Can Digital Interactions Support New Dialogue Around Heritage?

摘要

My abracadabra wish for interaction design is for the field to take a renewed look at heritage as a practiced domain, to go beyond the visitor- interpretation-focused functional approach of conveying content, often in only one "institutional" voice. Interaction design and cultural heritage have a long and sometimes conflicting relationship. Technologies for collection management and information capturing have been used by cultural professionals in their practice for several decades, providing an effective infrastructure for archiving, retrieving, and cross-linking information about heritage holdings. This also established a set of expert categories shaping how objects are understood and displayed to the public, often to the exclusion of other perspectives or voices. Information-capturing tools (for images, audio content, etc.) enabled the recognition and archival of a large body of heritage content (such as oral histories) in a more democratic way, but also created other forms of exclusion and access [1]. Interactive technologies have featured in museums, exhibitions, and historic sites since the early days of audio guides enabling visitors to personalize the trajectory of their visit. At the same time, they have been known to hinder social interaction and limit dialogue by delivering only one perspective on an exhibit or series of objects. Even these early examples brought to the fore the complexity of the discourse around heritage technologies.