From smart objects to smart experiences: An end-user development approach

Abstract

The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers to investigate the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon from different perspectives. The potential of this technology is evident in different domains. In Cultural Heritage (CH), it may enhance access to CH collections, in order to ensure a more engaging visit experience and to increase the appropriation of CH content by visitors. So far, research on IoT has primarily focused on tech-nical features of smart objects (e.g., how to program sensors and actuators), while there are very few approaches trying to facilitate the adoption of such a technology by end users. This lack limits the social and practical ben-efits of IoT; it creates barriers in all those usage scenarios where people would like to define the behavior of smart objects but they might not have the required programming skills. This is becoming evident in CH sites, where different stakeholders would benefit from managing ecosystems of interoperable smart objects to create enhanced visit experiences. This article presents a visual composition paradigm that allows non-programmers to synchronize the behavior of smart objects, thus determining more engaging user experiences. It discusses how the paradigm suites the need of curators and guides of CH sites to define smart visit experiences through which visitors can acquire CH content by interacting with the surrounding environment and the smart objects included in it. A serious game designed with professional guides of CH sites is used as a case study to show the potential of the presented approach.

Analysing trade-offs in frameworks for the design of smart environments

“…In our previous work, we already proved the effectiveness of introducing domainoriented semantics as a means to simplify SIE design (Ardito et al 2017a). Recently, we also conducted an experimental study to compare the three design paradigms for the definition of custom attributes, to better understand the contribution of each of them to the creative process underlying the SIE design (Ardito et al 2018).…”

“…The goal of the research discussed in this paper is to define methodologies and tools to support the design of SIEs, an aspect that is only marginally discussed in the literature (Conti et al 2012). The emphasis is on the synchronization among multiple objects and user actions to provide narrative threads conveying some content (Ardito et al 2017a). To define these complex usage situations, designers not only need to program the behaviour of single smart objects; rather adequate design environments and systematic methodologies are required to guide the identification of strategies for object synchronization.…”

“…The methodologies and the software environments that we have developed so far relate to End-User Development (EUD) (Costabile et al 2006;Lieberman et al 2006), as they address the needs of domain experts who might not be experts in technology. In particular, our work has largely focused on supporting Cultural Heritage (CH) operators to define SIEs for museums (Ardito et al 2017a). Several studies demonstrate the importance of introducing SIEs in CH sites (Ardito et al 2012;Ibrahim and Ali 2018;Marshall et al 2016;Petrelli and Lechner 2014;Rennick-egglestone et al 2016;Zancanaro et al 2015).…”

“…To enable the EUD of SIEs, we initially defined visual metaphors for the specification of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules and through user studies we assessed their effectiveness (Desolda et al 2017). During this phase of the research we identified the necessity of introducing conceptual tools to support the creative process for translating high-level ideas into rules that synchronize the behaviour of smart objects with user's actions (Ardito et al 2017a). To respond to this need, we defined three different design paradigms, two based on Tangible User Interface (TUI) and one on Augmented Reality, to allow domain experts to systematically express and specify concepts that derive from their domain knowledge and that can help governing the SIE dynamics.…”

DeCACHe: Supporting Designers in Creating Cognition-Centered Adaptive Cultural Heritage Activities

“…The aforementioned research attempts support CH designers in creating CH activities, but they do not support personalization, which is a desideratum in the CH domain [37].Tools for creating personalized CH activities. Focusing on research attempts that aim to create tools that support the design of personalized CH activities, Androutsopoulos et al [38] presented an authoring tool that generates multilingual personalized descriptions of museum exhibits; Konstantopoulos et al [39] presented an authoring environment for creating abstract semantic representations of CH object descriptions tailored to the profile of the audience; Not and Petrelli [40] recently presented the meSch authoring tool that supports CH designers in creating personalized and interactive CH experiences for visitors in diverse CH settings; Ardito et al [41] presented a visual composition paradigm that allows non-technical CH professionals to manage ecosystems of interoperable smart objects and synchronize their behavior to create enhanced visit experiences; Katifori et al [42] presented a tool that enables CH content providers and experts to create personalized and dynamically adaptive digital narratives, based on visitors' profile (e.g., interests, visiting behavior), in archaeological sites. While the aforementioned research attempts support CH designers in creating personalized CH activities, they do not take into consideration the cognition factor, which is an important personalization factor for CH [13] and other domains [14].…”