Last December I defended my Thesis for the one year master I attended in Italy. It is called “Tecnologie Avanzate di Comunicazione Interattiva” and I think it offers a good background preparation: perfect if you are not in the interaction field yet. And I was not (:
My thesis was about the relationship between museum and city. It started from the consideration that museums are quite far from the evolutions of contemporary societies since they do not evolve with the same tempo. Museums have the role of art and culture keepers that show their treasure in fixed times (that are what we call exihibition) but in the end they are closed spaces far away from being a “place”, that is a lived space. The experential dimension is really thin and reduced to the mere observation of the artworks. There are no possibilities of interacting with the works and, mainly, with other visitors. Obviously, there are a few good exceptions but I’m referring to the mainstream.The hypothesis of the work was that we can try to imagine an open museum that has deeper relations and links with the city where it’s hosted and that has also a new role: a cultural platform that drives the collaborative production of meaning.The idea of a spread museum is not new. Carlo Giovannella has reflected on the model of a museal field that originates from the theory of fields in Physics. In his words, “The world exits because elementar entites interact through field of forces they generated. All beings exist because they are in interaction.” A museal field is a field of forces, like the electric or magnetic one, which transports the cultural energy generated by the interactions it has with others fields.Thinking of museum in this way took me some time because, as Schon says, it is like breaking out your discipline and look at things from another point of view.During the research phase I’ve really appreciated the help Luigina Ciolfi gave me to build a grounded framework. His thesis is really interesting, especially the part about the articulation of place and space in interaction design. It also explores and makes an overview of the different approaches to the placeness and the experience. From phenomenology to the humanistic geography. Awsome.The solution I’ve proposed is based on the mobile augmented reality. It is a quite simple system that use an handheld device to inquire a database server for an image. The inquiry is based on the recognition of some images, called markers. These markers are associated with an ID to a database. So when the mobile phone\pda finds a marker, it inquires the server with the ID (the recognition is done thanks to a program installed on the phone) and then receives an image that can be, for instance, a workart.
The thing I like most of this project is not the system itself but how it can be easily expanded and reconfigurated. The markers are spread in the city and are like spots. The good thing with markers is that they can be printed, sticked or drawn. This means that almost everyone can create his own marker and put it into the city.
In this way the museum is spread by people and it can build new relations with the city and with the persons inhabit it. Think about the possibility of visiting the city and the museum at the same time: you could have a biographical tour of an artist and look at his places as well as at his workds . Moreover, the marker have a kind of urban aestethic that make them not far from a sort of urban art.
