Exploring Relationships Between Museum Artefacts Through Spatial Interaction

We propose a novel approach, which involves visitors physically manipulating visual representations of artefacts and scanning with their mobile phone different groups or sequences of items in order to reveal digital information about their relationships. To explore this interaction mechanism we collaborated with a museum to develop an interactive paper map, on which visitors can place tangible representations of artefacts and scan the resulting arrangements. Based on an in-situ study of its use, we reveal that museum visitors engaged in different strategies for exploration of relationships between artefacts in the museum collection (inspection, strategic and experimental configuration), and for social collaboration (sharing the interaction space, adopting interaction roles and sharing a reaction to the "reveal"). We discuss how future interactive installations can accommodate these behaviours.