Character Views Toolkot
Collaboration with Kongernes Jelling | 2024
Workshop Design | Illustration | Play
WHERE: Jelling, Denmark - 2024 COLLABORATORS: Jelling Museum Project Team Ornella Sol Gianforte, Zahra Abdus Samad
During our intrapreneurship at Kongernes Jelling, we realized that to help the museum staff create playful experiences, we needed to make the creation process playful too. This led to the "Character Views" workshop, conducted with the history experts and curators who have a wealth of knowledge but needed a playful leap to bring in emotion, feelings, and fun facts to engage guests with the amazing history of Jelling.
Using the Character Views toolkit, museum staff constructed character masks representing key figures and elements like Harald Bluetooth, Gorm the Old, the runestones, and the church. They then embodied these characters, communicating as if they were those figures. This playful approach helped staff infuse tacit knowledge, emotions, feelings, and fun facts into their storytelling, leading to more nuanced and engaging experiences for visitors.
How it works
Character Dice
Players write character names on blank dice, and then roll to choose which character to embody.
Mask Construction
Using pre-made pieces, participants create expressive masks to represent their chosen characters.
Character Embodiment
Wearing their masks, participants role-play and share stories as their characters.
Rolling the dice for a character
Intro to mask making
Constucting the mask
An angry runestone
Roleplaying
Tangible trace: Compiling a toolkit
The workshop was transformed into a boxed toolkit containing all the materials needed to conduct the workshop, along with an instructional booklet. This tangible trace of our time at the museum aims to encourage the staff to incorporate play into their process when designing guest experiences.
Trifold Instruction booklet
Mouth pieces for maskmaking
Inside the toolkit