Conservation architecture and the narrative imperative: Birmingham back to backs

The paper uses a case study to explore how the opposing logics of conservation architecture and interpretive exhibition design were played out in the shaping of a narrative museum space. The former concerns itself with an archaeological conception of physical space, which is defined through the decipherability of traces and their layering over time. The latter concerns itself with a theatrical notion of event space defined through the mapping and programming of performances and information flows. The contingencies of the Birmingham Back to Backs project – its incep¬tion, the in¬volvement of the National Trust, the foregrounding of community interests and the interpretive design process – gave rise to a novel resolution of contrasting interests. A particular idea of narrative was able to frame the use of, on the one hand, physical evidence to interpret what may have existed and, on the other, a combination of lived and documentary evidence to reconstruct the patterns of daily life. This can be understood as a process of recovering ordinary lives. The research addresses the following conference themes: sites overlaid with narrative, the role of visitor-centred design in the production of museum space, and the emergence of new approaches that cut across disciplines. Analysis of interpretive design and heritage management documentation is informed by Samuel’s theorization of the shaping power of memory (1994). However, overall, the approach is pragmatic, in that it engages in critical conversations, resists reductionism, and tries to point up what may be useful in helping us cope together in the world. The principal conclusions concern the role that a focus on narrative (re)construction can play in framing cross-disciplinary collaboration and the potential of embracing radically different conceptions of space in museum design

Multisensory interactive storytelling to augment the visit of a historical house museum

We present an interactive and multisensory intervention designed for a house museum. Digital technology holds great potential for such heritage sites, but current use is limited to the pre- and post-visit experience. Interviews with museum professionals highlighted their concerns about technology placed in historic houses and suggested four design principles that we used to carefully integrate interactive technology, and the value of a bespoke installation. The installation, the Interactive Tableaux, shows a novel use of digital interactive storytelling where we combined both tangible qualities and informational aspects while respecting the aesthetic of the house and its home feeling. We discuss the process of crafting a conversation in and with a particular place and present evidence from our evaluations that the interactive multisensory installation encouraged observation, reflection and conversation

Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st Century Archive

Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st-century Archive develops an original approach to studying feminisms media infrastructures, focusing on U.S. lesbian feminism from the early 1970s to the present. The dissertation proposes the concept of feminist information activism, in which engagements with commonplace media facilitate access to marginalized information and networks through purposefully designed interfaces. Newsletter print culture and other activist-oriented information contexts such as bibliographic and indexing projects, and community archives, sought to unite feminist publics with difficult-to-find published materials. In each of these cases, activists worked to collect and parse large amounts of information that would make marginal lesbian lives visible, adopting various information management and compression techniques to do so. These tactics often created anxieties over the effects rationalization procedures might have on information that ultimately attempted to represent messy and politically complex feminist lives. To address these tensions, activists re-worked existing standards in information management through the use of new networks, the design of unique subject-classification schemes, and the appropriation of tools such as index cards and early computer databases. Chapter one investigates 1970s newsletter culture, drawing on a select print archive to argue that these documents imagined a mode of network thinking critical to feminist social movements prior to the web. Chapter two examines indexing and bibliography projects of the 1980s, tracing their critical appropriations of early database computing through interviews, archival research in these projects papers, and historical research on indexing standards gathered from late 20th-century instructional manuals. Chapters three and four draw out connections between these print forms and todays digital feminisms through a study of ongoing digitization practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Through interviews and observation with archives staff, and documentary research in organizational records, these chapters examine feminisms influence on the design and implementation of accessible digitization projects that counter accepted archival standards. Framed by the historical chapters on feminist print activism; this study of feminist digitization re-casts indexing and bibliographic projects of the 1980s, and newsletters of the 1970s as media histories that situate todays digital feminisms in a longer genealogy.Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st-century Archive develops an original approach to studying feminisms media infrastructures, focusing on U.S. lesbian feminism from the early 1970s to the present. The dissertation proposes the concept of feminist information activism, in which engagements with commonplace media facilitate access to marginalized information and networks through purposefully designed interfaces. Newsletter print culture and other activist-oriented information contexts such as bibliographic and indexing projects, and community archives, sought to unite feminist publics with difficult-to-find published materials. In each of these cases, activists worked to collect and parse large amounts of information that would make marginal lesbian lives visible, adopting various information management and compression techniques to do so. These tactics often created anxieties over the effects rationalization procedures might have on information that ultimately attempted to represent messy and politically complex feminist lives. To address these tensions, activists re-worked existing standards in information management through the use of new networks, the design of unique subject-classification schemes, and the appropriation of tools such as index cards and early computer databases. Chapter one investigates 1970s newsletter culture, drawing on a select print archive to argue that these documents imagined a mode of network thinking critical to feminist social movements prior to the web. Chapter two examines indexing and bibliography projects of the 1980s, tracing their critical appropriations of early database computing through interviews, archival research in these projects papers, and historical research on indexing standards gathered from late 20th-century instructional manuals. Chapters three and four draw out connections between these print forms and todays digital feminisms through a study of ongoing digitization practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Through interviews and observation with archives staff, and documentary research in organizational records, these chapters examine feminisms influence on the design and implementation of accessible digitization projects that counter accepted archival standards. Framed by the historical chapters on feminist print activism; this study of feminist digitization re-casts indexing and bibliographic projects of the 1980s, and newsletters of the 1970s as media histories that situate todays digital feminisms in a longer genealogy

Using Virtual Environments as a Visual Interface for Accessing Cultural Database Contents

Cultural institutions have to deal with an enormous amount of data, which are stored in cultural databases usually designed for and managed by professionals. Difficulties in accessing such databases usually preclude or limit their use for the general public. Moreover, in the historic, artistic and cultural areas, an important part of the information associated to an object is related to its original historical and spatial context, an evidence that is often not disclosed, or is difficult to explain, to the non experts. For this reason, it is important to try to re-contextualize - where possible - the elements of cultural collections in the places where these objects were in the past. To this end, in this work we propose the integration of databases and Virtual Reality technologies to develop novel visual interfaces to improve the accessibility, for the non experts, to the contents of cultural databases. Virtual Reality is used to re-create the contextual environment of the objects in the database, which can be explored to gain new insights on specific elements and to improve the awareness of relationships between them. The use of two different types of Virtual Environments has been investigated in the development of the proposed visual interfaces. Results of their evaluation by a user panel, in order to assess the accessibility and effectiveness of both interfaces in relation to each other and with a classic text-based interface, are also presente

Greater good, empowerment and democratization? Affordances of the crowdsourcing transcription projects

Digital technology and Internet access have created new possibilities for museums and archives for digitization of their collections. Steadily, more museums are experimenting with inviting their audiences to participate in tagging images, annotating, transcribing historical texts or cropping photographs. This article is an exploration of visual and functional aspects of various digital interfaces frequently being used in crowdsourcing projects involving transcribing manuscripts. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with the editors of the projects and systematic technical walkthroughs of MediaWiki platforms (Edvard Munch’s Writings and Transcribe Bentham) and Zooniverse platforms (AnnoTate and Shakespeare’s World). The analysis aims to explore platforms’ affordances (Gibson 1978), in other words the opportunities that the layout and design offer to users interacting with facsimiles of manuscripts (‘digital networked objects’) (Cameron and Mengler 2015). The questions raised are whether and how the interfaces empower users and perform as a democratic actor providing the volunteers with agency. The platforms’ interfaces have emerged as an important and undervalued actor-network of elements which configure heterogeneous relations among actors and influence users’ engagement

Human-powered smartphone assistance for blind people

Mobile devices are fundamental tools for inclusion and independence. Yet, there are still many open research issues in smartphone accessibility for blind people (Grussenmeyer and Folmer 2017). Currently, learning how to use a smartphone is non-trivial, especially when we consider that the need to learn new apps and accommodate to updates never ceases. When first transitioning from a basic feature-phone, people have to adapt to new paradigms of interaction. Where feature phones had a finite set of applications and functions, users can extend the possible functions and uses of a smartphone by installing new 3rd party applications. Moreover, the interconnectivity of these applications means that users can explore a seemingly endless set of workflows across applications. To that end, the fragmented nature of development on these devices results in users needing to create different mental models for each application. These characteristics make smartphone adoption a demanding task, as we found from our eight-week longitudinal study on smartphone adoption by blind people. We conducted multiple studies to characterize the smartphone challenges that blind people face, and found people often require synchronous, co-located assistance from family, peers, friends, and even strangers to overcome the different barriers they face. However, help is not always available, especially when we consider the disparity in each barrier, individual support network and current location. In this dissertation we investigated if and how in-context human-powered solutions can be leveraged to improve current smartphone accessibility and ease of use. Building on a comprehensive knowledge of the smartphone challenges faced and coping mechanisms employed by blind people, we explored how human-powered assistive technologies can facilitate use. The thesis of this dissertation is: Human-powered smartphone assistance by non-experts is effective and impacts perceptions of self-efficacy

Elevating the Everyday: Designed Objects as Companions

From fleeting interactions to long affairs, our relationships with things are diverse and complex. Like people, designed objects and environments are close companions in our lives. The way we understand and engage with artifacts is parallel to the way we interpret and interact with each other. A constant source of comfort and delight, frustration and anxiety, their personalities inform our everyday dialogues and experiences. Designed artifacts assume engaging and pleasurable personalities when they transcend materials, challenge perceptions, and garner active, reflective interactions. Through the investigation of familiar materials such as concrete, crayons, paper, sequins, and thread in unfamiliar formats and contexts, I am creating objects that are playful in construction and interaction. By imbuing objects with friendly and intriguing personalities, everyday interactions and experiences with these objects are elevated, as users invest in pleasurable forays and relationships

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Towards a global participatory platform: Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project's own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed. Graphical abstrac