An End-User Oriented Building Pattern for Interactive Art Guides

A primary issue in the design of interactive art guides is the effort to build them as a synthesis of several cultures and skills concerning content editing, multimedia production, application structuring and interaction design. The communication between the actors of the development process can be boosted by involving the cultural domain experts in the whole life cycle, providing them with proper design environments for extending and modifying the guide structure and content, to refine the initial design without the intervention of computer specialists. We have developed a framework for End-User Development (EUD) of interactive multimedia guides based on experiences in art exhibitions held at Ca' Foscari in the last two years, culminating in the project of a multimedia guide for the François Pinault contemporary art collection at Punta della Dogana in Venice. The guide features dynamically generated tours personalized on the user answers to a set of questions asked during the tour, prepared by a domain expert as part of the guide content. In this paper we present a methodology for designing end-user oriented software environments based on open and portable standards, and discuss the development of a content management systems for domain experts able to generate personalized tours.