Place as dialogue: understanding and supporting the museum experience

This paper presents a dialogical approach to place, people and technology in museums. The approach has been developed in response to concern for locative experience in Interaction Design, an approach to the design and experience of interactive technologies that emphasises the particular place in which the technologies are deployed and the locative aspects of experience. Our approach emphasises the pivotal role played by a wide variety of relationships in experience and suggests a set of dimensions of experience that have been useful in our interpretations of museum experience: relational, open, sense making, narrative, and spatio‐temporal. In the process of describing the approach, the paper explains and exemplifies the potential for Interaction Design to bring people, for example staff and visitors, into the centre of technological mediation of heritage experience. It does this with specific reference to the mediation of museum experience and uses the design and evaluation of a particular museum exhibition to support its claims.