Between control and creativity: challenging co-creation and social media use in a museum context

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges and limitations of co-creation processes in museums based on an exemplary case of the design of a Danish museum-related campaign on Facebook. The article adds to the ongoing discussion on the paradigm shift in the museum by analysing potential problematical issues of including multiple agents in creative processes in museums. It concludes that it is arduous to establish a truly creative co-creative process, when the design team needs to accommodate to a well-established artistic vision as well as to the limited resources of the museum and the other participants. We argue that one cannot in advance predict or ascertain that social media users will find a campaign compelling and want to participate and engage with the content, even if substantial resources have gone into its creation. Furthermore, the complexity of many art projects is likely to make their dissemination on social media difficult.     

Towards children's creative museum engagement and collaborative sense-making

Abstract

In this article, we elucidate a socio-culturally framed approach to supporting children's creative museum engagement. Specifically, we focus on social activities and socio-cultural resources that can act as boundary-permeating objects in mediating children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making regarding cultural content within, across and beyond the spatio-material context of the museum. We contend that designing and organising children's creative engagement and collaborative sense-making in ways that cultivate boundary-crossing broadens opportunities for engagement and leverages children's creative potential and expansive learning. We build our argument by starting with a theoretical introduction to the design principles that constitute the Kids, Museums, and Technology Programme. We will illuminate the design principles of the programme with empirical examples and consider how the design principles and their situated construction can help us re-imagine museum exhibitions as hybrid, boundary-permeating spaces that afford novel transformative interactions, as well as new roles and identities for both children and museums.     

Designing infrastructures for creative engagement

Abstract

As museums extend their scope beyond traditional exhibition spaces and into everyday practices and institutions, it is necessary to develop suitable conceptualisations of how technology can be understood and designed. To this end, I propose the concept of infrastructures, as both social and material, as a useful frame for discussing important challenges and opportunities in terms of designing for audience engagement. I further argue that when designing infrastructures, an important challenge is to develop the social aspects of infrastructures in terms of creating, maintaining and developing relationships between organisations and communities. I argue that this is as much an object of design as technical interactive systems and discuss the relational work undertaken in this activity. The ideas of infrastructure and relational work is illustrated through a case describing the design of a system for cultural heritage engagement for Danevirke museum covering issues relating to the Danish minority in northern Germany.     

Experimental zones: two cases of exploring frames of participation in a dialogic museum

Abstract

A matter of concern for dialogic institutions such as museums is the struggle to find appropriate ways of integrating social media and digital technologies into dialogues with visitors. This paper addresses how co-creation and experimental methods may be applied in a situated, natural environment, exploring how these technologies may be shaped to support museum visitor relations. The concept ‘experimental zone’ is suggested as a format for a collaborative design space where digital media-based dialogues are explored in line with professional practices. This concept is discussed in relation to two design experiments undertaken in collaboration with the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology.     

Digital narrative conventions in heritage trail mobile apps

ABSTRACT

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are increasingly using digital technologies for storytelling and creating mobile applications (apps) for cultural heritage content, but how apps are used in practice to communicate information to users has not been widely studied. A team of people from a heritage organisation, a university, and mobile app development group plan to create a bespoke heritage trail app for Ireland, but to date design conventions/recommendations for this genre are lacking. This article applies a systematic approach to digital narrative content analysis to better understand how apps are being used specifically for heritage trails with the aim of identifying what the common features are, which modalities and narrative techniques are used. The selected corpus included 55 apps downloaded from the Google Play Store. The results of this content analysis—based on the App Walkthrough Method (Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900)—show that there is a gap between academic research themes/trends and how digital narrative is actually being communicated in the current market, and it aims to inform the future development of heritage trail apps by including a list of design and content features common to this genre.     

Puzzle: A mobile application development environment using a jigsaw metaphor

ObjectiveCreate a visual mobile end user development framework, named Puzzle, which allows end users without IT background to create, modify and execute applications, and provides support for interaction with smart things, phone functions and web services.MethodsDesign of an intuitive visual metaphor and associated interaction techniques for supporting end user development in mobile devices with iterative empirical validation.ResultsOur results show that the jigsaw is an intuitive metaphor for development in a mobile environment and our interaction techniques required a limited cognitive effort to use and learn the framework. Integration of different modalities and usage of smart things was relevant for users.ConclusionPuzzle has addressed the main objective. The framework further contributes to the research on mobile end user development in order to create an incentive for users to go beyond consuming content and applications to start creating their own applications.PracticeUsage of a mobile end user development environment has the potential to create a shift from the conventional few-to-many distribution model of software to a many-to-many distribution model. Users will be able to create applications that fit their requirements and share their achievements with peers.ImplicationsThis study has indicated that the Puzzle visual environment has the potential to enable users to easily create applications and stimulate exploration of innovative scenarios through smartphones.     

博物馆展示设计思维方法初探

文章从博物馆展示设计的现状与走向出发,简要论述了博物馆展示形式的历史变化,分析了设计思维方法的基本结构及其在博物馆展示设计中的运用,结合博物馆展览的历史性、文化性、艺术性、互动性等特点,列举实例阐释了博物馆展示设计思维方法的程序,并以中国国家博物馆展示设计为例表明博物馆展示设计可有多种变换与延展方法,指出在博物馆展示设计中应灵活运用多种设计方法,实现创新。     

ID-Services: an RFID middleware architecture for mobile applications

The use of RFID middleware to support application development for and integration of RFID hardware into information systems has become quite common in RFID applications where reader devices remain stationary, which currently represents the largest part of all RFID applications in use. Another field for applying RFID technology which is offering a huge set of novel possibilities and applications are mobile applications, where readers are no longer fixed. In order to address the specific issues of mobile RFID-enabled applications and to support developers in rapid application development, we present ID-Services, an architecture for an RFID middleware that is designed to support mobile applications. The ID-Services approach has been used to implement MoVIS (Mobile Visitor Information System), a mobile application which allows museum visitors to request individually adapted multimedia information about exhibits in an intuitive way.     

Embodied imagination: a hybrid method of designing for intimacy

Abstract

Situated in the domain of research into mobile, wireless, networked and wearable computing, this exploratory paperintroduces the embodied imagination method and explains how it can contribute to the design process by creating an elastic space of performance that incorporates daily life and personal imagination into the design process. It is based on a study called Placebo Sleeves which was an experiential design phase of a larger project in wearable computing called whisper[s]. The innovation offered by this research is twofold: an integration of previously distinct methodologies, and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework relevant to the design of devices for affective, networked communication. The methodologies are shaped both by user experience models and by performance practices. We also articulate a domain of public dreaming, located at the conjunction of the private, public and secret within human existence, and suggest that shared use of mobile technologies has the potential to be situated there.     

试论数字化博物馆空间艺术形态设计构思

数字化博物馆设计基于现代电子技术的发展,作为一种视听艺术,在二维的界面载体上构建出多维的视听虚拟空间的几种空间艺术形态的探讨。数字化博物馆的空间艺术形态表现形式本身就具有鲜明的空间性。设计师对虚拟空间形态的运用,会给观众带来更多趣味性和艺术性。对于设计师而言,设计创作的关键是从二维到多维空间思考角度的转变,并赋予其全新的审美趣味交流。     

Fluid ontologies for digital museums

With the advent and accessibility of the Internet, artistic and indigenous communities are beginning to realize how digital technologies can be used as a means for documenting and preserving their histories and cultures. However, it is not yet clear what knowledge architectures are most appropriate for creating a digital museum in order to facilitate an effective collection, organization, conservation, and experience of cultural and artistic heritage. In this paper, we discuss the concept of fluid ontologies, a novel, dynamic structure for organizing and browsing knowledge in a digital museum. Fluid ontologies are flexible knowledge structures that evolve and adapt to communities interest based on contextual information articulated by human contributors, curators, and viewers, as well as artificial bots that are able to track interaction histories and infer relationships among knowledge pieces and preferences of viewers. Fluid ontologies allow for a tighter coupling between communities interests and the browsing structure of a digital museum. We present the key ideas behind the use of fluid ontologies within the context of digital museum design and seminal work in metadata/dynamic ontologies, particularly as it pertains to objects of cultural heritage, and discuss these characteristics in three concrete examples: (1) Village Voice, an online agora that ties together the narratives created by a group of Somali refugees using an iteration of community-designed ontologies, (2) Eventspace, a node-based collaborative archive for design activities, and (3) Tribal Peace, an online digital museum still under construction and evaluation that uses proactive agents to tie distributed Kumeyaay, Luiseno, and Cupeno reservations together in their quest to achieve greater political sovereignty .     

Software engineering beyond the project – Sustaining software ecosystems

ContextThe main part of software engineering methods, tools and technologies has developed around projects as the central organisational form of software development. A project organisation depends on clear bounds regarding scope, participants, development effort and lead-time. What happens when these conditions are not given? The article claims that this is the case for software product specific ecosystems. As software is increasingly developed, adopted and deployed in the form of customisable and configurable products, software engineering as a discipline needs to take on the challenge to support software ecosystems.ObjectiveThe article provides a holistic understanding of the observed and reported practices as a starting point to device specific support for the development in software ecosystems.MethodA qualitative interview study was designed based on previous long-term ethnographical inspired research.ResultsThe analysis results in a set of common features of product development and evolution despite differences in size, kind of software and business models. Design is distributed and needs to be coordinated across heterogeneous design constituencies that, together with the software, build a product specific socio-technical ecosystem. The technical design has to support the deference of part of the development not only to 3rd-party developers but also to local designers tailoring the software in the use organisation. The technical interfaces that separate the work of different design constituencies are contested and need to be maintained permanently. Development takes place as cycles within cycles – overlaying development cycles with different rhythms to accommodate different evolution drivers.ConclusionThe reported practices challenge some of the very core assumptions of traditional software engineering, but makes perfect sense, considering that the frame of reference for product development is not a project but continuous innovation across the respective ecosystem. The article provides a number of concrete points for further research.     

The Aceh Besar midwives with mobile phones project: Design and evaluation perspectives using the information and communication technologies for healthcare development model

The introduction of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as mobile phones to basic health service providers in rural areas can help bridge lacunae in their work environment, resulting from under‐capacitated resources, constrained access to information and delayed interventions. The midwife mobile phone project was implemented in 15 health centres in Aceh Besar, Indonesia involving 223 midwives. The study group (121 participants) used project cell phones to transmit health statistics to a central database, contact coordinators and peers for health advice and information, and communicate with doctors and patients. The ICT for healthcare development model (Author, Lwin, Ang, Lin, & Santoso, 2008) was used a heuristic to determine project effectiveness. Findings from the project indicate that the mobile phone has proven to be an effective and efficient device for facilitating smoother communication, and allowing speedier emergency response. The system also aids in gathering and disseminating health‐related information to midwives, who in turn convey this knowledge to the patient community. The Technology‐Community‐Management model (Author & Zhao, 2009; Lee & Author, 2008) was used as a conceptual framework for probing the design of ICT for development projects. In particular, infrastructural, economic, technological, and socio‐cultural barriers were examined to highlight the tension between a top‐down hierarchical model of technology diffusion versus a more participatory bottom‐up approach.     

Structured Reactive Controllers

Service robots, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. This requires them to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. In this paper, we show how structured reactive controllers (SRCs) satisfy these requirements. The novel feature of SRCs is that they employ and reason about plans that specify and synchronize concurrent percept-driven behavior. Powerful control abstractions enable SRCs to integrate physical action, perception, planning, and communication in a uniform framework and to apply fast but imperfect computational methods without sacrificing reliability and flexibility. Concurrent plans are represented in a transparent and modular form so that automatic planning processes can reason about the plans and revise them. We present experiments in which SRCs are used to control two autonomous mobile robots. In one of them an SRC controlled the course of action of a museum tourguide robot that has operated for thirteen days, more than ninetyfour hours, completed 620 tours, and presented 2668 exhibits.     

The impact of interface metaphor and context of use on the usability of a speech-based mobile city guide service

This experiment investigated the effect of interface metaphor and context of use (private/public) on the usability of a hierarchically structured speech-activated mobile city guide service. Two different versions of the service were evaluated using a Wizard of Oz methodology. The first was a non-metaphor standard service with numbered menu options. The second was a service based on an office filing system metaphor, with different metaphor-related menu options at each level. User performance and attitudes to the services were recorded over a six week period, and post-trial interviews conducted. Results showed that the interface metaphor improved participants' performance compared to the standard service, but had no effect on attitudes. Context of use did not affect the usability of the services, which supports their use for mobile interaction. Visualisation of the metaphor-based service significantly affected participants' attitudes, suggesting an additional benefit of using interface metaphor for the design of speech-based mobile phone services.     

Modelling mobile app requirements for semantic traceability

The paper presents a modelling method aimed to support the definition and elicitation of requirements for mobile apps through an approach that enables semantic traceability for the requirements representation. Business process-centricity is employed in order to capture requirements in a knowledge structure that retains procedural knowledge from stakeholders and can be traversed by semantic queries in order to trace domain-specific contextual information for the modelled requirements. Consequently, instead of having requirements represented as natural language items that are documented by diagrammatic models, the communication channels are switched: semantically interlinked conceptual models become the requirements representation, while free text can be used for requirements annotations/metadata. Thus, the method establishes a knowledge externalization channel between business stakeholders and app developers, also tackling the Twin Peaks bridging challenge (between requirements and early designs). The method is presented using its modelling procedure as a guiding thread, with each step illustrated by case-based samples of the modelling language and auxiliary functionality. The design work is encompassed by an existing metamodelling framework and introduces a taxonomy for modelling relations, since the metamodel is the key enabler for the goal of semantic traceability. The research was driven by the ComVantage EU research project, concerned with mobile app support for collaborative business process execution. Therefore, the project provides context for the illustrating examples; however, generalization possibilities beyond the project scope will also be discussed, with respect to both motivation and outcome.     

Real exhibitions in a virtual museum

When creating a virtual environment open to the public a number of challenges have to be addressed. The equipment has to be chosen carefully in order to be be able to withstand hard everyday usage, and the application has not only to be robust and easy to use, but has also to be appealing to the user, etc. The current paper presents findings gathered from the creation of a multi-thematic virtual museum environment to be offered to visitors of real world museums. A number of design and implementation aspects are described along with an experiment designed to evaluate alternative approaches for implementing the navigation in a virtual museum environment. The paper is concluded with insights gained from the development of the virtual museum and portrays future research plans.

北京自然博物馆展示色彩设计中生态性语言的表达

在当今的博物馆展示设计中,自然博物馆受到越来越多人的青睐。色彩作为博物馆展示设计中构成要素之一,它对自然博物馆展示设计显得尤为重要,然而如何在自然博物馆展示色彩设计中体现生态性是当下我们应该思索的一个问题。本文紧紧围绕着展示色彩设计的生态性展开论述,以北京自然博物馆展示色彩设计的生态性为例,从展示色彩设计生态性的界定到色彩设计生态性的体现依次展开,最后重点对以自然为主题博物馆展示色彩设计生态性的表达进行了构想。     

Enhancing workplace competence acquisition through a persuasive system

The continuous development of individual competences is a fundamental instrument for organizations aiming to achieve long-term competitive advantage. Digital technologies can play a pivotal role in competence acquisition by facilitating the learning process. This paper describes the design, development, and evaluation process of a competence acquisition mobile app incorporating persuasive systems principles. A pilot study involving managers from an IT consulting firm was used to evaluate the artifact. This was followed by a full-scale deployment of the mobile app with management and staff of a supermarket chain. The results indicate that the use of the mobile app effectively improved users’ learning process outcomes, as well as their ability to deploy the new competence. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.