An Agenda for Designing Natural Interaction in a Museum Context

This paper presents four research-­‐themes that originate in investigations into interaction-­‐ design, new digital technologies, natural user interfaces and embodiment. The themes are 1) The body as interaction device 2) Pervasive presence of information collection, information access and information processing 3) Re-­‐understanding information in terms of presentation, representation, navigation, search & findability 4) Transgression of realities from virtual to real and real to virtual. These themes are in particular relevant to the context of museums as they reflect the dominant direction and challenges of many contemporary ICT solutions. Understanding and building on these themes will, among other things, allow museums to create solutions that integrates and draws support from existing ICT experiences of museum-­‐ goes. And more interestingly, then the context of The Transformative Museum constitutes a forum for exploring the boundaries of these four themes. The paper will examplify the themes through a number of cases from the museum-­‐world.
The outset of the paper is my ph.d. project which investigates the relationship between interactivity and animation. Animation has the wonderful and woeful ability of bringing life to otherwise dead objects and characters. ”if is moves, then it is alive” said filmmaker Segey Eisenstein [in Wells 2002]. Interactivity is basically various communicative modalities of power over content [Jensen 1997], [Preece 2007] and is as such an intrinsic part of any exhange of information between humans and humans and machines. Animation is only one of the many expressive modalities (and materials) that are used to design frameworks and objects for interactivity, but it seems that the power of shaping movement locates animation in a defining position in this framework. This defining position is established by the wide palette of digital input & output modalities and consumer products that has appeared in recent years. These technologies enables the realisation of a new paradigm of interaction which contains a (probably) limitless array of new approaches to the design of digitally based interaction. The digital nature of these technologies enables convergense and new combinations of existing objects and contexts, but also the establishment of new objects and contexts. This potential of digital technologies is very well illustrated by the Multiverse model developed by Joe Pine and Kim Korn [Pine 2011]. The defining position of animation is a result of the complexity constituted by this bit-­‐based mash-­‐up. Animation offers an invisible link between all the components as their relations and properties can be communicated through movement. And as the paradigm is largely based on body-­‐based interaction (touch, speech, sound, gestures, motion, device orientation), then we also expect the digital objects to respond to our movements through matching movements.
The four themes become the cornerstones for understanding, designing and communicating within this parallel interaction-­‐paradigm and must taken into consideration when investigating The Transformative Museum.