IDC 2007 Proceedings: Tangible Interaction
June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg, Denmark
“The Fire and The Mountain”: Tangible and Social
Interaction in a Museum Exhibition for Children
Francesca Rizzo and Franca Garzotto
Politecnico of Milano - Department of Electronics and Information
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, Mlano, 20133, Italy
+39 02 23993505, {garzotto, rizzo}@elet.polimi.it
The subject of The Fire and The Mountain was the
relationship between human beings and the fire from
prehistory to present times in the Como valleys, an area
that has remained relatively untouched by the massive
industrial growth of the city basin and preserves a wealth
of traditions, handicrafts, ways of life, oral heritage that
local institutions are attempting to make survive. Coal
mines and the use of fire date back to the first human
appearance in the area. They shaped not only the forests
around the Como lake, but also the culture and habits of
the people that lived in this area till 19th Century - the
“Magnani” people, whose job was to make iron stoves
using the fire and the coal miners.
ABSTRACT
The paper discusses the design and evaluation of a
museum exhibition named The Fire and The Mountain,
where we exploited hybrid (i.e., digital and physical)
artifacts as well as the paradigm of tangible interaction to
enhance children' experience and to support engagement,
learning, and social behavior.
Author Keywords
Tangible Computing, Museum, Edutainment.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation] User
Interfaces - interaction styles; Multimedia Information
Systems - evaluation; K3.1 [Computers and Education]:
The Fire and The Mountain aimed at exploiting ICT in
museums in a non-conventional way, and to
experiment/evaluate new forms of technology enhanced
learning and social interaction in public spaces, thus
promoting these concepts in local cultural end educational
players and sponsors. The exhibition was composed of
four digital touchable installations that support tangible
interaction and are “immersed” in a physical space
designed to create an emotional relationship with the
exhibition subjects, by means of light and sound effects.
Computers Use in Education.
INTRODUCTION
Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are receiving increasing
interest in museums as a mean to create hybrid
installations that support visitors manipulating physical
and digital artefacts, and improve their experience within
an exhibition. Designing TUI requires not only designing
the digital but also the physical, and their interrelations
within hybrid ensembles, as well as designing forms of
interaction that can be characterized as full-body, haptic,
and spatial. While a number of studies can be found that
report the design and evaluation of TUIs in a number of
traditional educational domains such as schools [3], [7],
[8], relatively few empirical research exist that discuss
TUIs in museum contexts especially for the support of
young visitor experiences [1], [6].
Next sessions introduce the principles that informed the
overall design of the user experience and discuss the
details of each installation. We then discuss the field
study we conducted with 62 children aging from 8 to 11,
to validate our design and to identify guidelines for
similar museum experiences in the future.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
This paper provides a contribution by discussing our
experience in The Fire and the Mountain - a temporary
museum exhibition held in 2006 at the Civic Museum of
Como (Italy) that involved the TUI paradigm in a creative
way. The exhibition was mainly conceived as a learning
experience for visitors, to raise awareness and to foster a
better understanding, especially among the young
generations, on the cultural heritage of the people living
on territory around the Como Lake.
The Fire and the Mountain was created as a joint effort of
museum curators, communication and new media experts,
local experts of the subject matters, video and sound
artists, interior designers, interaction designers, and
computer engineers. The design of the exhibition was
informed by a conceptual framework based on four
central design concerns, partially inspired to previous
work [6], [1]:
Emotional Involvement - making young visitor experience
suggestive, enjoyable, meaningful, engaging, and fluid
[9], [10], by means of an enriched physical space in
which art and technology as well as light and sound
effects intersection is exploited to foster curiosity and to
make environment “magical” to be experienced;
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IDC 2007 Proceedings: Tangible Interaction
June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg, Denmark
The second installation is the Talking Dictionary (Figure
3). It allows visitors to discover rungin - the ancient
idiom spoken by the people that lived in the Como valleys
until a century ago. A character (the image of an old man
from the valley) on a vertical smart can be “asked to
speak rungin”. Kids can drag-and-drop an Italian term on
his mouth and the character starts telling a short story
about the term meaning.
multi-modality: supporting different sensory modalities
and engaging multiple senses – tactile, auditory, visual;
discovery Learning: exposing children to a variety of
contents “hidden” in the various digital media
installations, and promoting their discovery by means of
multiple activities, stimuli, and interaction paradigms.
social Learning: supporting learning as a social process,
and fostering mutual collaboration and group discussion
during the execution of the different activities.
THE USER EXPERIENCE
All of the four interactive installations composing The
Fire and the Mountain integrate text, video, music and
sound. Although they can be freely explored in any order,
we conceived a narrative flow that progressively bring
young visitors along an in depth exploration of the
"culture of fire". Each installation was located in a
different museum room and for each of them our digital
artists designed a specific sound track, to create audio
effects that evoke the natural environment each of the
installation refers to.
The first installation, called Virtual Book (Figure 1 and
Figure 2), provides visitors with an overview of the
territory around Como, its origins and history. It is a
Flash application shaped as an old book whose pages can
be turned by hands on a horizontal smart board; with the
same interaction paradigm, kids can also manipulate
videos and pictures on the pages, e.g., moving them
around by “drag&drop” (Figure 1b), to create their own
“personalized” multimedia book.
Figure 3. The Talking Dictionary
The third installation called Research Tables is composed
of two tables equipped with horizontal smart boards
(Figure 4). They allow visitors to interact with 3D objects
in order to discover the characteristics of the underground
of the Como territory. On the first table, different pieces
of coal are reproduced on the smart board and kids may
interact with them by hands (moving, rotating, asking
details). The second table provides a 3D map of the
geological layers that compose the underground from the
prehistoric era to our days. By using different kinds of
physical objects on the various levels, kids can trigger
different phenomena on the environment: for example,
using a wood stick, they can see how trees on the land
surface have been transformed by time into coal.
Figure 1. The Virtual Book
Figure 4. The Research Tables
The fourth installation consists in an augmented environment that reproduces a Coal Cave (Figure 5). By using a
video projector, we created a virtual reproduction of an
existing cave, which can be explored using a tactile
mouse. The tactile mouse is a system that transforms
common thin panels into tangible interfaces using four
low cost microphones: the user can interact with his fin-
Figure 2. Images drag&drop
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IDC 2007 Proceedings: Tangible Interaction
June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg, Denmark
gers, wooden sticks, pens, etc. and the system tracks the
interaction by analysing the propagation of acoustic
waves in the panel. This yields to “virtual boards” built
with materials as medium density fibreboards, Plexiglas,
glass, etc., where the user can write or draw and the result
is displayed in real time on a screen or saved in a PC
memory.
Book, or using some objects (as in the Research Table).
These data highlight the role of affordance in the design
of interactive tactile or tangible interfaces, suggesting the
importance of rendering the actions that can be performed
on interactive objects in a clear and natural way in order
to reduce how much it is possible the distance between
the model of interaction implemented in the digital object
in use and the way in which the correspondent physical
obctes is used in natural/real contexts.
Expanding the Experience
Physical manipulation of a virtual environment may
stimulate an attitude to expand the virtual space by means
of tangible artefacts. Some 11 years old children, for
example, attempted to modify the Virtual Book by
placing a real paper sheet aside a virtual page: by effect of
smart board projection, they indeed achieved this visual
effect, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 5. A tactile mouse in the Virtual Coal Cave
The resulting interaction space provides a hybrid
environment where the representation of a real natural
environment (the coal cave) is integrated with points of
interactivity (the tactile mice) to interact with the
environment and receive information about it. In the
Virtual Coal Cave, our interior designers elaborated a
space concept consisting in black walls and a series of
leds, also mixing visual and audio cues in order to
evocate the obscurity of the cave and the light of the fire,
as well as the auditory perception that a person may
experiment inside a real cave (e.g., water dropping along
the rocks, or wood burned by the fire).
Figure 6. Adding a paper sheet to the Virtual Book
This data cluster highlights that physical objects can be
used not only as interaction tools, as it happens in most
TUIs, but also as tools to expand the digital representation of the information world users are dealing with.
FIELD STUDY
Age and Social Experience
The objective of our field study was to evaluate the
design of the overall experience by detecting potential
sources of disorientation and frustration, but also to
identify those aspects of the installations that were most
enjoyable and beneficial for learning for young visitors.
Our work exploited a design ethnography approach [2]
and involved 62 children aging from 8 to 11 who visited
the exhibition and interacted with the different exhibits.
Children’ interactions was observed in presence and
video-recorded, and kids were shortly interviewed during
a debriefing session after the visit. Qualitative data
analysis methods were applied to verbal and visual data
(observer’ notes, video recordings, kids answers). The
data cluster and their analysis highlighted a number of
interesting issues, discussed in the rest of this section.
Apparently, the tendency towards socialization in a
digitally augmented physical space is affected by age,
While older children (11 years old) tended to exhibit
solipsistic fruition of the installations, younger children (8
years old) preferred to work in group (Figure 7). This
difference was explained by children’s comments
collected during the debriefing session.
The role of “Technological Expertise” vs. Affordance
Children did not exhibit any difficulties to interact with
the installations even though they never used touch based
technologies before. Still, some of them (in some cases,
the “most” experts in computers) did not realize
immediately that they could manipulate some objects by
hands, e.g., moving pictures and movies on the Virtual
Figure 7. Children toughing together the interactive
map on a research table
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IDC 2007 Proceedings: Tangible Interaction
June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg, Denmark
Most of the older children declared that they were
interested in experimenting the technology per se, since
they “wanted to see if it works as videogames”. Younger
children, less exposed to technology at school and at
home and more incline to physical interaction among
peers, were more interested in playing and discovering
multimedia effects together, sharing this pleasure with
their mates. When interviewed, they reported that they
“liked to touch stuff together with their best friend”.
paradigms based on hybrid artifacts, which support
visitors manipulating and interacting with, and by means
of, physical, and digital objects [4], [5], [9], [6].
The field study that we conducted to evaluate The Fire
and The Mountains with young children suggests a
number of directions for research in cultural heritage
communication, learning in museum contexts, and, more
generally, HCI.
ACKNOLEDGMENTS
Tangible interaction vs. instruction-driven interaction
Authors are grateful to Prof. Piero Fraternali which led
“The Fire and the Mountain” project, and to all members
of the design team.
Once children realized that they could manipulate some
objects by hands or by means of other objects, they found
it very natural and easy, and tend to apply this model of
interaction in any situation. They experienced some
difficulties in interacting with objects in the “normal
way” we are used in desktop interfaces, i.e., expressing a
“command” by selecting an icon or a text label. We
observed that children who had used tangible interaction
and direct manipulation experienced a series of
breakdown interacting with the second research table that
required them to touch instructions such as continue;
close, start to trigger some behaviours. They tried
repeatedly to touch the available images on the screen to
make something happen, trying to apply the model of the
interaction they have learned, consciously or
unconsciously avoiding to read and interpret the
instructions.
It seems that while the shift of interaction paradigm from
an instruction-driven model (in which interaction is
mediated by a textual or iconic element that expresses the
meaning of the action to trigger) to a physical
manipulation model is easy and natural but the shift in the
opposite direction is not so easy to be performed.
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Contextual Affordance
Children moved in the space because they were driven by
both intentional motivations (e.g., personal interests and
preferences) and the properties of the environment. In
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designed characteristics of the physical place - such as
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CONCLUSIONS
10. Wood, D. & O’Malley, C. Collaborative learning
between peers: An overview. Educational Psychology
in Practice (1996), 11 (4), 4-9.
In this paper, we have discussed the design experience of
The Fire and the Mountain, a digitally augmented
museum exhibition in which we exploited interaction
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