Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

Abstract

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a codesign process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.

Data-inspired co-design for museum and gallery visitor experiences

“…While personalization tends to be approached in terms of matching users with relevant content, it can also focus on making an experience feel more personal by developing a personal connection between the visitor and the museum. Not and Petrelli (2019), for example, describe a system for generating personalized postcards summarizing visits. Alternatively, some museums have explored personalized storytelling and play as a means of fostering personal connections (Katifori et al , 2014; Vayanou et al , 2019).…”

Interpersonalizing Intimate Museum Experiences

“…However, the personalization of museum experiences is not always easy. Not and Petrelli (2019) suggest that a major obstacle to large-scale adoption of personalization in cultural heritage is the complexity of the technical systems, requiring technical expertise that is out of reach for most cultural heritage professionals with the implication that successful approaches may need to be technically lightweight. While personalization tends to be approached as a challenge of matching users with relevant content, it can also be considered as the challenge of making an experience feel more personal , or developing a personal connection between the visitor and the museum.…”

Fostering the Creation of Personalized Content for Cultural Visits

“…Personalization can occur at different levels, having different influence on the effectiveness of use. The work presented in [18], for example, identifies three types of customization: adaptability (also called customization), that offers the user the possibility of setting options so that the system adopts a desired behavior; context-awareness that is the system's ability to perceive dynamic changes in the environment and adapt accordingly to them; adaptivity that is the system's ability to adapt its behavior by inserting, for example, additional content. The adaptivity property, in particular, is the most complex to implement, requiring more effort from the author.…”