Crafting Critical Heritage Discourses into Interactive Exhibition Design

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory

Tangible auditory interfaces : combining auditory displays and tangible interfaces

Bovermann T. Tangible auditory interfaces : combining auditory displays and tangible interfaces. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2009.Tangible Auditory Interfaces (TAIs) investigates into the capabilities of the interconnection of Tangible User Interfaces and Auditory Displays. TAIs utilise artificial physical objects as well as soundscapes to represent digital information. The interconnection of the two fields establishes a tight coupling between information and operation that is based on the human's familiarity with the incorporated interrelations. This work gives a formal introduction to TAIs and shows their key features at hand of seven proof of concept applications

Differential Accumulation: Toward a New Political Economy of Capital

Existing theories of capital, neo-classical as well as Marxist, are anchored in the material sphere of production and consumption. This article offers a new analytical framework for capital as a crystallization of power. The relative nature of power requires accumulation to be measured in differential, not absolute, terms. For absentee owners, the main goal is not to maximize pro.ts, but rather to ‘beat the average’ and exceed the ‘normal rate of return’. The theoretical framework builds on Thorstein Veblen’s separation of industry from business and on Lewis Mumford’s dichotomy between democratic and authoritarian techniques. Extending their contributions, we argue that capital is a business, not an industrial category, a human mega-machine rather than a material artefact. Indeed, it is the social essence of capital which makes accumulation possible in the .rst place. Capital measures the present value of future business earnings, and these depend not on the productivity of industry as such, but on the ability of absentee owners strategically to limit such productivity to their own differential ends. Introducing the twin concepts of the ‘differential power of capital’ (DPK) and the rate of ‘differential accumulation’ (DA), we examine the non-linear and possibly negative link between industrial growth and accumulation in the US

Substitutional reality:using the physical environment to design virtual reality experiences

Experiencing Virtual Reality in domestic and other uncontrolled settings is challenging due to the presence of physical objects and furniture that are not usually defined in the Virtual Environment. To address this challenge, we explore the concept of Substitutional Reality in the context of Virtual Reality: a class of Virtual Environments where every physical object surrounding a user is paired, with some degree of discrepancy, to a virtual counterpart. We present a model of potential substitutions and validate it in two user studies. In the first study we investigated factors that affect participants' suspension of disbelief and ease of use. We systematically altered the virtual representation of a physical object and recorded responses from 20 participants. The second study investigated users' levels of engagement as the physical proxy for a virtual object varied. From the results, we derive a set of guidelines for the design of future Substitutional Reality experiences