The art experience: meeting tourist needs and design visions

The design of entertainment and edutainment systems is a compelling and challenging adventure. Such systems are not intended to help users perform work tasks and, most of the time, they cannot be brought back to clearly stated user requirements: their ultimate mission is to engage the user and to stimulate learning. The nature of these kinds of systems imposes a mediation between designers’ visions and user needs. In the following sections we describe the design process adopted to develop an electronic tourist guide that transforms the user experience from one of simple consultation (commonly achieved with audio guides, multimedia kiosks, CD ROMs or even books) to an immersion in a rich information environment. This work was driven by an ambitious vision: to minimise the boundary between the physical space and the related information using the movement of the visitor as mediator. The tourist guide assumes the role of a travelling companion that tells stories about what the visitor looks at, without requiring any explicit intervention for accessing information. From this vision we developed, within a three years project named HIPS (Hyper Interaction within Physical Space) funded by the European Commission in the I3 Programme, two prototypes: an outdoor prototype and an indoor installation in the Museo Civico in Siena, Italy. The project finished in October 2000 and the system is currently maintained in laboratory. The technology we used allowed multiple information structures to be overlaid on the physical world in a non-intrusive fashion, opening up new possibilities for creative design. This experience demonstrates that the success of entertainment or edutainment systems, especially those exploiting advanced technologies, strongly relies on a design philosophy that mediates between a deep and continuous focus on the users and innovative visions