DIY approach to Tangible and Embodied Visitor Experiences
Dick van Dijk

Waag Society
There is a notable need for museums and cultural heritage sites to engage visitors
in different ways. Within the meSch project, we take the stance that materiality complements and completes cognition and therefore a personally meaningful and sensorily rich experience with museum exhibits and places can greatly improve both the visitors’ experience and their appreciation for the museum’s cultural values. By empowering cultural heritage professionals with a technological platform to help them creating their own interactive, smart and tangible exhibitions, meSch aims at making the encounter of digital and material more sustainable in museums and at favouring the creation of a do-it-yourself community that shares experiences and learns from each other, grows and develops over time, inspired by concurrent developments in new technology.

The main goal of meSch is designing an infrastructure that supports cultural heritage
professionals in the preparation of step-by-step ‘recipes’ to create tangible, smart
exhibits and augmented spaces. Ingredients to such recipes include the appropriate
description of digital information to be associated to objects and locations in an exhibition, as well as the detailed specification of how visitors’ movements and actions can activate the contextualized presentation of that content. To facilitate adoption, we aim at encouraging the reuse of recipes over their creation from scratch. In the workshop we will present the current efforts in the meSch project, discuss the needs and possibilities for a DIY approach to interactivity in the museum, and try out the meSch tools.

http://www.dish2015.nl/programme/improvisation-session/day-1-lose-your-modesty/