What is Communicability

This chapter addresses the evolution of state of the art interactive systems aimed at the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean area in Europe, especially Spain and Italy. It covers the last two decades of advances in design and considers the human and technological factors in the effective use and assessment of hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia. The chapter introduces basic concepts to eliminate ambiguities and to (re)acquaint readers with the main components of audiovisual technologies that have been vital to the (r)evolution of on-line and off-line cultural heritage material. It goes on to analyze quality in the communication process between potential users and interactive systems by drawing upon essential concepts in software engineering, human-computer interaction, semiotics, interface design and communicability. The main goal is to establish metrics for the heuristic evaluation of the quality attributes that make up an interactive system, taking as a reference the intersection of the formal sciences and the factual sciences. The chapter mainly focuses on dynamic and static audiovisual media, including digital photography, video, and computer animation. Consequently, this process of diachronic study of interactive systems has allowed the author to generate a methodology—Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment (ACHCA)—for evaluating communicability in dynamic and static cultural heritage media. The chapter also includes a table for the heuristic analysis of on-line and off-line systems, based on design categories addressing content, presentation, structure, navigation, panchronism and conection of the interactive system. Finally the chapter presents the results of a study of on-line and off-line systems from the 1990s to 2010.