This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory.
The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aims at securing a lasting impact for technology-based interventions in the context of social inequities. Increasingly, HCI scholars are proposing assets-based design as an effective approach towards this issue. Rather than starting from people's needs and deficits, this approach posits that design should start from a deep understanding of people's assets. A pending issue, however, is how to account for the situated nature of assets; that is, how to decide which asset to leverage and for what design purpose. Drawing from cultural sociology and shifting the emphasis from assets to capacities, we propose Swidler's theory of culture-in-action as an analytical lens for unpacking the complex relationship between capacities, goals, and structural limitations. Leveraging findings from a Participatory Design engagement with 35 Latino immigrant parents for envisioning parent-education technologies, we demonstrate the applicability of this lens. We contribute to HCI scholarship by further discussing 1) how to analyze capacities' design potential, and 2) the methodological particularities for collecting them.
Volunteers are an underused but important resource in presenting plural heritages within large heritage organizations. We report on a qualitative study at a heritage site in the UK which combined explorations of volunteers' practice and digital design. The study comprised of observational fieldwork with co-creative activities across eight linked workshops, where we explored the site with volunteers, and how we might leverage existing working structures to make new design prototypes. Our collective account contributes new insights on working with volunteers and the opportunities that arise from acknowledging them as genius loci – recognising them as experts of their own experience and capturing and supporting their skills as storytellers. Working with the volunteering staff in a co-design process we created innovative designs including our Un-authorised View, which draws out the unique perspectives and the personal stories at heritage destinations.
Despite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space.
Organizational culture (OC) encompasses the underlying beliefs, values, and practices that are unique to an organization. However, OC is inherently subjective and a coarse construct, and therefore challenging to quantify. Alternatively, self-initiated workplace reviews on online platforms like Glassdoor provide the opportunity to leverage the richness of language to understand OC. In as much, first, we use multiple job descriptors to operationalize OC as a word vector representation. We validate this construct with language used in 650k different Glassdoor reviews. Next, we propose a methodology to apply our construct on Glassdoor reviews to quantify the OC of employees by sector. We validate our measure of OC on a dataset of 341 employees by providing empirical evidence that it helps explain job performance. We discuss the implications of our work in guiding tailored interventions and designing tools for improving employee functioning.