Conference Agenda

This paper addresses the question of aesthetics in museums. It does so starting from the work of Hilde Hein, a philosopher who posited that the shifts museums have gone through from classical to new museology has estranged them from their core role in society and brought them too close to other forms of entertainment. This assumption will prompt a discussion on the role technology plays in museums, beyond museum practice but more fundamentally into what the meaning of using technology in museums is and of what the implications of this use are, also from an aesthetical perspective.

What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This paper repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project between the Portsmouth Natural History Museum and the University of Portsmouth, we reflect on the interactive experiences using low-cost holograms and motion-capture avatars as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies.

Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman.

In the context of a digitally mature world in which the relationship between Cultural Heritage and digital technologies is under re-evaluation, this paper critically rethink the use of digital technologies for preserving and valorising Intangible Cultural Heritage through a decolonising lens. A criticall literature review is provided and a comparative analysis is conducted on EC funded reserachprojects in order to depict from rhetoric misuses to real transformative uses of digital technologies, in avoiding excluding actors depending on their gender, cultural inclination or digital literacy, generating a genuine capacitation and participation of the whole ecosystem and distributing leadership and agency. This scoping paper acts as preliminary work for further investigation, attempting to provide by four principles and a framework for Pluriversal Design for Digital ICH, initial indications of the potential extent and nature of this emergent topic at the intersection of digital technologies, decolonising design, and cultural heritage policy.

This paper examines how to redistribute curatorial power in VR heritage exhibitions by designing actionable governance mechanisms. We conceptualize VR heritage exhibitions as political curatorial infrastructures rather than neutral storytelling media. We employ a two-stage RtD framework: first building a baseline VR stage, then embedding two mechanisms: Parallel Weave (narrative authorship) and Asynchronous Governance Lock (publishing/veto rights). With N=32 participants, analysis reveals four tensions: (1) community narratives increased affective engagement and epistemic recognition, yet (2) parallel inclusion also risked narrative segregation; (3) a visible veto established accountable workflows, but (4) this power redistribution also transferred sociopolitical risk onto community representatives, creating a burden of power. We consolidate these insights into the Memory Loom principles: Structural Weaving and Protected Accountability. Our contributions include a mechanism-oriented RtD method and transferable design principles for equitable governance in post-digital museum contexts.

Generative AI is increasingly shaping the workflows of digital cultural heritage design practice, introducing new approaches to creative production, interpretation, and collaboration. Existing research has examined how generative AI influences general design workflows and supports creative practices in different domains. However, limited attention has been given to how these technologies participate in the design workflows of digital cultural heritage. Compared with other design contexts, digital cultural heritage design requires balancing creative exploration with the accurate transmission of heritage knowledge, which makes its workflows more complex. To address this gap, this study conducts a systematic literature review to examine how generative AI participates in different stages of digital cultural heritage design practice. It investigates the roles, methods, and impacts of generative AI in these workflows and aims to provide a structured understanding of this evolving field for future research and practice.