Designing an Interactive Mural for Cultural Reflections

While many cultural heritage projects currently exist, few explore how to record and transform intangible heritage into a publicly accessible collection. This paper presents an interactive system combining the Web and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to create an internet-linked interactive mural that allows visitors to listen and interact with crowdsourced life stories. Our findings highlight positive user reactions and some evidence of the interactive system being able to support cultural reflections. While the life stories appeal to most of the adults, younger children were less patient and interested in listening to them. Instead they were attracted to visual projections and the unobtrusive technology. We propose a design framework, outlining three design aspects necessary to understand and design engaging and immersive user experience. The use of interactive mural enabled us to understand the challenges of preserving and sharing intangible heritage so that they are heard and can be reflected upon in greater depth. The paper also outlines recommendations for future work to include a long term longitudinal study and to introduce mechanism for reviewing crowdsourced content.