see me, feel me, touch me, hear me

Abstract

We apply the HCI concept of trajectories to the design of a sculpture trail. We crafted a trajectory through each sculpture, combining textual and audio instructions to drive directed viewing, movement and touching while listening to accompanying music. We designed key transitions along the way to oscillate between moments of social interaction and isolated personal engagement, and to deliver official interpretation only after visitors had been given the opportunity to make their own. We describe how visitors generally followed our trajectory, engaging with sculptures and making interpretations that sometimes challenged the received interpretation. We relate our findings to discussions of sense-making and design for multiple interpretations, concluding that curators and designers may benefit from considering "trajectories of interpretation".

A Survey of the Trajectories Conceptual Framework

“…A common way of presenting the analysis of trajectories is to draw diagrams showing how an experience unfolds, found in 7 papers. In most cases, trajectories are plotted along a horizontal axis showing time [34,38,39,55,77,86,87], but there are examples of them being shown as an overlay on the map of a space [74,87]. Plotting trajectories is also an activity that researchers have asked participants to do to probe their experience [75].…”

“…a sound designer [38], museum staff [84]). In 6 of these 9 papers, the evaluation of the experience connects back with trajectories (counted in the sub-section above).…”

“…Three papers seem to have a differing global definition of trajectories. One refers specifically to "interpretative trajectories" [80], building on Fosh [38]'s extensions of the framework. The other two draw additional concepts into their definition of trajectories: one [55] calls upon the concept of learning trajectories from educational research [23] and the other [87] on interactive artists' description of interactions as journeys [24].…”

Gifting personal interpretations in galleries

“…For this, we chose the 'sculpture garden trajectory' previously proposed by Fosh et al [9], a configurable structure for guiding pairs of visitors through a sequence of exhibits. To quickly recap this, at each sculpture, visitors are presented with a piece of music, a voice instruction telling them how to engage with the sculpture (how to look, move around and gesture), and a fragment of text to be delivered as they walk away from it afterwards.…”

Supporting Group Coherence in a Museum Visit

“…The participants were able to design the interpretation resources that would be delivered through the mobile guide to accompany the objects in the tour. They were able to choose three pieces of content to fit our experience template [9]:…”