2014

In the last five years, how we engage with cultural heritage has been changed immensely. Cultural institutions’, especially museums’ structure has moved from an “ownership of content” towards a permeable one, accumulating and diffusing information and knowledge, positioning heritage content inside a dynamic system, not only to communicate but to make “use value” for audiences. Within this scenario of cultural knowledge circulation, technologies have gained an important role as in creating tools to preserve and diffuse cultural heritage in digital environments. Today, new ways of archiving information have emerged both focusing on these recent digitalization processes and debating on open- access issues; however, as it will be discussed in detail later, this paper does
not attempt to analyze archives within its “traditional” definition, but from
a metaphoric point of view, introducing concepts of narration, performance
and source of memory; thus, as a part of engagement strategies as a first step to discuss the possible future positioning of archives from a design research context. To this end, I will adopt a holistic approach, analyze diverse types of case studies (exploratory, descriptive and inspirational case studies), debating on one hand, the possibility of developing “active” archives within in these concepts focusing on how the archival material can be (re)used or produced, and on the other
hand on the possibility to “open” archives as open-ended knowledge systems responding to the additive and accumulative nature of cultural heritage content and knowledge.