Portable Museum Kit

The Portable Museum Kit featured on the home page of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

The Portable Museum Kit ©
An interactive, inflatable, open-ended system for the XXI century Flâneur.
2004

Originally developed as master thesis by Daniele Mancini, The Portable Museum Kit became soon a common teaching ground at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. It became also a powerful platform to develop numbers of interactive installations, workshops, projects within the e1 exhibition design unit.  The Portable Museum can be described as an interactive and open-ended system to collect and display data, based on RFID Tags technology: visitors/users come and evoke audiovisual content related to artifacts belonged to our everyday life.

Idea/problem/context.

Imagine you are an explorer or traveller planning a journey. To watch, study, analyze, describe, document and communicate your findings, you need the most appropriate tools and ‘sensors’ – and of course adequate space to either set up your tools locally (metaphorically, a base camp) or display an exhibition at the end of your mission. Objects of your exploration could be of many kinds: human artefacts as condensers of relationships and memory, say, or the ephemeral beauty of the natural environ-ment. Or you might simply need to collect sounds or record interviews. What kind of ‘probes’ will you need in all situations? How will you catch, gather, collect, and archive both the transient and tangible reality, then display all this in an evocative way?

What it is.

The Portable Museum Kit is packed into a foldable, modular and flexible white Museum Bag. The kit comprises an inflatable surface to be used either as a base camp or as a display surface, an RFID kit based on small tags, a 12-inch laptop, a digital and a video camera, an explorer’s sack to collect findings, power supplies, rechargeable batteries, the Portable Museum’s OS on CD-Rom, instruction manual, and other tools.

How it works.

On one side is the traveller’s experi-ence: daily findings are documented through pictures, videos or audio tracks, recorded moment-by-moment on the sites visited; an RFID tag is attached to each finding; and a database associ-ates tags, findings and the corresponding contents. For the final exhibition the explorer sets up an installation displaying selected findings. On the other side is the visitors’ experience: during the exhibition they are invited to pick up findings (objects, Polaroid-like pictures, labels) and watch or hear the multimedia contents, triggered by the tags read by an antenna.

Value/potential.

This open-ended system can be used for many different purposes: to carry out user-testing, track a travelling experience, docu-ment a material-culture environment (tangible collection), make a teaching experience more playful, or support the usual museum activities.

Here you can look at my report on issuu.com

Souvenir de voyage: ROMA 2004
Master Thesis by Daniele Mancini
Ivrea, 2004

Video by Cut-Tv (Paolo Peverini, Elisa Angelici, Simona Marani) 2004

[flashvideo file=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr5d12tGFHU image=http://exhibitiondesignlab.unpacked.it/wp-content/uploads/2004/05/COVER_small.jpg /]

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Volo sulla Toscana
Festa della Geografia
Firenze

All’interno del CICCIO si trovano tanti oggetti impacchettati in involucri trasparenti sottovuoto. Ogni oggetto è caratteristico di un’area della toscana: una miniatura del David, la terra di Siena, un sigaro toscano… Ogni involucro è dotato di tag. Prendendo l’involucro contenente l’oggetto e passandolo sul reader viene proiettato sulle pareti del CICCIO il video di un volo tridimensionale relativo all’area a cui l’oggetto si riferisce.

Video by Simone Muscolino (Id-Lab)

[flashvideo file=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdaIyfpKhL4″ image=”http://exhibitiondesignlab.unpacked.it/wp-content/gallery/volo-sulla-toscana/mappamondi.jpg” /]

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First Biennal of Architecture
Beijing
2004

Project by Daniele Mancini, Luca Poncellini with Stefano Mirti and Barbara Ghella
Photos and videoclip by Simone Muscolino, e1 Exhibition Design Unit @ IDI Ivrea

[flashvideo file=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qelYuJSQkUI” image=”http://exhibitiondesignlab.unpacked.it/wp-content/gallery/pechino_biennale/DSCN0123.JPG” /]

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e1 Exhibition Design Unit Portfolio
Firenze, Fortezza da Basso
Genova, Festival della Scienza
2004

Il visitatore arriva in un ambiente in cui si ritrova immerso in una fascinosa giungla di ondeggianti strisce colorate. Ogni striscia rappresenta un progetto e ogni estremità è dotata di un tag identificativo che permette di attivare l’interazione. I videoclip relativi ai progetti vengono proiettati con musiche e suoni modificando completamente lo spazio circostante quando il visitatore sfiora la superficie del piedistallo con l’estremità della striscia.

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Cortina d’Ampezzo, next architecture

Queste sono alcune delle realizzazioni curate da Id-Lab (www.interactiondesign-lab.com)

2005 La memoria degli oggetti
Gli oggetti magici

2005 Inside/Outside
The London zoo

2005 CineVolo

Id-lab goes to Script

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2004 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Installations and tagged with Banal, Do It Yourself, Everyday Aesthetic, Kit, Memory, Narrative, Open Ended, Platfrom, RFID Tags. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.