DIY approach to Tangible and Embodied Visitor Experiences – Booth 9

Demonstration
Dick van Dijk, Waag Society, The Netherlands, Daniela Petrelli, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, Dario Cavada, eCTRL Solutions, ITALY, nick dulake, Sheffield Hallam University , UK

There is a notable need for museums and cultural heritage sites to engage visitors in different ways and to put the collection back into the center of the visit. The meSch project (www.mesch-project.eu) takes the stance that materiality complements and completes cognition and therefore a personally meaningful and sensorily rich experience with museum exhibits and places can greatly improve both the visitors’ experience and their appreciation for the museum’s cultural values. By empowering cultural heritage professionals with a technological platform to help them create their own interactive, smart and tangible exhibitions, meSch aims at making the encounter of digital and material more sustainable in museums. The smart exhibits can have a high impact on visitor experience, with the technological means disappearing much more into the background. The demo will introduce the meSch tools: a starter/demo kit that connects to the online meSch platform (an authoring tool for multimedia content) and with various recipes for interactive exhibits as been developed so far by meSch consortium partners Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra (Trento, Italy), Allard Pierson Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Museon (The Hague, the Netherlands).

Bibliography:
1. Dudley, S. (2010) Museum materialities: Objects, sense and feeling. In Dudley, S. (ed.) Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations.
Routledge
2. Kubitza, T., Schmidt, A. (2013) First Set: Physical Components for the Creation of Interactive Exhibits. Proceedings of TEI '14, 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (http://www.teiconf.org/14/wip/wip-kubitza.pdf)
3. Petrelli, D., Ciolfi, L., van Djik, D., Hornecker, E., Not, E. and Schmidt, A. (2013) Integrating Material and Digital: A New Way for Cultural Heritage.
ACM Interactions 20(4), July + August 2013, 58–63
4. McDermott, F., Clarke, L., Avram, G. and Hornecker, E. (2013) The Challenges and Opportunities Faced by Cultural Heritage Professionals in Designing Interactive Exhibits, In Proceedings of NODEM 2013, Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums Conference, Stockholm, Sweden Dec. 2013
(http://www.academia.edu/5694408/Challenges_and_opportunities_faced_by_cultural_heritage_professionals_in_designing_interactive_exhibits)
5. D. Petrelli, M. Marshall, E. Not, M. Zancanaro, A. Venturini, D. Cavada, T. Kubitza, A. Schmidt, M. Risseeuw D. van Dijk, M. (2015) meSch: Implementing the Internet of Things for Cultural Heritage. Proc. of International conference on Digital Heritage, Granada 28 September – 2 October 2015
6. M. Zancanaro, E. Not, D. Petrelli, M. Marshall, T. van Dijk, M. Riseeuw, D. van Dijk, A. Venturini, D. Cavada, T. Kubitza, (2015) Recipes for tangible and embodied visit experiences. Museum and the Web 2015