ARTICLE Testing a Mobile Platform for Community Co-Created Exhibitions ALEXANDRA ROGERS AND JENNY ROCK Abstract The benefits of co-creation between museums and their communities are increasingly acknowledged but challenges remain in creating opportunities for and facilitating enactments of co- creation. Time, funding and supporting infrastructure are significant hurdles. This study addresses the latter in describing a mobile platform designed for hosting community co-created exhibitions. It assesses its functionality in two case studies where installations of the platform were hosted by major public museums in New Zealand. Both exhibitions had marine themes, but the co-creation partners varied from a science education centre and their citizen science collaborators, to an informal group of adults and students engaged in water quality monitoring. Reflective evaluation of the co-creative process using the platform revealed one of its major benefits to be its professional aesthetic, which allowed work to be presented to a high standard of display, and empowered co-creators to feel confident in the quality of their work. Further success arose from its physical constraints; a practical scope for exhibitions was demarcated by certain structural limitations and offered relief from what was initially experienced by novice co- creators as an intimidating amount of freedom within undefined space. Successful elements combined to facilitate key criteria for co-creation including early and continuous empowerment and co-ownership between co-creating parties. INTRODUCTION Definitions and expectations of co-creation in museology vary significantly. The generation and exhibition of “user-generated content” is probably the most popular form (e.g., where the public makes contributions through paper notes or on social media (Sandvik 2012; Stuedahl 2011), but also involves the least interaction between the museum and a public (Holdgaard and Klastrup 2014). Similarly, the donation or loan of an object (e.g., cultural artefacts or col- lage of submitted images) is often labelled co- creation; in these situations the community generally has little influence on exhibition design or creation and their activity might more accurately be understood as participation. The other end of the spectrum of what is accepted as co-creation has been well established by Simon (2010). She defined co-creation as a partnership between the public and the museum where both define their needs and goals at the start and work cohesively throughout a project to mutu- ally meet them. Her criteria are recognised as distinguishing participation from co-creation on multiple counts, which all address functional power-sharing and co-ownership (Gibson and Kindon 2013; Govier 2010; Holdgaard and Klastrup 2014; Oomen and Aroyo 2011). The benefits of facilitating community co-creation are becoming increasingly acknowl- edged in many fields, from marketing to Alexandra Rogers earned her masters in Science Communication from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; part of her thesis work on museum exhibition through community co-creation is described here. Jenny Rock (jenny.rock@otago.ac.nz) is Sr. Lecturer in Science Communication at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and supervised the aforementioned postgraduate research. Previously Alexandra Rogers was employed by the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 335 Volume 60 Number 3 July 2017