Seeing with New Eyes: Designing for In-the-Wild Museum Gifting

This paper presents the GIFT smartphone app, an artist-led Research through Design project benefitting from a three-day in-the-wild deployment. The app takes as its premise the generative potential of combining the contexts of gifting and museum visits. Visitors explore the museum, searching for objects that would most appeal to the gift-receiver they have in mind, then photographing those objects and adding audio messages for their receivers describing the motivation for their choices. This paper charts the designers' key aim of creating a new frame of mind using voice, and the most striking findings discovered during in-the-wild deployment in a museum -- 'seeing with new eyes' and fostering personal connections. We discuss empathy, motivation, and bottom-up personalisation in the productive space revealed by this combination of contexts. We suggest that this work reveals opportunities for designers of gifting services as well as those working in cultural heritage.