• Laseca, Guillermo
• 22 Jan 2021

In SPICE we are endeavouring to create new tools and methods which help European citizens to interpret culture and tell their own stories.

With these objectives in mind on October 29th 2020 SPICE Work Package 7 organized a mini-conference with the aim of specifying the situation of the five case studies that are going to be carried out in SPICE (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Design Museum Helsinki, Fondazione Torino Musei (GAM), Hecht Museum, National Museum of Natural Sciences). There day-long mini-conference consisted of four workshops examining interpretation of cultural heritage as well as co-design methods:

• Citizen interpretation methods using artefact analysis
• Persona development along with users, communities and stakeholders 
• Charting activities in context through UX and service maps 
• User interface design possibilities.

Experience in UX Map of curation activity

An example of the contributions made by participants during the mini-conference can be found in the user experience map created as part of the curation activity carried out. This map contains points of contact between the museum and its visitors:

Emotions : diversity of moods that may arise during the journey

Breakdowns : obstacles that prevent the journey;

Solutions.

The figure below demonstrates visitors' user-journey developed and iterated by the participants:

Experience in Interface design for the museums

In another workshop about interface design for the museums the objective was to agree a set of interface components that would enable an initial prototype to be developed within a six-month period. For each interface in turn each participant had to add their ratings individually, then discuss and add any group comments. In this one-hour workshop we brought everyone together to consider interfaces for a visit, interfaces for interpretations, and interfaces for reflection and scripting.

Thanks to the interesting input from the participants in the four workshops the main objective ** of the mini-conference was achieved: **to create and test case studies for an exemplary combination of methods that can be implemented in the interpretation-reflection spiral.

With these results, SPICE has established a set of evaluation protocols to implement them in the real case studies to be carried out in the project .