Active Prolonged Engagement EXpanded (APEX): A Toolkit for Supporting Evidence-Based Iterative Design Decisions for Collaborative, Embodied Museum Exhibits

Abstract

This article presents Active Prolonged Engagement eXpanded (APEX), a framework and toolkit for informing evidence-based decisions about the iterative design of embodied, collaborative museum exhibits. We provide an overview of APEX, a framework that builds on both prior work and experimentally derived data to provide an understanding of how visitors' physical, social, emotional, and intellectual engagement transform during the course of their interaction with an exhibit. We present two case studies demonstrating how to apply APEX in practice, analyzing video recordings of participant interactions with different design iterations of TuneTable-an interactive exhibit for co-creative computational music-making-at both a macro- and micro-level. In the case studies, we explore how APEX reveals important features of participant interaction that suggest implications and directions for design. Finally, we present a toolkit of resources to aid researchers in operationalizing APEX as a framework for video analysis, in-situ observation, and iterative design and evaluation.