The Medieval Museum of Stockholm

When we chose a museum to focus on, we mainly had two requirements: the museum needed to be fairly new since we were interested in technical solutions, and we had to be able to find our target group, elderly people, there. We decided between several museums, but were most drawn to the exhibition material from the middle ages available at The Medieval Museum of Stockholm. Additionally, when we researched the Medieval Museum, it proved to be average large with a great chance of finding our target group there. Also, the museum was relatively newly renovated, which improved our chances of finding interesting technology to investigate there.

Today, the 8th of February, we went to the museum to check it out. Our general impression of the museum was great. The Medieval Museum mainly consists of two exhibition rooms, one small and one much lager room. The smaller room connected the reception to the larger room.

Entrance to the museum

Exhibition in the large room

The exhibitions were ordered after themes, and not in a chronological order. For example, all exhibition regarding the culture, food and clothes from the middle ages were close to each other, and exhibitions about politics were gathered in another place.

At the museum, we first took in the environment and the atmosphere there in general. Then we looked for already existing technical systems in the museum or related to the museum, and found sound and light techniques, Audio Guide systems, and video monitors. We also found out about an universal app for museums called @Nationalmuseum. However, The Medieval Museum did not use this app yet. There technical systems will be discussed in more detail in our State of Art Analysis. To get more in-depth information about the technical systems, we interviewed the staff.

After inspecting the museum, we wanted to focus on our target group, elderly people, at the Medieval Museum in order to pin down the problem space. This was done mainly by doing individual interviews with people from the target group at the museum.