Crafting Tangible Interaction to Prompt Visitors' Engagement in House Museums

Abstract

This research explores design opportunities where tangible interaction enables new ways to engage visitors with the stories and artefacts on display, not in a museum as such, but within a house museum -- a particular type of heritage site where I noticed little attention from the field of interaction design. The work sits between the fields of design (e.g. exhibition design), heritage, and technology (e.g. HCI) and it investigates how the approach to designing for house museums may be different than for conventional museums. This research unfolds through a designerly approach to explore the potential of tangible interaction by means of a series of design interventions where art and design practices (e.g. creation of interpretive object), technology (e.g. tangible technologies embedded within object) and historical content (e.g. evocative narrative) are connected together to prompt visitors' personal, tangible and multi-sensory engagement at a house museum. This research is at an early stage (begun in October 2015), thus this paper presents an initial analysis of literature to frame the research, the motivations and context behind the project, the methods to achieve the goals of the study and future work plans.