Last week was the third international ACM workshop on personalized access to cultural heritage (Patch ’14). Given our current work with Winnipeg art gallery about interactive cases for inuit art, we send short paper that illustrates the design framework that we use to design these cases. Unfortunately, there are no writers who can travel to Haifa (Guo and I am processing permission from our Canadian residence and Pourang are in leave) and therefore cannot present paper, but the organizer makes it public and we can discuss it here.

I think using a transparent appearance at the exhibition is one of the cool things. And even rather clear, it is not difficult to find the most transparent display manufacturer -Brushing their appearance as the perfect equipment for displaying products. However, we believe they are more than just placing objects in this case. The purpose of our paper is to reveal aspects that need to be taken into account when designing the system. To do this, we conducted a series of studies in various museums that made us determine the requirements for transparent exhibition cases. The requirements include:

• To support the exploration of as much as possible the angle required by the artifacts.
• To link information to objects in a way that can be accessed.
• To present information in an unconscious and intuitive way.
• To facilitate information scaffolding around the idea of ​​the interpretation layer.
• To support collaborative interactions.
• To allow open exploration.

Based on these requirements, we scan the previous project literature, talk to other researchers, analyze existing installations, etc. … and consolidate all this information into a definition of design space. I think this is the most important contribution of this paper, and can be used by anyone who designs this type of system:

As you can see, the framework presents dimensions that guide very specific design decisions. I really like it, for example, displaying coverage, which shows that not all sides of the case must be used for visual output but also the pure transparent side is actually comfortable to support other visitors who do not interact. As an example of a type of case that our design framework helps design, we present two artificial designs:

Figure 4 on paper: Two examples of interactive exhibition cases that meet six requirements. A) Cylinder Cylinder, Insert shows IR LEDs and ultrasonic proximity sensors. B) Wall kasing, aligned text.

You can get a copy of our paper here. The following is an abstract for our paper:

Interactive technologies in museums enhance the visit experience
by providing contextual information and fostering collaboration
and participation. In this paper we revisit the design of the
ubiquitous transparent exhibition case from a museum learning
perspective. Transparent cases with interactive properties can
complement other museum technologies and mitigate some of
their shortcomings, such as the group isolation caused by audio
guides and mobile devices. This paper focuses on the design of
interactive cases and makes three contributions. First, based on
field observations and interviews we present a list of requirements
for interactive cases. Second, we propose a design space with
dimensions grouped around the themes of hardware, interaction
and information design. Our design space suggests interactive
cases which present collocated information at increasing levels of
detail, facilitate social interaction, and integrate with other
technologies. Third, we demonstrate our design space through
sample case designs and discuss the general technical challenges.


Resource

• Hincapié-Ramos, JD, Guo, X. and Irani, P. 2014. Designing an interactive transparent exhibition case. Proceedings of the third International ACM Workshop on personalized access to cultural heritage (Patch ’14). February 2014. ACM.