Abstract
Meanings and values of built heritage vary from factual and explicit meanings which are relatively easy to present, to more tacit knowledge, which is typically more challenging to communicate due to its implicit and often abstract character. In this paper, we investigate how tangible interaction influences the communication of this tacit knowledge of built heritage, and howit affects the experience of visitors. Through a between-group comparative study in a real-world museum context, we examined howthe tangible characteristics of an interactive prototypemuseuminstallation influence how visitors perceive a particular story containing tacit heritage knowledge. The communicated story relates a historical journey in ancient Egypt to the physical and architectural characteristics of the entrance colonnade at the Djoser Complex in Saqqara. Our experimental conditions consisted of an interactive navigation (input) and a passive representation (output) components, ranging from traditional digital displays to fully tangible means of interaction. We report on our findings, which showed various differences and commonalities between our three experimental conditions. We conclude with a number of discussion points and design recommendations: (a) to strive for balance between navigation and representation modalities in terms of affordance and the required cognitive effort; (b) to take advantage of physical representation and grasping, such as conveying particular physical details and characteristics; and (c) to consider design aspects of embodiment, physical abstraction and materiality for future research or potential further development of communicating the meanings and values of heritage.
Highlights
Our built heritage forms a unique asset, as it expresses the richness and diversity of our common past
We investigate how tangible interaction influences the communication of this tacit knowledge of built heritage, and how it affects the experience of visitors
We chose to communicate the tacit knowledge of the Djoser pyramid complex in Egypt because: (a) the antiquity department at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels already possessed significant historical and archeological expertise of this particular site; (b) we discovered that its architectural layout and features are comprised of a rich variety of distinctive architectural qualities that could potentially be represented via tangible interaction, such as its spatial proportions, number and style of columns, etc. which individually (c) symbolize a specific historical story that is sufficiently compelling and interesting to be communicated to a large, lay audience
Summary
Our built heritage forms a unique asset, as it expresses the richness and diversity of our common past. More intangible or tacit meanings and values, such as the skills, ideas and experiences that the heritage represents, are typically more challenging to communicate to visitors due to their implicit and often abstract character. Such tacit knowledge is important to understand the complexity and richness of heritage as an experiential and communal concept that is not necessarily declarative or definitive. Tacit knowledge of built heritage includes, but is not limited to: (a) architectural qualities, such as how aspects of the work reinforce the oeuvre of a known or distinguished architect, the interrelationships of the different design styles within the artefact, the contributions to its environment, or particular structural or decorative aspects and their design process [2]; (b) cultural values, such as how the work has gained cultural significance with the passing of time, or how particular building characteristics illustrate specific societal developments; (c) aesthetic features, such as how the work corresponds to the sense of tradition and is manifested through an appreciation of cultural and historic characteristics [3]; or (d) symbolic significance, such as the symbolic aspects of what the work represents, or their embodied value in terms of their construction [4]
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