Visitors, Cultural Heritage and Locative Media. Toward a New Aesthetics of Relations.

The paper describes an ongoing doctoral research that aims at understanding how mobile technology and locative media can modify the relation between visitors and cultural heritage, fostering new models of interaction. The issue is dealt from a design perspective and the major aim is the development of a framework and a process to exploit locative mobile technology in cultural heritage field, defining design mechanics to facilitate social engagement and learning. The definition of the design mechanics to connect people at different levels of social engagement is the crucial point of the process, in which aesthetics plays an important task. Design assumes a leading role in devising and applying new models of interactions that could affect the way people relate to each other and with objects while visiting museums and cities.