Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: The Interactive Tableau

The Interactive Tableaux were co-designed with museum volunteers to bring the Bishops' House in Sheffield, U.K., to life. Five tableaux represent five imaginary characters from the time the house was lived in, from the 16th to the 20th century. Each century is also represented by a digitally augmented object. Visitors can present an object to a tableau to provoke its character to respond—with pleasure if the object is from their own time, with surprise or fear if the object is from a different century. The object can be shown several times to unlock different audiovisual content, including smell.

Claisse, C., Dulake, N., and Petrelli, D. Design synthesis: An act of research through design. Proc. of the 2019 Research Through Design Conference.

Claisse, C., Ciolfi, L., Petrelli, D., Marshall, M., and Dulake, N. Multisensory Interactive Storytelling to Augment the Visit of a Historical House Museum. Proc. of the 3rd International Congress & Expo Digital Heritage. IEEE, 2018.

Caroline Claisse, Northumbria University
[email protected]

Daniela Petrelli, Sheffield Hallam University

Luigina Ciolfi, Sheffield Hallam University

Nick Dulake, Sheffield Hallam University

Mark T. Marshall, Sheffield Hallam University

A visitor chooses the embroidery for activating the tableaux during her visit. She shows the embroidery to the tableaux (by scanning the object's tag on the stand) to bring them to life.

A visitor showing her selected object to Anne—one of five imaginary characters who represent life at the house in 1960s. Her tableau portrays a modern family room with a TV set.