Designing for Engagement : Creating and Evaluating Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage

This thesis research explores how interactive digital media can be designed and evaluated to support meaningful engagement with cultural heritage. It combines Flow, Play, Uses and Gratifications, and Multimodality theories to frame user engagement as a multidimensional construct. In addition, frameworks from human-computer interaction (HCI) are applied to both design and evaluation. An interactive prototype was created to investigate the role of aesthetic design and workflow in enhancing engagement with public art sculptures. Interactive modules presented various types of interaction and were assessed by volunteer evaluators via a mixed methods approach to evaluate user engagement. Responses were analyzed from both cognitive and affective perspectives. The results show that evaluators prefer experiences that present high levels of media richness combined with intuitive interactivity that offers user control. Engagement was best supported when expectations of aesthetics and navigation were exceeded. In contrast, when interactions did not match user expectations, engagement was disrupted. This thesis highlights the importance of aesthetics and user agency in interaction design. It contributes a proposed workflow to digital cultural heritage practice, combining iterative design with framework-supported evaluation.