Teens Connect to Art and Each Other at u.l.k.: Statens Museum for Kunst embraces user-created content and social networking on its new site for teens 
Anne Tessing Skovbo Nielsen, Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark
Tine Nygaard, Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark
Ethan Wilde, Mediatrope, USA
http://ungeslaboratorierforkunst.dk
At Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), the Danish national gallery, we wanted to reach a teenage audience. Our assumption was that if we truly wanted to engage this difficult - very elusive, ever changing, and perfidious - age group in dealing with art, we had to invite them to be active partners in creating this new initiative as well as in running it when launched. We wanted to let young people decode art for their peers. The result was a new art community on-site in the museum and on-line for teens age 12-20. We called it u.l.k. (in Danish u.l.k. is an abbreviation for Young Peoples' Laboratories for Art). This paper evaluates the work done together with the teenagers, with a special focus on creating the Web site. The paper represents the outcomes of focus groups, interviews, usability tests, as well as log file analysis. We discuss what we’ve learned, how the community on the Web site has developed since the launch, and what our perspectives on the future are.
Session: Designing with Teens [Education]
Keywords: teenagers, social networking, education, community, user created content, constructivist learning
