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This article investigates the pervasive issue of bias within AI-driven cultural heritage collections, emphasizing how digital technologies both inherit and amplify existing societal and historical prejudices embedded in analogue records. It outlines the multifaceted nature of bias—ranging from data selection and annotation to algorithmic design and user interaction—demonstrating how each stage of the AI pipeline can introduce or perpetuate distortions in representation. Through a critical review of current scholarship and practical case studies, particularly in image classification, the article evaluates technical strategies such as data augmentation, adversarial debiasing, and monitoring plans for bias mitigation. The findings reveal that while methods like noise injection and colour jittering can balance datasets and improve model fairness, effective bias mitigation ultimately depends on interdisciplinary collaboration between heritage professionals, subject experts, and data scientists. The article concludes that addressing bias requires an ongoing, holistic approach, integrating both technical and humanistic perspectives from data collection to model deployment. This ensures more inclusive, accurate, and ethically sound representations of cultural heritage, supporting the sector’s goals of diversity and accessibility for future audiences.

Technology design taking place in interdisciplinary collaborations is a complicated process which, due to the nature of available research funding, shapes much of the research that falls under the umbrella of Research through Design (RtD). This dissertation is a meta-study of an EU funded research and innovation project, GIFT, situated in the domain of museum technology and involving multiple partners. The purpose of this Horizon 2020 collaboration was to look at ways to meaningfully incorporate technology in museum context, and included museum institutions, researchers, and commercial partners.

The dissertation discusses how the concept of The User, which is central to this form of collaboration, is defined and negotiated both in theory and in practice. Based on three years of fieldwork, and using case study methodology and ethnographic methods, the author investigates how “users” are conceptualized and present in the development cycle of the innovative museum installations developed within the GIFT project. The author problematizes the process on one hand through discourse studies, in particular the theoretical lens of the ´discursive-material knot´, on the other using design theory, with special attention to approach of Johan Redström and his critique of user-centred design. Through observing how The User was defined and negotiated, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of the tensions that underlie interdisciplinary collaborations and articulates possible points of conflict.

The results highlight how The User was shaped by a variety of discursive frames throughout the course of the GIFT design processes. Materially, the design and testing process was constrained by multiple factors including the institutional context of an EU project and contributed to how “users” were manifest and reached closure in testing processes. The User was further affected by the established structures it had to accommodate such as for example the logic of academic research and the logic of cultural heritage institutions. The thesis proposes that articulating and sensitising design teams to the inherent tensions between these dimensions provides a possible path towards navigating and potentially resolving some of them.

The concept of ‘Hybrid museum experiences’ is inspired by New Museology, and looks at how museum experiences can be made more meaningful by giving visitors agency in their museum experience. The chapter emphasises how museum experiences are inherently social, and looks at how hybrid museum experiences can be made meaningful through tapping into social practices and the visitors’ social context.

Museums are interested in designing emotional visitor experiences to complement traditional interpretations. HCI is interested in the relationship between Affective Computing and Affective Interaction. We describe Sensitive Pictures, an emotional visitor experience co-created with the Munch art museum. Visitors choose emotions, locate associated paintings in the museum, experience an emotional story while viewing them, and self-report their response. A subsequent interview with a portrayal of the artist employs computer vision to estimate emotional responses from facial expressions. Visitors are given a souvenir postcard visualizing their emotional data. A study of 132 members of the public (39 interviewed) illuminates key themes: designing emotional provocations; capturing emotional responses; engaging visitors with their data; a tendency for them to align their views with the system's interpretation; and integrating these elements into emotional trajectories. We consider how Affective Computing can hold up a mirror to our emotions during Affective Interaction

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges.

What does the age of participation look like from the perspective of a museum visitor? Arguably, the concept of participative experiences is already so deeply ingrained in our culture that we may not even think about it as participation. Museum visitors engage in a number of activities, of which observing the exhibits is only one part. Since most visitors come to the museum together with someone else, they spend time and attention on the people they came with, and often the needs of the group are given priority over individual preferences. How can museums tap into these activities - and make themselves relevant to visitors? In this chapter we will try to approach this constructively, as a design opportunity. Could it be productive for the museum to consider itself not only as a disseminator of knowledge, but also as the facilitator of participative activities between visitors?In what follows, we will outline a range of practical design projects that serve as examples of this approach. These projects were part of the European Union funded Horizon2020 project GIFT, a cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers, artists, designers and many international museums and heritage organisations, exploring the concept of interpersonal museum experiences (see https://gifting.digital/). What the projects have in common is that they build on visitors co-creating and sharing their own narratives in the museum context. We suggest that these projects demonstrate a spectrum of possibilities: From experiences that take place almost without any museum involvement, to those that give museums a role in curating these narratives.

Concepts and theories that emerge within the social sciences tend to be nuanced, dealing with complex social phenomena. While their relevance to design could be high, it is difficult to make sense of them in design projects, especially when participants have a variety of backgrounds. We report on our experiences using role-play scenarios as a way to sensitize heterogeneous designer teams to complex theoretical concepts related to museology as social and cultural phenomena. We discuss design requirements on such scenarios, and the importance of connecting their execution closely to the context of the design and the current stage of the design process.

This paper presents a meta study that has been taking place within the GIFT consortium. The study has been conducted by a researcher using ethnographic methods and provides information on observations that could be pertinent to issues in humanities, technology and exploitation in context of cultural informatics. I posit that interdisciplinarity of the field is a great advantage which is also difficult to manage on a practical level and can contribute to misunderstandings and chaos. Furthermore, position of technology in museum context often is overstressed. Developing critical approaches and giving more agency to research partners that are not core part of the team could strengthen potential project outcomes and exploitation of results.