[2023 – 2026]
Daddy the Porcupine Fish
Collaboration with Cumberland House Natural History Museum to develop an interactive experience of an interactive digital avatar based on their taxidermy collection.
The project reflects on using creative technologies to bring the museum collection to life. The intervention describes two interactive experiences designed to facilitate audience engagement with novel interfaces and the digitalization of Portsmouth’s Cumberland House Natural History Museum store artefacts: (i) a dynamic low-cost holographic display of 3D digital models and (ii) the showcase of an interactive experience leveraging real-time motion-capturing and Wizard-of-Oz performative methods to animate a conversational holographic animal that engaged with visitors via voice interaction, creating narratives around the museum’s collection. READ MORE: “Should Holograms Be Displayed Next to Papier-Mâché Models? Reflections on the Conflict of the Pre-Digital and the Post-Digital Museum“
The project asks: What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This work repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. The project reflects on the use of interactive experiences as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies. Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman. READ MORE: Not Post-Digital but More-than-Human: Rethinking Digital Design for Regional Natural History Museums