Digital Cultural Heritage Design Practice: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Human-Centred Design approaches in museums give rise to a new, digital cultural heritage design practice by refocusing design from the (digital) technology on to the (digitally-enhanced) visitor experience and requiring involvement in design from both designers and non-designers. This practice is foregrounded as central within a wider landscape of transformative museum design and innovation. The paper calls for a new research agenda that takes design practice as the unit of analysis and recognizes the uniqueness of each cultural heritage organization and its capacity to deploy digital media and technologies successfully in its own unique ways and as a matter of organizational fit. We outline this agenda through a conceptual framework for the analysis of digital cultural heritage design practice along the dimensions of activity, tool mediation, and knowledge production. The framework acknowledges that the design of digitally-enhanced visitor experiences is catalytically mediated by tools and constitutes powerful ways of knowing-in-designing.

Keywords:

• Design as practice
• museums
• digital cultural heritage

Acknowledgements

We thank the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, for hosting Marco Mason’s six-month secondment and all the staff who enthusiastically took part in the action research.

Marco Mason is grateful to Professors Guy Julier, Lucy Kimbell, and Davide Nicolini for invaluable discussions during the early stages of this research.

Giasemi Vavoula acknowledges support provided through a period of one semester’s academic study leave granted by the University of Leicester, UK.

Notes

1 See Dana Mitroff Silvers https://designthinkingformuseums.net/category/case-studies; Giuliano Gaia https://medium.com/@invisiblestudio/how-we-helped-the-egyptian-museum-of-turin-to-re-think-its-audioguide-using-design-thinking-6a27b080b3de; and Frankly, Green + Webb http://www.franklygreenwebb.com/2015/11/03/van-gogh-museum-amsterdam/

2 For details about the family guide design see: https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2017/03/15/design-thinking-designing-a-new-family-guide-for-the-fitzwilliam/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by two European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowships under grant agreements 302799 and 703682.

Notes on contributors

Marco Mason

Dr Marco Mason, with a Ph.D. in Design, Marco Mason is senior lecturer at the School of Design at the Northumbria University UK. He is a two times EU Marie Skłodowska Curie research fellow specializing in Design Research for Digital Cultural Heritage. He has carried out design research and taught in leading research centres such as faculty of Arts and Design at Iuav University of Venice, the School of Museum Studies in Leicester, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Giasemi Vavoula

Dr Vavoula is Associate Professor in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK, where she is Director of Research and teaches and supervizes research in digital heritage. She is an expert in technology-enhanced learning and mobile engagement, and is particularly interested in methods of design and evaluation.