In order to support the collaborative design of the museum, and weave the technical system into the existing social fabric of the community, we combine pervasive computing and tangible interfaces in a socio-technical architecture of distinct but integrated "interaction spaces." Such a distributed architecture aims both to enable participation and collaboration to fit more naturally with the way people act and interact with their local environment, and also to empower the interaction among current understanding, potential interpretations, and physical tangibility of the cultural object engendered by people's collaborative design.
In this instance, the interaction design of "The Silence" encourages participants to collect and use ambient sounds as the conversation pieces (or "boundary objects") of a social discourse about preservation and enjoyment of natural quiet in either wild or urban settings. This collective conversation is expected to produce a sort of "affective geography" of the cultural object (in this case, natural quiet), and to transform this object in a living entity (in our case, a visual and musical soundscape that changes according to people's current and future sensitivity and interpretation). This result will be obtained by combining direct experience, cognitive mapping, and face-to-face interaction; that is, by combining respectively:
(a) data catching (individual sound collection and geo-referencing by mobile
computing);
(b) data description (individual soundscape management by web tools); and
(c) data interpretation (collective interaction and social negotiation by tangible
interfaces).