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Cultural heritage and mobile technologies: Towards a design framework

Conference Paper · September 2012

DOI: 10.1109/VSMM.2012.6365914

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 Cultural Heritage and Mobile Technologies
Towards a 'esign )ramework
Davide Spallazzo
INDACO department (Industrial Design, Arts, Communication and Fashion)
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy
davide.spallazzo@polimi.it
Abstract—The paper presents the results of a research aimed at
providing designers and developers with tools able to guide a
conscious design of cultural mobile experiences, fully exploiting
the potentials of mobile technologies, with clear objectives and the
awareness of the means to achieve them. The research fits into the
field of mobile interpretation for GLAMs with a particular focus
on mobile gaming and how it can foster learning, socialization
and engagement. The paper describes the context in which the
research is grafted, the methodology, the insights and proposes
and discusses a design framework.
Keywords—cultural heritage; mobile technology; design
framework; cultural learning; social engagement
I. INTRODUCTION
The paper addresses the relation between mobile technology
and cultural heritage from a design perspective, describing the
results of a research aimed at providing designers and
developers with tools able to guide a conscious design of
cultural mobile experiences, fully exploiting the potentials of
mobile technologies with clear objectives and the awareness of
the means to achieve them. The research fits into the wide
discussion about mobile interpretation for GLAMs and cultural
institutions at large with three main filters: learning,
socialization and engagement. The assumption from which the
research starts is indeed that a designed use of mobile
technology during the visit to museums, cities and cultural
institutions can foster both learning and social engagement. The
main research questions here addressed are then: which
mechanics of interaction are enabled by mobile technologies
and how they can be exploited to design a mobile experience?
Which are the main factors to consider while designing a
mobile experience and, finally, what could be a general
framework to support the design of a mobile experience and
what process could be followed to optimize its design? Desk
research and case studies are the main methods employed to
answer the questions above and the result is a structured design
framework aimed at supporting designers and developers in
taking into account critical issues in developing a mobile
cultural experience. Two pilot projects, one completed and one
ongoing, have been developed in order to test the usefulness
and efficacy of the proposed framework. The paper describes
the context in which the research is grafted, the methodology,
and presents and discusses the achieved results with a particular
focus on the resulting design framework and process.
978-1-4673-2565-3/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 109
II. MOBILE TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
The access to cultural heritage resources is a large-scale
phenomenon, which relates a great variety of cultural
institutions with a very diversified and broad audience,
increasing the complexity of the relationship between the
cultural product and its public. Cultural institutions are facing a
mass phenomenon [1] characterized by an audience that is very
far from that of the first museums, made by noble or upper
middle-class connoisseurs who possessed the knowledge
necessary to fully understand the exhibited objects [2]. The
contemporary visiting model often rests on passive contents’
consumption [3], and it’s unable to fulfill the objectives of
education and enjoyment fixed by ICOM for museums [4]. The
audience is changing, it’s becoming more diverse and
consequently different expectations are arousing: someone is
just curious, solicited by broad cultural interests, and looking
for serious contents with a light mediation in order to approach
the topics in a facilitated manner [3]; others are eager to enter a
constructive dialogue with contents and the institutions [5] and
to play an active rather than passive role in their visits [6] while
a part of the audience is expecting to be engaged in discussing,
sharing and, eventually, creating contents [7].
A. Mobile Interpretation
Digital technologies and mobile technologies in particular
are often pointed as a driver to achieve new visiting models [6],
[8] but their employment in cultural heritage field is anything
but unproblematic. The introduction of digital technologies in
museums and cultural institutions, indeed, finds often curators
and education directors neither prepared nor equipped
technically and culturally [9] and consequently unable to design
and realize autonomously a digital experience [8] or simply to
direct their development. Despite the very long tradition of
mobile interpretation in museums and the new potentials
offered by smartphones and tablets [10], the current visit
models often relies on that enabled by audio guides, be it a
guided tour or a free choice tour, soundtracks and soundbites in
the definition of Proctor [11]. Museums and cultural
institutions, in order to meet visitors’ need, must deal with basic
expectations of today, such as connectivity and portability [5]
together with the integration with social networks. The
technological evolution in cultural heritage field is therefore no
more related to the technical development in itself, but rather to
portability and ubiquitous web access, that link what happen in
the exhibition space with what happens outside, letting visitors
connect with objects, ideas, people, places and institutions [6].
Furthermore the deployment of digital interpretations for
museums has been quite completely outsourced [5] and its
evolution has been a technological implementation of
traditional visiting models [11]. What follows is very often a
poor user experience [8] and mobile technologies are not fully
exploited, because employed in ways similar to those of the
first days of mobile interpretation [12]. What still lacks is a fair
vision of mobile technologies for what they are, tools which can
help to create a better relation with visitors [13], to enhance the
learning experience [14], to connect users with other users and
to provide new opportunities to engage them in novel ways
[15]. The discussion about mobile interpretation is therefore no
longer about technologies themselves [6] but about the
practices they enable [16] and how these practices could be
integrated in the field, to enhance the visitor experience [13].
The discussion must be therefore shifted from technology itself
towards the design of the mobile experience as a whole.
III. METHODOLOGY AND STEPS
In order to achieve the stated goal, that is to propose a
methodology able to support designers, developers as well as
curators, in designing mobile cultural experiences, the research
has been characterized by desk research, case studies and
practice-based research, plus a continuous movement back and
forth between the three methods. The main domains the
research deals with are mobile interpretation, cultural learning
and sociality in cultural institution: the first domain has been
studied in order to get a clear image of the state of the art in the
field, while the other two domain have been analyzed in order
to point out models of cultural mobile learning and models of
sociality that can be fostered during the visit through mobile
technology. The three domains are approached from a design
perspective, which means that the study is conducted to support
and inform the design framework. The outcomes are therefore
the definition of the characteristics and potentialities of front-
end mobile devices, a broad classification of cultural learning
approaches with mobile technology and the identification of
models of sociality and levels of social engagement achievable
during the visit. This phase resulted also in the definition of a
filter to read and map several applications of mobile technology
within museums and cultural institutions, aimed at clustering
such a various phenomenon and at identifying trends and
growing sectors. About 40 projects developed between 2000
and 2012, involving mobile technology to enhance the visit
experience, have been analyzed and mobile gaming has been
identified as a fast growing sector that suits particularly well
with the defined aims of active visitors engagement, learning
and socialization. A new phase of desk research has then
allowed to gain insights about mobile gaming field, and to
identify further tools to analyze the meaningful cases and to
face a deep instrumental study of fourteen cases, selected by
time and activity [17]. This study was mainly aimed at
understanding which game mechanics and dynamics have been
employed, at identify the main features that could inform the
design framework and which could be a design process to be
followed. The results of case studies, as well as the insights and
prior findings of literature review converged in the creation of a
110
main design framework and a process successively tested
through two pilot projects. The following section focuses
briefly on the first insights gained by literature review.
IV. LEARNING APPROACHES AND SOCIALITY
A. Mobile Cultural Learning Approaches
Addressing the vast and varied literature about learning in
museums and cultural institution is a complex task [18] and
matching it with that referring to mobile learning (m-learning)
is even more complex. The aim is indeed to find out main
common approaches between the two domains in order to
structure the design framework and to sensitize designer about
learning issues. A matching between the two fields can be done
according to the broad learning theories they refer to, but this
choice presents some weaknesses. A classification based upon
the pedagogic paradigms indeed doesn’t allow a clear
placement of the projects because the categories are not well
distinct [19] and furthermore pedagogy in mobile learning
projects is not stable, and little design changes can shift the
project from a paradigm to another [19]. To overcome these
limitations broader and more flexible categories, able to
encompass different learning paradigms and describe an
attitude, more than specific behaviors, are proposed. Three
main approaches based on the possible aim of the project
(learning, be engaged and socialize) are therefore proposed. The
focused approach encompasses projects mainly aimed at
providing visitors with a quantifiable learning experience. The
projects that fit in this category are usually based on a teacher-
learner model, in which the institution gives visitors focused
and precise information. Drill and feedback activities [20] are
commonly employed to deliver information, test the results of
the learning process and give feedback, but the common mobile
multimedia tours can easily fit in this class as well. The
immersive approach instead describes projects mainly focused
in providing visitors/learners with engaging and totalizing
experiences, in which they play an active role. Compared to the
focused approach there’s a shift from a teacher-centered to a
learner-centered model: the institution does not give visitors
ready information but rather a set of tools to construct a
personal meaning. Participatory simulations are a typical
example of immersive approach but also augmented reality
games, role-playing experiences and other projects heavily
based on a narrative background can be encompassed in this
approach. The last category, collaborative approach,
encompasses projects that attach importance to socialization
among visitors, providing them with experiences, tools and
conditions to foster dialogue and collaboration. The learning
process is a social activity in which every participant shares his
or her knowledge or skills toward a common goal, as suggested
by the collaborative learning theory. Examples of collaborative
approach are group mobile games or multimedia tours
specifically addressed to families.
B. Social Engagement and Models of Sociality
Learning is one of the critical issues to be considered while
designing a mobile cultural experience, but social issues need to
be carefully considered too. According to Paulette McManus,
indeed, the social aspect of a cultural experience is not simply
an adding pleasure but it’s a source of satisfaction at the very
heart of the experience [21] and people’s behavior in museums
is dependent on the social context of the visit and on the nature
of the group [22]. Very often the idea of spending few hours
with a good company is a key motivation for the visit in itself
[23], [24] but must be understood what are the models of social
appropriation of the exhibit space. Debenedetti addresses this
issue proposing a dynamic between the two polarities of
affiliation and anonymity, creating four different modes of
social appropriation of museum space [23]. He adds to the two
traditional and static models of personal vs. shared visit two
dynamic ones, which presuppose a movement from one
condition to another. In the separated visit, indeed,
accompanied visitors decide to freely move from a social to a
personal experience and vice versa, using verbal or physical
barriers to social interaction when needed; on the contrary the
not-alone model is animated by the pursuit of social interaction
by a single visitor who seeks to overcome his or her anonymity
[23]. This framework results very useful in sensitizing designer
about social configuration during the visit but it doesn’t
describe the level of visitors’ social engagement. The me-to-we
process proposed by Nina Simon describes the level of social
engagement through five steps [7] that start with the interaction
of visitors with contents and ends with indirect and direct social
relations between visitors. The process is structured as a
continuum in which every step needs the previous one but it’s
not mandatory to reach every time the last step: not every
visitor is indeed interested in socializing directly and not every
institution aims at being a space for social aggregation [7]. The
three approaches of mobile cultural learning as well as the
models of sociality and the levels of social engagement are part
of the design framework but are also useful tools for case
studies, whose results are briefly described in the next section.
V. INSIGHTS FROM CASE STUDIES
Following the categories proposed by Stake [25] the cases
analyzed during the research can be considered instrumental,
because the aim of the study is to gain insights into issues
related to mobile gaming, learning and sociality, helping to
structure the general framework. The analysis aimed at
understanding what mechanics of interaction and game
dynamics are employed and how are they applied, how the
mechanics and the dynamics are influenced by theoretical
approaches and how they actively stimulate learning and social
engagement. To answer these questions, multiple case study
seemed more suitable in order to find similarity and differences
between the units of analysis. For the study, fourteen cases have
been studied and the selection has been made by time and
activity [25]: it considers projects developed between 2000 and
2012, which employ mobile technology and gaming activities
to enhance the experience of visit.
A. Remarks from Case Studies
A first remark emerging from case studies is that
universities and research centers are the most active in the field;
cultural institutions are not always involved in the project
development; private societies and foundations have a
prominent role. Looking instead at the competences expressed
in the design teams, it results that technological skills are
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always present, followed by curatorial and broad design
competences. From the documentation produced by developers
and researchers who took part in the projects it results that for
quite all the applications, the first aim was to create an
educational experience able to amuse their target audience,
typically teenagers and families with children. Most of the
analyzed experiences take place indoor, usually within a
museum, while only few relate to the urban space and only one
to an open-air archaeological park. The result is not surprising
because museums are traditionally places of election for mobile
interpretation and offer a limited and constrained space for
experimentation. Most of the projects are indeed pilot
experiences that need a careful design and set up and the urban
space could be too wide to be monitored or controlled. Quite all
the projects provide a mobile experience that starts and ends
within the temporal limits of the visit: the result is quite
unexpected especially for those projects heavily relying on a
constructivist approach, that suggests to provide visitors with
time to prepare the learning experience and time to reflect about
it [26]. Looking at the contents, it results that all the projects
described present contents referred to the collection, being them
objects and exhibits exposed in the museums or points of
interest scattered in the city. Some others provide visitors also
with contents related to the case (e. g. the museum building or
the city as a whole) fostering knowledge deeply about the case
and broadly among the exhibits [14]. The projects with a strong
narrative structure very often provide visitors also with more
intangible contents that relate to the history of a place, or to the
daily life of historical figures or to famous legends. Looking at
the level of deepening of contents, roughly defined for
beginners, amateurs and experts it can be noticed that all the
projects propose very basic contents, suitable for children or
teenagers or people without any knowledge of the subject. This
result is in line with the targets identified by the different
projects but can be also explained with the choice of a game
approach: games mechanics, indeed, very hardly allow to go
deep into contents, using basic information easy to be read or
retrieved. This remark opens to important challenges for
designers and developers who want to engage visitors in a game
experience but not simplifying contents. The last criterion used
about contents tries to understand who are the creators of
contents: experts and curators, users or both. This criterion is
useful in the light of the progressive shifting in contents’
creation from experts to users [7] that are getting more and
more involved by the institutions in the creative process.
Looking at the analyzed projects it emerges that quite all the
applications are structured around contents edited by curators or
experts and very few propose contents edited by users together
with experts with a user-centered approach. This result is in line
with the idea of Silverman [27] that maintains that curators’
voice must provide an excellent and well-researched
interpretation and that visitors’ voice is in addition to and not
instead of the main exhibit message.
B. Learning and Sociality Issues
Analyzing the cases from the point of view of learning, it
emerges that the focused approach is dominant, followed by the
immersive and by the collaborative approach. This means that
several experiences are strictly aimed at making visitors learn
something about the exhibits and the game mechanics are
usually employed to make people notice some details and verify
they have gotten the key message. Other projects attach less
importance to the acquisition of specific notions and are aimed
at involving visitors in simulations: users play roles and are
called to act as if they were pilgrims in the middle ages, or
detectives looking for clues, ghost hunters or characters of
mystery stories. Very often these experiences include game
mechanics common to the focused approach: what changes is
that they haven’t an end in themselves but are fully integrated
into a plot. Regarding sociality issues it results that most of the
cases enable a fusion visit: in this cluster there are the projects
based upon a role-playing game and those addressed to
families. The separated visit is allowed by those experiences
designed to guarantee an high level of personalization together
with a constant sense of social presence: visitors play alone or
in small groups but in continuous contact (direct or indirect)
with other singles or groups, collaborating or competing with
them. Solitary visit is the model of sociality usually enabled by
audio guides and in this analysis it collects all those projects
that support solo games: this model is not highly represented
and from this result it can be inferred that the game structure
can someway overcome the limitation usually linked to the
audio guides. The pursuit of social engagement is allowed only
by one project which rewards players with points if they get in
contact with other players or groups of players, stimulating
information sharing and new social relationships. Regarding
instead the levels of social engagement enabled by the projects
is emerges that level five, direct social engagement, is by far the
most represented. This result is consistent with the result
regarding the models of sociality, because all the projects that
enable a fusion visit necessarily allow also direct social
relations.
C. Game Mechanics and Rules
Looking at the defining traits of game it results that less
than half of the projects proposes a solo game, an experience
played by a sole visitor while the other half is structured as a
team game and, among them, the majority is a role-playing
experience: every visitor/player within a group embodies a
character with particular gifts and duties and needs to
collaborate with others in order to complete tasks and missions.
Collaboration is never employed as the only conflict model but
only associated with competition: in other words the most
common conflict model is a competition among groups within
whom members collaborate. Competition is without
collaboration when only one visitor plays the game and it can
be against other players/visitors or against the system. What
emerges is that competition is employed in every project as a
means to stimulate visitors’ engagement: competition is indeed
pointed by several authors as a defining characteristic of game
[28–30] and the only cooperation is not seen as a sufficient
stimulus for the game experience. Looking at the game rules
that govern the experiences it results that the majority of them
are based upon treasure hunt and similar models (scavenger
hunt, geocaching), some are based upon the urban adventure
game model and only few employ a card game model. Urban
adventure games are mainly treasure hunts and counting them
together it results that this model is definitively paramount. This
result indicates that curators and developers are closely tied to a
tour model with stops [11]: treasure hunts indeed well suit with
112
museums and cities, because the objects to be discovered can
easily coincide with museum exhibits or points of interest in the
city and the game mechanics are employed to stimulate interest
and to verify the acquisition of knowledge. Story is the last
analyzed issue: form the analysis it emerges that half of the
projects are based upon a strong background history while the
other half is structured as a sequence of targets to be
accomplished. Background history is usually employed to give
contextual information to visitors and when the application is
not developed to obtain specific and quantifiable learning
outcomes. Conversely the projects structured as series of targets
usually have a more defined learning aim and the sequential
steps give visitors new knowledge and verify its acquisition
through game mechanics.
D. Insights about Mobile Gaming
Summarizing the results described above, two main positive
aspects of mobile gaming can be listed: first is the ability to
stimulate visitors’ active involvement as advocated by the latest
cultural learning theories [31], [32] and that, in particular, role
playing and competition are great stimuli for involvement;
second is that gaming can foster high levels of social
engagement. On the contrary it results that game mechanics can
someway limit the target audience to teenagers and families
with children: this limitation has a strong influence on the level
of deepening of contents, usually very basic and aimed at
conveying few clear notions. Game dynamics seem also to
constrain the mobile experience to the visit itself: despite the
wide discussion about pervasive games [33] is indeed true that
one of the defining characteristics of game is liminality both in
terms of time and space, the famous magic circle of Huizinga
[28]. Liminality of play could also limit social and collaborative
activities to people that already know each other, making in this
way difficult to get in contact with strangers unless the
experience is carefully designed.
VI. DESIGN FRAMEWORK AND PROCESS
The remarks discussed above together with the prior
findings of literature review converged in the definition of a
design framework, a methodology/tool to support designers in
developing mobile cultural experiences. If in literature, indeed,
we can easily find several pilot projects describing innovative
mobile applications for museums and cultural institutions,
there’s a need to reflect on the mobile experience as a whole
and on how to design working and useful mobile experiences.
The attempt here described is not completely new in cultural
field: Nancy Proctor [11], for example, lists six guiding
questions developers have to ask themselves in order to design
a meaningful mobile experience and to reflect on its five basic
features: audience, contents, space, narrative model and
technology. What seem to lack in this proposal to be a meta-
design tool are the interconnections among the units and a
process to be followed in order to optimize the process of
decision-making. A design process is indeed a sequence of
decisions to be taken, in which every choice necessarily affect
the others and the question-like model suggested by Proctor
[11] may support the design activity. The framework here
proposed incorporates Proctor’s questions, framing them into a
wider structure that adds features and organize them in a
sequential process (Fig.1). The four steps are those of a
common design process: brief and analysis (analytic phase),
concept/design (creative/synthetic phase), implementation and
evaluation plus some iteration through a recursive process of
corrections and tests. The four steps process is therefore a
transposition in the mobile field of the widely diffused design
process but it is also grounded in the analysis of the cases. This
process of creative interpretation of requirements and
constraints into a story, models of interaction and finally into a
scenario is the focus of the framework here discussed, that aims
at giving developers a supporting tool for the design process.
A. Analytic Phase
The first step, the analytic phase, is aimed at retrieving all
the information that could be useful for the development of the
project and to take all the necessary decisions in order to
structure the experience. Compared to the common design
process it encompasses the brief and the research: it captures
indeed an aim as input and supports developers to detail the
brief, namely the requirements and needs, and to retrieve all the
necessary data, that is the research. In the framework the
analytic phase is structured in five main units as shown in Fig.
1: constraints, learning approach, sociality, relationship and
contents. The unit constraints helps developers reason about
those choices partially due to exogenous factors such as the
target audience, where and when the experience should take
place and which technological device and platform will be
used. The cluster relationship instead stimulates reflection
about the criteria to be used to match users with contents and
other users (namely profile, position in the space, random, etc.)
but also ask developers to decide if these relationships will be
based upon homophily (similarity) or the contrary on
heterophily (diversity). The unit contents asks developers to
decide what kind of the contents will be provided, at what level
of deepening and from whom they will be edited, from experts,
form users or from both. The last two units address learning
and sociality issues and are based on the theoretical models
described in IV.
B. Half Analytic-Half Creative: Mechanics of Interaction
An intermediate step between the analytic phase and the
creative phase is the definition of the mechanics of interaction
Figure 1. Schematic view of the design framework
113
with contents that is informed mainly by the constraints, the
learning approaches and sociality issues. The decisions taken in
the analytic phase indeed, guide the choice of the mechanics of
interaction (Fig. 2), here intended as single interactions user-
contents and user-user, allowed by mobile technology. They
should be thought of as the basic bricks on which the models or
dynamics of interaction are constructed, using the same bricks
or composing them: different mechanics can indeed be
employed within the same mobile experience. This phase is half
analytic, because most of the choices follow the decision made
in the analytic phase, but also half creative because developers
can decide to modify them or add new ones, join together
several mechanics and so on. An example is the mechanic
consumption of contents, which provides users with information
received passively, or the mechanic question which allows
users to ask questions in real time to other visitors, to curators
or to the web, activating wiki and crowdsourcing dynamics.
Other dynamics are instead aimed at stimulating higher level of
social engagement such as serendipity, which employs mobile
devices to alert users of possible buddies (contents/users)
nearby or the mechanic smart mob, which collects people at the
same time at the same place in order to provide them with
learning activities. It must be clarified that the mechanics here
presented (fig. 2) are those derived from case studies and
literature during the research and the list isn’t absolutely closed:
designers and developers can freely decide to add new ones or
modify them. The list of mechanics, indeed, mustn’t be
intended as a strict catalogue from which to draw but as a way
to reason about interaction and to stimulate the generation of
new models.
C. Creative Phase
The insights deriving from the analytic phase as well as the
chosen mechanics of interaction are the inputs of the
creative/synthetic phase which has the duty to interpret these
data and transform them into models of interaction and story
and, finally, into a feasible scenario. It consists of three main
units organized in two consecutive steps (Fig. 1), the models or
dynamic of interaction with contents/people and the story,
which together converge within the scenario. The first unit,
models of interaction, collects data from the analytic phase and
the mechanics of interaction and merges them with rules,
configuration and conflict in order to define how people behave
during the mobile supported cultural visit. In particular
designers have to decide if the experience will be based on a
tour model, be it free or guided, on a game model, choosing
among the existing game genres, or to create a new model. It
must be decided also how people is configured during the
experience, if in group with roles or not, or as a single user, and
what kind of conflict will be proposed: collaboration, in the
case of a tour for example, competition for a single user game
or collaboration plus competition for teams that compete one
against the others. The second unit defines what kind of story
will govern the experience integrating contents with the models
of interaction; it asks developers to decide if the experience will
be structured as a sequence of units of information (soundbites
in the definition of Proctor [11]) or as a structured story
referring for example to existing genres. This phase can be
defined creative because all the steps described are somehow
grounded in a detailed and coherent analysis of the aims, needs,

Figure 2. Mechanics of interaction arranged for level of social engagement
constraints but they are creatively interpreted in order to
generate a new mobile experience. If the results of the analytic
phase could be somehow considered quite independent from
who conducts the analysis, the creative phase relies on the
personal choices of developers and requires skills that are
typical of designers, for example to build the scenario. It’s a
mock-up of the experience, which describes it in order to get
feedback and inform the implementation of the system.
Scenario is here intended in the meaning proposed by Carroll
[34], a story which envisions and documents typical and
significant user activities. Scenario building is the last activity
of the creative phase, whose result, the story/storyboard, feeds
the following phases which translate it into a prototype and,
through an iterative process of test and correction, into the
working mobile application.
D. Using the Framework
The framework briefly described above has been employed
to develop three mobile experiences within two pilot projects,
one completed and one developed till the end of the creative
phase. The aim of the projects was to test the usefulness and
efficacy of the framework in supporting the design of mobile
cultural experiences and to verify its ability to be applied to
very diverse contexts. The description of the two pilot projects
is beyond the aim of this paper, which wants to focus mainly on
the design framework, but it’s useful to briefly contextualize
them in order to better understand the final remarks. The first
pilot project has been developed in collaboration with Studio
114
Museo Achille Castiglioni, a small but reputable institution
which conserves a vast amount of documentation about the
famed Italian architect and designer and promotes the
knowledge of his work. LfAC (Looking for Achille Castiglioni)
is a mobile location-aware display of contents, which guides
users to discover the works of Castiglioni in downtown Milan,
providing them with digitized archival materials and
descriptions, in the right place where the work is or was. LfAC
is a working bi-lingual mobile experience and user tests has
highlighted good results in terms of learning and enjoyment
[35]. The second pilot project has reached the form of scenario
and hasn’t been still deployed. It’s being developed in
collaboration with Museo Glauco Lombardi of Parma, an
institution that collects and shows artworks mainly regarding
Maria Luigia, second wife of Napoleon, and Duchess of Parma
after the Restoration. The aim of the mobile experience is
twofold: to provide families with and engaging and learning
activity within the museum and to valorize the heritage of the
Duchess across the city. Two scenarios are being implemented:
the first is an indoor role-playing experience addressed to
families and the second is a walking multimedia tour in
downtown Parma, based on letters written by Maria Luigia
during her dukedom.
VII. REMARKS AND CONCLUSIONS
It’s not easy to validate or verify a design process, but it
seems it’s worth to present some remarks emerged during the
employment of the described framework, despite limited to
only three mobile cultural experiences. A first question about
the general design framework is whether it takes into account
all the aspects related to the design of a mobile experience or
not, in other words if it is sufficient to deal with the complexity
of a project. In the light of the experience matured during the
development of the pilot projects, the framework didn’t show
evident deficiencies that could affect the project development.
On the contrary the implementation of LfAC has highlighted
some redundancies: the early definition of an off-the-shelf
platform [35] has indeed guided several choices, depriving
some units of meaning and developers of freedom of choice.
This result suggests that the framework can be fully exploited
only if the technological constraints are not so strict and if the
technological system is defined ad hoc. Another remark is that
the frameworks’ units and, in particular, those encompassed
within the analytic group cannot be considered alone, without
moving back and forth among them. They are indeed strictly
interrelated and every unit is affected and affects the others,
requiring a process of continuous revision of the choices in
order to keep an overall consistency. This means that, within a
single phase, there isn’t a mandatory sequence to be followed (a
part from starting from constraints) and that every unit must be
intended as a question to be answered and the answers must be
compared with those of the other units. The design framework
is indeed a tool to make designers aware of their possible
choices and of what they imply and to support them in the
process of decision-making. The general design framework,
therefore, mustn’t be considered as a sequence of strict design
guidelines or recommendations but rather as a way to sensitize
designer about the critical issues of a mobile experience. This
choice is in line with the design sensitivities proposed by
Hindmarsh et al. who provide a list of design actions useful to
stimulate cooperation and sociability in museum settings, but
specifying that they are means to sensitize designers and not
tightly defined guidelines [36]. The authors remark indeed that
every strict guideline proposed for museums is bound to fail
because every institution and exhibit arises different issues and
needs [36]. Looking at the main structure and process, the
framework resulted useful in helping the development teams to
consider the involved factors and their interrelations and to
follow an ordered and optimized sequence of steps. A
particularly valuable fact is that all the choices made in the
analytic and, partially, in the creative phases, resulted useful in
structuring the story and the scenario, assisting the teams to
design a feasible scenario well suited with the aims. A feasible
and structured scenario guided correctly also the system
implementation, at least for LfAC, avoiding several iterative
processes of tests and corrections. The last remark is that the
framework resulted quite flexible in supporting the design of
three very different mobile experiences, and flexibility is
necessarily a prerequisite for a design framework. It must be
noticed that the pilot projects have been conducted under the
guidance of the author, therefore potentially hindering the
correct evaluation of the framework, whose employment by
design teams external to the research is highly desirable.
Summarizing, the design framework here discussed is a
structured attempt to foster a chemistry between cultural
heritage, mobile technology, cultural learning and social
engagement through a design approach, supporting designers in
the development of a mobile cultural experience.
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 Figure 3. Design framework. Detailed view of the analytic and creative phase.

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