ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings

#intangibleculturalheritage #indigenousheritage #museums #tangibles #digitaltabletops #valuesensitivedesign #vistorstudy

About

ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings is an interactive tangible tabletop museum exhibit that uses replicas of Musqueam belongings excavated from c̓əsnaʔəm, as well as contemporary objects that are a part of everyday Musqueam life to represent the long history of salmon fishing and the continuity of related knowledge at c̓əsnaʔəm. Drawing on contemporary community voices and Musqueam’s ancestral language hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, each replica has its own story to tell, which is accessed when placed on the tabletop. By connecting the replicas to visual elements on the salmon cutting table, the table invites visitors to learn about the many cultural and historical meanings of belongings from c̓əsnaʔəm, and about how technological knowledge associated with activities such as salmon fishing have a fundamental place in Musqueam history and persists today as part of everyday life.

The tabletop exhibit was part of c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city, an historic partnership of three Vancouver institutions: the Musqueam Indian Band, the Museum of Vancouver, and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. All three explored this extremely significant ancient village site on which part of Vancouver was built. In the three different exhibitions, visitors learned not only about the past, but about Musqueam culture and community today. Dr. Susan Rowley, Jordan Wilson, and Lisa Uyeda at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (MOA) worked with Dr. Kate Hennessy, Dr. Alissa Antle, Rachael Eckersley, Brendan Matkin, and myself at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology to develop an interactive tangible tabletop as a component of the exhibition at MOA, which will ran from January 2015 to January 2016.

Role

Interactive Tangible Tabletop Exhibit

I was the project manager, photographer and co-designer during the design and development process of the museum exhibit.

Research Study

I was the lead researcher for the vistor study to evaluate the exhibit in the museum space. I designed the research, observed users, conducted interviews, led the data analysis with a second coder, authored the conference papers communicating the results and recommendations, and presented the research study at the 2016 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the details of the design at the 2017 Designing Interactive Systems Conference.

Results

In conference papers, I presented our value-sensitive design process, five interdependent design goals, and the design strategies and interactions that enabled us to meet these goals. I evaluated our approach through a user study. From our design process and evaluation, I developed recommendations for designing values into interactions more generally and for tangible interactions specifically in ways that support visitors’ experience and understanding of specific cultural values through technology. These recommendations are:

1) Cultural Forms. Use both physical forms and the social practices around the forms to reflect values.

2) Accessible Information. Create opportunities for immediate interaction and access to basic information.

3) Connect. Connect the exhibit to visitors’ lives.

4) Contextualize. Provide context through different modalities.

5) Hands on values. Design the physical properties of tangible objects to convey cultural values in such a way that visitors can immediately perceive those values as they view and handle the objects.

6) Non-linear explorations. Allow for different pathways for exploring information.

Read More

Reese Muntean, Alissa N. Antle, Brendan Matkin, Kate Hennessy, Susan Rowley, and Jordan Wilson. 2016. Designing Cultural Values into Interaction. In Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025908.

PDF

Reese Muntean, Kate Hennessy, Alissa N. Antle, Brendan Matkin, Susan Rowley, and Jordan WIlson. 2017. Design Interactions in ʔeləw̓k̓ʷ – Belongings. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901912.

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