Re-Tracing the Past: exploring objects, stories, mysteries, was an exhibition held at the Hunt Museum, in Limerick, Ireland from 9th -19th June 2003. We attempted to create an exhibition that would be an engaging experience for visitors, that would open avenues for exploration, allow for the collection of visitor opinions, and that would add to the understanding of material already in the Museum, rather than focus on "gee-whiz" technology. Thus our augmented environment completely hid the technology from view. A key objective was to be faithful to the ethos of the Museum, and to produce an exhibition that would stand up to scrutiny by Museum professionals. This design study paper gives a flavour of the exhibition by taking the reader on a tour of the whole design and development cycle -through site pictures, drawings, scenarios, pictures of the exhibition spaces, the interactive components, and visitor comments. June, 2003. During this time the exhibition space was continually in use, with all the interactive artefacts 'live' for the duration of the Exhibition, maintained unobtrusively by our research staff. Two room-sized spaces -the Study Room and the Room of Opinion (as above) -were created within the temporary exhibition area of the Museum. Interactive installations were embedded within these spaces, taking great care to ensure that the installations melded seamlessly into the setting, rather than being seen by visitors as 'the computer section' of the Museum. The first space, the Study Room, enabled visitors to explore various details of mysterious objects in the Hunt collection. The purpose of this area was to provoke their imagination, to show that there are a multiplicity of perspectives from which to understand these objects, and that there can be several kinds of evidence that might be used to interpret them. The second space, the Room of Opinion, enabled visitors to record a personal opinion on the nature and possi-
A unique exhibit called "Re-Tracing the past" at the Hunt Museum in Ireland in 2003, focused on embedding technology seamlessly into the space REF .
Shaping experiences in the hunt museum: a design case study
DIS '04
Computer Science Engineering