Designing for meaningful visitor engagement at a living history museum

This paper presents an interactive installation designed to facilitate and support visitor engagement in a living history museum. Little research thus far has explored how interaction design can bring added value to living history museums, although they present great potential for participation, interactivity and engagement. We discuss the design rationale for the prototype installation we have developed for a living history museum called Bunratty Folk Park, and present exemplars of empirical data showing how the system merged into the site facilitating an engaging experience for a particular category of visitors.