This paper examines a Museum projects that deals with Communities of Knowledge (CoWs) and Communities of Practice (CoPs) as related to Memory and Heritage. These communities came to be as a result of the need to create a new system of knowledge gathering and dissemination in the form of a 3D historical reconstruction for the Vrouw Maria project. Participation by these communities in the project led to a retrieval and reorganization of memory related to heritage. The community participants in the project were experts of their own respective spheres of knowledge. The project facilitated an exchange of knowledge that was materialized both virtually and physically: The Vrouw Maria interactive virtual reality installation allows the museum guests to “visit” the underwater heritage site of the noted 17th Century shipwreck.
In the project, the participating communities contributed with knowledge about acoustics, archeology, architecture, biology, computer science, design, new media, maritime history, and sound design, among other topics. From the beginning the project’s objective was that the work would operate within the Museum’s context. Knowledge would be transferred from closed communities of specialists to the general public through their interaction with an open system that uses multimodal, embodied, representations.
In this paper I examine the choices made in the design that supports such open system. I focus on the interaction design as interplay between a narrative and a ludic approach to interaction and navigation in 3D space. As a conclusion I would like to stress three factors: 1) Successful interactive installations must really empower people. 2) In systems design this mostly happens by creating open systems that accommodate to the interactor. 3) In addition to the difficult task involved in these two previous guidelines, media art applications designed for the Museum carry on the added responsibility of clearly communicating knowledge to the audiences.