Recipes for tangible and embodied visit experiences

Museums and cultural heritage sites have a notable need to engage visitors in different ways. Within the work of the meSch project, we take the stance that the materiality complements and completes cognition, and therefore a personally meaningful and sensorily rich experience with museum exhibits and place can greatly improve both the visitors’ experience and their appreciation of the museum’s cultural values. By empowering cultural heritage professionals with a technological platform to help them create their own interactive, smart, and tangible exhibitions, meSch aims at making the encounter of digital and material more sustainable in museums. At the same time, it favors the creation of a do-it-yourself community that shares experiences and learns, grows, and develops over time, inspired by concurrent developments in new technology. This paper discusses the current efforts in meSch towards the definition of a general formalism, inspired by co-design activities with cultural heritage professionals, for specifying "recipes" for creating technology-augmented experiences to enhance the museum visit. 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.