Abstract
This paper investigates how generativity, understood as showing care and contributing to the next generation's lives, shapes visitors’ engagement, experience, and psychological wellbeing in the Hong Kong Space Museum. We conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews to explore how generativity unfolds in museum interactions. Building on Fan and Luo (2022), we extend the generativity model by introducing bidirectional and recursive relationships among generativity, engagement, and experience. Our findings show that generativity can be understood as a designable, relational and temporal pathway to wellbeing. Thematic analysis further reveals that different types of installations scaffold generativity and wellbeing through distinct design features such as low initial complexity, visibility of others’ actions, shared control, and layered annotation. These features enable visitors to guide, share, and explain, contributing to others’ experiences. The findings highlight museum design as a medium for situated wellbeing.
Keywords
Generativity; Psychological Wellbeing; Knowledge Sharing; Museum Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.892
Citation
Chen, C., Law, A., Cao, J., and Li, X. (2026) Designing for generativity and wellbeing: Insights from visitors at the Hong Kong Space Museum, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.892
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Designing for generativity and wellbeing: Insights from visitors at the Hong Kong Space Museum
This paper investigates how generativity, understood as showing care and contributing to the next generation's lives, shapes visitors’ engagement, experience, and psychological wellbeing in the Hong Kong Space Museum. We conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews to explore how generativity unfolds in museum interactions. Building on Fan and Luo (2022), we extend the generativity model by introducing bidirectional and recursive relationships among generativity, engagement, and experience. Our findings show that generativity can be understood as a designable, relational and temporal pathway to wellbeing. Thematic analysis further reveals that different types of installations scaffold generativity and wellbeing through distinct design features such as low initial complexity, visibility of others’ actions, shared control, and layered annotation. These features enable visitors to guide, share, and explain, contributing to others’ experiences. The findings highlight museum design as a medium for situated wellbeing.