While museums are designed to engage and interest various audiences, teenagers are often a neglected segment. Without digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain exciting and relevant to a young, tech-savvy audience. Games can benefit museums by fostering positive attitudes towards museum spaces and creating more joyful destinations to promote meaningful informal learning combined with entertainment. We developed a dual-gamified mobile experience targeted at teenagers, for the Natural History Museum of Funchal, Portugal: a story-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Turning Point) and a game-based strategy ( Memories of Carvalhal's Palace — Haunted Encounters ). These strategies were studied in depth with 159 teenagers (15–19 years old) to understand how gamified strategies might enhance their user experience in a museum. On one hand, game-based strategies, in which game mechanics predominate, can catch a visitor's attention by displaying challenging questions that promote competition. On the other hand, story-based strategies, in which storytelling is prominent, can promote an emotional connection with the museum and exhibits and facilitate awareness of historical facts by including an engaging plot with high-quality media and tightly edited stories. This article reports on lessons learned that museum experience designers and curators can use in designing enjoyable, interactive experiences for teenage visitors.

Current cultural policies are evolving from social inclusion (removing barriers and promoting equality for participation in culture) to social cohesion (fostering solid bonds between groups despite their differences). Digital interventions can create spaces that promote social inclusion and cohesion. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a cultural heritage and digital storytelling application supporting a participatory approach to culture and hosting society. We evaluate our intervention in three marginalized communities with different social-cultural contexts: migrant women in Barcelona, a community living in a priority neighbourhood in Paris and second and third-generation migrants in Lisbon. Through an analysis of their application use, our findings point at their needs and desires, highlighting how the app can support social inclusion as the first step towards cohesion, but that these are heterogeneous concepts susceptible to nuanced appropriations by the different communities.

While museums are often designed to engage and interest a wide variety of audiences, teenagers are a neglected segment. This article describes a set of findings that aids in designing enjoyable interactive experiences inside natural history museums for teenagers (15–19 years old). For this research, 223 teenagers have been involved through co-design sessions and testing of Augmented Reality prototypes (130 of these teenagers took part in a focus group as well). This work also involved 3 museums from Portugal, 12 cultural heritage professionals, and 17 master's students as sources of information who took part in different research studies. Through qualitative analysis, the findings from the studies provide a strong foundation to inform and inspire work within the emerging research field concerning museum offerings and the current teenage generation.