research proposal

• IAT 811: COMPUTING POLITICS
• Research Proposal
• Title: Time-camera: a design fiction to reframe museum touring experience
• Student Name: Ce Zhong
• Student ID: 301314787

Paper

Background:

The design and deployment of digital artifacts in museum and relic research have long been a generative topic in HCI research within past years. For example, Guo et al.,[2] designed an algorism to support the repair of relic fragments. Cafaro[1] deployed an interactive map that can help viewers avoid the complexity components around an open space museum. Indeed, the development of technologies has better supported the practice of people in time and space over time[3]. Nevertheless, touring in a museum and engaging with digital artifacts and ancient cultural relics for viewers is still time and space limited. Furthermore, the characteristic and quality of ancient cultural relics will be changed a lot over time after it unearthed. For instance, the surface of the unearthed bronzes will be rapidly oxidized in a few minutes. It is hard for viewers to appreciate the aesthetic and artistic value of ancient culture relics in the museum. More importantly, people have no opportunities to observe the changing processes of ancient cultural relics in the museum. How does technology bring benefits to people through their engagement with the time and space adjustment of relics? Although researchers have already focused on the HCI research in the museum to augment the experience of visitors on relic appreciation, none of the researchers focus on the research to inquire and design computing artifact that can augment the human-relic interaction of visitors when they are touring or off touring in the museum over time.

Keywords:

Museum touring; research-through-design; human-relic interaction; time and space; design fiction; diegetic prototyping.

Research questions:

How does algorism help people better appreciate ancient cultural relics over time?

How does technology augment human-relic interaction between ancient cultural relics and people in real time and real space in their everyday activities?

Artwork

Time-camera Prototype:

In artwork session, I may design an interactive computing time-camera that can achieve these functions: first, this camera can take and import pictures. People can interact with pictures that they want to know more after the unearth of historical relics in it. Second, the camera is likely to embedded algorism, which can calculate the change of relics over time. Third, people can control the change frequency of historical relics in the picture. For instance, if one visitor setting one hour is the changing hour of one relic in a picture, he/she can appreciate the difference of the relic in the picture through the screen of the camera especially he/she is at home. Also, he/she can be setting any time if he/she want. By living and engaging with time-camera, both people and time-camera can be changed and gained more possibilities over time.

Reference:

1. Francesco Cafaro and Stella A. Ress. 2016. Time travelers: mapping museum visitors across time and space. ACM Press, 1492–1497.
2. Hai Guo, Leiguang Ouyang, Xiangxu Meng, Hui Xiang, Chenglei Yang, and Rongjiang Pan. 2006. A system framework and key techniques of fragments assembly for restoration of historical relics based on grid. Proceedings of the 2006 ACM international conference on Virtual reality continuum and its applications, ACM, 387–390.
3. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen. 2010. Critical Terms for Media Studies. University of Chicago Press.