Visiting museums as part of a group poses the challenge of managing engagement with exhibits while preserving group cohesion. We respond to this by reconfiguring the social dynamic of visiting with an experience designed specifically for groups, that invites the group members themselves to design and "gift" interpretations to one another. We present a trial of this experience with groups of family and friends at a museum. We show how groups managed and configured themselves during the visit, revealing the strategies involved in maintaining different group behaviors. We discuss how our design accommodated different visiting styles by making objects social and scaffolding rather than directing the group experience. We interpret our findings to frame group coherence as a flexible and configurable phenomenon within CSCW.

We apply the HCI concept of trajectories to the design of a sculpture trail. We crafted a trajectory through each sculpture, combining textual and audio instructions to drive directed viewing, movement and touching while listening to accompanying music. We designed key transitions along the way to oscillate between moments of social interaction and isolated personal engagement, and to deliver official interpretation only after visitors had been given the opportunity to make their own. We describe how visitors generally followed our trajectory, engaging with sculptures and making interpretations that sometimes challenged the received interpretation. We relate our findings to discussions of sense-making and design for multiple interpretations, concluding that curators and designers may benefit from considering "trajectories of interpretation".

The designers of mobile guides for museums and galleries face three major challenges: fostering rich interpretation, delivering deep personalization, and enabling a coherent social visit. We propose an approach to tackling all three simultaneously by inviting visitors to design an interpretation that is specifically tailored for a friend or loved one that they then experience together. We describe a trial of this approach at a contemporary art gallery, revealing how visitors designed personal and sometimes provocative experiences for people they knew well. We reveal how pairs of visitors negotiated these experiences together, showing how our approach could deliver intense experiences for both, but also required them to manage social risk. By interpreting our findings through the lens of 'gift giving' we shed new light on ongoing explorations of interpretation, personalization and social visiting within HCI.

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