Supporting Cultural Heritage Professionals Adopting and Shaping Interactive Technologies in Museums

Abstract

Increasingly, cultural heritage professionals (CHPs) (including curators, museum directors, and education officers) are becoming more involved in designing interactive technologies. Specifically, growing access to and availability of digital technology enables CHPs, who may have limited experience with interactive technologies, to create content for and integrate these technologies into their museums. With these developments, there is a growing importance in investigating how CHPs build understandings of these tools in context; this is particularly since curators aim to learn how those tools can support their audiences. In this paper, we highlight how CHPs formed understandings for integrating an interactive tool to support an intended visitor experience into the museum environment through experimentation. Inspired by lessons learned, we propose design recommendations for interaction designers and HCI experts in designing tools and resources that support CHPs to experiment with various ways these technologies could service their interpretation goals.

A Comparison of Immersive Realities and Interaction Methods: Cultural Learning in Virtual Heritage

“…Hence, balancing interaction, engagement, and content is very crucial for learning. More specifically, cultural learning relies on the contextual connection (relationship) between users and cultural context, and on some form of collaboration between users (Maye et al, 2017;Rahaman, 2018;McGookin et al, 2019;Šašinka et al, 2019). Enhancing cultural learning in VH applications, therefore, requires the underlaying immersive reality and interaction method to enable a contextual relationship, collaboration, and engagement between users and the virtual environment (Champion, 2010;Jankowski and Hachet, 2013;Caputo et al, 2016;Rahim et al, 2017).…”

Framing collaborative processes of digital transformation in cultural organisations: from literary archives to augmented reality

“…around the potential of new interactions to support their audiences (Maye, Avram, Dominique Bouchard and Ciolfi, 2017). Nevertheless, in such studies cultural professionals typically take the lead in developing only the content for the interactives, whose design is still firmly in the hands of the designers.…”

Bridging cultural heritage and communities through digital technologies

“…In this scenario, cultural institutions have taken advantage of participatory design approaches that have been successful in other sectors [60] in order to try to increase audience engagement in their collections and encourage a dialogue with their visitors, adopting more audience-centred practices [59]. For instance, cultural institutions have adopted participatory design to build interactive experiences that enhance the exhibition space and facilitate the engagement of new audiences [27,48,62,68]. Co-design methodologies have also been refined to empower cultural heritage professionals to be more active in the design and direct management of digitally-enhanced visitor experiences [16].…”