Liam Bannon , Steve Benford , John Bowers

Assembling mixed media artifacts in order to create engaging museum environments. Hybrid Design Creates Innovative Museum Experiences T he Situating Hybrid Assemblies in Public Environments (SHAPE) project within the European Disappearing Computer initiative has explored how emerging ubiquitous technologies can support museum visiting experiences. Many museums still rely on simple text panels to provide information to visitors about museum artifacts, which are enclosed in locked glass cases. Visitors have little chance of engaging with the material. Also, ethnographic studies of public installations have highlighted the collabora-tive nature of museum visiting, with couples and family groups interacting around exhibits, and discussing arti-facts with museum guides and other visitors [1, 4]. The studies revealed the significance of co-participation and collaboration in the museum experience and the ways in which the navigation of galleries, the discovery of exhibits, and the conclusions that people draw arise in and through social interaction. These studies involved extensive fieldwork, audiovisual recording, interviews and discussions with curators, museum managers, educators, and exhibit designers. In response, SHAPE has designed hybrid artifacts—installations that support visitors manipulating physical and digital material in a visible and interesting manner for many museum visitors. A second concern has been how to knit together multiple artifacts into a coherent visiting experience that extends across space and time. These ideas have been explored in two living exhibitions developed within public museums. Both design interventions avoid the simple didactic forms of display , where visitors passively receive information, by creating stimulating exhibition environments where people explore, question, debate, and reflect on the nature of museum collections. Uncovering digital history at Not-tingham Castle. Nottingham Castle has witnessed over 1,000 years of British history, including the exploits of Robin Hood and his followers. However, visitors to the current site face a difficult challenge: how to understand the many interleaved events that have taken place at different times and locations, in buildings and spaces often no longer visible above ground. The first living exhibition addressed this problem by creating a " history hunt " around the castle grounds [3].