Supporting Place-Specific Interaction through a Physical/Digital Assembly

Abstract

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.

Placelessness of urban design and industrial branding in small town planning

“…Museums and cultural heritage sites have been early adopters of these kinds of interactive technologies. In HCI literature the concepts of place and place-making have been deployed in order to grasp how combinations of digital technologies and tangible elements shape and mediate experiences of cultural heritage (Ciolfi and McLoughlin 2018).…”

Envisioning, designing, and rapid prototyping heritage installations with a tangible interaction toolkit

“…HCI research for cultural heritage has a long history and, as well as contributing to our understanding of this specific application domain, it generated important knowledge for the broader discipline: from studies of how digital technologies mediate collaborative interactions (Hindmarsh et al, 2005;Weilenmann et al, 2013), to evaluations of mobile, augmented and tangible interaction frames and applications (Brown et al, 2003;Grinter et al, 2002;Hornecker, 2010;Rizzo & Garzotto, 2007). More specific to the heritage domain, HCI explored interactive technologies for supporting the portrayal of stories, museum objects, and contributions of visitors: whether designing for openair museums (Ciolfi & McLoughlin, 2017;McGookin et al, 2017), science centers (Fleck et al, 2002) or traditional collection-based indoor museums (Barbieri & Celentano, 2011), a main challenge is to complement the spaces, artifacts, and sensory qualities that make heritage experiences immersive and memorable. Tangible and embedded interactions have been deployed for this purpose as part of exhibitions and visiting companions such as digital guides.…”

Evaluating Digital Cultural Heritage ‘In the Wild’

“…The arguments for reflexive museological and exhibiion design pracice are not new: Catherine Styles [2] and Shelley Ruth Butler [3] specifically reviewed a number of self-reflexive museum exhibiion displays to conclude that 'transparent or self-reflexive' exhibiions 'enable visitors to see the quesions and tensions arising from the material, rather than the answers alone' [2] and that the best reflexive intervenions 'are highly site-specific' [3]. Scholars in the field of digital cultural heritage have also begun to creaively explore the dynamic and fluid nature of 'experience' within digital heritage programmes (see for example [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]). As Robert Stein notes, 'the quality of debate and discourse in the field has matured substanially' so that museum technologists and researchers are 'tack [ling] challenging quesions about the idenity of museums, their role in society, their responsibiliies to serve a global public, and the nature of collecing, preservaion, educaion, scholarship, primary research, and ethics in the digital age' [14].…”