Workshop Introduction

We are delighted to host the international workshop Re-Thinking Technology in Museums, made possible by the generous support of Convivio, the EU-sponsored Network for People-Centred Interactive Design. Over the past few years work at the Interaction Design Centre has dealt with a number of issues regarding the complex relationship between museums and galleries and interactive technologies. Whereas museums are one of the domains where the proliferation of multimedia applications has been most evident in the recent past, we felt that a number of significant issues regarding how to approach the design of museum interactives in the museum context are still open to debate and discussion. For example, how do we develop an understanding of the museum and its visitors in order to inform the design of interactives? How do we evaluate their impact? How do we ensure that the technology does not distract visitors from exploring the artefacts themselves? The primary motivation for organising this event lies in the work that our research group has conducted in the past years regarding the design and evaluation of museum interactives and technologically-enhanced exhibits. We have conducted feasibility studies and heuristic evaluations of more traditional museum interactives such as websites and touch-screen kiosks, showing how these latter installations can become a cause for visitor distraction when placed around exhibitis without an analysis of the spatial layout (Hertzum, 1998; Ciolfi, Bannon and Fernström, 2001). More recently we have been involved in a major EU-funded project, SHAPE, devoted to designing and developing asssemblies of hybrid, mixed-reality artefacts in museums and exploratoria 1 . Our centre coordinated work leading to a major interactive exhibition, “ReTracing the Past”, which took place at the Hunt Museum in Limerick during June 2003 (Ferris et al, 2004). In this context we conducted in-depth studies of the behaviour and practices of both museum staff and visitors in the Hunt Museum (Ciolfi and Bannon, 2002). On the basis of our findings, we developed a series of design sensitivities to inform the development of design scenarios (Ciolfi and Bannon, 2003).