Tangible interaction in museums and temporary exhibitions: embedding and embodying the intangible values of cultural heritage.

Abstract

[EN] Moving from a design perspective, the paper explores the potential of tangible interaction \nin giving shape to intangible contents in museums and temporary exhibitions. \nGoing beyond tangibility intended in the strict sense of touching assets we use here a wider \ninterpretation of tangibility that considers touch in the sense of embodied experience. In \nthis way we consider as tangible all those experiences that foster a strong involvement of \nthe body when interacting with digital content. This includes objects-based and gesturesbased \ninteractions. \nTangible interaction is interpreted as a practice able to multiply the levels of the narrative, \nto make the visit experience memorable and to give materiality to intangible values. This \napproach uses tangible interaction as a way to let the audience experience practices and \nrituals linked to the contents and representative of the intangible values embedded in the \nassets. \nThe potential of tangible interaction to foster the intangible values of cultural heritage is \ndiscussed starting from a provisional classification of tangible interaction case studies. In \nparticular four different categories are identified that are: smart replicas/originals, \nsymbolic objects, codified gestures and performing gestures. \nIn conclusion, two possible design strategies that employ tangible interaction for enabling \nthe experience of intangible values of cultural heritage are highlighted. These are: \nEmbedding meaning: it consists in creating sensorised objects that embed in themselves \nmeanings related to intangible values of cultural heritage, and that communicate explicitly \nthis meaning in their physicality; \nEmbodying meaning: it consists in integrating a meaning related to intangible values in \ngestures, so that intangible values are communicated implicitly in the action performed by \nthe visitor.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.