Place as Dialogue: Understanding and Supporting the Museum Experience

Abstract

This paper presents a dialogical approach to place, people and technology in museums. The approach has been developed in response to concern for locative experience in Interaction Design, an approach to the design and experience of interactive technologies that emphasises the particular place in which the technologies are deployed and the locative aspects of experience. Our approach emphasises the pivotal role played by a wide variety of relationships in experience and suggests a set of dimensions of experience that have been useful in our interpretations of museum experience: relational, open, sense making, narrative, and spatio‐temporal. In the process of describing the approach, the paper explains and exemplifies the potential for Interaction Design to bring people, for example staff and visitors, into the centre of technological mediation of heritage experience. It does this with specific reference to the mediation of museum experience and uses the design and evaluation of a particular museum exhibition to support its claims.

Keywords:

• Interaction Design
• Museums
• Dialogism
• Experience
• Place

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of Science Foundation Ireland in conducting part of this research, and the contribution of the other SHAPE partners in the Hunt Museum case study.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience; Ciolfi et al., Re‐thinking Technology in Museums; Russo and Watkins, ‘Creative New Media Design’.

[2] Caulton, Hands‐on Exhibitions.

[3] Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience.

[4] Ciolfi and Bannon, ‘Space, Place and the Design of Technologically Enhanced Physical Environments’; Harrison and Dourish, ‘Re‐place‐ing Space’; Hornecker and Stifter, ‘Learning from Interactive Museum Installations’.

[5] Davis, ‘Theoretical Foundations for Experiential Systems Design’; Forlizzi and Battarbee, ‘Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems’; McCarthy and Wright, Technology as Experience; Reeves et al., ‘Designing the Spectator Experience’; Vaughan, ‘Embodying Design’.

[6] Marti, ‘Design for Art and Leisure’.

[7] Grinter et al., ‘Revisiting the Visit’.

[8] vom Lehn et al., ‘Exhibiting Interaction’.

[9] See Petersen et al., ‘Aesthetic Interaction’; Boehner et al., ‘Affective Presence in Museums’; Wakkary and Hatala, ‘ec(h)o’.

[10] Dewey, Art as Experience.

[11] See Ciolfi and Bannon, ‘Space, Place and the Design of Technologically Enhanced Physical Environments’; Fitzpatrick, The Locales Framework; McCarthy and Wright, ‘Technology in Place’.

[12] E. Biörgvinsson, ‘Socio‐material Mediations. Learning, Knowing and Self‐produced Media within Healthcare’, PhD diss., University of Malmö, 2006.

[13] McCarthy and Wright, Technology as Experience.

[14] Ciolfi and Bannon, ‘Space, Place and the Design of Technologically Enhanced Physical Environments’.

[15] Casey, Getting Back into Place.

[16] Augé, Non‐places.

[17] Žižek, ‘Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?’

[18] Laurel, Computers as Theatre; Moggridge, Designing Interactions.

[19] Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act.

[20] Partners in the SHAPE consortium were: the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden), King's College London (UK), the University of Nottingham (UK) and the University of Limerick (Ireland).

[21] Ciolfi and Bannon, ‘Designing Interactive Museum Exhibits’.