Conference Agenda

The digital transformation of museums is reshaping how culture and knowledge are shared, but it also risks creating new accessibility barriers, deepening the digital divide for people with disabilities. Co-design has emerged as a promising approach to embed inclusive participation and mitigate these risks. However, research on its application within this context remains fragmented, needing to address different disability groups and assistive technologies equally. To synthesise knowledge and learn from current practices, this study systematically reviews co-design research within the broader cultural heritage (GLAMs) context. The review maps co-design processes, tools, and technologies, analysing the key benefits and challenges for engaging different disability groups. Based on this analysis, we propose a systematic framework for inclusive digital museum practices, offering practical guidance for museum professionals and designers and a structured agenda for inclusive design researchers. Emerging trends such as AI-supported co-design and a growing focus on empowerment are also discussed.

Game jams have increasingly been adopted as innovative learning approaches to explore and address complex cultural and societal challenges across formal (e.g., university) and informal (e.g., GLAM) educational contexts. However, there remains a lack of pedagogical models and materials that align learning goals, activities, and assessments constructively for such events. Based on an analysis of four cultural game jams (2024-2025) involving 168 young people (aged 14-32) held in an art museum, this paper proposes a pedagogical design model grounded in systematisation and adaptability as core design principles. The model promotes hybrid and inclusive participation that connects young people, museum professionals, creative industry experts, and educators across disciplinary boundaries and digital and physical environments, advancing design as an innovative educational practice within GLAM’s digital transformation. Its primary contribution is a practical pedagogical model for designing and facilitating jam-based learning spaces that strengthen collaborative and cultural innovation across formal and informal contexts.

Today, the growing demand for sound in shaping multisensory museum experiences requires exhibition designers to acquire relevant sound knowledge. However, designers often find it difficult to identify applicable insights across the vast and interdisciplinary fields of acoustics and sound studies. Thus, this paper conducts twelve semi-structured interviews with experts in acoustics and sound-related disciplines. The findings establish a basic sound knowledge framework comprising four thematic areas with related concepts: fundamentals of acoustics, sound and space, sound and audience experience, and sound control and technology. In addition, the paper explores interdisciplinary communication and collaboration in sound design practices within exhibition productions. These discussions reveal the underexplored potential of sound in museums and underscore the importance of fostering sound sensitivity and collaborative methods in design education, in order to support designers in creating more experimental sonic experiences in museums.

This research explores how design mediates the digital transformation of cultural heritage through hybrid and multisensory installations in archaeological contexts. Using the Case Romane del Celio in Rome as a pilot site for the European project HeritAdapt, it aims to redistribute visitor flows and promote sustainable tourism by enhancing the intangible value of minor sites. The study contributes to the post-digital museology debate by framing design as a critical, participatory practice operating across physical and virtual dimensions, fostering collaboration among engineering, management and restoration. Combining Service Design, Extended Reality and Artificial Intelligence technologies, qualitative research and iterative prototyping guided the creation of an integrated experience along the entire visitor journey. The approach seeks symbiotic interventions that ensure long-term sustainability, stakeholder involvement, storytelling-based engagement, heritage preservation and promotion. Following a testing phase, the project will develop toolkits and guidelines for GLAMs, enabling adaptable, accessible, and context-grounded digital interventions in heritage scenarios.

Oral heritage is inherently unstable: unlike written records, it persists through repetition and reinterpretation rather than through the conservation of a stable object. In post-digital cultural heritage contexts, safeguarding oral memories therefore cannot be reduced to storing audio files; it requires the socio-technical conditions to be designed that make voices interpretable, discoverable, and reactivatable. This paper develops and applies a three-phase framework ̶ Listening / Composing / Amplifying ̶ as an analytical and methodological lens for tracing how oral material is collected, translated into an questionable structure, and returned to the public through differentiated formats. The paper grounds the framework in the CHANGES programme and in the case study Around the Clock, outlining the project’s selection and validation steps; its qualitative corpus of oral and archival materials; and a multi-format public restitution. We argue that “designing the echo” reframes digital oral archives as infrastructures of reactivation for Futuring Digital Cultural Heritage.

This project reimagines tartan as a data-physicalization of Scots Gaelic. Extending ‘Radical Gaels’, a psycho-geographic soundscape that maps the identity, geographies and material history of Contemporary Gaels. Weaving Visual Language translates Scots waulking songs and geographies through cryptographic mapping to weave structure, using a Python-based binary matrix encoding system, illustrating the loss of Gaelic oral traditions. The resulting textiles act as linguistic archives and objects of cultural dissent. The project proposes a framework for museums to engage audiences through preserving information within the artefact itself, rather than exterior labelling. Theoretically, this work develops the idea of ‘culturally constrained physicalization’, where cultural legibility, provenance and the anthropology of making are treated as primary constraints that may legitimately override data fidelity. We propose a new methodology to combine the material and immaterial object, creating embodiment. It demonstrates how material–digital artefacts can preserve and perform intangible heritage, communicating the anthropology of making.