Making Exhibitions, Brokering Meaning: Designing new connections across communities of practice

New media museum exhibits often see designers representing the research of expert content providers. Despite perceptions that such exhibits provide museum visitors with a greater depth and range of experience, differences in knowledge and practice between designers and content providers can see content development become an unruly, competitive process in which audience experience, digital mediation, visualisation techniques and meaning become contested territory. Drawing on Etienne Wenger’s theory of “communities of practice”, this paper argues that designers’ advocacy for audiences and distance from exhibition content well positions them to broker interdisciplinary goal setting so that exhibitions observe the representational objectives of content providers and meet the needs and preferences of museum visitors. A wide range of design literature already discusses the pragmatic benefits and ethical importance of user-centered design, while the literature on co-design suggests that designed outcomes are more successful if the design process considers the interests of all stakeholders. These discussions can be compelling, but the inherent challenges in engaging others’ perspectives and knowledge in the design process are less acknowledged, Wenger’s ideas on the social dynamics of group enterprise offering designers valuable insights into the actuality of negotiating designed outcomes with non-designer stakeholders. The paper has two main aspects. The first outlines the theory of communities of practice, focusing on the brokering of knowledge and practice between disciplines. This discussion frames an analysis of the design process for two museum exhibitions. Representing an original application of Wenger’s ideas, the discussion recognises the unique role of the designed artifact in brokering information visualization processes, transcending the actions and intentions of individual stakeholders. While accepting there are successful examples of interdisciplinary exchange in various areas of design, the interpretation of examples via Wenger contributes useful principles to the theorisation of co-design with non-designer stakeholders. Keywords: Information visualization; New media museum exhibits; Multidisciplinary projects; Communities of Practice; Brokering; User-centered design; Co-Design; Etienne Wenger</p

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Digital archiving of manuscripts and other heritage items for conservation and information retrieval

Expression of cultural heritage looking from the informatics angle falls into text, images, video and sound categories. ICT can be used to conserve all these heritage items like; the text information consisting of palm leaf manuscripts, stone tablets, handwritten paper documents, old printed records, books, microfilms, fiche etc, images including paintings, drawings, photographs and the like, sound items which includes musical concerts, poetry recitations, chanting of mantras, talks of important persons etc, and video items like archival films historical importance. To retrieve required information from such a large mass of materials in different formats and to transmit them across space and time, there are several limitations. Digital technology allows hitherto unavailable facilities for durable storage and speedy and efficient transmission / retrieval of information contained in all the above formats. Hypertext and hypermedia features of digital media enable integrating text with graphics, sound, video and animation. This paper discusses the international and national efforts for digitizing heritage items, digital archiving solutions available, the possibilities of the media, and the need to follow standards prescribed by organizations like UNESCO to enable easy exchange and pooling of information and documents generated in digital archiving systems at national and international level. The need to develop language technology for local scripts for organizing and preserving our cultural heritage is also stressed

Updating the art history curriculum: incorporating virtual and augmented reality technologies to improve interactivity and engagement

Master's Project (M.Ed.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This project investigates how the art history curricula in higher education can borrow from and incorporate emerging technologies currently being used in art museums. Many art museums are using augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to transform their visitors' experiences into experiences that are interactive and engaging. Art museums have historically offered static visitor experiences, which have been mirrored in the study of art. This project explores the current state of the art history classroom in higher education, which is historically a teacher-centered learning environment and the learning effects of that environment. The project then looks at how art museums are creating visitor-centered learning environments; specifically looking at how they are using reality technologies (virtual and augmented) to transition into digitally interactive learning environments that support various learning theories. Lastly, the project examines the learning benefits of such tools to see what could (and should) be implemented into the art history curricula at the higher education level and provides a sample section of a curriculum demonstrating what that implementation could look like. Art and art history are a crucial part of our culture and being able to successfully engage with it and learn from it enables the spread of our culture through digital means and of digital culture

Pervasive Gaming: Testing Future Context Aware Applications

More and more technical research projects take place that weave together elements of real and virtual life to provide a new experience defined as pervasive. They bank on the development of mobile services to drive the expansion of pervasive applications and in particular pervasive games. Using geolocalisation, local networks and short range radio frequencies technologies like RFID or other tagging technologies, pervasive games rely on a close relationship to the environment and thus explore the space between fiction and reality. This is their main quality but possibly their main weakness as the development relies on the production of specific contents in relation to the context of use. In this article, we propose to explore what this entirely new paradigm for game design implies in terms of production and how to overcome the limitations due to this dependency of contents and context. Based on our experience of three pervasive games developed within research projects on adhoc wifi (ANR-Safari and ANRTranshumance) and RFID networks (ANR-PLUG), this paper presents different options to reducing the cost of content production relying on either traditional editors or grass root contributions.pervasive games, content production, game design, geolocalised technologies.

Assessing the Prospects of the Integration of Mobile Device Applications in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Educational Framework

The Victoria and Albert Museum desired research regarding the concept of enhancing education through technology and the usefulness of handheld device applications in a museum setting. Previous studies suggested that mobile device applications enhanced learning. Our team used this research, surveys, and an educational benefit analysis and determined the effectiveness of the technology in educating visitors and their feelings on it. Our analyses demonstrated that participants\u27 learning improved and they felt inclined towards expanding the technology throughout the museum

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications