What kind of tangible interaction is this thesis focused on?

1.1 What kind of tangible interaction is this thesis focused on?

The use of the expression tangible interaction in the CH field can lead to ambiguity and misunderstanding. Tangible interaction is an expression that finds its origins in the technological world, and for this reason is not generally used as such in the museum studies and cultural heritage literature. Nonetheless, when used in the museum context, this expression can easily be associated, especially by cultural heritage professionals, to a variety of meanings that are connected to topics that are instead dealt with in the museum studies literature. These meanings are reported below, along with some theoretical references³. The purpose of this overview is mainly to make clearer, especially for a reader who is not a technology expert, what interpretation of tangible interaction is used in this thesis and what is not.

For non ICT-expert people or for people with a human science background, what seems to be a privileged meaning for tangible interaction is the one related to the possibility of touching the objects.

Indeed, if we look at the etymology of the term, “tangible” derives from late Latin tangibilis, from tangere, meaning “to touch” and one of the meaning for tangible reported by the Oxford English Dictionary is, indeed, “capable of being touched; affecting the sense of touch;

touchable”⁴. After having considered for years the museum visit as a mainly unisensory visual experience (Candlin, 2008) and touching cultural heritage pieces as “disrespectful, dirty and damaging”

(Classen, 2005, p. 282) and without cognitive or aesthetic value, recently there has been a “sensory turn” in museum studies and practice (Levent et al., 2014, p. xvii).

Contemporary museum professionals have started rethinking the multiple restrictions on the use of the senses and started to implement projects that acknowledge “the value of sensory modalities beyond the visual alone, particularly that of touch” (Dudley, 2010, p. 11)⁵. The backgrounds (humanities, interaction design, technical background) during the investigation of the topic. While some theoretical sources are reported to justify the different interpretations, a complete review of the humanistic literature that links to the topic is beyond the aim of this work and would lead the research far away from the main objectives as listed hereinafter.

4 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/197491?redirectedFrom=tangible

5 For a history about how the practice of visiting have changed during the centuries with reference to senses see (Leahy et al., 2012).

and the Walters Art Museum’s exhibit titled “Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuette”⁶ offering visitors the possibility of touching replicas of Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, represent just two examples of this trend. In addition, more and more studies have emerged in the literature pointing to the social, cognitive and even therapeutic value of handling objects (Classen, 2005;

Chatterje, 2008; Pye, 2008; Candlin, 2010). In the concept of tangible with the meaning of to touch we can also include all the experiences that have been designed to allow blind people to experience works of art and museum objects, allowing them to touch original artworks or replicas or bas-reliefs derived from paintings (Axel et al., 2003;

Reichinger et al., 2012; Neumüller et al., 2014). The Museo Nacional del Prado, for example, has launched the initiative “Touching the Prado”

for visually impaired visitors: using a relief painting technique, six works of art belonging to the museum collection have been copied allowing blind visitors to create a mental image of them through the touch⁷ (Figure 2).

Figure 1 An object handling session at the British Museum

(source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/

visiting/planning_your_visit/object_hand ling_sessions.aspx).

6 http://thewalters.org/events/event.aspx?e=2207

7 https://www.museodelprado.es/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/at-the-museum/hoy-toca-prado/exposicion/

Figure 2 At the Museo Nacional del Prado blind Visitors can touch works of art (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/arts/design/at-museo-del-prado-blind-visitors-can-touch-masterpieces.html).

The term tangible is sometimes used also in the more blurred sense of

“that can be clearly seen to exist”⁸, to refer to the experience of a cultural object in the real world as opposed to the digital experience usually offered by traditional visualization technologies.

In the era of VR, what sometimes happens is the possibility to experience CH objects in a digital form instead of its physical forms, using either classical devices like multimedia kiosks or more immersive VR systems (Carrozzino et al., 2010)⁹. The 3D reconstruction of the Camposanto Monumentale (Monumental Cemetery) of Pisa¹⁰, carried out by PERCRO Lab (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa), represents a divulgation tool that allows a virtual visit of the monument (also in different times), and the possibility of accessing a database of information about it (Figure 3). Different from the virtual visit is instead the real – “tangible” – visit of the same monument that is

8 http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/tangible

9Applications of this kind have been used, for example, for showing reconstructions of artworks or environments that are not existing anymore (Baracchini et al., 2004), that are not easily accessible or enjoyable in all their details (Callieri et al., 2011) but they have also been used more simply for their attractive power as divulgation and storytelling tools in alternative or in addition to classic media.

10 http://www.opapisa.it/it/attivita/nuove-tecnologie/sistema-informativo-del-camposanto.html

possible to have walking inside it (Figure 4), although it must be admitted that modern virtual reality systems allow for an experience that is more and more similar to reality. Indeed, often the experience they provide is not limited to the sight, as virtual reality systems have been developed that allow a multi-sensory experience of digital representations of cultural objects (also tactile) through haptic interfaces. For example, in “The Museum of Pure Form” (Loscos et al., 2004), the visitor can explore the shape of a statue using a haptic device mounted on an exoskeleton (Figure 5). Summarizing, in the blurred sense analysed here, having a tangible experience of the object means encountering it in the real world through one of our sense modalities.

Figure 3 A digital

Figure 5 In the museum of Pure Form, the visitor can “touch” the object using an haptic device (source: Loscos et al, 2004).

Another interpretation of the term tangible is as synonym of embodied. It emerges if the touch is considered as a wider concept rather than the mere contact between the hand and the object. In the literature, some people have acknowledged that “there may be more to touch than meets the hand” (Bacci et al., 2014, p.18) and that we should extend

“the concept of touch to bodily sensations and to multisensory perception” (Bacci et al., 2014, p. 19). As written in (Levent, 2014b, p.

75) summarizing a text of Ackerman (1991, pp. 64-98), “when considering the sense of touch, we tend to connect it to actions that involve the hands. But touch is associated with the largest of the sensory organs and covers the entire body”. Considering touch in the wider sense of embodied experience can lead to consider as tangible experiences all those where there is a strong involvement of the body, such as: moving inside or exploring a building, a landscape or an archaeological site, putting ourselves in the position of a statue to better understand it, making actions with originals or replicas of cultural heritage object in order to live a past tradition, but also experiencing bodily sensations activated in indirect way, for example just from the view of a work of art. The broad sense of touch (and thus of tangible) as outlined above, implies that “museum restrictions to one’s ability to

touch do not necessarily imply a complete absence of some alternative bodily experience of art” (or other objects) (Bacci et al., 2014), and that

“art can and should be a touching experience. Standing in front of a painting, appreciating a sculpture, or walking through a building, even if we are not permitted to physically touch the work we should at least be touched by it” (Peterson, 2007, p. 79).

In addition, the term tangible can find a connection with a new orientation in the museum studies literature that can be referred to as material orientation and that emphasizes the visitor’s personal understanding of the object starting from the material encounter with it, beyond the information about its context (Dudley, 2010). As summarized in (Wood et al. 2011) for Dudley “Materiality refers to embodied engagement with physical things. The term emphasizes the physical, material characteristics of objects and focuses on the ways in which those characteristics are sensorially experienced by human beings”. In this definition, the focus is on the object per se and the emotions, affects, and sensations affecting the visitor while encountering the artwork without the prerequisite of information. This is also expressed in the following quotation: “The more I looked at them, the more I studied them, the more appreciated their beauty over and above the information about their context. They were beautiful!

The more I described them and handled them, the more emotionally attached to them I became… My eyes opened” (Dr. Ekpo Eyo, quoted in Vogel, S. 1991).

Opposed to the material approach is what can be called informative approach, “the view in which objects have value and imports only because of the cultural meanings which immediately overlie them and as result of the real or imagined stories which they can be used to construct” (Dudley, 2010)¹¹. Here the material object becomes “just a part – and indeed not always an essential part – of that informational culture”, in other words it “becomes part of an object-information package” (Dudley, 2010). In the extreme cases, so much emphasis is put on the information that “things dissolve into meanings” (Hein, 2006).

Finding a balance between these two positions is not always easy, not only because conceptually different but also because the tools traditionally used to convey information about objects in museums often happen to distract the visitors from the object on display, thus making difficult both to link the information to the object it refers to

11 In this regard, F. Antinucci in his book “Comunicare nel museo” argues that “exhibit objects physically is not enough, for the existence itself of the museum it is paramount to convey culture to the visitors” and this can be done “by applying the theory of communication to those particular signs that are the works of art” (translated by the author from the back cover of Antinucci, 2014).

and also precluding the possibility of a physical engagement with the object.

Finally, another source of confusion with the application of the expression “tangible” in the CH field is due to the fact that the terms tangible and intangible has some important meaning in the CH sector as they are used as a way to classify different types of CH assets. On the one hand, there is the tangible heritage, consisting of physical objects inherited from the past and considered of cultural significance; on the other hand, there is the intangible heritage consisting of “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith- that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage”¹².

The perspectives and related body of literature mentioned above are not the main fields this thesis aims to contribute to. As said, this research situates itself in the Interaction design field applied to cultural heritage and, as such, it will consider a more technological concept of tangible interaction, that always includes a digital component, and consists of “user interfaces and interaction approaches that emphasize:

tangibility and materiality of the interface; physical embodiment of data; whole body interaction; the embedding of the interface and the users’ interaction in real spaces and contexts”¹³, thereforerepresenting something different compared to traditional desktop, mobile and virtual reality systems. Examples of the systems that are considered in this research are shown in Figure 6. Basically, they consist of interactive installations the visitor interacts with through the body or through specific physical objects rather than using generic devices like the mouse, the keyboard, the joystick, or a smartphone.

12 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguard of the Intangible Heritage (http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention).

13https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/tangible-interaction. For a detailed description of this encompassing perspective to tangible interaction see (Hornecker, 2006). A more complete discussion of what tangible interaction is meant to be will be anyway present in the next chapter.

a) b)

c) d)

e) f)

Figure 6 Examples of tangible interaction systems applied to the CH field: a) Virtex – Ara Pacis (source:

http://bmuseums.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/141029-tangible_interfaces.pdf); b) “The Painting, a material object” installation (source:

http://www.museumlab.eu/exhibition/movie/movie09.html); c) The Loupe (source:

Petrelli et al., 2014a); d) Etruscanning (source: Pietroni et al., 2013); e) the interactive desk in Retracing the Past (source: Fraser et al., 2004); f) The Virtual Conductor (source:

https://www.wien.info/en/music-stage-shows/city-of-music/house-music).

While a good body of theoretical work have explored the humanistic meanings mentioned above, almost nothing has been done for understanding in its entirety what the technological application of tangible interaction in CH is and what are the implications. That is one of the reason why this topic is so relevant to be researched on.

This does not imply that the other meanings will be put aside and not taken into account in this research. Since one of the reasons often cited for using tangible interaction in museums is to integrate digital and physical experience of cultural heritage, it is important to consider whether and how tangible interaction systems can elicit experiences of cultural heritage assets in the different meanings that have been mentioned above¹⁴.

1.2 Problem definition, research aims, methodology and expected