Designing for interaction: socially-aware museum handheld guides

Abstract

We present ARCHIE, an interdisciplinary research project of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media (Hasselt University) and the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren (Province of Limburg) which aims to discover how a handheld guide can be used to enhance the museum learning experience. Because we stress on the important role of social interaction as a prerequisite for intellectual, social, personal and cultural development, one of the main objectives of the ARCHIE project is to encourage and stimulate interaction with the museum, the PDA and fellow visitors. Designing for interaction however asks for a mental switch. At this point, we developed a first application: a collaborative trading game.