Email
Scaffolding Creativity of Arts Students: Framework, Toolchain, and Educational Material on how to Create their Own Virtual Exhibitions
Background
Recent evolvements and breakthroughs in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide nowadays new opportunities but also challenges related to their adoption by
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Europe. Despite the fact that HEIs continuously seek to adopt and rely on ICT services and tools there is also an urgent need to support this adaptation process not only through the provision of new technological artifacts but also through building digital capacity of HEIs stakeholders in the context of creating educational material and implementing teaching learning and training activities.
This is particularly the case of Humanities students, especially in the field of the Arts, who rely on easy to use and adopt ICT services and tools that can support their academic studies, aiming to offer tools and processes for effective, innovative, and creativity-enhancing dissemination of their works. As such one crucial technology challenge, within HEIs' digital transformation activities and strategies in the field of Arts, is the increasing need for digitisation, preservation and presentation of various creations i.e. sculptures, paintings towards a wider audience. Moreover, it is evident that in the case of art students and art professionals, ICT can provide valuable help to foster creativity and present their artwork in innovative, easy-to-use and cost-effective ways. In essence, such solutions are relevant nowadays during the pandemic crisis which demolished literally real-world exhibitions. From a technological perspective, eXtended Reality (XR) technologies, like. mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), represent emerging research fields which allow real-time streaming and replication of physical artifacts through 5G networks paving thus the way for considering such breakthroughs in the context of the aforementioned reasoning.
One key issue and need of European HEIs is the absence of unified frameworks and tools that address state-of-the-art challenges related to solutions that provide the opportunity to art students to present their work in a creative and educational way on the basis of the aforementioned technologies . The recent literature reveals that the information concerning virtual exhibition creation is fragmentary, entails several weaknesses and open issues with regards to issues concerning the special requirements of art students . For example, art students often are obliged to use software and to adopt digital tools that are not designed to meet their needs. Furthermore, from an educational perspective, there is a need to develop easy-to-use technologies, for the creation of virtual exhibitions, and educating and training stakeholders in HEIs through learning and teaching practices. This embraces the design and development of courses and training material, hands-on practical tutorials, and webinars with regards to best practices of solutions for virtual exhibitions creation.
Through the implementation of CREAMS, we anticipate addressing the aforementioned multi-disciplinary challenges and intrinsic needs of participating HEIs for educating and creating awareness of various stakeholders with regards to scaffolding creativity of arts students, and deploying a robust and innovative framework and open-source tools for virtual exhibition creation, which will be free to use during and after the end of the project. In addition, special emphasis will be given in developing personalization tools that will allow alignment of specific narratives to specific target end-users in order to improve user experience of the exhibition.
Objectives
Objective A: Engage Stakeholders of European HEIs to Elicit Requirements related to the creation of virtual exhibitions for art students.
The goal of CREAMS is to engage various and representative HEI stakeholders during a User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology that will involve different European HEIs (Greece, Norway, Israel, Cyprus) with the participation of various stakeholders sharing different profiles and roles like art student, art professionals, teachers, instructors and software engineers. This methodology will help us triangulate requirements, literature-based and empirical-driven knowledge about how, when and why technologies can be applied successfully by art students for creating virtual exhibitions.
Objective B: Design, Develop and Evaluate a Framework and Open-source Tools for the creation of virtual exhibition for art students.
CREAMS envisions to enrich digital capabilities and readiness of HEIs through the design, development and evaluation of a state-of-the-art framework and tools for virtual exhibition creation specially designed to meet the needs of art students, which can be freely adopted by HEIs as an open-source solution. The framework will consist of different layers of abstractions, i.e., methods and procedures for digitising information, storing and retrieving data in different educational settings and scenarios, and open-source tools with well-specified Application Programming Interfaces that will be available for system administrators and will be able to be presented with the need of Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality. In addition, the framework will provide the ability to art students to personalize the narratives of the virtual exhibitions based on specific user profiles and models.
Objective C: Implement and Evaluate Educational Material for HEIs Stakeholders and Implement LTTAs.
CREAMS aims to implement digital educational material in the form of PowertPoint presentation and webinars, hands-on exercises that will be available in five European languages (Greek, German, Norwegian, Hebrew, English) and perform three LTTAs at the partner HEIs. Moreover, we will proceed and organize multiplier events for different target audiences aiming to teach various theoretical and practical aspects of technologies for virtual exhibitions creation for art students. Furthermore, we will run LTTAs with the participation of various stakeholders for virtual museum creation, and policymakers on how to adopt methods and tools for virtual exhibition creation, for art students, within their institutional strategy.
Objective D: Dissemination and Sustainability.
CREAMS aims to disseminate and exploit the project results to different target audiences and stakeholders through joint publications, engagement in accredited conferences, showcase events, multiplier events, engagement in social media, and deploying the framework in real-world HEI settings. CREAMS has involved a dedicated dissemination partner for this purpose (Technological University of Cyprus), which is very experienced in organising conferences and events, has participated in various relevant European projects (e.g. Virtual Multimodal Museums), and has an extensive network of partners. We foresee that the Technological University of Cyprus will leverage on its existing wide network to sustain and maintain the project’s outcomes.
Activities
We will implement a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach for elaborating the CREAMS framework. As such, different iterations for developing the toolchain and material for virtual exhibition creation will be performed. Moreover, we plan to disseminate the project results throughout the project implementation but also after its end and perform sustainability activities to ensure that CREAMS will continue to exist after the end of the project. In more detail, we will have three iterative cycles, i.e., low- and high-fidelity, and final release. For each of these iterations, we will engage several end-users in order to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback about the usability of the toolchain end the user experience of the end-users.
More specifically:
Low-fidelity Framework, Toolchain and Educational and Training Material.
In the early stages of the project, we plan a series of semi-structured interviews, surveys and focus groups with expert stakeholders from the participating HEIs (e.g., artists, art theorists, museologists,educationalists, software engineers, instructors, policymakers, etc.) aiming to verify the current literature on the creation of virtual exhibitions as well as to elicit the current policies, procedures and the identity management technology utilized by each HEI.
A series of learning, teaching, training activities (LTTA), multiplier events, and training webinars. Three LTTA activities are planned to be held at the three participating HEIs. LTTA 1 will be organized by the University of Patras at the end of the first year (after the completion of the needs verification) aiming to train instructors on methods and practices for virtual exhibition creation. LTTA 2 will be organized by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki at the end of the second year aiming to train on art digitization. LTTA 3 will be organized by the Technological University of Cyprus at the end of the project (upon release of the final framework) aiming to train policy makers of the participating HEIs on how to use Virtual, Mixed and Augmented Reality for virtual exhibitions. Furthermore, we plan to produce a series of webinars that will be used for the training of instructors upon implementation and testing of the framework prototype. Two types of webinars will be implemented: i) training webinars on conceptual aspects of virtual exhibitions for art students; and ii) training webinars with hands-on practice on virtual exhibitions, e.g., hands-on tutorials focused on the design, implementation and setup of technology for virtual exhibitions creation.
Dissemination and Sustainability Activities
We will conduct dissemination and communication activities including paper publications, run multiplier events, conduct technology demonstrations and presentations, organizing workshops to promote the developed technologies and encourage their uptake, producing user documentation and training material, producing and distributing promotional materials such as press releases, as well as updating the Website with user-related material and guides. We also plan to engage with software developers and technical communities by participating in workshops, conferences, and clustering events. Finally, we will adopt an open-source software license to make the software available for free to other users.
Impact
Project Result (PR1): Requirements Verification and Conceptual Design of the Framework
As part of the needs verification analysis, one important project outcome relates to the derived knowledge on intrinsic requirements with respect to the employment of virtual reality platforms for art exhibitions in HEIs. This new knowledge will be used for driving the design and development of the CREAMS framework.
Project Result (PR2): Design and Implementation of Tools supporting Digitization of Physical Artifacts and Creation of Virtual Exhibitions
The design and development activities will produce different prototype versions of the framework that will be used iteratively by following a User-Centered Design methodology within formative and summative studies. The CREAMS platform will support an innovative workflow that will consist of: a) digitization of physical artifacts into the CREAMS platform through a mobile application; b) assigning the digitized artifacts to virtual exhibitions; c) personalizing the narratives to specific technological means (Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality) and target groups.
Project Result (PR3): System Verification and User Acceptance of the CREAMS Framework
Finally, the system verification and user evaluation studies will produce verification and evaluation results of the framework on the added value, effectiveness, system performance, accuracy of the implemented technology, as well as the user acceptance, opinions, and perceived user values such as perceived usability, privacy and trust towards the technology.
Project Results (PR4): Course and Training Material Development on virtual exhibitions for art students
The training material includes practical design, implementation, and integration guidelines about virtual exhibition technologies. This material includes content and presentations on conceptual and practical aspects of virtual exhibitions for art students, providing insights on presenting, teaching, and training methods and techniques within HEIs, as well as hands-on tutorials, focused on the design, implementation, and setup of virtual exhibitions for art students tools and technologies and Application Programming Interfaces.
Project Result (PR5): Webinars for Training the Trainers on virtual exhibitions for art students
The education-related activities will produce a repository of learning, teaching, training material, including textual and digital course and training material, training webinars, hands-on tutorials, PowerPoint presentations, system demonstrations, teaching activities, best practices, and guidelines for system integration for a variety of HEI stakeholders. Course material for instructors includes the introduction on emerging trends in virtual exhibitions for art students, VR, MR, and AR technologies, and copyright issues.
Dissemination- and Sustainability-related Project Results.
Project results related to the dissemination and sustainability include the project's Website and any associated Web content material. The training material and webinars will be initially based on the English language and subsequently will be translated to the German, Hebrew, Norway and Greek aiming to increase outreach and dissemination effectiveness. Social media design material, press releases in the national press, e-newsletters, mailing lists, research paper publications and system demonstrations will be also part of CREAMS dissemination strategy. Moreover, an open source software policy will be adopted that will allow us to publish the software in Git and make it available to a large audience of software developers around the globe including HEIs. Presentations at multiplier events as well as third-party events, commercial and demonstration videos. Further results include network contacts and established relationships with other universities, institutions, companies, working on related topics.
The Partners:
PANEPISTIMIO PATRON, Greece - Coordinator
ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS, Greece
Cognitive UX GmbH 🇩🇪 Germany
NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU, Norway
SHENKAR ENGINEERING.DESIGN.ART (PBC), Israel
TECHNOLOGIKO PANEPISTIMIO KYPROU, Cyprus
