For the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest (Néprajzi Múzeum) we developed an online, interactive game that offers a playful, hands-on insight into how museum curators build an exhibition. Here the visitor isn’t just a viewer: they make decisions, arrange tasks in a logical order, and step into a concrete planning situation to experience—“as a curator”—how an exhibition concept comes together through selection, structure, and visual presentation.

The game is built in layers. First, it introduces exhibition-making as a form of coordinated teamwork, showing that the process typically unfolds in distinct phases (which can vary from project to project). It also highlights the curator’s multifaceted role through approachable metaphors—balancing research and storytelling, organisation and communication, collaboration and problem-solving.

The centrepiece is the Exhibition Planner, where users can create their own alternative version of a display inspired by the museum’s ZOOM exhibition. To support this, the interface provides 52 curated photographs from the museum’s photo collection, which can be freely selected and arranged into a wall composition. The experience is designed primarily for desktop use (with limited functionality on mobile devices). The result is a final “closing shot”: a complete layout with a title and wall texts, which the system automatically saves to the user’s computer.

Quick how-to (Exhibition Planner): enter your name, your exhibition title and a short description, then choose a room. In the planning view, drag photographs onto the wall surface, resize and position them, and add labels. With the “camera” button you can generate the final image, and you can still refine your layout afterwards—or start over at any time.

Link: https://turelemuveg.neprajz.hu/kurator/