Thousands of human remains are stored in museums and collections worldwide. But while their collection, handling and display are increasingly subjected to ethical guidelines and regulations, institutional guidelines and research on their digitization are scarce. This study explores the challenges and opportunities of digitizing human remains, outlining new directions. Based on interviews (n=23) with museum professionals across 14 organizations worldwide, we map: 1) A taxonomy of data work with human remains; 2) Main areas of uncertainties in data work and adaptive strategies currently employed to address them; 3) Examples of ill-fitting digital systems. We introduce the concept of ‘data hauntings’ to highlight the historical, technical and regulatory ghosts lingering in digital systems of contested assets, and the specters of future data circulation. Lastly, we propose a ‘hauntological’ framework for rethinking, (re)designing and maintaining digital systems to enable equitable data work - balancing historical trace-ability, ethical accountability and searchability.

A body of HCI work focuses on cultural heritage settings, such as museums, galleries, and historic sites – domains where established digital technologies such as interactive screens and mobile guid...

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory.

This exploratory paper makes the case for deepening and expanding CSCW research on how knowledge and digital professionals work at home. The steady rise of flexible and “mobile” working policies and burgeoning of freelance work and solo entrepreneurs, means that working from home is now commonplace. Yet, there is a dearth of investigations in relation to how people make working from home ‘work’. In response to this gap, this paper focuses on how homes become sites of complex coordination and negotiation for those people who use them as workplaces. In particular, the paper reviews the relevant literature and shows how it frames debates about working from home. Additionally, it opens up a set of research questions which should be urgently tackled. We argue that CSCW research needs to attend more closely to those intricate emplaced negotiations and coordination efforts that occur at home, not only to collaborate remotely with colleagues and clients, but also in relation to the more ‘intimate’ relationships of households families, as well as how both sets of relationships are shaped by the spatial and environmental organisation of the home as a shared space for most.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the technologically-mediated practices of work/life balancing, blurring and boundary-setting of a cohort of professionals in knowledge-intensive roles in Sheffield, a regional city in Northern England. It contributes to a growing body of CSCW research on the complex interweaving of work and non-work tasks, demands and on the boundaries that can be supported or hindered by digital technologies. In the paper, we detail how a cohort of 26 professionals in knowledge-intensive roles devise diverse strategies for handling work and non-work in light of a set of interconnected forces, and we argue that boundary dissolving and work-life blurring, and not just boundary setting and “balancing”, are essential resources within such strategies. We also show how boundary sculpting pertains not only to work pervading personal spheres of life, but also the opposite, and that establishing, softening and dissolving boundaries are practiced to handle situations when the personal seeps into professional life.

This article examines visitor interactions with and through a physical/digital installation designed for an open-air museum that displays historic buildings and ways of life from the past. The installation was designed following the “Assembly” design scheme proposed by Fraser et al. (Citation2003), and centered around five principles for the design of interactive experiences. We discuss how the Assembly framework was adapted and applied to our work on the installation called Reminisce, and we then present qualitative data gathered through the shadowing and naturalistic observations of small groups of visitors using Reminisce during their exploration of the museum. Through these data excerpts, we illustrate how interaction occurred among visitors and with the assembly. We reflect on the guiding principles of the adapted Assembly framework and on their usefulness for the design of place-specific interactional opportunities in heritage settings. Results from the empirical study show that the adapted Assembly principles provide HCI (human–computer interaction) researchers and designers with ways in which to flexibly support collocated interactions at heritage sites across artifacts and locations in ways that both complement and enrich the physical setting of the visit and its character.

Increasingly, cultural heritage professionals (CHPs) (including curators, museum directors, and education officers) are becoming more involved in designing interactive technologies. Specifically, growing access to and availability of digital technology enables CHPs, who may have limited experience with interactive technologies, to create content for and integrate these technologies into their museums. With these developments, there is a growing importance in investigating how CHPs build understandings of these tools in context; this is particularly since curators aim to learn how those tools can support their audiences. In this paper, we highlight how CHPs formed understandings for integrating an interactive tool to support an intended visitor experience into the museum environment through experimentation. Inspired by lessons learned, we propose design recommendations for interaction designers and HCI experts in designing tools and resources that support CHPs to experiment with various ways these technologies could service their interpretation goals.

Recent CSCW research has shown that nomadicity can be seen as a dynamic process that emerges as people engage with practices supporting them in the mobilisation of their workplace to accomplish work in and across different locations. This paper elaborates on the emergent aspects of the process by detailing a spectrum of motivational and contextual forces that surround and shape nomadic practices. The paper contributes to existing CSCW literature on nomadicity and extends it by articulating the complex intersections of motive and context that shape nomadic practices. The findings that the paper presents emerged from an ethnographic study of a group of academics and their nomadic work/life practices.

In this paper we reflect on the process of co-design by detailing and comparing two strategies for the participatory development of interaction concepts and prototypes in the context of technologically-enhanced museum visiting experiences. While much work in CSCW, HCI and related disciplines has examined different role configurations in co-design, more research is needed on examining how collaborative design processes can unfold in different ways. Here we present two instances of co-design of museum visiting aids, one stemming from an open brief, another from an initial working prototype; we discuss the process in each case and discuss how these alternative strategies presented the team with different possibilities as well as constraints, and led to different patterns of collaboration within the design team. Finally, we draw a set of themes for discussion and reflection to inform and aid researchers and practitioners participating in similar co-design processes, particularly in the domain of cultural heritage.

This paper presents the design, creation and use of tangible smart replicas in a large-scale museum exhibition. We describe the design rationale for the replicas, the process used in their creation, as well as the implementation and deployment of these replicas in a live museum exhibition. Deployment of the exhibition resulted in over 14000 visitors interacting with the system during the 6 months that the exhibition was open. Based on log data, interviews and observations, we examine the reaction to these smart replicas from the point of view of the museum curators and also of the museum's visitors and reflect on the fulfillment of our expectations.

We report the results of an extended empirical two-stage study on the aesthetics of hybrid objects that combine form and behaviour. By combining two shapes (spheres and cubes); two sizes (7.5cm and 15cm); two materials (fabric and plastic); and four behaviours (emitting light, emitting sound, vibrating or displaying no behaviour) we created 32 objects that differ for a single feature. In a between-participants study, 175 participants assessed and described the 32 objects. From this, seven dimensions were identified: pleasant; interesting; comfortable; playful; relaxing; special and surprising. In a second between-participants experiment 486 participants rated each object on the seven dimensions from the first study. Overall Spheres, Fabric, and Vibration were the preferred features, but for some of the dimensions specific combinations of features were rated more positively. This paper contribution is twofold: it provides a first study on the aesthetic of tangible interaction as a combination of form and behaviour outlining a potential instrument to measure it; and it provides empirical evidence of the value of experimenting with different forms (spheres) and material (fabric) even if they are difficult to create as they generate the strongest aesthetic effects.

This paper presents an empirical approach to designing and deploying technologies to support visitor activities in exhibition spaces. Specifically, we focus on the concept of "assembly" and how it was extended and applied to develop an interactive installation for an open-air museum. We argue that this approach to designing for a meaningful visitor experience is particularly suited to open-air visit scenarios; we describe how we have extended the approach and applied it, detailing the resulting multi-device installation that was deployed on site, and presenting some reflections on the usefulness of the assembly concept.

Re-Tracing the Past: exploring objects, stories, mysteries, was an exhibition held at the Hunt Museum, in Limerick, Ireland from 9th--19th June 2003. We attempted to create an exhibition that would be an engaging experience for visitors, that would open avenues for exploration, allow for the collection of visitor opinions,and that would add to the understanding of material already in the Museum,rather than focus on "gee-whiz" technology. Thus our augmented environment completely hid the technology from view. A key objective was to be faithful to the ethos of the Museum, and to produce an exhibition that would stand up to scrutiny by Museum professionals. This design study paper gives a flavour of the exhibition by taking the reader on a tour of the whole design and development cycle-through site pictures, drawings, scenarios, pictures of the exhibition spaces, the interactive components, and visitor comments.