Sense of Care in the Design of Digital Heritage Applications

Cultural heritage care emphasizes preservation, ethical duty, empathy, and relational bonds, with museums fostering deeper connections and historical understanding. This paper develops a design approach to interactive media applied to coloured collection, by focusing on a “care theory” for cultural heritage. The work also analyses art from diverse periods and media, exploring how various engagement types—visual, emotional, interactive—evoke care in viewers. Multimedia art similarly fosters empathy and reflection. The study utilized a Cultural Probe Kit to analyse caring behaviours, revealing traits and triggers that prompt a caring attitude. A proposed framework outlines emotional and empathetic aspects, emphasizing meaningful connections between caregivers and cultural heritage, enhanced through storytelling, engagement, and interactive technologies. Museums, as social spaces, benefit from user participation, fostering care and meaning making. Two prototypes like ColorColab and MyTISSE are described, focusing on their capacity to engage visitors with hands-on, multi-sensory technology, enhancing their personal connections to artifacts and social interactions. The chapter closes testing the framework and caring trigger on a number of different interactive projects.