Conference Agenda

This paper presents Digital Ghosts, a practice-based research project exploring how creative and tactile approaches to web archives can reimagine engagement with digital cultural heritage and GLAM collections. Using exploratory visualisation of metadata, the project transforms the digital into interactive multimedia installations. Operating within the “post-digital” condition of GLAM, the project investigates how design can mediate between the technical infrastructures of preservation, traditional archivist practice, and the experiential, interpretive needs of users. Rather than treating messy humanities data as a failure, the project frames absence and inconsistency as evidence of the web’s fluid temporality and of institutional decisions about what counts as memory. Through user-testing workshops, visitor surveys and interviews with archivists and users, the research explores the role of visualization and interaction in accessing GLAM data. The paper argues that creative access is effective in sustaining engagement and encouraging data literacy, which are necessary for the sustainability of collections.

Narrative has long been used in cultural heritage for interpretation and communication, primarily within institutions and historic sites. Everyday heritage, however, foregrounds seemingly modest places and is constituted through routine interactions and practices, emphasising a continuing narrative between place and everyday life. Ubiquitous digital technologies make multi-layered narratives possible and bring underrepresented stories to light in situ. This pilot study in Loughborough’s Market Place, UK, explores narratives rooted in lived experiences that convey cultural-heritage significance. We designed and deployed cultural probes (a set of creative and speculative tasks) to prompt and record place-based stories. The analysis identified four themes: spatiality, temporality, sensoriality and social context. These findings inform a narrative framework for the next stage of the research: AI-assisted co-design of locative media for everyday heritage and, ultimately, a distributed and inclusive heritage experience in urban environments, fostering a sense of place and community connection.

Australian museums invest heavily in hybrid and immersive gallery technologies yet treat their websites, where many neurodiverse visitors seek essential planning information, as static brochures. As 15 to 20 percent of the global population is neurodivergent, this oversight affects a significant audience. This study presents the first Australian audit of neurodivergent accessibility across 43 museums, revealing major disconnects: 86% offer minimal digital experiences despite their accessibility potential, and 35% provide no neurodivergent resources. While many claim consultation, neurodivergent voices remain absent from digital design. Shared digital infrastructure across museum networks creates sector-wide intervention points, since improving centralised systems could enhance accessibility across multiple institutions. Building on theory that calls for co-design and recognition of digital as a heritage experience, this practice-led research establishes baseline data to move from advocacy to implementation. In partnership with a federal museum, future phases will test neurodivergent-led co-design to drive organisational change and meaningful accessibility.

This research explores how design-driven approaches can boost engagement with cultural heritage and archives, centering on an experimental initiative in San Marino's historic center. The project envisions the city as a dynamic archive brought to life through interactive installations. A system featuring an interactive device called Iride and six site-specific installations was created to reveal the hidden historical and meaningful layers within the urban landscape. These installations use multisensory components to craft experiences that enhance visitors' cognitive and emotional connections with local cultural stories. This method illustrates how design and digital technology can connect tangible and intangible heritage, institutional archives and community memory, as well as static preservation and dynamic interpretation. The project provides a model that small historic towns can replicate to utilize their cultural resources and create engaging heritage experiences. This highlights the role of design in reimagining archives as evolving cultural engagement sites in the digital era.

Building an information legacy requires method: identifying, selecting, and cataloguing information that can anchor future research demands a thorough archiving process, with accurate information access and rigorous preservation practice. Yet academic archives today must also respond to a broader cultural condition shaped by digital transformation and interdisciplinary collaboration.

This paper discusses the development of an academic design archive as part of the wider GLAM ecosystem, where preservation, innovation and digital transformation coexist. It proposes a design-led framework that approaches archiving as a cultural and participatory process.

Through literature review and institutional reflection, the study highlights the archive’s dual role: collecting and curating pedagogical outputs while activating them for new purposes such as exhibitions, partnerships, and critical discourse.

The archive thus becomes a living system, sustaining academic memory, fostering creative renewal, and positioning design education within the post-digital landscape as a platform for continuity, participation, and ethical reflection.

This article presents a study examining digital collections in order to map resources available on digital platforms that influence user behavior and participation. By analyzing the collections’ interfaces, it identifies how artificial intelligence resources can relate different cultural objects within those spaces, working with different layers of information. These resources provide ways to overcome barriers between systems and the assumptions of their original cataloging, leading us to conceptualize digital objects as potential entangled objects. From this perspective, the article discusses the dual role of digital collections—as knowledge repositories and as mediation systems—while exploring viable alternatives for constituting collections within specific contexts of the Global South. To this end, the study presents an interface design, organized with computer vision techniques, arguing the importance of critical engagement with digital images and the intertwined dynamics in a decolonial approach on memory and technologies. It outlines implications for design practice, policy, and research globally.