Blending customisation, context-awareness and adaptivity for personalised tangible interaction in cultural heritage

Shaping personalisation in a scenario of tangible, embedded and embodied interaction for cultural heritage involves challenges that go well beyond the requirements of implementing content personalisation for portable mobile guides. Content is coupled with the physical experience of the objects, the space, and the facets of the context – being those personal or social – acquire a more prominent role. This paper presents a personalisation framework to support complex scenarios that combine the physical, the digital, and the social dimensions of a visit. It is based on our experience of collaborating with curators and museum experts to understand and shape personalisation in a way that is meaningful to them and to visitors alike, that is sustainable to implement, and effective in managing the complexity of context-awareness. The proposed approach features a decomposition of personalisation into multiple layers of complexity that involve a blend of customisation on the visitor’s initiative or according to the visitor’s profile, system context-awareness, and automatic adaptivity computed by the system based on the visitor’s behaviour model. We use a number of case studies of implemented exhibitions where this approach was used to illustrate its many facets and how adaptive techniques can be effectively complemented with interaction design, rich narratives and visitors’ choice to create deeply personal experiences. Overarching reflections spanning case studies and prototypes provide evidence of the viability of the proposed framework, and illustrate the final effect of the user experience.