Dear Engagers, As a part of activities here at CARET largely unrelated to CollectionSpace or Engage, an interesting question came up that fluid people might be able to help with. As a part of this something else we stumbled upon the seamless experience ideas in Engage, and realised that there was an issue that you must be encountering, and have some traction with.
In some circumstances digital material will be with the object, and in some cases without it. In the case that it's without, the material will probably have to attempt to substitute for the absence of the object in some way. Whereas in the presence of an object this may serve only as reference, be clutter or, worst of all, unduely skew the experience of the object. The issue came up in a design context: a gallery with an online exhibit may want, for example, to be led by a visual representation of an object whether it's designed to substitute, complement, or market the physical museum experience. In visiting the gallery a kiosk, or handheld device, may have some means of detecting proximity and providing, for example, a biography, soundtrack or shopping experience where some kind of "substitute" would be cluttering, which is particularly important on mobile devices. The traditional catalogue of a two part screen, half image, half metadata is cluttered with the image in the presence of the object and cluttered with the metadata (in the first instance) in its absence. Is this a real seam? Where does the thinking go from here (I've reached the end of my brain!)? I can think of some responses to this (for example, on a phone a stateful slidable thing which allows you to wipe the image or metadata from the screen or have half-and-half. But the issue seems more pernicious than this to me. If you have an exhibit of, I dunno, the beauty of capacitors, and you've arranged capacitors to look sparkly in your museum, then an online exhibit might want to recreate in its design, visual style, layout, etc, of how beautiful capacitors can be, but in the presence of them have a very subdued, minimal modernist grey-on-grey labels on a handheld or kiosk to avoid detracting from the in-museum capacitor experience. Do you detect if a device is inside a museum? For example? I'm sure this is the kind of thing that you can get grants to pontificate and write theses on: anyone know where we might look? Dan. _______________________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
