bridge that appears in many photographs contains many comments on the history of the bridge but with a contemporary twist. In this way the design experiment in Ak-

erselva Digitalt points to how interventions may illuminate the complexity of people`s imagery practices and thus how museum communication/design may relate to these practices of imagery and placemaking activities. These aspects need more detailed studies. Based on our experiences from the Akerselva River project, we argue that participatory projects that go outside defined design settings and apply social media as a means for involving and engaging users in innovative processes do need to take these meditational practices into account. That designers, in one way or another, have to thoughtfully consider how users understand the signified and symbolic level of the dialogue when engaging young people in social media based design processes. This challenges designers to develop methodologies that are sensitive to the aesthetics of cultural and social layers and potentially re-think the agency of the designer. We have in this paper argued for integrating a cultural studies perspective in participatory processes, revealing how semiotic language is used to express tensions, conflicts and controversies that constitute the dynamics of participation in cultural activities. Based on our experience from experimenting with Instagram as a platform for engagement in the Akerselva river project, we find such integration of humanities perspectives to be useful for design strategies that intend to engage located and situated groups of young people involving social media and imagery. Being aware of how methods and design facilitation do interact and are influenced by a wider



context of participation, ownership and power (Light & Akama 2012), we see cultural dynamics as an important resource for setting up a design space so that it engages young people. In this way, perspectives from cultural studies have helped us to move beyond classification of social media interaction as nicely packaged in routines and conventions, into understanding social media practices as ongoing and ambivalent processes of negotiation. For the sake of engaging people in the participatory experiment, cultural studies helped us realize that youth`s sense-making using Instagram are negotiated in encounters and transactions. This has helped us to focus on the differences, contrasts, resistance, oppositions and tensions by which young people engage in active sense-making. These are capacities that young people use in located and situated cultural expressions and experiences, and are important for designers to understand in facilitating youth participatory processes. In this way, a Cultural Studies perspective provided us with an understanding of the diverging assembling activities people engage in when they relate social media activities to physical, place-based ones. Our case also raises several issues that require more in-depth analysis than the ones explored here. First, understanding semiotic activities as both mimicking and contrasting socially shared practices, underlines the ambiguity by which cultural processes are characterized. For museum design this calls for the museum to go beyond issues of representation in exhibitions and into the exploration of

the relationships between curation and popular culture when engaging young audiences. Social media sparks a shift of roles in museum communication, and questions the role of the curator as well as that of the designer in participatory museum innovation. The small-scaled design experiment reported here was set up to explore potential possibilities for advancing a traditional mobile museum guide, connecting to people’s ongoing social media practices along the Akerselva river. Due to time constraints and the position of the research in the structure of the project, the museum curators were only involved in the project by following the postings of @akerselva on Instagram and by attending the follow-up workshop summarizing the experiment. However it became clear that the experiment would have gained even more understanding of the shifts in museum curatorship and innovation, if museum curators too had participated in both the creation of the Instagram postings and the setting up of the installation. Such inclusion of museum professionals in the design process would have integrated their professional perspectives on hastagging and creation of prompting questions. This would have given a deeper understanding of the challenges of social media communication between museums and its youth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank our respective institutions, Norwegian Research Council for Grant VERDIKT 193011/ S10, Fulbright Scholar Exchange for



supporting this research collaboration. Also, the Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology and Medicine, Oslo Museum and Arts Council of Norway and followers of the @akerselvadigitalt stream on Instagram

Botero, A., & Saad-Sulonen, J. (2008). Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. Paper presented at Participatory Design Conference 2008, 266-269.

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