Balancing adaptivity and customisation : in search of sustainable personalisation in cultural heritage

Personalisation for cultural heritage aims at delivering to visitors the right stories at the right time. Our endeavour to determine which features to use for adaptation starts from acknowledging what forms of personalisation curators value as most meaningful. Working in collaboration with curators we have explored the different features that must be taken into account: some are related to the content (multiple interpretation layers), others to the context of delivery (where and when), but some are idiosyncratic (“match my mood”, “something that is relevant to my life”). The findings reveal that a sustainable personalization needs to accurately balance: (i) support to curators in customising stories to different visitors; (ii) algorithms for the system to dynamically model aspects of the visit and instantiate the correct behaviour; and (iii) an active role for visitors to choose the type of experience they would like to have today

Blending customisation, context-awareness and adaptivity for personalised tangible interaction in cultural heritage

Shaping personalization in a scenario of tangible, embedded and embodied interaction for cultural heritage involves challenges that go well beyond the requirements of implementing content personalization for portable mobile guides. Content is coupled with the physical experience of the objects, the space, and the facets of the context – being those personal or social – acquire a more prominent role. This paper presents a personalization framework to support complex scenarios that combine the physical, the digital, and the social dimensions of a visit. It is based on our experience in collaborating with curators and museum experts to understand and shape personalization in a way that is meaningful to them and to visitors alike, that is sustainable to implement and effective in managing the complexity of context-awareness. The pro posed approach features a decomposition of personalization into multiple layers of complexity that involve a blend of customization on the visitor’s initiative or according to the visitor’s profile, system context-awareness, and automatic adaptivity computed by the system based on the visitor’s behaviour model. We use a number of case studies of implemented exhibitions where this approach was used to illustrate its many facets and how adaptive techniques can be effectively complemented with interaction design, rich narratives and visitors’ choice to create deeply personal experiences. Overarching reflections spanning case studies and prototypes provide evidence of the viability of the proposed frame work, and illustrate the final effect of the user experience