Envisioning, designing, and rapid prototyping heritage installations with a tangible interaction toolkit

This paper discusses an empirical study on the use and appropriation of a toolkit for cultural heritage professionals and other non-technical experts (such as exhibition designers) to envision, design and prototype tangible interactive installations for visitor engagement. The Toolkit is composed of an online editor (the software) and a set of interconnected physical components and devices (the hardware). The software enables creating, adapting, deploying and testing installations together with the digital content populating them, while the hardware underpins their hands-on interactivity. The Toolkit was evaluated holistically in workshops with participants from the cultural sector. We detail aspects of the Toolkit design and how it was used in practice by collaborating teams. We discuss results showing how the Toolkit supported three phases of development of tangible heritage installations: envisioning, designing, and rapid prototyping. This paper contributes new research in HCI on digital interaction in the heritage domain, and on designing and assessing tools supporting user-driven development of novel technologies.