Touch & Discover
An interactive museum console for Idrottsmuseet, Gothenburg.
15,000 items, almost no room to show them
Idrottsmuseet, the Gothenburg Sports Museum, holds over 15,000 items across three floors, with almost no room for information plaques. Exhibits are cluttered and unexplained, which favours visitors who already know the athletes — mostly middle-aged men — and shuts out everyone else.
The project used Ingemar Johansson, one of Sweden's most iconic boxers, as the test case: his artefacts were on display but told through static text that most visitors skipped past.
The goal was a touch-screen console that guides visitors to relevant exhibits, tells their stories, and works without a guide standing beside it — while staying accessible to a broader, younger audience than the museum currently reaches.
Looked to Universeum and Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg, and the Museum of London, where touch-screens and audio let visitors explore digital archives at their own pace, tied to the physical exhibits around them.
- Contributed to the interaction design process from ideation to the final design.
- Created the Figma prototype.
- Created the video about Ingemar Johansson used in the installation.
- Created the physical prototype.
- Designed the image in Photoshop that was placed on the backboard behind the screen.
From paper sketches to Intuiface
Ideation started with paper sketches — each member sketching, writing or thinking through an idea in five-minute bursts — and converged on a touch-screen concept. From there the work split into a digital interface and a physical exhibit setup, developed in parallel.
Group sketching led to a digital Photoshop concept: Ingemar Johansson centered on screen, surrounded by icons for the information on offer.
Built in Intuiface from a Figma concept: a video carousel, a scrollable photo grid with captions, and a map of award locations — each item tagged to a shelf number.
A shelf board behind the screen, wired with six LED-lit, 3D-printed lightbulbs. Selecting an item on screen lit the matching physical exhibit — prototyped Wizard-of-Oz style with two Arduino Unos.
A short video about Ingemar Johansson's life and career, made for the console's video carousel.
Set up at Idrottshögskolan for presentation: selecting a video or photo on screen lit a small bulb above the matching physical exhibit, linking the digital story to the object in front of the visitor.
The manual light-control buttons were mounted too high to reach comfortably while using the screen — a limitation of the Wizard-of-Oz setup rather than the final concept.
How visitors responded
Visitors responded well: the link between digital content and physical exhibits made previously overlooked details more visible and easier to engage with. Clearer task-splitting within the group, and buttons placed within easy reach, are the two things worth doing differently next time.
Download full report (PDF)