The social value of engineering and design heritage in post-industrial cities and its digital interpretation in a museum context
The Team: Dr Kaja Antlej
This interdisciplinary project is about how we can use extended reality technologies to communicate engineering and design heritage in post-industrial cities. We want to basically create a pop up museum experience, because we believe that it’s very important to go closer to the audience, and using technology to create something that is engaging, that’s meaningful. We believe it could bring new audiences to cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, or heritage centres.
If we look at Geelong, which lost of a lot of traditional manufacturing capacities, I think it’s important to bring back this civic pride as well, through communicating those achievements throughout the history, and tell the future generations that what’s now coming to Geelong – all this innovation, design, advanced manufacturing – it’s actually as a result of this tradition for so many decades.
We’re doing interviews with local leaders from education, heritage, government, tourism, and manufacturing. We’re also doing online surveys to talk to the local community. Once we’ve got these results, we will be able to analyse them and prepare participatory procreative workshops with the local communities, in which we will be able to evaluate what’s interesting for them from the interaction perspective and from the perspective of content.
We have involved engineers who are going to develop this. We have designers who will be exploring different ways of 3D interaction within this VR, AR, or mixed reality or extended reality experience, and we have researchers from a heritage perspective as well.
The grant scheme is a great initiative, because we have so many different and great researchers across one university, and this is the way how we can learn about each others’ skills and knowledge without going out of the university. And it’s a great platform as a pilot project that can lead into a bigger project to be competitive on a national or even international level.
The Team: Dr Kaja Antlej (co-investigator, pictured)
A collaboration with Deakin School of Engineering (Faculty of Science and the Built Environment), School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Coventry University and Aarhus University.