Open Books: Supporting the Comprehension of Photobooks as Sequential Art

The Open Books is an interactive installation developed by the EPFL+ECAL Lab in collaboration with the Photo Elysée Museum designed to engage the public through interaction design to support the comprehension of photobooks. A photobook is a work in which photographic images are edited and arranged into a sequence, with meaning produced through editorial and layout relations rather than through isolated images or text. While photobooks are increasingly mediated through exhibitions and interactive museum installations, little empirical work in human–computer interaction (HCI) has examined how interactive design supports the comprehension of photobooks as sequential works, or how its impact on comprehension can be measured. Open Books addresses this gap through the design and evaluation of an interactive installation. The installation is based on two design strategies to expose layout relations: (1) visual and audio-visual augmentations that make layout features perceptible, and (2) layout-based recommendations that support exploratory navigation. The installation was evaluated through a laboratory study (N = 62) and an in-situ museum study (N = 40). In the laboratory study, multimodal augmentation scaffolded photobook-related comprehension, yielding significant improvements in sequence observation, relational identification, and conceptual definition. Recommendation increased perceived reward while introducing usability trade-offs. In the museum study, both Visual and Audio-Visual modes were positively evaluated, with Audio-Visual interaction preferred by half of participants and associated with higher pragmatic quality. Iterative refinements improved perceived usability from the laboratory to the museum context. These results show that exposing layout relations through interaction can scaffold interpretive comprehension of photobooks without prescribing meaning, positioning interface design as interpretive infrastructure for sequential visual artefacts in cultural heritage contexts.