Enabling social interaction in the museum through the Social Display Environment

Visitors of museums and cultural heritage sites are not different from other types of citizens and, hence, they are getting more and more engaged into a participatory culture that encourages them to play an active role and not only acting as information consumers. In this paper we describe a technological platform that makes it possible to enable such proactive behavior by supporting social storytelling and interaction in the domain of cultural heritage sites. The platform development was inspired by a workshop run with cultural heritage professionals and students who identified social interaction as a key feature of an enhanced experience with cultural objects.