Methodology for Design of Online Exhibitions

Abstract

The process of designing systems or products largely depends on a number of decisions, like "who do I design for?", "what should my product do?", "what are the user requirements?" etc. The developing teams usually base their decisions on experience and/or heuristics and this is particularly the case, in the development of online products and especially online exhibitions. The different solutions are frequently case studies of specific museums or institutions that wish to provide online content to actual or possible visitors. In addition, the interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor, involving museology, technology but also education, poses important design problems. In the following sections, we present a generic methodology for the design of online exhibitions, using top-down processes and transferable findings across museum types that wish to assist the designers during the early decision stages. This paper provides an introduction to the field, emphasising its interdisciplinary nature and reviews related work in the area of online exhibition design. It also presents an overview of the methodology, elaborating on the individual methodology steps; in particular, the processes for determining the visitors' perception of the museum (degree of museumness); the museum needs that require to be supported; the educational approach to be adopted; the relevance to lifelong learning activities; the approach to adaptivity; and user involvement have been reviewed.

The MUSETECH Model

“…Viewed from this perspective, an online exhibition is as much a virtual museum as a serious game played on a mobile device or an interactive table-top installation. The cross-fertilisation of the many underlying disciplines, such as museum and visitor studies, interaction design, user experience or digital humanities can also be hold responsible for that (Antoniou et al 2013;Ciolfi 2018). For example, the term "digital humanities" (Ross 2018), predominantly used to flag the use of the digital in the Arts and Humanities for research or formal education purpose, does not exclude uses in informal learning environments such as museums and galleries.…”

“…The virtual exhibitions literature has advocated that the design of online exhibitions needs to go through a series of decisions. It has also emphasized that "an explicit and established procedure is needed, such as which are the decisions to be made and who and how decides on design issues" (Antoniou et al 2013). This holds true for any museum technology embodiment.…”

“…It follows other important breakthroughs, models and learning theories that have greatly contributed in comprehending the complex relationship between museums and their public as well as the societies in which museums are grounded. Influential theories include the theory of flow (Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson 1999); Huizinga's magic circle as a liminal, separate from reality, space in which learning through games, play and edutainment occurs (Astic et al 2011); the interactive museum experience model (Falk and Dierking 1992); visitors' identities (Falk 2016); Hein's approach to meaningful object-oriented learning (2002); and various learning, cognitive and meaning-making theories that researchers and museum practitioners have experimented with in the museum environment (Antoniou et al 2013;Damala 2007). In terms of museum practice resources, they culminated with Simon's concept of "relevance"; with this, she tried to draw our attention to the importance of meaning and relevance for engaging museum visiting experiences, providing several examples of how museums can make a difference in the life of the individuals and the communities in which they are grounded.…”

ROSSIO Infrastructure: a digital research tool for Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities

“…• BIBFRAME. 15 The vocabularies reuse BIBFRAME classes for representing the entity types that are present in each vocabulary, namely Topic, Person, Organization, Place and Temporal. This facilitates both the internal organization of the ROSSIO vocabularies and their reusability as linked data.…”

“…Another service the platform will provide are exhibitions and digital collections. According to authors such as Martin R. Kalfatovic [11], Chee Khoon Leong [12][13], Maria Teresa Natale [9] and Angeliki Antoniou [15], digital exhibitions are activities that use hypermedia -information presented in the form of text, graphics, audio and video -with the objective of developing a given subject, resorting to a diverse set of digital objects arranged according to a predetermined narrative, potentially accessible to a wider and geographically dispersed audience. The inclusion of a contextualizing narrative distinguishes digital exhibitions from other similar initiatives, such as image galleries.…”