Challenges for the Technological Augmentation of Open-Air Museums: Bridging Buildings, Artefacts and Activities

Abstract

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.

Designing for meaningful visitor engagement at a living history museum

“…Through a series of brainstorming sessions and design focus groups that involved previous visitors to Bunratty Folk Park [3], the themes of identification, reminiscence and everyday life emerged thus far were used to inspire the development of scenarios focused on supporting engagement and identification with the site, and on extending this aspect of the visit so that it could become visible and appreciated by a larger portion of visitors at a wider number of sites in the Park. The end of the creative design phase led to the development, deployment and evaluation of a prototype installation called "Reminisce", that will be described in detail in the following section.…”

“…In the initial phase of the project we conducted qualitative studies of visitor experiences at Bunratty Folk Park through observations, video diaries, informal interviews and conversations with both visitors and staff (for full details on this initial phase of our work see [3]). Goals of the studies were to understand how people visited the site (from the point of view of spatial paths, dwell time at specific locations, etc.…”

Personalized and content adaptive cultural heritage path recommendation: an application to the Gournia and Çatalhöyük archaeological sites

“…Initially, collaborative projects showed interest in interpretive archaeology and information dissemination at cultural heritage sites and museums (Champion 2011;Noh et al 2009;Kenderdine 2010). Among these, some stressed the importance of exploring the visitor-heritage site interaction through ethnomethodological practices for informing the design of such applications (Ciolfi and McLoughlin 2011;Chrysanthi 2015), while few have undertaken user evaluations for assessing the interpretive value along with the technological advancements (Economou and Pujol-Tost 2007;Kenderdine 2010). More recent work has focused on co-design approaches in authoring visitor experiences that empower cultural heritage professionals in their diverse roles to deliver engaging interpretation (Roussou et al 2015;Not and Petrelli 2019).…”

Deepening Visitor Engagement with Museum Exhibits through Hand-crafted Visual Markers

“…These include use of social media to encourage visitor engagement [35,19,38], tagging of exhibits [1,11,34] and specially developed interactive displays [12,31]. Previous research projects, such as Retracing the Past [14] and Reminisce [10], have shown that allowing visitors to record voice messages is a particularly effective way of sharing memories and opinions with others in the museum setting.…”