A design framework for Smart Cultural Objects

Marco Gaiani,Fabrizio Ivan Apollonio,Berta Martini

doi:10.4013/sdrj.2015.81.04

Marco Gaiani, Fabrizio Ivan Apollonio + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4013/sdrj.2015.81.04

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Abstract

Nowadays cities, as well as Cultural Heritage, are facing new challenges due to the public financial straits and the increasing need to deliver innovative service to manage a wide heritage. Great expectations are in put the Smart City paradigm relying on the capability of the city to realize and scale up intangible infrastructures based on new typologies of partnerships for the development of services. The paper presents a design framework aimed to transform Cultural Items in Smart Cultural Objects (SCO), meant as sources and recipients of advanced information applied on ‘Widespread Built Cultural Heritage’. The aim has been not just to enhance the artifacts with their own quality, but their unique social, communal, anthropological and urban-infrastructural meaning. The ability to manage efficiently heterogeneous data and the levels of global connectivity, as well as the real-time interaction, perception, localization, communication, and identification, made possible by cloud computing and Internet of Things, to allow the changeover from Cultural Objects to SCO. The framework, here exposed, aims to provide an extensive and robust theoretical support to design and to manage the processes of Cultural Objects and Cultural bins, implementing a methodological system and an advanced environment based on ICT technologies for recording, storage, processing, access and presentation of Cultural Heritage (CH) data in a Smart Management environment. The framework has been applied in two projects for a prototypical case study of widespread urban CH. Keywords: cultural heritage, human smart city, co-design, internet of things, heritage management and communication.

Highlights

In the Cultural Heritage (CH) field, the traditional analysis, conservation, preservation, management, exploitation and communication process is complex, driven from multidimensional data and approaches, fragmented, high-cost and still limited to major Cultural Object (Gaiani, 2012)
We focus on ‘Widespread Built Cultural Heritage’ (WBCH), though it constitutes a large part of the European Heritage and are bearers of great cultural and economic interest
The approach we suggest aims at overturning the design process of the Smart City (SC) solutions from the dominant paradigm that moves from technology to solutions to the emerging one that moves from problems, to solutions considering all the available resources

Summary

Introduction

In the Cultural Heritage (CH) field, the traditional analysis, conservation, preservation, management, exploitation and communication process is complex, driven from multidimensional data and approaches, fragmented, high-cost and still limited to major Cultural Object (Gaiani, 2012). If in the near future we expect citizens to be able to fulfill and promote a culture of sustainability of our Heritage, we must assume a responsibility in relation to the ability to ‘educate’ in such culture, since it is not the result of spontaneous opportunities in which each one can run more or less sporadically, but the result of deliberate practice, converging towards pursued design achievements in different institutional contexts of interest Within this context, a prime problem, already connected to the application of IT to traditional processes, concerns the usability of digital objects and their user experience, or rather, the conditions for their effective use. The effectiveness of the use depends on the relationship established between subject and object, and the latter by the ability to design interactional milieux able to transpose the variability of individual and epistemic factors in a dynamic form

First projects of SCO application to Cultural Heritage

Conclusions