1- Executive Summary

100-200 words
The work package Exhibition Design, Technology of Representation and Experimental Actions is
permeated throughout by the work of practitioners, designers, artists, technologist and
computation-based practice. The use of technologies within both research practice and
interventions within the MeLA project, spearheaded by the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction
Designs team of interaction design researchers. The work purposefully serves throughout as
prompt, provocation and forward potential for new museum studies and social sciences research
approaches into exhibition and representation that engage with digital, computational and
technological dimensions. Cultural institutions, as an organisational form, are classically
approached through case-study and related textual and cultural humanities analysis. The intent of
the work package activities are here oriented towards augmenting and supplementing the readings
of museums research, user studies and related and resultant research outputs. The work is
synthetic, and constitutive of graphic and design-based outputs which characterise museumdesign case studies in a topological way, creates a new method for and designs for a critical
archive that summarises and orients outputs for the MeLA project as a whole.

2. Introduction
300-400 words + graphics if needed
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Designs (CIID) work is a studio and practice-based design
research group based within a context and history of a commercial consultancy, itself heavily
oriented toward the fulfilment of client-specific and user-specific needs. As such, the work of the
CIID group is heavily oriented towards methodological and design-deliverable research work.
Collaboration with the MeLA project, a project largely composed by museum studies, cultural
studies and architectural critique groups, represents a departure for the type of work CIID normal
undertakes. The interdisciplinary nature of the MeLA work, as it implicates material and designoriented practices of real museum spaces, as well as the critical and history analyses of these
spaces, allowed the work package described herein to provide a bridge between contemporary
design and interaction design research with discourse, historical and critique oriented work of other
partners. Involvement and key partnerships on the Exhibition Design, Technology of
Representation and Experimental Actions work package include the INDACO at Polytechnico
Milano, the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, as well as the Study Centre
group at MACBA.
The first portion of systems and research work created, in collaboration with all project
partners, was the development of a system for the collection of case-study material, early in the
MeLA project. The intention was both to understand the constitution of individual cases for the
groups on the project (as a diversity of approaches indeed resulted in a multitude of different
conceptions of what constituted a case study), collect these, and finally provide a visualised,
communicable output that could be used to illicit trends, opportunities, insights and multiple
readings. This first portion of interaction research was informed by concepts and practices in the
digital huamnities, including the idea of a far reading of data-sets from cultural content (i.e.:
cultural analytics, data visualisation). A second collaborative output to be summarised here
originating from Exhibition Design, Technology of Representation and Experimental Actions, was
the development of a speculative approach to the use of head-mounted camera systems, and a
particular analysis and interview technique originating with partners at the International Centre for
Cultural and Heritage Studies. A further design-activity and effort was put towards the designdevelopment and visual-cultural research of an interface and database strategy for the
3. Approaches and Results
Unlimited: for example 2000 words

The contemporary culture of museums is a culture in service of a public. As such, in each of its
guises (e.g.: as institutions of artistic, heritage, historical, scientific and social import) this culture
must recognise popular techno-cultures and mass media, while manifesting histories and styles
that have evolved through research conventions, archival and conservation practices, art history
and science, amongst others. The institutional culture of cultural institutions has often been subject
to challenges, concerns and anxieties about the adoption of new technologies, implicitly behind the
scenes, and explicitly in the design of public exhibition spaces. As technologies become more
distributed in geographic and social senses, becoming foundational to culture itself as in our
contemporary spheres, museums are continuously challenged to understand the roles they should
play in the broader, digital, technical media landscape. What do technologies do to reframe the
proposition of the museum as a whole, and how is awareness of these changes maintained.
As social, and (somewhat arguably) public spaces framed by a set of traditions and historical
practices and conventions, the museum is an environment where the introduction of new
technologies is seldom seldom unnoticed. Some of the positive repercussions of technical media
are relatively conspicuous, even obvious: The introduction of a new scale or resolution available for
the analysis or interrogation of a given museum asset by the visitor, for example. Technologies can
in themselves become contentious, problematic or the source of confusion and misunderstand- ing
(even when theyre functioning properly, but perhaps more readily when malfunctioning frequently
or under-cared-for). Still other effects are much more subtle, influencing the receptive and
interactive modes of meaning creation resulting from the museum experience.
The collection of case studies from cultural institutions (and from contexts that are liminally
institutional), wherein in new technologies are implicated, is an activity that helps characterise
future research and worlds of investigation, while it develops a picture of contemporary practice.
Largely the work of consolidating case studies was accomplished via web-form, and the research
teams experimented with digital humanities derived metrics generating techniques (such as
sliders for the case-study input form which allowed the research involved to develop a spectrum of
projects across, for example, a qualitative spectrum. One example would be individual versus
social interaction potentials of the interaction itself, which is neither a categorical nor a mutually
exclusive determination).
[IMAGE - case study input form?]
Analysis of museum-sector case studies, and of all applications of technologies initiated by
museums, galleries and cultural institutions must be considered in the context of cultural
technologies adoption and use outside the museum. No single community or audience is entirely
well-served by a single communication channel, just as no single method of engagement will serve
the needs or intentions of all communities or individuals. The digital, interactivity and creative
computing applications in museums are often thought as predominantly captivating, beneficial and
popular, while other groups may read the same initiatives as signalling unwanted change,
interruption, noise, or as a sign of exclusivity: This is not for me.
[IMAGE - case study archive listing?]
The most promising aspects of bringing technologies in the museum come through an approach
that is well-informed by the technological culture from which these technologies and their usepatterns and values emerge. That is, thinking eco-systemically about what it means to bring
technological interventions into the culture and historical context of a cultural or heritage institution,
and vice versa. This becomes particularly important if we look at contemporary trends and popular
engagement with online culture, pointing as this does to the Internet as predominantly a medium
for social interactions, often around other media. In the context of museum and cultural
experiences, these interactions feed into our everyday, our public spaces, our social lives. The
social has, in fact, been a long-standing understated aspect of cultural and museum experiences.
Technologies are more and more designed and derived from inter- actions with and between other
people, and less and less derived from the interactions of single individuals with resources or
information. One way of approaching the problem of integration of technological materials and

systems into the museum space is to recognise that there are resonances, values and contingent
characteristics specific to these technologies, proper to an emergent digital culture. It is this
culture, in part or in entirety, which is invited into the museum whenever technology arrives on the
scene.
[IMAGE - walkthrough in museum - maybe the picture of Chris?]
Amongst a host of other technological proliferations, video imaging technologies loom large in all
aspects of contemporary social and cultural life. The use of video, the development of technologies
such as Google Glass, and other increasingly commonplace miniaturised video technologies make
the potential of body-mounted, first-person video capture both apparent and under- researched.
Further, the analysis of video as data and the sophistication of real-time image analysis tools open
a host of future scenarios for linking visual anthropological uses of digital video with the motivations
and promise of digital humanities and research into an increasingly quantified self. The potential
for head-mounted video capture in social research contexts (in ethnography and anthropology, for
example), has been explored by researchers in visual-anthropology contexts as both a general
method, and in specific, contextual applications. It appears that VideoTraces or reflective videotechniques can be important tools to engender talk with visitors and to have them reflect on their
backgrounds and behaviour, and also on exhibit properties and characteristics. While such tools
are quite successful in generating discussion, many authors conclude that understanding of
visitors conduct and interaction still needs to be explored.
A prepared set of video recordings of head-mounted camera recorded museum visits present a
single uninterrupted shot of the walk-through (which can be up to an hour long, as an approximate
average). An interviewer conducts a semistructured interview based on a set of preconceived
topics of interest to the overall study, but lets the interviewee and herself be guided by the recorded
material and the discus- sion that arise from watching it together. Discussion on the subjects
thoughts, actions and motivations for tracing the exhibition as he does is encouraged, prompting
the subject when he (in the recording) deviates from his route, dwells at certain exhibits, move a lot
or fast, or when seem to lose focus or attention on the exhibited objects. These interview, mediated
by the recorded recent experience engages the subject in a reflexive sense-making activity which,
through commentary of his or her own dynamic understanding of his experience, is recorded.
Combining these materials to synchronise them provides a multimedia reflective document which
relates to the techniques of more traditional qualitative analyses directed towards the topic of
museums.
[IMAGE - walkthrough interview]
Additionally, the video is processed by a set of simple video-processing algorithms that allow both
summary data to be evoked from the video and audio streams (in the form of a static data
visualisation), as well as real-time metadata to be displayed via graphical interface element on
the stream after processing and re-rendering (in the form of a summary video). As example, the
system is able to process and automatically cata- logue the number of dwell times which occur
during a museum visit. We are inspired in by methods and techniques employed in notable work in
the field of life-logging (Whittaker et al.), passive photography toward reflexive technologies, or
technologies that help unearth aspect of sub- jective experience and contexts.
In order to automatically segment and index video data into smaller fragments, forming the
referential building blocks of the narrative, we extract dwells (movement pauses) and related
motion transitions (movement) out of the recorded itinerary. Motion dwells are understood as
moments where subjects engage with cultural objects and/or social encounters and can be
extracted from video feeds using motion analysis.
[IMAGE - walkthrough visualisation]
The purpose of the head-mounted camera experimental actions devised and reflected upon during
Exhibition Design, Technology of Representation and Experimental Actions is to provoke insight

into the development of more reflexive and critical methods for museums studies, as well as the
understanding the design of spaces as relational and individually composed. Future publications
and methods development are intended to expand on these initial investigations, toward a developed protocol for field investigations, standards for coding, and image and audio processing
techniques, as well as output format that fit the processes and practices of museum researchers
and practitioners alike. The potentials for the technique as a user-perspective-driven account of the
composition of both meaning and identity in the museum space have excited much interest in the
area for further deployment in museums and exhibitions, as well as other areas of investigations
where walking and the memory of experience meets the assumptions and proscriptions of
designed public environments.
[IMAGE - Critical Archive - development / visualisation examples?]
The Critical Archive is a key output, intended to summarise without presuming the possibility of
summarising problematic and open-ended topics of the MeLA project. The Critical Archive serves
to enumerate a set of resources and input materials that were generated during the project, but
also those things that served to inspire and contrast the approached in the project, by other
authors, scholars, artists, researchers and technologists.
[Catherine - this would be a great place to add a small narrative about how you prepared the
material, what your strategy was as a designer, etc.? This is one place where you know more than
anyone about what we did, and why ]
[screen grabs from the design / design development process please caption]
The texts and other forms of knowledge media included in the Critical Archive through the
Interpretation, Representation and Technology therefore form a constellation on non-domain
specific, multidisciplinary documents. It is worth noting that the design of the Critical Archive, its
implementation as a technical disposif for reflecting the forms of representation of research
projects like MeLA back on themselves, also forms part of the (an)archival record in this case. As a
cluster concerned with the use of technological representational formats and forms, we take the
archive itself, and the possibility of representing knowledge in this way, as subject to the same
problematics and opportunities as the museum and its designed, material histories of technology.
The final design of the Critical Archive is both an archive which is critical of itself, while absorbing
the notion of the anarchive, which is fissured and indicative of its own absences, lacks and
incompleteness. The metaphor of the star map features heavily in the design, as this produces a
map of a territory that is inherently incomplete and expandable, its constituent elements always in
a variagated, relational and speculative relationship to their representation.

4. Implications and Recommendations

300-400 words + graphics if needed
A main lesson from the work of the Exhibition Design, Technology of Representation and
Experimental Actions work package is that technologies and cultural institutions can no longer, in
our post-digital and post-everything moment, be considered simply as a set of material practices to
be brought in to the museum space. The pervasive disposition of the contemporary mediatechnological has brought about such complete restructuring of what culture and citizenship
means, that engagement with technological domains must find its way into the practices, thinking
and research methodologies of those involved in museums and their research. As such, the intent
of the work package was successfully met in that it provides a number of models for the ways in
which interaction design, and research with and through technologies can be used to summarise
and critically synthesise the technological landscape of museums in the 21st Century. A further
result, as a more internal reflection, involves the use of networked and on-line tools for the
pragmatic articulation of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary projects of this kind. A number of

systems for the collection and analysis of case studies, as well as museum research outputs and
evidence, have been developed and tested. The computational, digital and data-base relevant
practices tested here are highly relevant for forthcoming projects in museums research, as they are
practices which span research, archiving, curatorial, museums, library and it must be said
everyday practices of knowledge. Computers have, for better and worse, become partners in the
formation of our subjectivity, and museums, as well as museums researchers, have a responsiblety
to reflect and critique this reality in their practices going forward.
[Graphics something inspiring / pretty from the collection of headmounted stuff?]
5. Public Awareness
[Weve already compiled this list - could you add it Catherine]
List of events, publications and conferences and other activities