Situated Interaction in Art Settings

This paper describes metaphors and design strategies applied to conceive and develop a hand-held location aware electronic guide for museums and cities that includes a number of situated and contextual aware interaction mechanisms. In particular we describe a design approach based on the situated visiting strategies and the contextual space affordances in order to support the user involvement in the activity and with the physical environment. The work reports some of the resul ts achieved within HIPS, a three-year project funded by the European Commission within the I-Cube (I) Program. This paper offers a contribution to the design of cognitive artefacts aiming at mediating the emotional involvement with physical and information spaces starting from the understanding of how the situation of use does influence the interaction process.