Engaging Emerging Professionals in Design: Devising Mobile Supports for Explainers at STEM Museums

Informal Science Education Institutions (ISEIs) like STEM museums and zoos are increasingly employing technology to engage their visitors and support their interpretive staff (employees, also known as explainers, who engage visitors in educational conversations about ISEI content). Explainers could benefit from technology purposely designed to scaffold their facilitation of visitor learning, to respond to the social and attentional demands of exhibit spaces, and to help them reflect on their interpretation practices. In this work, I defined a new genre of technology that I dub FRAIMS (Facilitation, Reflection and Augmented Interpretation Mobile Systems), and developed a new research methodology to tackle this under-explored problem space. Participatory design (PD) is a human-centered approach that engages the end-user in all phases of research and design. Traditionally, PD participants are expert end-users who can represent the task domain. However, in this context end-users are both experts and novices (emerging professionals), which raises new challenges for the PD process. Novices may not yet fully understand the task domain, but eliciting their needs and visions is still important for producing a tool they will find useful. The novelty of this work was applying a socio-technical system framing to design PD sessions. Two theory-derived PD techniques (role-play scenario in a real setting, and discussion guidance by an expert) were studied and used with emerging professionals to facilitate their envisioning of the work-related tasks and to bridge the gap between novices’ needs and experts’ goals. Analysis of the results from implementing this socio-technical approach to PD sessions highlighted the benefit of considering the level of participant expertise as a key factor that shapes a design, in our case resulting in different supports for the design of FRAIMS. This research reports in a qualitative fashion the requirements suggested by the different groups of explainers and validated via an online survey delivered to multiple ISEIs. We also collected explainers' opinions about features indicative of experience (education, training, employment, and confidence) to begin the process of developing a model of interpretive expertise. The two main outcomes of this research are a design methodology for a new population of users, and a set of design specifications for a new technology genre (FRAIMS).