Abstract
The lack of interpretation when considering the outdoor cultural heritage sites has the potential to limit the engagement and educational potential of these sites, as well as presenting a missed opportunity for visitor engagement. We pre-sent an approach that explores the development of interactive stories specific to users that documents their journey through a physical site via a tangible artefact – The Abbot’s Book. We describe the Research through Design process, which in-cluded interviews with Museum and Heritage experts, and the creation of two design prototypes that acted as probes to explore the potential to provoke emo-tional, empathetic relationships with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). Finally, we evaluated the prototypes through a reflective workshop with heritage profes-sionals. Our findings indicate that this approach offers rich potential to extend visitor engagement to reveal not only existing stories in any given heritage site, but also ask questions about untold stories.
Keywords
research-through-design; digital heritage; design methods; tangible interaction
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.922
Citation
Ahmed Maqbool, S., and Maxwell, D. (2024) Story Seeds: Creating interactive narratives for visitors of outdoor heritage sites, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.922
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Story Seeds: Creating interactive narratives for visitors of outdoor heritage sites
The lack of interpretation when considering the outdoor cultural heritage sites has the potential to limit the engagement and educational potential of these sites, as well as presenting a missed opportunity for visitor engagement. We pre-sent an approach that explores the development of interactive stories specific to users that documents their journey through a physical site via a tangible artefact – The Abbot’s Book. We describe the Research through Design process, which in-cluded interviews with Museum and Heritage experts, and the creation of two design prototypes that acted as probes to explore the potential to provoke emo-tional, empathetic relationships with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). Finally, we evaluated the prototypes through a reflective workshop with heritage profes-sionals. Our findings indicate that this approach offers rich potential to extend visitor engagement to reveal not only existing stories in any given heritage site, but also ask questions about untold stories.