Evaluating Visitor Experiences with Interactive Art

The Music Room is an interactive installation that allows visitor to compose classical music by moving throughout a space. The distance between them and their average speed maps the emotionality of music: in particular, distance influences the pleasantness of the music, while speed influences its intensity. This paper focuses on the evaluation of visitors' experience with The Music Room by examining log-data, video footages, interviews, and questionnaires, as collected in two public exhibitions of the installation. We examined this data to the identify the factors that fostered the engagement and to understand how players appropriated the original design idea. Reconsidering our design assumptions against behavioural data, we noticed a number of unexpected behaviours, which induced us to make some considerations on design and evaluation of interactive art.