Sensing context: Reflexive design principles for intersensory museum interactions (original) (raw)

Paper
Daniel Harley, Ryerson University, Canada, Melanie McBride, York University, Canada, Jean Ho Chu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, Jamie Kwan, Ryerson University, Canada, Jason Nolan, Ryerson University, Canada, Ali Mazalek, Ryerson University, Canada

Published paper: Sensing context: Reflexive design principles for intersensory museum interactions

Artifacts in cultural history museums are typically enclosed in glass displays, decontextualized from their social and cultural origins, resulting in a “look, but don’t touch” encounter. With reference to perspectives and counter-perspectives of the “multisensory museum” (Levent & Pascual-Leone, 2014), this paper describes our development of experimental interactive prototypes based on early sixteenth-century boxwood prayer-nuts. Our work aims to engage the historical, social, and cultural contexts through sensory interactions involving smell, touch, and sound, with visual and aural feedback. Given the neglect of smell from many museum encounters, we draw special attention to our conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel smell interaction. Building on these experiences, we offer an “intersensory” intervention of the multisensory paradigm through our considerations for meaningful, contextual, and inclusive design with the senses.

Bibliography:
Agapakis, C. M., & Tolaas, S. (2012). Smelling in multiple dimensions. Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, 16(5), 569–575.
Chu, J. H., Clifton, P., Harley, D., Pavao, J., & Mazalek, A. (2015). Mapping Place: Supporting Cultural Learning through a Lukasa-inspired Tangible Tabletop Museum Exhibit. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 261–268). ACM.
Classen, C., Howes, D. & Synnott, A. (1994). Aroma: The cultural history of smell. Routledge: London.
Falkenburg, R., (1999). “Toys for the Soul Prayer-Nuts and Pomanders in Late Medieval Devotion.” In F. Russell (ed.). A Sense of Heaven: 16th Century Boxwood Carvings for Private Devotion. Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute.
Gibson, J. J. (2013). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Psychology Press.
Henshaw, V. (2013). Urban smellscapes: understanding and designing city smell environments. London: Routledge.
Howes, D. (2005). Empire of the senses: the sensual culture reader. Oxford: Berg.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.
Jewitt, C. (2009). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis. London: Routledge.
Kress, G., & Selander, S. (2012). Multimodal design, learning and cultures of recognition. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(4), 265–268.
Kwan, J. Chu, J. H., Harley, D., McBride, M., & Mazalek, A. (2016). Grasping Cultural Context with Multisensory Interactions. Extended Abstract in the Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, ACM.
Levent, N., & Pascual-Leone, A. (Eds.) (2014). The multisensory museum: cross-disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
McBride, M., Harley, D., Mazalek, A., & Nolan, J. (2016). Beyond vaporware: considerations for meaningful design with smell. In CHI'16 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM.
McBride, M., & Nolan, J. (In Press; expected 2016). Including smell: An intersensory curriculum, by design. In V. Henshaw, K. MacLean, D. Medway, C. Perkins and G. Warnaby (Eds.), Designing with smell: practices, techniques and challenges. New York: Routledge.
Nolan, J., & McBride, M. (2014). Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments. Information, Communication & Society, 17(5), 594–608.
Nolan, J., & McBride, M. (2015). Embodied semiosis: Autistic “stimming” as sensory praxis. In In P. Trifonas, (Ed.), The international handbook of semiotics (pp. 1069–1078). Berlin: Springer.
Scholten, F. (1999). “Prayer-Nuts and Other Boxwood Micro-Carvings.” In F. Russell (ed.). A Sense of Heaven: 16th Century Boxwood Carvings for Private Devotion. Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute.
Scholten, F. (2011). A prayer-nut for Francois Du Puy. Burlington Magazine, 153(1300), 447–451.