Borrowable Museum: Utilizing Digital Fabrication Techniques for Remote Tangible Experiences

Abstract

This thesis aims to create interactive, tangible, and shareable replicas of museum contemporary collections outside their walls. Our work is motivated by the inaccessibility of museums in remote communities that cannot access artworks in-person. Our research questions explore: a) How can we utilize FLAGs to create a tangible public interactive display for museums to serve remote communities? b) How can we design an interface with unbounded interactions, locations and context supported by self-monitoring data collection in the wild? We prototyped the Borrowable Museum (BM), a portable interactive physical display. Using artifacts from the Wearable exhibition at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology, we designed borrowable replicas of three artifacts using digital fabrication techniques. Using insights from the museum, we built the Borrowable Museum to be an interactive screenless box on wheels (with digitally-monitored instruction labels, user logs, and system logs) to house borrowable replicas. We embedded the Borrowable Museum with sensors to record usage online in real-time. We ran a self-monitored study where the Borrowable Museum was publicly displayed for 2 months at 4 different locations (2 recreational and 2 educational). We collected data from 6 installed sensors, 261 hours of field observations, 17 filled questionnaires, and 14 semi-structured interviews to understand how people interact with, make sense of, and perceive such artifacts. All the qualitative data was used to conduct Thematic Analysis and the quantitative data was analyzed for deeper understanding of the time, number, and duration of interactions. Findings show participants’ hesitancy towards handling artifacts outside museums for lack of surrounding context, but familiarity with the space and unmonitored interactions encouraged engagement. Social engagement and online/offline sharing increased among people in groups while empty spaces/hours and unusual labels increased engagement. We then discussed how remote museums and tangible memorabilia added new benefits besides accessibility. We highlight the constraints of shareability and reflect on the research questions by recommending design opportunities for future research.