This paper presents an interactive installation designed to facilitate and support visitor engagement in a living history museum. Little research thus far has explored how interaction design can bring added value to living history museums, although they present great potential for participation, interactivity and engagement. We discuss the design rationale for the prototype installation we have developed for a living history museum called Bunratty Folk Park, and present exemplars of empirical data showing how the system merged into the site facilitating an engaging experience for a particular category of visitors.
This paper reports research and design work focused on enhancing visitor experience of an open-air museum, Bunratty Folk Park in County Clare (Ireland). We will discuss how existing work in the domain of museum technologies has so far dealt little with open-air sites. Our approach aimed at developing themes of participation and visitor contribution at a site that differs from indoor exhibitions on the grounds of size, structure and material on display. We will describe the background research and design research towards an interactive multi-device installation entitled “Reminisce” for Bunratty Folk Park, informed by a focus centred on visitor activities and their experience of place. We will then provide examples of visitors’ interactions with Reminisce in order to show how this approach can lead to successful design interventions.
This article examines visitor interactions with and through a physical/digital installation designed for an open-air museum that displays historic buildings and ways of life from the past. The installation was designed following the "Assembly" design scheme proposed by Fraser et al. (2003), and centered around five principles for the design of interactive experiences. We discuss how the Assembly framework was adapted and applied to our work on the installation called Reminisce, and we then present qualitative data gathered through the shadowing and naturalistic observations of small groups of visitors using Reminisce during their exploration of the museum. Through these data excerpts, we illustrate how interaction occurred among visitors and with the assembly. We reflect on the guiding principles of the adapted Assembly framework and on their usefulness for the design of place-specific interactional opportunities in heritage settings. Results from the empirical study show that the adapted Assembly principles provide HCI (human-computer interaction) researchers and designers with ways in which to flexibly support collocated interactions at heritage sites across artifacts and locations in ways that both complement and enrich the physical setting of the visit and its character.
On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present.
Elisa Giaccardi, Editor
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.