Daniela Petrelli

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Sheffield Hallam University

This paper explores the challenge of restoring the sensory experience of archaeological museums, particularly through the engagement of touch, in order to enable visitors to have an embodied museum experience. The traditional ocular-centric approach of museums, emphasising visual and information-led approaches, has led to a disconnect between visit...

Tangible and Embodied interactions are areas of research within HCI and Interaction design. They refer to a way in which interacting with computer systems is closer to the way we interact with the real world. Instead of using devices such as a computer or a phone, we interact using seemingly non-technological objects, by moving our bodies or by usi...

To effectively communicate the archaeological remains of the distant past is a challenge: little may be left to see, and the culture may be very different to comprehend. This paper compares two technological approaches to communicating Roman archaeology in museums: virtual reality and tangible interaction. Although very different in rationale, desi...

For many outside of the scientific community, big data and the forms it takes, such as statistical lists, spreadsheets and graphs, often seem abstract and unintelligible. This book investigates how digital fabrication and traditional making approaches are being used to present data in newly engaging and interesting ways. The first part of the book...

Over four years, meSch produced over a dozen demos: small experiments focused on a specific technology or place; interactive stations designed as part of large exhibitions open to the public; and tangible interaction and data souvenirs that bridge the physical-digital divide. The four projects presented here offer a sample of visitor experiences we...

Motivation : The past 25 years have seen a constant increase in the use of information technology to deliver digital content in cultural heritage settings. Museums have experimented with multimedia PCs, PDAs and phones, table-tops, Google Glass and now VR. The aim has always been to provide more information despite the fact that only a minority of...

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represent...

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting wi...

Despite years of HCI research on digital technology in museums, it is still unclear how different interactions impact on visitors'. A comparative evaluation of smart replicas, phone app and smart cards looked at the personal preferences, behavioural change, and the appeal of mobiles in museums. 76 participants used all three interaction modes and g...

This study examined the aesthetics of interactive objects (IOs), which are three-dimensional physical artefacts that exhibit autonomous behaviour when handled. The aim of the research was threefold: first, to investigate whether aesthetic preference for distinctive objects’ structures emerges in compound stimulation; second, to explore whether ther...

Shaping personalisation in a scenario of tangible, embedded and embodied interaction for cultural heritage involves challenges that go well beyond the requirements of implementing content personalisation for portable mobile guides. Content is coupled with the physical experience of the objects, the space, and the facets of the context-being those p...

Building a long-lasting personal relationship with visitors by maintaining their engagement after the visit is one of the most challenging endeavours cultural heritage sites face. When successful, this connection fosters new opportunities for the visitor to get in touch with the heritage, e.g. to visit again or to take part in cultural activities....

The technological innovation of Industry4.0 opens up new possibilities for bespoke and unique designs all rooted in the same technology and supported by the same services. Taken together, Cyber-Physical Systems, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things offer a neutral platform for the creation of hybrid digital physical objects. The economy of scale...

This paper presents current research on the design and evaluation of tangible interaction within house museums – a particular type of heritage site. Containers of Stories was an interactive installation co-designed with the volunteers at the Bishops’ House museum, one of the few surviving Tudor buildings in Sheffield, UK. Dating from the 16th centu...

This paper presents the design, implementation, use and evaluation of a tangible data souvenir for an interactive museum exhibition. We define a data souvenir as the materialisation of the personal visiting experience: a data souvenir is dynamically created on the basis of data recorded throughout the visit and therefore captures and represents the...

The Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield was completed in 1961 to designs by Gollins Melvin and Ward and it has been dubbed by English Heritage ‘the most elegant University tower block of its period’. Its renovation, finished in 2012, can be understood as representative of wider debates about the attitudes and values attached to the future use...

A comparative evaluation of smart replicas, phone app and smart cards looked at the personal preferences of visitors and the appeal of mobiles in museum exhibitions. As part of an exhibition evaluation, 76 participants used all three interactions modes and gave their opinions in a questionnaire. The result shows that Phone and Replica are equally l...

It is of paramount importance that cultural heritage professionals are directly involved in the design of digitally augmented experiences in their museum spaces. We propose an approach based on a catalogue of reusable narrative and interaction strategies with step-by-step instructions on how to adapt and instantiate them for a specific museum and t...

We use design research to explore ways in which tangible and embodied interaction can be used to create novel experiences of heritage. We identified five design principles and used them to frame the challenge. In collaboration with curators, we co-created an interactive multi-narrative soundscape for the remains of trenches and a fortified camp fro...

This paper presents the design, creation and use of tangible smart replicas in a large-scale museum exhibition. We describe the design rationale for the replicas, the process used in their creation, as well as the implementation and deployment of these replicas in a live museum exhibition. Deployment of the exhibition resulted in over 14000 visitor...

We report the results of an extended empirical two-stage study on the aesthetics of hybrid objects that combine form and behaviour. By combining two shapes (spheres and cubes); two sizes (7.5cm and 15cm); two materials (fabric and plastic); and four behaviours (emitting light, emitting sound, vibrating or displaying no behaviour) we created 32 obje...

Cultural heritage is a variegated field of inquiry for human-computer interaction (HCI), including both efforts to understand how digital technologies mediate human activities in heritage settings and the development of interactives to support the interpretation of heritage. Cultural heritage takes many forms and heritage settings vary greatly, fro...

We report in detail the co-design, setup and evaluation of a technological intervention for a complex outdoor heritage site: a World War I fortified camp and trenches located in the natural setting of the Italian Alps. Sound was used as the only means of content delivery as it was considered particularly effective in engaging visitors at an emotion...

This workshop will explore the role of technology supporting and mediating cultural heritage practices for both professional communities (cultural heritage professionals, heritage institutions, etc.) and civic communities (citizen-led heritage initiatives, heritage volunteers, personal and community identified heritage, heritage crowdsourcing, etc....

We present empirical fieldwork conducted in collaboration with a local community of cultural heritage volunteers at the historic Sheffield General Cemetery, in order to inform and realise concepts for interactive installations. The volunteers take care of the site and of its visitors and perform a variety of important activities for preservation an...

Museum objects have fascinating stories but are often presented in a detached, objective way that tends to keep visitors at a distance. In a collaborative research we have explored a different way to present museum objects: fifteen exhibits from the museum deposit compete for one of the four display cases on the exhibit floor. Objects are given a p...

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’ exp...

Interactive technology has been long deployed at cultural heritage sites for a variety of purposes (education, guidance, research, etc.) and in a variety of forms (from touch screens, to mobile guides, etc.). However, while there has been an increasing attempt to make the visitor’s interaction with technology and with the site more active and parti...

We present a study of preparation for and celebration of an English Christmas, with particular stress on temporal aspects, including duration, anticipation and repetition. We asked nine households to document their countdown to Christmas using media and diaries, and interviewed them before and after. We detail how time appears in the accounts, from...

The meSch project, Material Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage, has the goal of designing, developing and deploying tools for the creation of tangible interactives that will connect the physical experience of heritage with relevant digital cross-media information in novel ways. A wealth of digital cultural heritage content is available in on...

Personalisation for cultural heritage aims at delivering to visitors the right stories at the right time. Our endeavour to determine which features to use for adaptation starts from acknowledging what forms of personalisation curators value as most meaningful. Working in collaboration with curators we have explored the different features that must...

Constraints are part of any interaction design activity, as they inform as well as challenge and limit the designer. In this one-day workshop, we will discuss how constraints, which are resulting from their context, are fostering or hindering designs and the act of designing. Also constraints that have both positive and negative consequences will b...

Drawing on a field study with eight families in northern England, we explore the traditions and rituals carried out at Christmas, looking at the artifacts and processes that constitute family life at this time of year. In addition to individual differences, a common pattern emerges: an extended preparation is carried out by the hosting household ov...

We examine photos in the family home as examples of mementos, cherished objects kept in memory of a person or event. In a ‘memory tour’, we asked participants to walk us through their family home selecting and discussing significant mnemonic objects. With each personal narrative we recorded memento location, i.e. the room, place within the room and...

In order to better explore the opportunities for tangible interaction in new areas such as the home or cultural heritage sites, we used multiple rapidly-developed prototypes that take advantage of existing technology. Physical prototypes allow us to give form to ideas and to evaluate the integration of form and function, two core components of tang...

Many embedded platforms that support the creation of interactive smart objects have become available over the last years. Arduino, Raspberry Pi, electric imp, mbed, MSP430, and .NET Gadgeteer are examples of hardware platforms with very different properties and capabilities. In order to make interactive artifacts additional sensors, actuators, and...

This paper presents current research on the design, deployment and evaluation of tangible interaction concepts for an outdoor heritage space, the Sheffield General Cemetery. The Cemetery is an area of historical and natural importance managed and maintained by a community group. Following a co-design approach, we have conducted a series of activiti...

The essence and value of Linked Data lies in the ability of humans and machines to query, access and reason upon highly structured and formalised data. Ontology structures provide an unambiguous description of the structure and content of data. While a multitude of software applications and visualization systems have been developed over the past ye...

A digital copy of a Le Corbusier drawing supports analysis to a greater level of detail than its paper counterpart, but the feeling of being in the archive, the emotion of touching the same paper as the master, and the smell of dust and years past are what makes the experience unique and unforgettable. The information over object approach has influ...

On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present. Elisa Giaccardi, Editor

Personalization research for the Cultural Heritage domain has mostly focused on supporting the visitors by automatically creating the narratives and the visit experience. The meSch project shifts the focus of research from visitors to curators and re-designs the personalization process in a context of tangible interaction, to strengthen the role of...

Elaborating on the result of a field study of Christmas traditions in eight British households, we explore the design of technology specifically aimed at augmenting existing practices. Four concepts that favoured playfulness and engagement across generations were discussed in a workshop with eight people who took part in the initial field study. Th...

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that “record everything.” Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synt...

Over the last twenty years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visito...

Purpose This paper aims to describe a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross‐language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive. Design/methodology/approach A controlled lab‐based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian‐English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searc...

This paper reflects on the uses of different forms of storytelling in the design and implementation of an experience prototype for a Museum exhibition about the medieval historian Jean Froissart. Concept designs developed during interdisciplinary design workshops were captured as pastiche scenarios for further discussions. Content was created using...

The manufacturing industry offers a huge range of opportunities and challenges for exploiting semantic web technologies. Collating heterogeneous data into semantic knowledge repositories can provide immense benefits to companies, however the power of such knowledge can only be realised if end users are provided visual means to explore and analyse t...

The explosion in growth of the Web of Linked Data has provided, for the first time, a plethora of information in disparate locations, yet bound together by machine-readable, semantically typed relations. Utilisation of the Web of Data has been, until now, restricted to the members of the community, eating their own dogfood, so to speak. To the regu...

This paper describes two-part research exploring the context for and human-centred design of ‘digital mementos’, as an example of technology for reflection on personal experience (in this case, autobiographical memories). Field studies into families' use of physical and digital objects for remembering provided a rich understanding of associated use...

Purpose This paper seeks to describe the preliminary studies (on both users and data), the design and evaluation of the K‐Search system for searching legacy documents in aerospace engineering. Real‐world reports of jet engine maintenance challenge the current indexing practice, while real users' tasks require retrieving the information in the prope...

One of the open problems in Semantic Web research is which tools should be provided to users to explore linked data. This is even more urgent now that massive amount of linked data is being released by governments worldwide. The development of single dedicated visualization applications is increasing, but the problem of exploring unknown linked dat...

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our unde...

We explore the role of sound as a medium for social reminiscing: 10 families were involved in recording 'sonic souvenirs' of their holidays. They shared and discussed their collections on their return. We compared these sounds with their photo taking activities and reminiscences. Both sounds and pictures triggered active collaborative reminiscing,...

We carried out fieldwork to characterise and compare physical and digital mementos in the home. Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic form...

We report part of the design experience gained in X-Media, a system for knowledge management and sharing. Consolidated techniques of interaction design (scenario-based design) had to be revisited to capture the richness and complexity of intelligent interactive systems. We show that the design of intelligent systems requires methodologies (faceted...

Complex scenario analysis requires the exploration of multiple hypotheses and supporting evidence for each argument posed. Knowledge-intensive organisations typically analyse large amounts of inter-related, heterogeneous data to retrieve the knowledge this contains and use it to support effective decision-making. We demonstrate the use of interacti...

Semantic formalisms represent content in a uniform way according to ontologies. This enables manipulation and reasoning via automated means (e.g. Semantic Web services), but limits the user’s ability to explore the semantic data from a point of view that originates from knowledge representation motivations. We show how, for user consumption, a visu...

This paper details an integrated methodology to optimise Knowledge reuse and sharing, illustrated with a use case in the aeronautics domain. It uses Ontologies as a central modelling strategy for the Capture of Knowledge from legacy docu-ments via automated means, or directly in systems interfacing with Knowledge workers, via user-defined, web-base...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe a study set up to investigate and map the landscape of digital writing today. A holistic perspective has been adopted involving writers, readers and publishers alike. Design/methodology/approach The research uses a qualitative approach and combines interviews and direct observations. In in‐depth int...

The analysis of data using a visual tool is rarely a task done in isolation, it tends to be part of a wider goal: that of making sense of the current situation, often to support decision-making. A user-centred approach is needed in order to properly design interaction that supports sense-making incorporating visual data analysis. This paper reports...

Sensemaking is the process of analysing complex situations in order to make informed decisions. Semantic Web technology can be effectively used to create new sensemaking systems that focus on concepts and knowledge instead of documents. We demonstrate how this is achieved using information extraction to acquire knowledge and create a semantic repos...

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger rememberin...

This design proposal explores the concept of tangible digital mementos concealed inside baubles to be periodically revisited at special occasions. A photostory describes the concept and a technical description provides details. We outline how this concept could be extended to other objects, like tinsels, creating chains for stories.

This paper examines gestural deixis production in a multimodal (natural language and pointing) interaction. Users (N=30) were required to fill in 4 forms by interacting with a simulated system. Labelling of Entry Fields (LEF, Complete-Partial; between-subject) and Feedback (Present-Absent within-subject) were manipulated in a 2*2 design. Results in...

Some of the significant factors associated with cultural heritage are discussed. The term cultural heritage refers to historical sites and buildings, works of art, and less tangible objects, such as music and films. This collective heritage needs to be looked after and preserved for future generations, but it is also an inheritance to be understood...

INTRODUCTION The University of Sheffield participated in iCLEF 2002 using, as a test-bed, the prototype under development in the Clarity project. Clarity is an EU funded project aimed at developing a system for cross-language information retrieval for so-called low density languages, those with few translation resources. Currently translation betw...

In their study of family homes, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton take a critical position on technological homes, and underline that “meaning, not possessions, is the ultimate goal of [people] lives, and the fruits of technology […] cannot alone provide this. People still need to know that their actions matter, that their existence forms a patt...

This paper describes hybrid search, a search method supporting both document and knowledge retrieval via the flexible combination of ontologybased search and keyword-based matching. Hybrid search smoothly copes with lack of semantic coverage of document content, which is one of the main limitations of current semantic search methods. In this paper...

Purpose To provide a first understanding on the constraints historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that an online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as case study. Multiple methods were used t...

Current technology makes it possible to capture huge amounts of information related to everyday experiences. Despite this, we know little about the processes by which people identify and manage mementos - objects which are directly meaningful to their memories. Among the millions of objects people encounter in a lifetime, few become such reminders...

This paper discusses the role of user-centred evaluations as an essential method for researching interactive information retrieval. It draws mainly on the work carried out during the Clarity Project where different user-centred evaluations were run during the lifecycle of a cross-language information retrieval system. The iterative testing was not...

‘Lifelogging’ technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger rememberi...

This paper describes a study set up to investigate and map the landscape of digital writing today. Writers, readers and publishers have been interviewed and questioned for their opinions on different issues. Results show the area is still unsettled though much excitement surrounds experimentations and freedom of publishing online. Publishers are no...

Interactivity has proved a successful way to engage visitors of science museums. However it is not a common practice when the objects to exhibit are artefacts or, as in the case of this paper, books. A study was set up to investigate the driving criteria for the “The Life and Work of William Butler Yeats” exhibition at the National Library of Irela...

This paper reports on the preliminary results of a study in information production, transmission, access and use in aerospace manufacturing and maintenance. Multiple techniques were used in order to understand the context in which the information flow takes place. The complexity is such that after several meetings with users the full picture is not...

Ontology-based annotation provides a method of making document content amenable to automatic searching and the construction of an index even when professional support is not a possibility. Research in this area is currently investigating applications both to the World Wide Web and to specific domains, e.g. in aerospace. Some of the tools developed...

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the...

A novel and complex form of information access is cross-language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. The authors present three user evaluations u...

In this demo paper, we present AKTiveDoc, a tool for supporting sharing and reuse of knowledge in document production (e.g. writing) and use (e.g. reading).

This paper describes our results from the image retrieval task of iCLEF 2005 based on a comparative user evaluation of two interfaces: one displaying search results as a list; the other organising retrieved images into a hierarchy of concepts displayed on the interface as an interactive menu. Based on a known-item retrieval task, data was analysed...