Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities

Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 1 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 1 1 Document Information Document Identification Status Final Due Date 30 September 2025 Version 2.0 Submission Date 30 September 2025 Related WP WP1 Document Reference D1.9 Related Task(s) 1.3 Document Type DEM Related Deliverable(s) D1.9 Dissemination Level Public Lead Participant Heritage Malta (HM) Deliverable Leader Aphrodite Andreou (HM) Contributors Magna Żmien (MŻ) Reviewer Lorela Mehmeti (UNIBO) Reviewer Björn Stockleben (FBKW) Author(s) First Name Last Name Partner Aphrodite Andreou Heritage Malta Andrew Pace Magna Żmien Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 2 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 2 Document History Version Date Modified by Modification reason 1.0 22/09/2025 Aphrodite Andreou and Andrew Pace First draft 1.1 26/09/2025 Lorela Mehmeti and Björn Stockleben Internal review 2.0 28/09/2025 Aphrodite Andreou and Andrew Pace Internal reviewer’s comments implementation 2.0 29-30/09/2025 Łukasz Pieczonka Karolina Wawok Żaneta Żegleń Evaluation by the QC Team Quality Control Role Who (Partner short name) Approval Date Deliverable Leader Aphrodite Andreou (HM) 28/09/2025 Quality Controller Łukasz Pieczonka (JU) 29/09/2025 Project Coordinator Żaneta Żegleń (JU) 30/09/2025 Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 3 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 3 2 Executive Summary This deliverable, D1.9 ‘Online and offline workshops with communities’, presents the methodologies and results of a series of online and offline workshops undertaken with the IMPULSE target communities at a local and institutional level, and a number of larger Consortium-level workshops as part of Task 1.3.1 ‘Preparation’ of Work Package 1. Its purpose is to consolidate the questions, methods, and insights generated so far, and to frame them as preparatory work for the next phase of prototyping. The research emerged from Work Package 1, Task 1.3: ‘Teaching and Learning Prototypes’, which explores how to engage teachers and students with digital cultural heritage collections through reciprocal learning techniques in XR environments. The work builds upon the results of the user survey of Task 1.1 ‘UX Research’ and the ideation of Task 1.2 ‘Artistic Research Prototype’ to develop a methodology for engagement in workshop formats that explore the interpretation of collections through sharing and co-creating with collection objects within the Multi-User Virtual Environment that is being developed by Work Package 2, as well as more speculatively. This work is framed by Task 1.3.1: ‘Preparation’ phase, which involved in-depth reviews of collections and prototyping largely within the consortium, and with external community and institution-level workshops with prototype users. This preparatory work forms the foundation of Task 1.3.2: ‘Co-creation’, beginning immediately after the completion of this deliverable, which will implement more workshops based on the methodologies formed through Task 1.3.1. The research was coordinated by Heritage Malta, the University of Malta, and Magna Żmien. The deliverable was written by Heritage Malta and Magna Żmien. Key words: Workshops, Human Computer Interaction, HCI, Research through Design, RtD Online community, Game Jams, Cultural Heritage, Speculative Design, Playfulness, Participatory Design, Co-creation, Education, Agency, Technology, Multiperspectivity. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 4 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 4 3 Table of Contents 1 Document Information 1 2 Executive Summary 3 3 Table of Contents 4 4 Abbreviations and Acronyms 6 5 Introduction 7 5.1 IMPULSE Project 7 5.2 Objectives of Work Package 1 7 5.3 Objectives of Task 1.3 8 5.4 Scope of this Deliverable 10 5.5 Structure of the Deliverable 13 5.6 Scope of the Workshops 15 6 Research 17 6.1 Research Agenda 17 6.2 Research Questions 19 7 Workshops 25 7.1 Workshops Framework 26 7.1.1 Target Groups and Users 26 7.1.2 Format of the Workshops 29 7.1.3 Design of the Workshops 31 7.2 Community Workshops 34 7.2.1 Recruiting Community Workshop participants 37 7.2.2 Community Workshops 1 and 2: Mixed Groups 42 7.2.3 Community Workshops 3, 4 and 5 44 7.3 Consortium Workshops 46 7.3.1 Consortium Discussions and Ideation Sessions 47 7.3.2 Institutional Deep Dives 50 7.3.3 Live Visits 51 7.3.4 Pre-hackathon IMCo Workshop (Leuven) 53 7.3.5 Pre-hackathon IMCo Workshop (Malta) 55 8 Methodologies 58 Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 5 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 5 8.1 Workshop Methodologies and Frameworks 59 8.1.1 Research through Design 60 8.1.2 User-centred and participatory design 61 8.1.3 Human-Computer Interaction, feedback loops and iteration 62 8.1.4 Game-based approaches and playfulness 63 8.2 Applying Methodologies to the Workshops 65 8.3 Methodology Evaluation 70 9 Observations and Analysis 74 9.1 Workshop key findings and reflections 74 9.1.1 How the Leuven Pre-hackathon affected our practice 77 9.1.2 Case Studies Presented during the Community Workshops 79 9.1.3 Community Workshop 1 84 9.1.4 Community Workshop 2a 86 9.1.5 Community Workshop 2b 87 9.1.6 Community Workshop 3 90 9.1.7 Community Workshop 4 93 9.1.8 Community Workshop 5 95 9.2 Workshop Prototypes 98 9.3 Workshop Reports 100 9.4 Next Steps 103 10 Bibliography 105 11 Annexe 110 A.1 Photos of workshops in Malta, 26-28 July & 4-5 September 2025 110 A.2 Template consent form for Community Workshops, Malta 113 A.3 Workshop Reports 114 Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 6 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 6 4 Abbreviations and Acronyms Abbreviation / acronym Description AR Augmented Reality C&D Communication and Dissemination CC Associazione Clust-ER Industrie Culturali e Creative CCI Cultural and Creative Industries CH Cultural Heritage ECCCH European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage EV Explodedview sp. z o.o. G1 Group 1 G2 Group 2 G3 Group 3 GDPR General Data Protection Regulation GLAM Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums HCI Human-Computer Interaction IMCo IMPULSE Community of Practice IPR Intellectual Property Rights KPIs Key Performance Indicators MDA Mechanics–Dynamics–Aesthetics MR Mixed Reality MUVE Multi-User Virtual Environment RtD Research Through Design TIFF Thessaloniki Film Festival UI User Interface UX User Experience VR Virtual Reality XR Extended Reality Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 7 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 7 5 Introduction 5.1 IMPULSE Project Digital technologies are playing a key role in the sustainability transformation; therefore, IMPULSE applies a comprehensive approach to tackling some of the major pressing gaps in the European cultural heritage digitization processes. In doing so, IMPULSE will develop ground-breaking, comprehensive solutions and methods for digitization processes and accessibility of digital cultural heritage collections, that will enable their innovative (re)use, solve challenges related to the interoperability of platforms and facilitate the availability of existing digitized cultural heritage content in novel contexts like the Metaverse while creating innovative standardization procedures and adapting legal frameworks to contemporary transformations and creative processes in and for education, arts, and CCSI. IMPULSE will foster solutions that extend the range, and consequently the quantity, of artifacts and objects, that can be displayed through using XR to recreate objects, making collections more virtually accessible in order to enable original uses of digital cultural heritage archives to create diverse, and layered narratives, for the wider demographic audience and underrepresented communities, empowering them to engage more deeply with the topics and themes on display, also through artistic (visual artists and dancers) performance through IMPULSE’s pilots and prototypes. IMPULSE will also enable connections and encounters among researchers, artists, cultural heritage practitioners, CCSIs, entrepreneurs, local institutions, companies, and other relevant stakeholders, through effective engagement such as IMPULSE Community of Practice, and appropriate tools and channels such as IMPULSE Hackathon and Acceleration & Mentoring Hub in order to facilitate effective dialogue, co-creation, and capacity building in immersive digitization. 5.2 Objectives of Work Package 1 Work Package 1 (WP1), entitled Extended Storytelling Towards Vivid User Experiences, is one of the foundational modules of the IMPULSE project. Its overarching goal is to conceptualise, develop, and empirically validate new modes of storytelling in immersive environments based on user needs, narrative diversity, and technological affordances. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 8 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 8 WP1 seeks to: • identify and define the information needs and behaviours of selected user groups interacting with immersive cultural content, • investigate affective, cognitive, and social dimensions of XR-based user experiences, • support the design of educational and artistic applications using extended reality (XR), • produce guidance for narrative structures and interaction strategies that are accessible, inclusive, and adaptable to different audiences and contexts. To achieve these goals, WP1 includes the design of a comprehensive research methodology (developed in D1.1), followed by empirical UX research (documented in D1.2), and culminating in behavioural diagnostics and persona construction (in D1.3 and beyond). The findings from WP1 are directly integrated into the technical development of the prototype platform in WP2, ensuring continuity between conceptual design, user engagement, and implementation. 5.3 Objectives of Task 1.3 Task 1.3: Teaching and Learning Prototypes (M13-36) (Lead: HM; Partners: UM, MZ, UJ, KUL, UNIBO, NKUA, FBKW). This task explores how to engage teachers/students with digital cultural heritage collections/curators in such a way that the learning experience is reciprocal. The key to this is a data-driven yet human-centred approach that intensifies interaction to the level of co-creation. The partners in this task will build upon the results of the user survey in Task 1.1 and ideation from Task 1.2 to develop a methodology for engagement that focuses on collection interpretation by sharing and co-creating contextual layers around objects included in the Metaverse. Collaborative interpretation models employing novel, suitable discovery aids (the desktop and VR interfaces developed under WP2) will be developed on the basis of a use case that allows for replication and extrapolation in different settings and (upscaled/downscaled) dimensions. By making interpretation, contextualization and teaching/learning processes incremental and reciprocal, the target audiences/end users become the pivot of the heritage experience jointly with the collection holders. Guided by a methodology designed to include use scenarios and interpretation models, this task will also produce a playbook for community interaction building on insights and experiences gathered through the teaching/learning use case. Both methodology and Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 15 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 15 Annexe 3 presents the reports from each of the workshops in the form of templates, including an evaluation of each of the workshops that examines how the research questions were explored and the processes of iteration that were employed to build on the successes of each. 5.6 Scope of the Workshops The workshops were designed as exploratory, participatory spaces that brought together diverse stakeholders, to reflect on how digital cultural heritage can be reinterpreted and experienced through immersive technologies. Their scope was not to produce finished prototypes, but to generate and explore questions, test methodologies, and surface insights that inform the co-creation process of Task 1.3. The main focus is how the IMPULSE project can effectively make informed decisions and attempt to listen to the target audiences, while challenging top-down approaches that are usually encountered in educational approaches, questioning where learning takes place and how. Task 1.3 of Work Package 1 examines the ways in which immersive environments and digital cultural heritage can be incorporated into teaching and learning processes, focusing on co-creation and co-curation opportunities in an educational context that can be explored within the multi-user XR platform. There are three important groups that IMPULSE is targeting in this regard: educators and students, artists, and professional members of cultural and creative industries (CCIs). For educators and students, the prototypes are intended as tools for exploratory learning that move beyond traditional didactic methods. Instead of static displays or textheavy catalogues, interactive prototypes encourage students to engage with artefacts through play, speculation, and embodied interaction. Educators, in turn, gain access to new forms of pedagogy where heritage can be approached as an open-ended, participatory process rather than a closed narrative where learning becomes reciprocal. For artists, the prototypes function as laboratories for experimentation, including with site-specificity, speculative storytelling, and the politics of representation. They explore possibilities for reimagining collections as materials for creative reinterpretation and affective engagement. Artists in the workshops often framed such interventions as both a privilege and a challenge: they were valued for generating curiosity but sometimes critiqued by curators as fragmented or out of context. This tension Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 16 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 16 is productive, as it reflects the role of art in questioning institutional authority and offering alternative readings of heritage. For CCIs, prototypes are crucial in demonstrating scalable models of engagement that can be adapted across institutions and audiences. Ideas for future prototypes that emerged from discussions with CCI participants, such as AR-based collection games, conservation simulators, or interactive storytelling platforms, illustrate how digital cultural heritage can align with contemporary media practices and with professional usecases. The design and testing of the MUVE design and interaction prototypes for IMPULSE is with the needs of these target groups in mind. The workshops have been designed to engage with target groups (and levels of expertise) simultaneously, allowing ideas and perspectives to be shared across these professional boundaries. This ensures that the outputs we develop are not only effective as teaching tools but are also flexible enough to respond to future cultural and creative contexts where learning and creativity overlap. Each group brings distinct expectations and forms of expertise, yet their engagement with the prototypes highlights important overlaps. This overlapping reflects the Research through Design (RtD) approach that underpins the workshops of Work Package 1; prototypes are not fixed solutions, but vehicles for ongoing dialogue (see Section 8.1.1). Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 17 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 17 6 Research 6.1 Research Agenda The research agenda is being advanced through four strands of areas of investigations, structured around a combination of online, offline and hybrid workshops that serve as the primary research vehicle within Task 1.3. Their agenda is to test ideas and methodologies in practice, identify user needs and behaviours, and develop prototypes of interaction that question how teaching and learning can take place with digital heritage collections in virtual spaces. Each workshop builds on the previous ones, evolving the research questions iteratively. Each workshop focuses on how different groups (students, educators, artists, curators) interpret and interact with collections, how digital and physical experiences differ, and how creative practices (including speculative storytelling, playful mechanics) can be integrated into institutional contexts. In this sense, the workshops act as living laboratories, generating insights that guide both design and theoretical reflection. One strand of investigation examines how cultural and educational spaces, ranging from museums and galleries to classrooms and online platforms, are being redefined and extended into hybrid environments. Workshops allow us to observe how physical and virtual domains intersect, revealing both tensions and new opportunities for learning, playfulness, and engagement. These explorations are connected to the development of interactive and immersive experiences, where user feedback directly informs the design of the MUVE being developed in Work Package 2. A second strand of investigation explores how educational outreach in the form of edutainment strategies can bridge formal and informal learning. Collaborative exercises with educators and students guide us in aligning design outputs with pedagogical objectives. At the same time, experiments with digital and technological assemblages highlight the evolving role and value of digital artefacts, prompting questions of preservation, interpretation, and reuse. A third strand of investigation explores how critical perspectives are integral to this process, especially concerning representation, accessibility, censorship, and bias. By involving diverse participants in workshops, we can identify cultural sensitivities, Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 18 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 18 inclusivity needs, and potential blind spots in our approaches. This supports the design of more equitable systems while also opening discussion around ownership, selfexpression, and participatory practices. Related to this is the exploration of narrative as a fourth strand of investigation. Workshops serve as testing grounds for non-linear storytelling, interactive fiction, and game design, all of which invite audiences to become co-authors of meaning and interpretation. Attention is paid to how digital folklore, and speculative futures emerge from contemporary practices, as well as how cultural and historical contexts can be resituated through immersive technologies. Across these strands, the focus on designing with care ensures that interfaces are intuitive, ethical, and context-sensitive, supporting both usability and critical engagement. Several key discussions emerged from the ideation sessions that significantly shaped our approach to the workshop themes, methodologies and questions. These discussions spanned a wide range of topics related to game design, digital culture, AI ethics, and gender studies. Drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks, these topics provided a foundation for how we conceptualised the workshops and informed the paradigms and research questions we aimed to address. A central theme that was returned to revolved around the role of games, digital environments, and play in shaping social norms, cultural narratives, and individual identities, outlining how theoretical discussions directly influenced our focus on the ethics of game design, the intersection of memory and technology, and the social impact of digital play in future implementations of our workshops. These can be arranged in three broad categories. 1. The role of Game Design and its philosophical implications. Discussions around game mechanics highlighted how seemingly simple design choices can significantly impact player behaviour and influence societal norms. Game mechanics, particularly those that address meaningful actions, were seen as tools for expressing deeper narratives about society, culture, and individual agency. Additionally, concepts such as transgressive play were explored, raising questions about how games can challenge conventional structures. 2. Digital Memory and technological influence on art and culture. Another central discussion revolved around the role of digital technologies in shaping memory and cultural preservation. This theme emerged from the exploration of algorithmic folklore and how digital tools influence the creation of new forms of cultural Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 19 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 19 expression. As Gabriele de Seta explores in his work on the mutual shaping of automation and vernacular creativity, digital environments not only reflect but also actively create cultural narratives (de Seta, 2024). These conversations prompted us to frame the workshop as a space where participants can explore how digital artifacts, games, social media, and other interactive platforms, act as vehicles for memory-making and cultural transformation. The idea of memory as a digital construct was further influenced by projects such as Spencer Chang’s ‘Field Companions’ (Chang, 2024) and the ‘Sungrazer Project’ (Pipkin, 2023). These projects explore how objects and digital spaces are imbued with memory, prompting us to consider how digital media can become archives of collective and individual histories. 3. The ethics and social impact of Digital Play. Conversations were also prompted on how games can serve as platforms for addressing global crises, environmental concerns, and wider societal pressures. These were ideas developed from ecocentricism and existentialism in virtual spaces, such as those explored in Peter W. Zapffe’s work on the ‘virtual tragic’, which illuminate how digital environments can explore profound philosophical themes (Gualeni & Vella, 2020). 6.2 Research Questions The initial set of research questions for IMPULSE following the above research agenda were grounded in a literature review of cultural heritage, game studies, and hackathon design for digital museology, as well as an exploration of relevant applied case studies. Applying this research to each of our workshops generated new layers of inquiry, shaped by direct input from curators, conservators, artists, students, educators, and technologists. The process ensured that research questions evolved beyond theory into situated, practice-driven concerns. Through this iterative process, the questions became more specific, contextual, and attuned to stakeholders’ lived realities. The development of research questions within IMPULSE follows a Research through Design (RtD) trajectory, moving from theory to practice in an iterative cycle. Beginning with the literature review and case study analysis, broad and open-ended questions were formulated to map the field and frame the initial areas of inquiry. These were then tested and refined through the different types of workshops, where questions were grounded in the lived realities of cultural heritage professionals, artists, students and educators. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 20 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 20 This process culminates in design-oriented questions, directly informing the prototypes that will be developed. The questions and themes that ultimately emerged across the workshops were not incidental, but essential tools for structuring inquiry and shaping the design space. They were important precisely because they resisted easy answers and instead opened spaces of negotiation. Questions in design research frame opportunities for reflection and intervention rather than definitive solutions. In our case, questions around ownership, learning, agency, and representation became essential because they pointed to the tensions between institutional authority and community participation, between conservation and reinterpretation, and between fact-based education and artistic speculation. These research questions are not self-contained problems to be solved; rather, they share themes that can be best explored by approaching them from multiple perspectives. Ideas that emerge from tackling one question might unlock a new line of inquiry or association in another. These are the main clusters of questions that we are exploring directly and indirectly, having emerged through the discussions in the workshops of Work Package 1 in iterative feedback cycles. All of the question clusters mentioned bellow touch thematically on the three categories mentioned in Section 6.1, Research Agenda. Research questions Cluster 1: Institutional responsibility and ethics. How should cultural institutions balance their role as custodians of factual knowledge with the ethical obligation to acknowledge contested histories, colonial legacies, and sensitive materials? What forms of responsibility emerge when institutions act as both authorities and facilitators of public dialogue? Can ethics be operationalised not only as safeguards against harm but also as opportunities for transparency, care, and dialogue with communities whose voices have been historically marginalised? How can artistic interpretations productively intersect with institutional frameworks to generate new meanings, challenge assumptions, and reframe cultural memory without trivialising or distorting it? Looking at historical precedents brings into focus questions that remain unresolved today: Access and reuse, issues of representation, mediation, and interpretation. How far do GLAM institutions allow for engagement with their physical and digital artefacts in alternative, perhaps subversive ways? Are collection objects digitised in ways that facilitate creative experimentation, or are they produced for a specific application? To what extent is the rigidity or flexibility of digital objects enabling or preventing reapplication, or upcycling, of digitised collection artefacts? Technical Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 21 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 21 questions such as these are not necessarily directly linked to the successful (or not) implementation of AR, VR or XR technologies within an institution. Research questions Cluster 2: Speculation and artistic interpretation. What role can speculative practices and subjectivity play in expanding narratives beyond conventional historical accuracy? When do such interventions enhance engagement with cultural heritage? How are artists approaching XR, and how do they interact with cultural heritage artefacts in their practice? By experimenting with interactive installations, speculative storytelling, and immersive theatre, artists extend the possibilities of heritage representation, highlighting alternative forms of engagement and care. Their approaches point to the importance of exploring alternative interfaces and modes of interaction, moving beyond conventional VR headsets to experiment with tactile, spatial, and multisensory formats. While institutional practices establish the frameworks through which XR is implemented, it is equally important to acknowledge how these boundaries are tested, redefined, or even subverted by artists. Institutions often prioritise accessibility, preservation, and education, yet artists introduce speculative, playful, and critical dimensions that expand what is possible. Research questions Cluster 3: Learning and education. First to consider in this context are institutional practices. What are cultural heritage institutions currently doing to integrate XR into their exhibitions and educational outreach, and how do these practices vary across contexts? Differences between large and small museums are particularly significant, as questions of scale, resources, and audience demographics directly shape how XR is implemented. In parallel, we must ask what cultural heritage institutions need from XR in order to remain relevant and sustainable? How can educational practices embrace multiplicity, layering, and speculation without losing sight of accuracy and care? In what ways might playful and participatory learning approaches encourage deeper connections between audiences, heritage, and institutions? Research questions Cluster 4: Ownership and agency. We also engage with cross-cutting issues of representation and mediation. Who owns cultural heritage and its digital versions? Who decides how artefacts are represented? Whether through games, installations, or digital archives, XR environments raise fundamental questions about what aspects of cultural heritage are emphasised, how Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 22 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 22 narratives are constructed, and who has the authority to decide. What should be augmented when cultural heritage assets, tangible or intangible, are represented in virtual environments: the object itself, the bond it creates, or speculative narratives that extend its meaning? How can interactive storytelling and non-linear design contribute to layered, co-created experiences? Research questions Cluster 5: Game based approaches to learning. The exploratory role of artists is part of a longer lineage of experiments that merge cultural heritage with new technologies. To better understand the place of contemporary XR practices, we must also situate them within their historical trajectories. To what extent can the wider field of edutainment, archaeogaming, and historical games provide instructive examples, demonstrating how play can function as a vehicle for both education and critique? Game-based approaches open questions around how history can be taught through play, storytelling, how meaningful mechanics and interactions can be embedded within cultural heritage experiences, and how audiences can be transformed from passive consumers into active participants. Research questions Cluster 6: Materiality and preservation (and augmentation). It is also crucial to consider infrastructural questions, including how these practices tie into the far-reaching preservation efforts of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) (European Commission, 2022). Here, metadata, paradata, and standardisation are addressed as foundational challenges, not only for how heritage assets are digitised and represented, but also what elements could be augmented in a virtual environment: the object itself, the connections it evokes, or speculative stories that extend its meanings. How should digital heritage practices account for the material qualities and layered histories of artefacts? Which layers of an object’s history should be preserved, highlighted, or left ambiguous? How do practices of digitisation risk replicating Western-centred concepts of preservation, and what alternative models, such as ritual rebuilding or ephemeral interventions, can challenge these norms? In what ways can preservation itself be understood as a speculative and interpretive act, rather than a purely factual one? Research Cluster question 7: Technology and mechanics. To what extent should technology remain a tool to support the artefact, rather than replace it, and how can speculative mechanics highlight rather than conceal the politics of representation? Technology also raises questions of longevity and obsolescence: how Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 23 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 23 can design strategies ensure that ephemeral prototypes remain pedagogically meaningful even as platforms and formats evolve? By embedding meaning into mechanics, interactions shift from being merely playful to becoming acts of critical engagement, enabling participants to experience heritage as something lived, embodied, and contested. Mechanics also impose boundaries, what is possible, permissible, or visible is constrained by the affordances and assumptions of the technology itself. In cultural heritage applications, this means that XR systems can inadvertently reinforce hierarchies by privileging certain narratives or modes of interaction over others. A virtual reconstruction, for instance, may present a polished but singular version of the past, reducing space for multiplicity or dissent. In this way, technology can operate as a silent authority, encoding decisions about what is remembered, forgotten, or reinterpreted. This gradual grouping into clusters reflects what Gaver describes as design as a process of accumulation, where fragments of discussion begin to cluster into themes, gradually forming a more coherent Research through Design landscape (Gaver, 2012, p.8). Ultimately, the value of these questions lies in how they remind us that design within IMPULSE cannot be abstracted from its context. The project’s research is an ongoing, organic process that grows with each workshop, interview, and exchange, continually reshaping its focus in response to new reflections. At its core, this work seeks to confront the hierarchical imbalances that often define teaching and learning, instead positioning co-creation as a way to redistribute agency. These imbalances directly influence the narratives that are produced by institutions, and careful attention is needed to avoid outcomes that feel superficial or gimmick-driven. For IMPULSE, relevance means designing with and for the realities of the institutions, communities, and collections we are engaging with, ensuring that prototypes emerge as meaningful holistic interventions rather than detached experiments. The development of these questions across workshops can be seen as a progression from broad, comparative inquiries ('What are other museums doing with their spaces?') towards more situated, practical and speculative concerns ('What level of agency should a virtual visitor have?' or 'How do we seduce people into learning without over-curation?'). Our process of question-building reflected the sometimes-contradictory institutional structures at play (e.g., Heritage Malta’s top-down narratives versus Magna Żmien’s multivocality, or curatorial narratives versus artistic speculation) as well as the artistic provocations that challenge them. The process of developing these questions was itself iterative and participatory. Starting from a review of comparative case studies of other digital cultural heritage experiences, Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 24 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 24 the questions evolved through a range of workshops of different types with different stakeholders. This follows what Zimmerman et al. describe as the design research methodology: “Through an active process of ideating, iterating, and critiquing potential solutions, design researchers continually reframe the problem as they attempt to make the right thing. The final output of this activity is a concrete problem framing and articulation of the preferred state, and a series of artifacts—models, prototypes, products, and documentation of the design process.” (Zimmerman et al., 2007, p.5). This is what we see here: a layering of questions, each one opening further possibilities rather than closing them down. It is important to highlight that this process also reflects a pedagogy of inquiry. In IMPULSE, it can be useful to consider questions themselves as educational artefacts, tools for thinking collectively across disciplines, institutions, and cultural contexts. These questions form a basis to explore the meaning and emotional impact of artefacts, their physical and contextual relationships, and how they can be translated into virtual environments while maintaining their integrity and serve as a foundation for identifying technical requirements for the platform and pilot projects. In this light, the research questions and prototype ideas developed so far should not be seen as isolated design exercises, but as critical entry points into wider debates about how XR is currently deployed across cultural heritage. The reflections gathered during the workshops underline that what matters is not only what is represented in virtual environments, but also how and why it is represented. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 31 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 31 Methodologically, these embodied and participatory encounters offered insights into intuitive design practices and situated applications of Research through Design. However, offline workshops were logistically more demanding to organise, less inclusive for geographically distant participants, and required limited group sizes to be effective. These factors placed constraints on scalability and accessibility despite the depth of engagement achieved. Hybrid workshops combined physical and virtual presence, namely during the IMCo Leuven Pre-hackathon. This format expanded accessibility and reach by allowing participation from individuals who were unable to travel to attend the event, including those outside the immediate consortium members. Hybrid events therefore played an important role in testing accessibility strategies and developing approaches to inclusive interaction design. At the same time, they often fell short in sustaining the same intensity of engagement as dedicated offline, or even online, workshops. Remote participants, despite being present, frequently experienced a reduced level of interaction compared to those on-site, leading to an imbalance in dialogue that limited opportunities for genuine co-creation. While hybrid formats helped bridge physical and virtual participation, they underlined the methodological challenge of ensuring parity of engagement across both environments. Hybrid engagements need careful facilitation so that online audiences are not excluded and so that different institutional voices can be represented on equal terms. By comparing these modalities against the objectives of each workshop, IMPULSE can better learn how different target groups (educators, students, artists, cultural heritage professionals) interact under different conditions to determine the most suitable methods going forward. We can gather first-hand insights into how our XR prototypes can account for physical presence, remote accessibility, and blended experiences. In this sense, the comparison is not just methodological but also thematic, because the very questions of placelessness, access, and mediation that have arisen in the workshops mirror the challenges of cultural heritage representation in virtual and hybrid environments. 7.1.3 Design of the Workshops The workshops are central to advancing the research and prototyping of the MUVE virtual world. They are designed to bring together different stakeholder groups to test, refine, and co-create both the technological and pedagogical dimensions of the platform. For example, Pre-hackathons provide concentrated periods of experimentation and Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 32 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 32 prototyping with consortium members, allowing participants to engage in intensive, hands-on testing of the MUVE. These events are particularly valuable for pushing the technological development forward, encouraging creativity and rapid problem-solving while also keeping the development within context of the ongoing research. Community Workshops, by contrast, are short, in-person sessions with external stakeholders such as artists, creatives, cultural heritage professionals, educators, and students. They ensure that design and pedagogical features are tested in real-world contexts and that the platform remains responsive to the needs of those who will ultimately use it, even if the platform itself is not engaged with directly during those sessions. A workshop is considered fruitful and impactful, if it produces actionable feedback on how the MUVE can support teaching, learning, and creative practices, or if it can identify and highlight areas of concern and note-able interactions and entanglements. This feedback is returned to Work Package 2 who update the MUVE with new features accordingly. Impact also depends on whether the sessions enable genuine co-creation and critical reflection, with participants from different backgrounds contributing meaningfully to the development process. A balanced representation of perspectives across user groups ensures that we integrate the voices of professionals and nonprofessionals, experts and novices. Negotiating a balance of digital literacy levels across the workshops was challenging, as our pool of participants available at any one session is limited. Finally, success relies on thorough documentation of participant contributions, allowing feedback to be systematically analysed and applied to subsequent project stages. To measure our workshops in terms of impact, we can look to Sufi et al. (2018, pp-5-22) who defined ten rules for measuring the impact of workshops. A number of these rules have been applied to the workshops that have been undertaken to date and can be found in their evaluations in Section 9 of this deliverable. These were important factors when designing our workshops. Setting goals effectively. For IMPULSE, this means specifying whether a workshop is meant to test pedagogical uses of the MUVE, gather feedback from artists, educational users, or CCIs (or a mix), or stress-test prototypes in pre-hackathons, for example. Goals should be explicit, and participants should be chosen who it is believed can achieve these goals. Creating metrics purposefully. Metrics that measure the outcome of workshops should directly reflect the workshop’s goals and research questions. Since IMPULSE workshops involve educators, creatives, and cultural heritage professionals, impact can mean different things. Educators may value clarity and learning outcomes, artists may value Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 33 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 33 creative flexibility, and GLAM staff may prioritise metadata or preservation fidelity. However, metrics inherently simplify complex information, so we must be aware of how this can mislead results that are synthesised from single or collective responses. Understand bias. Biases more generally can mislead results, including confirmation bias (the tendency to reaffirm one’s own beliefs, or the dominant beliefs of the workshop group), sampling bias (derived from the participants chosen for each workshop), or social desirability bias (participants responding to questions in ways that will ingratiate them with the coordinators, such as agreeing with their statements perhaps if their knowledge of the topic is limited). Design participation well. Understanding the workshop participants’ familiarity with XR, cultural heritage collections, or teaching practices ahead of the workshop will lead to formulate more pertinent questions and to evaluate whether the workshop has generally confirmed expected responses, or if there has been a change of responses or attitudes through the workshop discussions. Ask about participants’ ‘confidence’. Understanding participants’ prior experience with the tools, theories, collections and concepts being presented in the workshop can lead to a better implementation. This is a reason why User levels have been recorded, to give us an idea of how informed a participants’ responses may be to a question. However, that is not to say responses from lower User levels is less valuable, but the context of their knowledge should be considered to better inform the prototyping. Ask about specific skills. Understanding the skill level, background and expertise in their discipline was important information that we gathered about our participants. This manifested in their Group (G1, G2, G3), but also in capturing information about the participant’s professional background. Harness gamification to test participants' skills. Once the MUVE is in a condition to prototype during public workshops, it can be used to assess whether the needs of a participant can be met by the interactions offered by the platform. This can also be considered as an assessment of the platform itself and allows participants to ask and answer questions through those interactions and game mechanics. These ‘rules’ were applied to the grouping of participants and the exercises and discussions that were planned in each workshop. Overarching these rules are broader workshop activity frameworks. Sufi et al. define two such forms of workshop in which these rules can be applied in the context of IMPULSE as ‘Exploratory’, and ‘Creating’: Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 34 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 34 “In exploratory workshops, ideas are analysed to better understand a topic and its associated problems, current solutions, and future challenges. These workshops can have aims such as identifying what actions are needed to move a particular topic forward or getting expert advice from and into different communities [...] Creating workshops bring together individuals with a common or intersecting interest to solve particular problems by collectively building something. They can include multidisciplinary teams in which problem holders guide the creative process.” (Sufi et al., 2018, pp.4-5). ‘Exploratory Workshops’ are the form taken in the Community Workshops, and to an extent in the Consortium Workshops through the Institutional Deep Dives and Ideation Sessions. ‘Creating Workshops’ have been implemented primarily in the pre-hackathon in Leuven and in the pre-hackathon in Malta. Creating Workshops will be the primary type in the next phase of workshopping directly with the MUVE. Further Exploratory Workshops are also being planned in upcoming Community Workshops with university professors and students in the form of game jams. The feedback and results gathered from all of the workshops play a crucial role in guiding the future stages of IMPULSE. In terms of development, they will inform refinements to the MUVE’s design features, interaction models, and pedagogical tools implemented in Work Package 2. For testing, they will identify areas where functionality or user experience requires further prototyping or redesign. And in terms of dissemination the workshops provide evidence of meaningful stakeholder engagement that can be communicated to wider cultural, academic, and creative communities. This iterative process ensures that the MUVE prototype(s) are not only technologically functional and useful but also pedagogically and creatively relevant to the audiences they are intended to serve and designed with care towards them. 7.2 Community Workshops Community Workshops are short in-person workshops with IMCo members, including artists, creatives, educational staff and students, CCI’s, and cultural heritage professionals. Five Community Workshops have been held, drawing on themes emerging from the Ideation Sessions and Institutional Deep Dives, tackling topics relevant to the participants. 38 individuals external to the Consortium participated in the Community Workshops, which were led by five coordinators from Heritage Malta, the University of Malta, and Magna Żmien. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 35 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 35 Title Location Date Format Participants Community Workshops 1 - 2 Mixed group: artists, curators, game designers, Academics (AI, IT, Digital Humanities) and students Community Workshop 1 Valletta, Malta 26 July 2025 Offline 10 Community Workshop 2 Valletta, Malta 28 July 2025 Offline 12 Community Workshops 3 - 5 Cultural heritage professionals of Heritage Malta and students Community Workshop 3 Kalkara, Malta 4 Sep 2025 Offline 18 Community Workshop 4 Kalkara, Malta 4 Sep 2025 Offline 9 Community Workshop 5 Kalkara, Malta 5 Sep 2025 Offline 8 Tab. 3. List of Community Workshops undertaken through Work Package 1. The Community Workshops were devised as exploratory exercises to encourage participants to reflect and discuss the key research questions of IMPULSE. Each workshop followed a general structural approach. The specific structure/objectives/outputs and key observations of each workshop individually, can be found in the Annexe at the A.3 Workshop Reports while a description of valuable moments that shaped the approach are being described in Section 9. First, IMPULSE was introduced to the participants, the general objectives and goals of the workshop were laid out, the collections were overviewed, and examples of interactive XR projects were presented. A strong, recurring emphasis within all these sessions was the project’s collaborative and educational remit. As one of the workshop facilitators noted, IMPULSE is fundamentally concerned with “immersive digitisation, upcycling cultural heritage towards new reviving strategies,” where “education [...] or at least a collaborative element is really important.” This articulated aim shaped the tone of the workshops: conversations continually returned to how platforms might support reciprocal learning between institutions, creatives and general public audiences rather than merely a means to distribute or showcase assets. After this largely presentational opening section, the floor was opened to the participants for an open discussion that was led by prompt questions drawn from feedback, reflections, and observations made by the participants during the opening phase of the workshop. This approach allowed the conversations to be initially led by the participants’ observations. The focal points of each workshop therefore altered depending on the participants' engagement with the collections and the topics that were raised in the opening section. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 36 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 36 The scenarios, tasks and questions presented to the participants of each workshop also depended on a number of practical factors: 1. The format (offline only in this case). 2. The number of participants. 3. The professional background of the participants. 4. The specific objectives aimed for, depending on the above. These factors and their effects are evaluated most plainly in the workshop reports laid out in Section 9.1 and Annexe 3. To help direct the conversations, Heritage Malta and Magna Żmien collaborated to create a document of XR-related case studies and projects that showcased innovative implementations and approaches to virtual worlds and digital exhibitions. Over 100 examples were noted, some of which were selected to be briefly presented during the workshops (depending on the composition of the participants) to provoke discussions of the possibilities of applying such examples to our consortium’s collections. This was a useful resource that was referred to many times during the Community Workshops that helped to provide tangible examples and direct conversations. The document can be found at this link: Web Resources for Workshops. All of the workshops began with a review of the available cultural heritage collections and an introduction to the holders’ institutions, outlining the formation and curation of the collections within their care. This provided important insights into the collections and the approaches of these institutions and are an important way to ground the objects in their tangibility and existing (and historic) contexts, before delving into the malleability of their digital possibilities. Factsheets describing the collections’ formats and origins and the catalogued digital assets were collected from Work Package 3, making it possible for participants to explore the collections remotely. During the Community Workshops at Heritage Malta the focus was on collections held by that institution (additionally including those not presented to the consortium more generally) but nevertheless also included a review of the other partners’ collections. It was considered that owing to the unique composition of those particular workshops it would be more beneficial to invite the participants to compare artefacts that they are responsible for, rather than focus on the partners’ collections. During the pre-hackathon in Malta, a selection of artefacts from all the consortium participants’ collections were decided to be made available, based on suggestions and interactions that emerged through the ongoing process of the local Community Workshops. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 37 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 37 These workshops are vital to the success of IMPULSE as these represent core users of the platform that is being developed in Work Package 2. The feedback from IMCo members provides important insights into the development of the platform and the interactions that are enabled through it, independent from the discussions and research being undertaken by the consortium. All these workshops occurred offline, as in-person events. 7.2.1 Recruiting Community Workshop participants Our recruitment methodology for the Community Workshops follows section 3.1.4 of Deliverable 1.1, ‘focus group interviews’: “For experts and users recruited using convenience sampling, a non-random sampling method (Galloway, 2005), participants are chosen based on the researcher's easy access (temporally and spatially) and the likelihood of their willingness to participate (due to personal acquaintance or knowledge of their qualifications, competencies, and experience, which is crucial in the Creative and Cultural Industries sector and for artists with specific specialisations)... An interesting approach would be to combine users from G1, G2, G3, experts and nonusers in the focus groups interviews sessions. Bringing together these two groups, observing their communication processes, knowledge transfer, perceptions, and understanding of the metaverse and immersive vs. traditional worlds would provide significant dynamics in focus group interviews. Questions would be broad, and expectations would involve comments and references to insights gained during discussions, shaping or deepening the knowledge of users and non-users.” (Krakowska, 2024, p.53). Based on this approach, several potential issues may arise with our use of this qualitative methodology in the context of Malta that we attempted to address. One concern is the reliance on the coordinators’ professional networks to identify participants. While this is understandable in Malta’s relatively small cultural and academic community, it risks reinforcing existing circles and excluding those who are less connected to institutional or academic heritage networks. This can introduce bias and limit the diversity of perspectives, particularly from grassroots or underrepresented cultural groups, whose experiences may not align with those of established professionals. This was countered to an extent by the presence of Magna Żmien, who were able to draw in participants from an expanded audience. On the other hand, the Maltese Islands are often less represented at the European level, therefore the Community workshops functioned as a vehicle to communicate insights of institutions and NGOs from a smaller nation. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 38 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 38 Participants of the five Community Workshops held in Malta were identified and invited by the workshop coordination team, comprising representatives from Heritage Malta, the University of Malta, and Magna Żmien. Selection was primarily based on the coordinators’ professional networks and prior engagement with different categories of potential users. This recruitment method was considered appropriate given Malta’s relatively small and closely connected cultural and academic communities, following Galloway’s ‘convenience sampling’ method noted earlier, a non-random sampling where participants are chosen based on the researcher’s easy access to them and the likelihood of their willingness to participate based on personal acquaintance (Galloway, 2005, p.859). Of the 38 individuals external to IMPULSE who participated in the Community Workshop series, more than half came from the cultural heritage institution Heritage Malta. This creates a strong institutional weighting toward cultural heritage professionals, Group 3, which may unintentionally sideline the perspectives of Group 1 (educators and students) and Group 2 (artists), such as interested citizens, casual users, or community-level participants. As a result, workshop discussions could be dominated by professional viewpoints, reducing the inclusiveness and representativeness of the outcomes. This was mitigated by including Heritage Malta employees in a set of workshops separate to the more general ones. However, we intend to mix these in at least one future workshop. The relatively small number of external participants also poses challenges for compiling conclusions at this stage. Participation in the workshops is voluntary and requires an investment of around three hours of time, raising questions about availability, timing, and the perceived relevance of the workshops for those approached. With smaller numbers, the representativeness of age, gender, and user-type diversity may have been affected, even if demographic considerations were factored into the groupings. However, the times proposed for the workshops were arranged to account for varied schedules. In future workshops we intend to engage more participants from Group 1 (educational institutions), as they will coincide with semesters and not take place over summer, as the workshops so far have done. We still managed to have at least one educator in every workshop and at least two students either pursuing their BA, MSc, or PhD, coming from Digital Humanities, Game Development, IT and Visual Arts. There is also the risk of over-reliance on specific institutional staff. While Heritage Malta participants were recruited through an internal call, this method may not capture the full diversity within the organisation itself, accounting for differences in roles, levels of seniority, or staff who are less directly invested in cultural heritage work. In addition, Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 39 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 39 staff members may feel an implicit pressure to participate or to align their contributions with institutional expectations, which could limit the openness and authenticity of the discussions. Despite these concerns, the pool of 23 participants from Heritage Malta represents around 15% of the professional staff of the organisation. A further similar number of colleagues also expressed an interest in participating but were unavailable on the occasions we set, therefore, these will be approached for future workshops in this series. Finally, broadly speaking there may be gaps in demographic representation. Participant lists for each workshop were shaped primarily through convenience sampling, drawing from existing networks and associations rather than by systematic efforts to ensure diversity and inclusivity. Looking ahead, since recruitment so far has leaned heavily on known contacts and institutional staff, maintaining a broad and varied participant pool for future workshops may prove difficult once these initial networks are exhausted. Reaching new voices will likely require more deliberate outreach strategies beyond the existing professional and institutional circles. It is also crucial to note at this point that the majority of the participants of the Community Workshops are Maltese or are permanent residents of the Maltese Islands. This was important for the Community Workshops because: a) they functioned as a platform of usually less represented voices to be heard and be more visible in a European level, along with the struggles and perceptions of institutions and NGOs of small, underrepresented countries like the Maltese Islands, b) Malta’s colonial past under British rule further deepened these discussions, especially around decolonial practices. For instance, Magna Żmien’s archive of Malta’s Neolithic structures was highlighted as an invaluable resource for Heritage Malta archaeologists. In Community Workshop 3 (A.3.7), one participant reflected on how British soldiers stationed in Malta often took personal photographs of their time on the islands, images which later left with them and are now difficult to trace. These were not institutional records but personal photographs. Yet the discussion revealed how even such intimate, seemingly casual acts can replicate colonial practices, where ownership of memory itself becomes a form of privilege. The privilege lies in being able to carry away and keep fragments of a place’s history as private mementos, while for the local community these same images constitute scarce and invaluable traces of collective memory. In this way, colonialism can appear not only as overt domination, but also as the quiet imbalance between public and private memory, where personal keepsakes for some translate into cultural loss for others. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 40 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 40 Below are visualisations summarising the distribution of the total participants and coordinators of the Community Workshops, providing a broad insight into the ages of the participants, their Group (G1 students, researchers and university academics, G2 artists, G3 CCIs), and their level of familiarity and expertise with XR technology. A complete list of Community Workshop participants is in Annexe 4. Fig. 2. Age distribution of all Community Workshop participants. Fig. 3. Group distribution of all Community Workshop participants. Group 1 (educators and students), Group 2 (artists), Group 3 (CCIs). Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 47 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 47 Title Location Date Format Participants Consortium Discussions Online 15 sessions March – October 2024 Online 15-20 Ideation Sessions Online 76 sessions October 2024 - September 2025 Online 20-25 Institutional Deep Dives Online 7 sessions March - July 2025 Online 20-30 Live Visit (Jagiellonian University Museum Collegium Maius) Krakow, Poland 14 May 2024 Offline 30 Live Visit (KU Leuven Libraries) Leuven, Belgium 20 February 2025 Offline 20 Live Visit (Malta Maritime Museum) Birgu, Malta 19 December 2024 Offline 7 Live Visits (Magna Żmien) Valletta, Malta 2 sessions 20 December 2024, 19 January 2025 Offline 6 Pre-hackathon 1 IMCo Workshop Leuven, Belgium 18-19 Feb 2025 Hybrid 39 (consortium) 10 (IMCo offline) 14 (IMCo online) Tab. 9. Summary of workshops undertaken through Work Package 1. 7.3.1 Consortium Discussions and Ideation Sessions At the beginning of IMPULSE, bi-weekly online sessions were held for Work Package 1 consortium members to explore the objectives of IMPULSE, define target groups and users, and determine the collections that would be available to the project. 15-20 IMPULSE consortium participants were engaged across 16 sessions. These loosely structured workshops set the framework for the Ideation Sessions that would follow on. The two-hour,bi-weekly online Ideation Session workshops, brought together the key stakeholders within the consortium in speculative conversations about how the collections can be explored through digital tools, and how places of learning and experimentation can look in virtual spaces. The IMPULSE consortium members explored the available collections in more formal ways, discussed the technical progress of the MUVE with the development team from Work Package 2, and with the Standards and IPR teams of Work Packages 3 and 4, respectively. 20-25 IMPULSE consortium members were engaged over 76 sessions. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 48 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 48 The workshops were divided into three separate subgroups that focused on different topics target audiences. Each of these subgroups were led by a different coordinator. • 1.2a is led by Aikaterini Antonopoulou (NKUA), researching artistic experimentation on visual aspects of MUVEs, focusing on designing multispecies entangled worlds and challenging anthropocentric design. • 1.2b is led by Luka Prinčič (UM), researching artistic experimentation through exploring performing heritage, queering the archives, gender representations/identities and mythmaking, designing memories, live coding, democratising heritage through LLM, and highlighting structures of power. • 1.3 research teaching and learning methods, exploring collections in virtual spaces in an education context. The 1.3 Ideation Sessions contained the core team of Task 1.3, led by Margerita Pule (UM), Afroditi Andreou (HM), Andrew Pace (MŻ), Kris Polidano (MŻ), and Jacob Saliba (HM). The purpose of these sessions was to learn more of each collection from a technical standpoint (i.e. format, assets catalogued, time period, previous interpretations) while also exploring the implied questions behind every cultural heritage artefact represented. Another key point was to better comprehend the relation between the institution owning/representing the collection and what they envision for these digital assets, or what difficulties they have encountered in presenting them so far. The first phase of these sessions was very ‘curated’, since presentations of the artefacts were made by the institutions that owned them. However, free dialogue was encouraged, with institutions engaging in open ended discussions with the other IMPULSE consortium participants to try to identify the emergent questions and themes in each collection. The outcomes of these sessions provided Work Package 1 with a clearer sense of how to proceed. For example, it became evident that live visits to the collections were necessary, where possible, to deepen our understanding of the collections and inform subsequent design choices. The discussions moved fluidly between technical considerations, such as mechanics, requirements, and affordances, and more speculative reflections, where we explored personal and thematic connections across and within collections. Most participants tried to identify personal connections with the collection objects, or create parallels between the different collections, or find emerging themes from Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 49 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 49 the same collection that could be built upon theoretically. This process helped us recognise the collaborative potential of the virtual platform and reaffirmed the role of design as a tool for co-creation. One of the first themes that emerged in these initial exploratory sessions as a narrative thread were navigational tools and equipment, which were present in many of the collections (most prominently at Jagiellonian University Museum and the Malta Maritime Musuem). Such objects were being considered literally and in abstraction: navigation through collections and as geographic navigation; tools as mechanical equipment, personal totems, intimate objects, personal sculptures of experiences, affordances and extensions of the body, etc. During the online Ideation Sessions with the IMPULSE consortium partners, we sought to explore what forms education can take within the context of cultural heritage and immersive environments, asking what we are trying to teach and learn, and through which modes of engagement. Several thematic directions were identified: 1. Historical information drawn from Heritage Malta’s collections provided a foundation for contextual understanding. 2. Design teaching offers opportunities to engage with the morphology of threedimensional objects studying their form, structure, scale, and proportion, while enabling participants to modify, play with, and experience these objects in space. 3. Curatorial methodologies come into play, as narratives are developed and connections between objects and themes are constructed. 4. Archival practices and structures such as taxonomy encourage the classification and interpretation of heritage materials through systems of naming and categorisation. 5. Visual culture provides a space for storytelling, especially when working with 'mysterious’ or narratively rich images. These materials also prompt critical engagement with questions of representation and power dynamics. 6. Finally, the dated nature of some material offers opportunities for critical reflection, allowing participants to interrogate historical portrayals and to consider how meaning, representation, and interpretation shift over time. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 50 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 50 The feedback generated through these online ideation session workshops directly informed the next steps of the project by opening a dialogue between educational and artistic approaches to cultural heritage. 7.3.2 Institutional Deep Dives In the online Institutional Deep Dive sessions, consortium partners have had the opportunity to learn more about the collections that are available to IMPULSE. During the Deep Dive sessions, collection holders each delivered a detailed presentation about the specific collections, their context and history, followed by open discussions and an exploration of the themes that emerged from each. During these Deep Dives and during the Ideation sessions that ran in parallel with them, these discussions provided insights into participants’ reactions and assisted in identifying how certain artefacts were triggering reactions and interpretations. These collections included those from Heritage Malta, Magna Żmien, Film University Babelsberg, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Jagiellonian University Museum Collegium Maius, and KU Leuven Libraries. Besides learning about the collections, these Institutional Deep Dives also give participants an opportunity to learn about the work of the cultural heritage professionals that work with these collections in different capacities. Structurally, each Deep Dive focused on a specific theme or area of expertise, with partners leading discussions based on their unique contributions to the project. For example, workshop-style presentations were held by 2D digitisation experts at KU Leuven Library, the 3D digitisation team of Heritage Malta, the project team behind the volumetric testimonies of Holocaust survivors project at Film University Babelsberg, and IPR and copyright implications from the University of Jagiellonian copyright team of Work Package 4. These technical sessions created an online space where consortium members could ask direct questions about the work conducted by each partner when dealing with the acquisition of digital artefacts, about digitisation practices, and the collection and cataloguing of metadata and paradata, all of which fed into an ideation session strand on presenting the professional work of cultural heritage staff within the MUVE. The Deep Dives ran simultaneous to the Ideation Sessions, thereby feeding them directly. 20-30 consortium participants were engaged over 7 Deep Dive sessions, as summarised below. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 51 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 51 Title Date Partner Lead Deep Dive 1: What is 2D Digitisation? 28 March 2025 KU Leuven Deep Dive 2: What comes first: the data or the story? 25 April 2025 UM and NKUA Deep Dive 3: Making data available on the platform 23 May 2025 NKUA and KUL Deep Dive 4: UX Design, 1.1. Who are our Users? 17 June 2025 Jagiellonian University Deep Dive 5: 3D Digitisation 20 June 2025 Heritage Malta Deep Dive 6: 3D Digitisation 11 July 2025 FBKW Deep Dive 7: Copyright / Legal 18 July 2025 Jagiellonian University Tab. 10. Summary of Institutional Deep Dive workshops undertaken through Work Package 1. The Deep Dive sessions have played a crucial role in the IMPULSE project by encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue and enabling consortium partners to learn from one another’s expertise. These meetings are not only about presenting research but also about educating and learning across different domains, making the work more approachable for all members of the consortium. Given that the cultural heritage professionals that participated in the Deep Dives come from diverse backgrounds (curatorial, legal team, technologists, artistic research, and design), the Deep Dives create the necessary space to negotiate how different areas of the project are being framed and understood, and encourage participants from different backgrounds to present their nuanced ideas about these collections. They highlight the different levels of digital literacy and expertise present across partners and allow stakeholders to adopt and reflect on multiple roles within the project. Through these conversations, issues of standardisation, documentation, and process comparison became visible, with marked differences between institutions. All of these elements contributed to the development of the MUVE. 7.3.3 Live Visits Several offline events have taken place for IMPULSE consortium members that have contributed to the effectiveness of the workshops of Work Package 1. These include a series of five Live Visits, including to Jagiellonian University Museum Collegium Maius, KU Leuven Library and its digitisation labs, the Malta Maritime Museum, and Magna Żmien’s archive. In total, 30 IMPULSE consortium members engaged in these visits. Whilst these are not considered as workshops or formal feedback sessions, they are nevertheless important encounters between IMPULSE partners and the physical collections that are being worked with. The tangibility of these collections is a significant Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 52 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 52 factor that should be embodied within their digitised counterparts placed into the MUVE. Three main objectives of the Live Visits were established: • First, to allow participants to experience the artefacts directly and tangibly within their material and spatial context, fostering discussions that emerged organically between the visitors to the space and the curators; • Second, to identify areas of interest for the different teams involved in IMPULSE based on these spatial interactions, aligning institutional priorities with the exploratory directions of the project; • Thirdly, an opportunity to observe and reflect on alternative approaches to interpretation, preservation, and engagement, drawing inspiration for future prototypes and design iterations. Title Location Date Format Participants Live Visit (Jagiellonian University Museum Collegium Maius) Krakow, Poland 14 May 2024 Offline 30 Live Visit (KU Leuven Libraries) Leuven, Belgium 20 February 2025 Offline 20 Live Visit (Malta Maritime Museum) Birgu, Malta 19 December 2024 Offline 7 Live Visits (Magna Żmien) Valletta, Malta 2 sessions 20 December 2024, 19 January 2025 Offline 6 Tab. 11. Summary of Live Visit workshops undertaken through Work Package 1. The purpose of the in-person visits between consortium members was to explore collections in-situ, to understand how they were currently being displayed and contextualised. These can be considered comparable to the Deep Dives sessions but taking place physically with smaller groups of participants. These visits necessarily focused on one collection at a time, but as the discussions took place within the curated spaces of each institution the direction of conversations would differ as the physical setting and arrangement dictated. Particularly interesting discussions and feedback emerged from visits to the Malta Maritime Museum and to Magna Żmien (MŻ) that guided Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 53 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 53 the progression and design of the ensuing workshops, which can be explored in the attached reports (A3.10). 7.3.4 Pre-hackathon IMCo Workshop (Leuven) The pre-hackathon format – a time-bound, intensive event where participants from diverse backgrounds collaboratively design, prototype, and test innovative solutions to specific challenges – was conceived as a creative and exploratory exercise focusing on academia and the teaching and learning prototype, following Task 5.3.1, the first IMCo workshop. Pre-hackathons are public-facing events formed within the framework of the IMPULSE Community of Practice (IMCo), a wider network of participants engaging with IMPULSE consortium members, managed by Work Package 5 ‘Dissemination, communication and mentoring’. Pre-hackathons take the form of hybrid events over the course of two days’ workshopping and prototyping with the MUVE, involving consortium members and IMCo members. In this type of workshop, participants engaged in storyboard prototyping, speculative codesign, and narrative ideation exercises, using tools such as Miro boards and collaborative flowcharts. Each team developed storytelling scenarios around themes such as ancient architecture, anatomical knowledge, or intercultural encounters, adopting narrative roles such as archaeologist, medical student, local resident, or ritual practitioner to explore how heritage could be experienced and interpreted in an immersive space. This pre-hackathon engaged 29 IMPULSE consortium members and 10 IMCo participants external to the Consortium in physical, offline participation, plus 14 IMCo participants via the online Discord platform. The participants of this two-day workshop were drawn from three target groups: Group 1 (educators, researchers, and students), Group 2 (artists, art teachers, and creative practitioners), and Group 3 (cultural heritage professionals and representatives from the creative and cultural industries), but with a focus on education. The 4 teams included students from KU Leuven from associated disciplines gathered through an open call within the University, alongside the consortium partner participants. The Pre-hackathon was held primarily offline, but with a hybrid element to enable participants from abroad to contribute through the IMCo IMPULSE community of practice. More information can be found at the corresponding report in Annexe A.3.4. To create a productive and inclusive environment, participants were divided with attention to gender balance, institutional diversity, and fields of expertise. No single Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 54 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 54 institution was overrepresented in a team, and external participants and students were distributed across teams to bring fresh perspectives. It was however important to include a member of KUL in each team to act as a source of information about the collections that were available to the pre-hackathon. The focus of this pre-hackathon was to engage with students and academics and explore possible interactions and interpretations that could inform the teaching and learning prototype(s) and its implementation within the MUVE prototype. It therefore foregrounded academic collections, such as those noted above, and educational interpretations of them. Participants were organised into four interdisciplinary teams and worked with digitised assets from KU Leuven Libraries, including Vesalius’ annotated Fabrica folios and glass slides of historic archaeological artefacts and excavations. Their diversity – from archaeological sites to anatomical drawings – allowed the teams to engage with objects that reflected both scientific progress and cultural heritage. Key findings showed a number of distinct orientations. Some participants valued clarity and educational logic, proposing object-based learning and interdisciplinary teaching scenarios; others prioritised expressivity and embodiment, imagining ritual reactivation, memory walls, and performative narratives despite technical instability; and others stressed curatorial fidelity and ethics in the MUVE world, highlighting needs for metadata integration, multi-user collaboration, and provenance tracking. Cross-cutting recommendations for the MUVE by the authors of Deliverable 1.2 included improving onboarding and interface clarity, enabling multi-user functionality, offering avatar customisation, and supporting branching, non-linear storytelling. One of the main challenges and opportunities for Work Package 2 here was finding meaningful ways to reimagine flat archival materials as dynamic 3D environments, requiring participants to think not only about content but also about how users would move through and interact with the story spatially. Overall, the Leuven workshop produced both concrete design recommendations and conceptual explorations of immersive storytelling. This first pre-hackathon workshop, held in Leuven in February 2025, has been described in more detail in Deliverable 1.2, section 8, so will not be elaborated on in this deliverable beyond a summary (Krakowska, 2025, pp.28-46). Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 55 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 55 7.3.5 Pre-hackathon IMCo Workshop (Malta) Another Pre-Hackathon took place in Malta in September 2025 (Task 5.3.2). All of the workshops created the foundation for the Pre-Hackathon in Malta, (Task 5.3.2), with main focus was artistic practices and artists. Building on the conceptual and practical discussions, the three teams (1.2a, 1.2b, and 1.3) were able to experiment within the IMPULSE platform, testing interaction models and translating workshop-generated ideas into early prototypes. In particular, the concept of the “virtual loan box,” first proposed during the Community Workshops, became a central strand of experimentation, as teams explored how layered narratives, personal stories, and institutional knowledge could be meaningfully embedded in digital containers. This continuity ensured that the prehackathon was not an isolated event, but a cumulative step that extended and operationalised earlier workshop debates, allowing participants to refine speculative concepts into tangible, testable formats. The Gozo event therefore marked a pivotal stage in Task 1.3, consolidating earlier conceptual discussions into tangible directions for development, while also setting a collaborative roadmap for the student workshops and long-term exhibition goals of IMPULSE. World 1 | Witnesses to History This world centres on sound, voice, and testimony. Participants encounter volumetric recordings of Holocaust survivors, dockyard oral histories, and għana singing, placed within an abstract white mist environment. The emphasis is on listening as witnessing how minimal design can highlight human voices as carriers of memory. It raises critical questions about ethics, care, and designing for sensitive materials. World 2 | Fragility Here the focus is on the deterioration of artefacts and the aesthetics of decay. Massive images (cinema posters, glass slides, manuscripts, home videos) gradually disintegrate in front of the user’s eyes, with the pace of decay tied to the user’s gaze. The world explores how fragility, time, and perception can be designed as experiences, highlighting the vulnerability of heritage and the layered temporality of preservation. World 3 | Sky Travels This world takes navigation instruments and places them in a surreal setting where a user begins in a small boat, able to travel both across the sea and up into the stars. The Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 56 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 56 navigational artefacts (sextants, telescopes, etc.) become touchpoints for layered stories about exploration, colonial encounters, survival, and memory. It links practical knowledge (astronomy, navigation, craftsmanship) with metaphorical journeys between past and present. World 4 | Future Past A speculative setting where future archaeologists uncover dusty computers in a rediscovered museum, revealing digitised artefacts (e.g. anatomy manuscripts, cinema posters). This world probes hyperreality and mediation, asking how future audiences might interpret heritage when the physical is gone but the digital remains. It plays with perception, power hierarchies, and how “digitisation” itself becomes the fragile artefact of tomorrow. World 5 | Gift Box Chronicles Inspired by the “virtual loan box” concept, this world asks users to curate their own digital box of heritage objects, choosing what to include, how to describe them, and who the box is for. The box may act as gift, archive, Pandora’s box, or time capsule, with each choice shaping meaning. This world critically explores power, ownership, and authorship, turning co-curation into a playful yet provocative exercise in redistribution of authority. The five proposed worlds for the Malta Pre-Hackathon did not emerge in isolation, but were directly informed by the series of earlier workshops. The speculative exercises, debates, and prototyping sessions carried out in Leuven and during the Community Workshops seeded many of the ideas that now shape these environments. For example, Witnesses to History builds on discussions about how to handle sensitive and traumatic archives with care, while Fragility reflects the metaphor of “notes over notes” and the layering of guilts that participants used to describe heritage as a site of ongoing deterioration and interpretation. The navigational metaphors and embodied interactions in Sky Travels stem from earlier explorations of maritime collections and conversations about embodied learning, orientation, and scale. The speculative lens of Future Past was influenced by participants’ interest in reimagining archives and questioning what remains when physical artefacts disappear, echoing debates on hyperreality and the authority of digital preservation. Finally, Gift Box Chronicles directly develops the “virtual loan box” concept that emerged in the institutional workshops, translating it into a playful exercise in redistribution of ownership and agency. Together, these worlds embody a cumulative Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 63 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 63 8.1.4 Game-based approaches and playfulness Playful and game-based approaches introduce methods inspired by game design to investigate alternative interfaces, interaction patterns, and user experiences. Central to this methodology is the Mechanics–Dynamics–Aesthetics (MDA) framework, which distinguishes between the formal rules of a system (mechanics), the emergent behaviours that arise from player interaction (dynamics), and the affective responses these interactions generate (aesthetics). By applying MDA analysis, designers and researchers can systematically evaluate how design choices shape user engagement, motivation, and interpretation (Hunicke et al., 2004). This structured perspective enables the testing of prototypes not only for functionality but also for their capacity to evoke meaningful and engaging experiences. In addition to analytical tools, playful experimentation serves as a creative, low-stakes method of exploring new interaction patterns. Through playful activities, participants are encouraged to imagine and test unconventional scenarios, which can reveal insights that may not emerge through traditional evaluation methods. In this regard, game jams can be used as a playful methodology in our workshops. Game jams are intensive, timeconstrained events where participants collaboratively design and prototype games, making them a valuable methodology for rapid prototyping and innovation. By compressing the design cycle into short time periods, game jams foster creativity, interdisciplinary teamwork, and experimentation, often leading to unexpected solutions. The methodology is inherently iterative: participants generate ideas, create quick prototypes, test them, and adapt based on immediate feedback from peers or playtesting. This cycle mirrors broader design research practices, where failure and revision are embraced as opportunities for learning (Fowler et al., 2013). Beyond producing playable prototypes, game jams also function as experimental research environments, enabling the exploration of new interaction patterns, mechanics, or storytelling strategies. Importantly, they cultivate a low-stakes atmosphere where innovation is prioritised over perfection. As such, game jams exemplify how compressed feedback loops and collaborative iteration can drive rapid exploration in prototyping methodologies (Kultima, 2015). As a research methodology, game-based approaches highlight the value of play in uncovering design opportunities, fostering collaboration, and ensuring that systems are not only functional but also engaging, memorable, and enjoyable. Game-based approaches will feature prominently in future workshop iterations, specifically in the form of Game Jams. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 64 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 64 The 2024 paper Gamifying Cultural Heritage: Exploring the Potential of Immersive Virtual Exhibitions (Wang et al., 2024) reviews over 70 papers that focus on gamified cultural heritage in immersive virtual exhibitions, identifying theoretical frameworks that guide such work: gamification theory, immersive experience theory, heritage interpretation, participatory heritage, and pedagogy. In it, the authors point out the need for more empirical evaluation of user experience and learning outcomes, remote collaboration, and balancing fun against pedagogical value (Wang et al., 2024). This evaluation connects to Task 1.1 (UX Research) and Task 2.4 (Pilot Development and Content Processing) of IMPULSE. IMPULSE explicitly addresses this gap by embedding mixed-methods user studies and iterative feedback loops into its workshop design, thereby providing the empirical evidence that the wider field is currently lacking. Their review emphasises the need for cultural sensitivity and adapting experiences to user preferences when developing virtual exhibitions. These are key elements that are being addressed through the workshops, by including such questions as design criteria in workshops and prototypes, for example by selecting which narratives or assets are highlighted, allowing users to choose how they engage with collections to enhance inclusivity and relevance. Their findings highlight the importance of balancing entertainment and educational goals in developing sustainable gamified cultural heritage experiences, to ensure that playful elements enhance rather than overshadow heritage interpretation and learning (Wang et al., 2024). This point has also been echoed by workshop participants, who have recognised that often technology leads a digital interpretation, overshadowing the objects themselves. Another gap identified through this literature review is the lack of quantitative and qualitative studies that measure learning outcomes and engagement with virtual exhibitions. It is therefore imperative that IMPULSE build in evaluation steps in its prototyping and testing phases in upcoming workshops that engage directly with the MUVE to include metrics for heritage understanding and interpretation, emotional engagement, and retention. The paper shows that gamified elements improve engagement but must be carefully balanced so that educational goals are not lost. This is especially relevant for IMPULSE’s Task 1.3 teaching and learning prototypes, with its remit to design gameplay and interaction mechanics that support reciprocal learning models of pedagogy without trivialising or overshadowing heritage content. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 65 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 65 8.2 Applying Methodologies to the Workshops The approach to the workshops was designed to not enforce a singular vision of XR interaction or experimentation, but to act as spaces for co-creation. Participants, including artists, educators, students, game designers, and cultural heritage experts, were therefore invited to shape the direction of activities. Their contributions highlighted both the opportunities and limitations of existing approaches, and continually informed refinements to the methodological framework. It was important to approach the workshops from the point of view of what our target audiences are interested in, and how we can offer them interesting experiences that resonate with their wants and needs by using innovative tools while also creating meaningful engagements. Some of the core methodologies are detailed below in the context of their application within the design of the workshops. Rather than focusing solely on technological optimisation, the workshop sessions have explored diverse modes of HCI, from embodied engagement to non-linear narrative sequencing. Discussions and prototyping have foreground affordances, meaningful mechanics, and speculative storytelling approaches, allowing participants to test how different design strategies either support or undermine audience engagement. By situating these practices within a RtD methodology, we create a feedback loop where speculative prototypes and participatory experiments can directly inform Task 1.1’s UX research and Task 1.3’s collections-based experimentation, while also preparing the ground for Tasks 2.3 and 2.4’s pilot and prototype development. In this way, the integration of visual grammar from XR research, combined with workshop-based exploration of interaction models, enables us to identify viable ways forward for designing immersive cultural heritage experiences that balance agency with orientation, freedom with narrative coherence, and innovation with critical reflection. Similarly, in Co-Designing Interactive Technologies for Cultural Heritage Contexts – Creating and Evaluating Interactive Museum Experiences (Paananen, 2024) Paananen’s research underscores the methodological backbone of IMPULSE: participatory, iterative, and ethically sensitive co-design processes, that ensure cultural heritage technologies remain relevant, respectful, and transformative. Paananen emphasises user-centred and participatory design methodologies when developing interactive cultural heritage technologies, stressing that applications must provide meaningful, respectful, and engaging experiences rather than being technology for technology’s sake. This aligns directly with how IMPULSE has structured its workshops: bringing together Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 66 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 66 multidisciplinary groups to iteratively explore the role of XR and interactive mechanics in heritage contexts. The focus on cultural sensitivities and ethical engagement in the paper is echoed in IMPULSE’s discussions around representation, meaningful mechanics, agency in virtual spaces, and the challenges of Euro-centred preservation concepts. In both cases, design is framed as a dialogue between technology, heritage, and users, rather than a one-directional imposition of digital tools. Design processes in cultural heritage experiences are shaped through the interplay of institutional values, the creative visions of designers, and the lived experiences of audiences. This perspective underscores that XR prototypes and co-creation sessions do not emerge from a neutral ground but are constantly mediated by competing priorities, strengthening the argument that the workshops are not only sites of collaboration but also of tension, mediation, and value-alignment. This is evident in two ways: • Firstly, it highlights the politics of design, that XR and cultural heritage interactions are shaped by competing priorities (accessibility, institutional authority, creative freedom, user agency); and • secondly, it provides a bridge to discussions about representation, inclusion, and power relations, which are central to IMPULSE but are reinforced with this framing. Acknowledging this negotiation as a central part of the design process allows to critically reflect on how decisions are made, whose voices are foregrounded, and how cultural narratives are shaped through immersive technologies. Another important element to consider is ‘design friction’, moments where collaboration between diverse elements produce tensions, misunderstandings, or competing expectations, which then become productive sites for innovation. Rather than seeing these frictions as obstacles, they can be framed as essential to uncovering implicit assumptions and generating more inclusive design outcomes. For IMPULSE, this concept can add depth to the analysis of co-creation workshops, where artists, cultural heritage professionals, technologists, and educators bring different priorities and vocabularies. Recognising and documenting these frictions, whether about representation, data accessibility, or the balance between creative expression and institutional constraints, can help the project refine its iterative design process. More importantly, it allows us to embrace conflict as a generative force. A tension that emerged concerned the balance between education and artistic interpretation, and whether these are distinct domains or overlapping practices. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 67 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 67 Discussions with Task 1.2 and Task 1.3 representatives, respectively, Luka Prinčič (UM) and Margerita Pulè (UM) highlighted questions of agency: who ultimately shapes the narrative, and to what extent does the project lean towards didactic objectives versus open-ended artistic expression? Who holds more responsibility and what are the faces that co-creation and participation take in art practices and educational practices respectively? Rather than seeking definitive answers, the workshops allowed us to juxtapose the emergent narratives and comments, positioning this tension as a productive space for experimentation. In Paananen et al.’s paper, they argue that interactive storytelling approaches must be sensitive to local contexts and community voices, ensuring that technological interventions do not overwrite but rather amplify diverse perspectives (Paananen et al. 2024, p.549). This emphasis on contextual sensitivity and amplification of community voices is particularly significant for IMPULSE, where digitised cultural heritage risks being presented through uniform or institutional lenses. Paananen et al.’s reminder that interactive storytelling must not overwrite but rather amplify local perspectives adds an important ethical layer to the project’s work. In practical terms, this aligns with the design of the workshops, where participants from different backgrounds collaboratively reinterpret collections, where speculative approaches allow underrepresented voices to surface and the reuse of digital assets both aligns with technological innovations while also being socially responsive. In addition to recognising the role of negotiation and friction in co-creation, the IMPULSE workshops can also be understood through the lens of what Comber et al. describe as the “violence of inaction” (Comber et al., 2025, p.896). This adds depth by shifting the frame. Friction is not only about conflict between perspectives, but also about the tension between action and inaction, which is highly relevant when dealing with contested heritage and digital experimentation, highlighting that hesitation to intervene in digital heritage design out of fear of imposing bias can itself reproduce colonial dynamics. To act out of fear of misrepresentation or overstepping can inadvertently reproduce dominant narratives and power imbalances. By contrast, the IMPULSE project treats intervention itself as a necessary and generative act, one that allows participants to question inherited structures and propose alternative futures for engagement with digital heritage. Comber et al. explain in their paper how designing with decolonial intent means recognising archives as political spaces that both reflect and reproduce power relations, while also holding the potential to subvert them (Comber et al., 2025, p.896). This resonates with the project’s iterative and participatory design ethos, where speculative experiments and user-centred feedback loops are not only methods of refinement but also forms of epistemic disobedience. In this way, the project Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 68 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 68 embraces creative interventions as essential to reimagining representation, access, and interpretation across both virtual and physical heritage contexts. Another concept from Comber et al. that could enrich the IMPULSE framework is the idea of archives as sites of resistance. Rather than treating collections solely as sources of historical data, this framing positions them as active spaces where struggles over representation, power, and memory unfold. This perspective underscores the importance of viewing digitised cultural heritage not as neutral material but as contested terrain in which design choices, curatorial practices, and technological affordances all carry political weight. This is particularly present in the ‘friction’ between items in Heritage Malta’s care, such as the neolithic “temple” structures, and historic documentation of people’s tangible interaction with them that is now restricted, as evidenced in Magna Żmien’s audiovisual archive of those same sites. Another paper that shaped our approach in the context of hackathons, was 'Timbre Tools: Ethnographic Perspectives on Timbre and Sonic Cultures in Hackathon Designs’ (Saitis et al., 2024). The authors approached hackathons as a means to investigate how the subjective nature of sonic timbre is conceptually negotiated among creative practitioners, including instrument makers, audio developers and musicians, during a hybrid hackathon, combining workshops, pre-engagement, team formation, and openended creative prompts (Saitis et al. 2024, p. 229). Fig. 5. Hackathons as observatories of design thinking: Exploring the problem space and solution space follows a pattern of divergent thinking followed by convergent thinking, visualised as two diamonds (Saitis et al. 2024, p.230) This model uses a Double Diamond design thinking model that explores both the problem space (understanding what timbre means to people, how it is described, what metaphors are used) and the solution space (how people build tools, choose technologies and map features). IMPULSE workshop structure follows similar problem Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 69 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 69 and solution spaces and phases, in the form of an initial exploration of participant ideas (the problem space) followed by prototyping, experimentation, and refinement (the solution space). This alignment ensures that creative tension is leveraged first to understand what matters to participants then to provide tools and interactions that reflect those values. Another major theme derived from this work is the role of metaphor and embodied, multimodal interaction to help participants articulate subjective sonic qualities. For example, colour, imagery, bodily experience, or gestural mapping become ways to make timbre more intelligible. Just as ‘Timbre Tools’ found metaphor and embodied mapping helpful, the IMPULSE workshops explicitly explore how participants might describe heritage artefacts or experiences metaphorically, for example as “floating”, “textures”, or “movement”, and how different types of interactions with objects, be they gestural, spatial, non-linear, can evoke a wide range of meaning through specific interactions (Saitis et al., 2024, p.230). Spatial formation, posture, shared workspaces and nonverbal dynamics (such as how teams physically position themselves around tables and screens and their interaction styles) significantly influence collaboration, communication and creative decision-making (Saitis et al., 2024, p.234). Observations in ‘Timbre Tools’ regarding how posture, team formation, shared screens and face-to-face vs remote/online presence affect collaboration are being used in IMPULSE to shape how we decide on and mix online/offline/hybrid sessions. For example, limiting group sizes in physical workshops to ensure everyone can contribute; designing the online MUVE platform to allow meaningful remote collaboration; paying attention to how participants are placed or how interaction flows in physical spaces. Hybrid modes (on-site/hybrid/remote) introduce both opportunities in the form of wider reach and inclusivity, but also challenges such as differences in access, different interaction styles and less cohesion among remote participants. A very relevant facet of the ‘Timbre Tools’ paper is in its successful application of Iterative Feedback Loops. The ethnographic observations, interviews and reflection on how teams negotiated timbre informs IMPULSE’s approach whereby every workshop not only elicits feedback, but uses that feedback to adjust the next prototype, next workshop design, or interaction model. Moreover, another parallel with the Impulse Community Workshops was the authors’ decision to include in the Timbre Hackathon both music practitioners and timbre makers. This ensures the project remains responsive and grounded in participants’ lived experience and needs from the platform, not only in theoretical or technical possibilities. Returning to gamification, Riccardo Fassone in his 2015 paper ‘This is video game play: video games, authority and metacommunication’, addresses topics that directly influenced Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 70 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 70 the way that we decided to approach our workshop design research (Fassone, 2015). He explores how video games communicate the meta-message ‘this is play', building on Gregory Bateson’s theory of meta-communication); how video game rules, their computational and digital constraints, and the ways players interact with or against these rules, reflect authority and power; and how some games make players aware of the rules, limitations, and ethical implications embedded in the system, thereby highlighting their reflexive nature (Fassone, 2015). Fassone argues that “playing a video game means confronting, acting against and reflecting upon the very notion of authority, thus playing with authoritarian systems and processes found in ‘real’ life”, drawing parallels between game rules and authority (Fassone, 2015, p.49). This observation can help deepen discussions in IMPULSE about how virtual heritage environments should acknowledge their own rule-structures: • What cannot be changed by the user? • Which institutional or technical constraints are “hard-coded” into the experience? Making these questions visible can increase transparency and allow participants to critique or reflect on them. Fassone also demonstrates that video games (virtual spaces) can be reflexive, in that they can expose their own rules and authority, revealing power dynamics which turn them into interactive systems of power. It was decided that incorporating this ideology into IMPULSE workshops might help participants think about how digital heritage platforms themselves including their metadata, UX and interface options can embody authority in what is presented, what is hidden, and who decides this. This reflection can tie into questions about curatorial voice, narrative framing, or metadata standardisation, which can feed how the MUVE worlds are developed. Fassone also highlights that player agency and designed constraints such as rules and computable limitations are not only restrictions but shape the gameplay and meaning. Constraints can produce creativity in solo and group gameplay to work with or against the limitations presented to the user or player. This links with IMPULSE’s interest in meaningful mechanics and how enabling affordance within constraints can lead to richer interaction. 8.3 Methodology Evaluation To ensure consistency and comparability across all sessions, the project developed a standardised template for collecting and synthesising outcomes from the workshops. This template was designed to capture not only participants’ immediate feedback but also to trace the evolution of the research questions over time. By structuring inputs Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 71 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 71 in a systematic way, covering aspects such as themes discussed, emerging questions, participant reflections, and proposed prototypes, the template allowed us to monitor how the inquiry shifted across different contexts and participant groups. Importantly, this approach also creates a continuity of method, enabling us to identify recurring concerns and new directions while avoiding fragmentation in the documentation process. These templates are not only a record of past workshops but will continue to serve as a living tool throughout the project, supporting future workshops in maintaining coherence while allowing for adaptability to the needs of different groups. To capture the workshop outcomes, we emphasise qualitative indicators that go beyond numerical participation data. These indicators allow us to trace how ideas evolve, how participants engage, and how knowledge is co-created across disciplines and contexts. Key areas of attention include: Depth of reflection: How participants articulate new perspectives, challenge assumptions, or reframe their understanding of cultural heritage through discussion and feedback. Emergence of new questions: The generation of novel or refined research questions during and after workshops, which signal intellectual and creative growth. Collaborative dynamics: Observations of how participants interact across different levels of expertise (e.g., students, curators, artists), revealing patterns of co-creation, negotiation, or friction. Relevance to practice: The extent to which participants connect workshop discussions to their own professional or creative practices, identifying possible applications or adaptations. Narratives of change: Personal accounts or testimonies that demonstrate shifts in attitudes toward digital heritage, XR technologies, or participatory approaches. Creative outputs: Prototypes, speculative scenarios, or conceptual frameworks generated during workshops, which reflect the participants’ ability to translate dialogue into design. Co-curation is how enabled these participants and users are to narrate their own stories through the MUVE and have a sense of interactivity and agency within it. Feedback from each workshop is feeding our evaluation of these concepts, which in turn is informing how we structure each subsequent workshop based on responses of the participants. This will continue to be an important feature in the next phase of workshops as we Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 72 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 72 iteratively alter the questions that we pose to each workshop, depending on its composition and expertise. Impact measurement allows us to trace change across multiple dimensions: from participants’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills to the evolution of research questions and design directions. It also helps identify which workshop formats (i.e. online, offline, or hybrid) produce more fruitful interactions, ensuring that future activities are grounded in evidence rather than assumptions. Moreover, systematic impact assessment highlights gaps and frictions in participation, pointing to areas where methods can be adjusted to be more inclusive or accessible. Furthermore, measuring impact is about accountability while also capturing value beyond immediate outputs: the formation of networks, the emergence of new perspectives, and the shifts in institutional or artistic practices. By making these impacts visible, the project can refine its approach, strengthen co-creation, and demonstrate the long-term relevance of the research to its target groups. In evaluating the impact of workshops within the IMPULSE project, we can draw on perspectives from Research through Design (RtD) as outlined in Godin and Zahedi (2014). For IMPULSE, this means that success is measured not only by the immediate outputs, such as ideas, prototypes, or design suggestions, but also by how discussions, feedback, and speculative engagements reshape research questions and expand collective understanding of cultural heritage interactions. Feedback emerging from discussions plays a central role here. It serves as both “reflection-in-action" and “reflection-on-action" (after Schön, 1984), where participants’ spontaneous ideas during the sessions and their more considered responses afterward are captured as valid contributions. These insights are then iteratively fed back into the design of future workshops, embodying RtD’s principles. Importantly, evaluation is also tied to the rigour and validity of the process: whether conversations were inclusive, whether the workshop design allowed diverse participants to meaningfully engage with collections, and whether outcomes can be extended and built upon in future sessions. In this sense, success lies in how well workshops open pathways for future inquiry and design, not just in immediate deliverables. The iterative nature of our workshops has allowed us to build upon the results of previous ones. This is especially the case for the Community Workshops which have grouped similar participants on multiple occasions to compound results, by either presenting ideas in different ways, or reacting to positive or negative / tangent discussions accordingly in the next iteration. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 79 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 79 for refining our methodological framework, prompting us to integrate speculative approaches with practical design considerations. The concepts that emerged from this session were subsequently taken forward and actively shaped the structure and focus of the next series of workshops, ensuring continuity while also broadening the scope of inquiry to address the interplay between physical artefacts, digital affordances, and user interaction across diverse cultural heritage contexts. Not all heritage artifacts should be represented in the same way; rather, their materiality, speculative qualities, and modes of storytelling should guide their digital augmentation. 9.1.2 Case Studies Presented during the Community Workshops The IMPULSE Community Workshops introduced the project to small interdisciplinary groups, surfacing practical and conceptual questions about how digitised cultural heritage can be represented and used in interactive environments. Participants included researchers, digital-games students, visual artists and heritage professionals. The participants’ disciplinary diversity was both an asset and a design constraint. Several participants introduced themselves as coming from distinct disciplinary backgrounds including game design, curatorial practice, visual art, and museum outreach, and used those positions to pose different practical questions about digitisation and public engagement (for example, “how can we actually get the collections [that are] mostly digitised into more interactive platforms for the public?”). These contributions made clear that design choices must accommodate heterogeneous workflows and expectations across stakeholder groups. To address the wide range of disciplinary perspectives represented in the workshops, we introduced a series of carefully selected projects and visual examples. These served as provocations to spark discussion across different knowledge domains, helping participants move beyond their own disciplinary assumptions. By presenting case studies that blurred the boundaries between art, education, and technology, we created a shared reference point for dialogue. A number of a variety of case studies and creative examples framed this discussion and were introduced to the participants during the presentational phase of the workshop. In this section some key examples will be referenced: The website Monuments to Guilt (Torres, 2022) and Studio Oleomingus’ game Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place (Studio Oleomingus, 2020) exemplified how interactive and speculative formats can be used Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 80 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 80 to engage with collective memory, guilt, and contested histories, often by layering personal and political narratives. Monuments to Guilt is “a short exhibition exploring exclusionary design. Acquaint yourself with the core principles of this harmful practice, re-evaluate the objects you see every day and let guilt sit with you, for just a little while” (Torres, 2022). Presenting examples of hostile public architecture in the form of a VR museum explores how intangible emotions can be spatialised, materialised, and shared within a digital environment, while highlighting that learning can take different shapes and forms. The project was relevant to our discussion as it demonstrates how difficult and abstract concepts, such as guilt or trauma, can be expressed through interaction and spatial design, offering parallels for how cultural heritage can engage audiences beyond factual narration. Fig. 7. Promotional image of ‘Monuments to Guilt’ game (Torres, 2022). Studio Oleomingus’ Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place is a narrative game that reflects on consumption, displacement, and the commodification of land. Framed as a surreal tale about houses being eaten, it provides a critical allegory of postcolonial exploitation and erasure. Within our session, it highlighted how speculative storytelling can reframe heritage not as static objects but as contested, living narratives, opening space for reflection on ownership, memory, and the politics of preservation. The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places is described as “a study of the violence of completion. Of complete memory and perforated form. Of edible history and perforated reality” (Studio Oleomingus, 2020). In its single-player form, the game unfolds as a surreal tale of a municipal building-eater consuming a tower at the edge of an unnamed town. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 81 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 81 It meditates on the violence of erasure and the grief of surviving on the margins of history, while inclusive and entangled records are effaced. The game demonstrates how speculative narrative can expose the precariousness of cultural memory. Within our workshops, it served as a critical example of how digital storytelling can confront histories of displacement and erasure, raising questions about whether respect in virtual heritage must take the form of accurate representation, or whether it can emerge through poetic, allegorical re-imaginings. Fig. 8. Promotional images of ‘The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places’ game (Studio Oleomingus, 2020) Similarly, references were made to the cyclical destruction and reconstruction of the Ise Grand Shrine in Mie Prefecture, Japan. The shrine is ritually dismantled and rebuilt with new materials on an adjacent site every twenty years, ensuring the building is simultaneously ancient and modern, fostering the conservation of the means of construction over the preservation of the structure itself. This provides a striking Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 82 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 82 counterpoint to Western-centred notions of conservation, demonstrating how cultural values shape ideas of permanence, continuity, and decay. Other examples, such as social media reinterpretations of heritage on platforms like the British Museum’s gamified Instagram posts (British Museum, 2025), Phillip Penix-Tadsen’s reflections in Video Games and the Global South (Penix-Tadsen, 2024), and digital works such Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas by Dan Olson (Olson, 2019) highlighted how alternative geographies and how we interact with them, expand the interpretive scope of cultural heritage beyond institutionalised Western frameworks. This short video essay discusses how certain colonial narratives are being replicated unconsciously in virtual spaces, having as an example how players relocate villages and populations in Minecraft. This tension between ‘authoritative’ narratives raised important questions about the role of narrative reinterpretation and decontextualisation in virtual worlds. Can immersive storytelling provide a means of engaging critically with painful histories, or does it risk trivialising and exploiting them? Such debates echo wider concerns in cultural heritage HCI, where scholars have cautioned that “multiperspectivity and inclusion demands a reevaluation of conventional research and design practices, focusing on empowering local communities and safeguarding diverse narratives and individual perspectives” (Hirsch et al., 2024). What also became clear in this discussion is that respect is not monolithic. For some participants it meant safeguarding material from re-use altogether, while for others it meant framing it carefully within broader narratives to open up dialogue. These differences demonstrate that respect can take multiple shapes and forms, and that such plurality must be acknowledged when designing interactive and virtual experiences. The session therefore highlighted the need to develop storytelling practices that not only communicate historical trauma but also respect its gravity, ensuring that speculative or playful methods do not overwrite or diminish lived experiences. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 83 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 83 Fig. 9. Promotional images of ‘Queen Boat’ game (Khalifa, 2023). Another project that shaped the discussion was Queen Boat (Khalifa, 2023), which was introduced by its designer, also a lecturer at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. The game explores issues of persecution, identity, and queer histories in Egypt, foregrounding how digital experiences can act as speculative archives for voices often excluded from official records. The discussion it provoked underscored that respect does not necessarily require strict realism. Symbolic and metaphoric modes of representation can be equally powerful in addressing trauma and marginalised narratives. At the same time, participants stressed that censorship is not a viable solution; silencing difficult or contested stories risks repeating the exclusions they seek to critique. Instead, projects like Queen Boat demonstrate how interactive design can carefully Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 84 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 84 balance sensitivity with creative expression, offering players both affective engagement and critical reflection. 9.1.3 Community Workshop 1 The first workshop group critically interrogated representation and interaction. One prompt from the convenor summarised the immediate task for design: “we need to find a way to represent and not only [be] representative […] how would you like to interact with different artefacts, how can this interaction be meaningful?” This question framed subsequent exchanges as participants explored what “meaningful” interaction would look like for conservators, curators, students and the public, and whether different user groups require bespoke interaction mechanics or shared affordances. Attitudes toward technology were nuanced and pragmatically cautious. A practising visual artist who has traditionally been working with essay films and drawings and has recently been experimenting with AR admitted that the medium and XR in general poses certain restrictions. Another participant from the second Community Workshop noted that “We are making something with an expiration date, like we are already in the fold of irrelevance, and it doesn't have to be like that.” Together these remarks point to an important design imperative for IMPULSE, that prototypes must be demonstrably usable and pedagogically productive, not merely technologically novel. Practical questions about digitisation, metadata and standardisation, and interface affordances were brought into immediate relation with live ideation. Participants asked for concrete demonstrations and for access to a platform that would allow them to iterate on modes of interaction. This aligns with the project’s aim to pilot prototype UI/UX and to let stakeholder feedback shape successive versions of the MUVE. The first workshop also explored how cultural heritage objects carry layers of meaning, responsibility, and even guilt, both in their preservation and their representation. Participants introduced the idea of a “history of guilts” and a “layering of guilts,” reflecting how each act of preservation, interpretation, or omission leaves behind traces that can never be entirely neutral. Activities such as working with and annotating “notes over notes over notes” were used as a metaphor to describe the layered, subjective interpretations that people project onto artefacts. Rather than fixed descriptions, these layers resemble personal tagging or forms of metadata and paradata, opening up ways of researching and engaging with heritage through more abstract, affective, or culturally situated frameworks; exploring how layers of responsibility and interpretation accumulate over time, shaping both personal and institutional engagement with heritage. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 85 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 85 Material examples drawn from the consortium’s collections highlighted these tensions. The unavoidable fate of many of the actual artefacts contrasted with the potential of digitisation to safeguard fragile heritage. while also depending on permissions and contested rights. In some cases, preservation itself becomes problematic, reproducing “Western-centred concepts of preservation” that may overwrite or distort local practices and voices. Indeed, the role of the museum as a controlling body for access, knowledge, and representation was prevalent throughout the conversations. Two of the participants’ dialogue on decolonial practices for instance foregrounded how representation and aesthetics in virtual worlds often remain tethered to dominant frameworks. The critical question posed was: “What is more acceptable? Which Egyptian interpretation?”, referring to the participants discussing the portrayal of Egypt in KU Leuven Slides and the Queen Boat Game, and do visual aesthetics affect the representation and interpretation of stories? (The designer who was also a participant of the workshop is from Egypt himself, adding more layers to the conversation, since he could also connect in a different way with the glass slides.) This opened reflection on authority, legitimacy, and whose perspectives are prioritised when cultural artefacts are reproduced digitally. Artefacts that have contested histories once excavated and removed from their country of origin were discussed in particular, driven by the images from KUL’s archaeological excavations collection. Speculative design interventions further engaged these tensions. Wrapping posters around buildings to “omit or hide problematic parts” of the posters (and / or the buildings themselves) or folding and refolding them until they “gradually wither at certain places” served as metaphors for the fragility and erasures inherent in preservation. Similarly, designing specific mechanics/affordances and imposed MUVE constraints like “walking as a time restriction” highlighted how digital and physical affordances shape interaction with heritage. One student, for example, reflected on how “walking and scale became a timed interaction,” suggesting that embodied navigation can alter the perception of an object or collection. These discussions revisited the difficulty of handling problematic or contested collections. Participants asked whether it is better to avoid using problematic artefacts altogether, or to confront their complexities openly. For instance, one participant reflected whether the Egyptian excavations documented in the1920s glass sides collection were more or less problematic than the amateur films made in 1950s Malta that rendered its rural landscape and catacombs as a stand-in for Ancient Egyptian tombs, complete with ‘Egyptian’ hieroglyphics and grave robbing archaeology. The discussion underscore how site, context and institutional voice mediate the acceptability of engagement with such objects. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 86 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 86 Overall, the first session foregrounded the importance of acknowledging preservation as a layered, often contradictory practice, shaped by guilt, omission, and cultural authority. It further demonstrated how experimental approaches to actions, such as folding, walking, wrapping, annotating, tagging, and the subjectivity of such actions, can make these tensions tangible, offering productive avenues to rethink how cultural heritage is represented and experienced in both physical and virtual spaces. Ethical challenges emerged most vividly when participants reflected on the handling of sensitive materials such as Holocaust testimonies presented by FBKW and the glass slides from KU Leuven. These discussions revealed sharply contrasting positions: while some argued that such material should be carefully contextualised in order to preserve its historical significance, others felt that certain content should not be circulated at all, particularly within experimental or virtual environments. This divergence underscores the difficulty of working with collections where trauma, violence, or colonial appropriation form the core of the narrative. 9.1.4 Community Workshop 2a The second Community Workshop had a similar demographic constitution. Discussions in this workshop foregrounded the intersections between language, memory, and speculative engagement with cultural heritage. One of the central conversations revolved around the accessibility of language and oral histories. Participants reflected on how meaning is conveyed beyond words, through tone, rhythm, and affective qualities of speech. As one comment highlighted, “everyone knows about the Holocaust, you don’t need the subtitles, you want to hear the quality of the voice, in order to understand that there is meaning.” This resonates with previous debates around the role of affect and presence in digital heritage, underscoring that accessibility is not solely about translation but also about recognising the embodied nature of communication. A recurring theme was the imaginative reconstruction of the past, particularly through speculative artefacts. References were made to “imaginary ships, drawings of ships that never came to life, blueprints of things that never came to be,” which were seen as valuable precisely because they occupy the blurred line between fiction and history. This interest extended to prototypes proposed by participants, such as “forcing students to build narratives around non-entities,” or creating “a gossip column of the artefacts… something fun, maybe even something I can download as a keepsake.” These suggestions highlight a desire to move away from rigid factuality towards playful, layered modes of engagement. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 87 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 87 The workshop also engaged with debates on the role of technology and media formats, questioning the rationale for advanced tools such as volumetric videos. One participant asked: “Why go for volumetric videos? What are volumetric videos? Why do we need that?” The ensuing discussion reframed such tools not as technological novelties but as potential vehicles for intimacy and presence, with another participant imagining “watching them from home, having them sitting next to you, telling you a story within your space.” This reflects an ongoing negotiation between functionality, affect, and technological affordances. Institutional roles were also problematised, particularly the differences between Magna Żmien and Heritage Malta. While HM was seen as more authoritative and top-down, MŻ was perceived to foreground lived experiences and memories. “People used to have more interactions with the sites that now belong to Heritage Malta,” one participant noted, suggesting that access restrictions imposed by institutionalisation alter both memory and engagement. This fed into broader reflections on ownership, curatorship, and the political framing of heritage, with strong critiques of over-curation: “I am very anti over-curation. These assets should belong to the people, not just the government.” Another strand of discussion focused on how learning takes shape across these speculative practices. Education was reframed not as the delivery of factual information, but as creating conditions for participation, speculation, and personal meaning-making. One participant noted that “the more accessible you make it, the more meaning will come out of it,” suggesting that broader access invites diverse interpretations and new forms of knowledge production. Finally, several prototypes emerged from these exchanges, including scenarios where participants could embody roles, “the user could be a photographer, collecting his own version of artefacts”, or engage in communal storytelling exercises such as collectively guessing which artefact is being described. These speculative exercises reinforce IMPULSE’s commitment to co-creation and participatory design, while also raising critical questions about scalability, sustainability, and the long-term role of digital platforms in cultural heritage. 9.1.5 Community Workshop 2b A recurring theme was the tension between fact-based presentation and narrative storytelling. While national institutions often privilege factual accuracy, this was seen as potentially limiting as it risks stripping artefacts of their lived context. Participants Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 88 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 88 emphasised the need to consider everyday interactions, minor histories, and personal commentaries as equally important layers of heritage interpretation. Artefacts were described as “triggers for discussion,” capable of connecting people through memory, narrative, and speculation. Several concrete examples were raised: photographs of Maltese temples before protective installations, dockyard collections tied to living memories, or everyday objects like oil lamps and vessels. These artefacts revealed how interpretation shifts across time and disciplines, with architects, conservators, and archaeologists all approaching value differently. Storytelling was identified as essential. Artefacts are not just facts but puzzles of past lives, and their interpretation requires balancing conservation choices, contextual information, and imaginative engagement. Technology was discussed as both a challenge and an opportunity. Participants agreed it should serve as a tool that supports the artefact, augmenting what cannot otherwise be experienced, and not used a replacement for it. XR and virtual environments were seen as promising, but participants were wary of clunky prototypes, over-complex interfaces, and “Disneyfication.” Concerns emerged about commercialisation and emotional manipulation, with warnings against designing experiences that simply exploit affective responses. They called for simplicity, clarity, and careful integration of sensory elements. An example that was appreciated was the British Museum’s (now defunct) The Museum of the World online portal, an interactive timeline that mapped objects from the British Museum's collections to a timeline that users can explore and make connections between the world’s cultures (Museum of the World, 2020). The subtle use of music and good sound design was cited as a positive example of effective, minimal design in this case. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 95 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 95 9.1.8 Community Workshop 5 Participants examined the tension between standardisation of assets and terms and the diverse ways in which professionals and audiences approach cultural heritage. This revealed a critical question: are these practices and digital tools designed only for visitor experiences, or can they also serve as research instruments for conservators, curators, and educators? The idea of designing for both professionals and audiences was captured when a participant reflected: “If we help the professionals to use digital tools in their work, then visitors could also interact with it. Visitors always want to behave as conservators […] putting pieces together, linking them to conservation principles.” The conversation repeatedly returned to the role of museums as sites of knowledge production. Curators, by selecting and framing narratives, inevitably impose certain interpretations, yet visitors seek agency in shaping their own meanings. Digital and speculative interventions were discussed as tools to rebalance this dynamic, enabling multi-layered narratives where visitors can choose pathways while still grounded in factual knowledge. This tension was further underscored by debates on ‘Disneyfication’, where museums risk privileging entertainment over reality, and the consensus that while dialogue must evolve, museums should not abandon their educational responsibilities. As one participant expressed, “The museum should provide factual knowledge – it is an institution. It is the dialogue that needs to change, and we need to provide the tools for people to experience how they interact with them, instead of changing the dynamics.” Across the Community Workshops, but particularly within the institutional ones, participants repeatedly emphasised the dual role of museums as custodians of factual knowledge and as spaces for education, interpretation, and storytelling. Rather than merely presenting artefacts, museums are seen as environments where learning takes shape through layered narratives, contextual framing, and opportunities for critical engagement. A recurring theme was the distinction between “teaching facts” and “teaching stories”. As one participant noted, “as a national agency we have to offer the facts, but we lose the narrative of the sites, how people interact with the sites.” Others echoed this tension, stressing that storytelling is an essential educational tool: “Storytelling is essential, because an artefact is not just facts […] the objects are puzzles of another day.” Another crucial strand of discussion revolved around how museums can connect professional practices with accessible forms of public engagement. One conservator suggested that the most effective approach might begin with the needs of professionals themselves: “Make something for conservators that could also be used as a game. Visitors Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 96 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 96 always want to behave as conservators; they make parallels, ‘oh, I had a vase at home’, so why not give them a tool?” This notion highlights how professional workflows, transformed into simplified versions, can foster public understanding in ways similar to simulators, where audiences learn by adopting the expert’s perspective. At the same time, the workshops raised critical questions about the role of museum marketing departments in shaping educational experiences. Is their responsibility primarily to increase footfall, or can they actively contribute to learning? Examples such as the British Museum’s gamified social media campaign in early 2025, where historical weapons were presented with “stats” akin to video games, demonstrate how playful strategies can both attract attention and generate curiosity, but may also risk reducing complex heritage to entertainment (British Museum, 2025). These conversations stress the importance of carefully balancing professional knowledge, public engagement, and institutional strategies in creating meaningful educational experiences. Fig. 11. Image of The British Museum’s Instagram post (British Museum, 2025). It was considered crucial to try to include students and educators in every workshop, as their perspectives ensured that discussions around cultural heritage, technology, and storytelling remained grounded in pedagogical relevance and future applicability. A recurring concern regarding museums as learning environments was how to balance content delivery with experience design. For example, some participants noted Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 97 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 97 that “sometimes videos are better than something more interactive,” suggesting that duration, format, and intensity of engagement must be carefully tailored to the site, the artefacts, and the audience. This brought up question of experience length: "how long should a museum or site-specific interaction last, and what should be included or left out?” Museums are also challenged by how to present contradictions within their narratives. Should museums strive to be objective, or can they explicitly highlight tensions, biases, and omissions? Participants questioned whether “problematic” is even the right term to use when describing sensitive or controversial aspects of collections. Instead, the challenge lies in framing such areas critically, without erasure or sensationalism. This discussion extended into institutional structures. What role does the marketing department play in education? Is its function merely to bring audiences into the museum, or should it actively participate in shaping public learning? As one participant reflected, “behind the scenes videos that turned into a game” referring to how audiences often connect strongly with behind-the-scenes videos of conservators and cultural heritage professionals, as these provide a rare, intimate interaction with artefacts. Instead of encountering objects as static displays, viewers witness the care, decision-making, and human presence that shape their preservation. This glimpse into the “hidden” labour behind collections generates trust and empathy while making conservation practices more transparent. Replicating this type of interaction virtually could offer new ways to engage audiences, allowing them to experience conservation processes, understand the dilemmas professionals face, and even participate in simplified versions of these practices. This exemplifies how outreach and education can intersect, turning promotional content about professional conservation or digitisation work can be turned into playful and meaningful learning experiences. The role of the curator, once described as “god-like,” was discussed in relation to how much authority they should hold in shaping educational narratives. Curators inevitably produce knowledge from their own perspective and within the limits of their contemporary environment, but this also risks constraining alternative voices and interpretations. At the same time, the discussions revealed the importance of artefacts as “lore”, objects that carry layered histories, meanings, and stories that extend beyond their factual descriptions. These layers invite audiences to imagine, speculate, and connect across timelines. Participants also stressed the importance of recognising museums as sites that produce knowledge, but not necessarily the only or ultimate truth. The “lore of artefacts”, such as the Mona Lisa or even everyday objects like dockyard tools, was in fact seen as a bridge for public engagement. Artefacts Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 98 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 98 are not only about their history but also about their resonance in the present, and the ways in which people project meaning onto them. In terms of possible outputs, participants suggested a series of prototype concepts for future workshops and design testing. One idea was for an augmented reality game, similar to Pokémon Go, where visitors could collect fragments, stories, or even intangible traces from the museum experience (Niantic, Inc., 2016). The act of collecting becomes a form of storytelling, allowing knowledge to emerge playfully through personal engagement. Reference was made to the Pokémon Fossil Museum exhibition in Japan, which juxtaposed Pokémon fossil lore with real paleontological artefacts, showing how fiction and science can intersect to generate curiosity and deeper learning. In this context, participants emphasised that museums could use similar playful systems to highlight connections between myth, material culture, and lived histories (National Museum of Nature and Science, 2022). 9.2 Workshop Prototypes These prototypes that emerged from the Community Workshops can act as critical tools: they allow participants and audiences to reflect on the affordances of digital storytelling, the role of meaningful mechanics, and the plasticity of games and playfulness as a medium to unsettle dominant narratives and invite multiple interpretations. This responds well to an important strand of IMPULSE that looks to redress hierarchical biases in institutional collections and in places of learning. Narratives of Non-Entities: Encouraging students to build narratives around generated images or objects that do not exist. Encourages speculation, creativity, and reflection on how meaning is constructed. Having the player/user being the shoes of someone else within a specific scenario so that you can see how you will feel if you were there. (Community Workshop 2) Gossip Column of Artefacts: Creating playful “gossip” around objects, enabling participants to anthropomorphise artefacts and engage with them in a lighter, social way. Potential to produce downloadable keepsakes or shareable outputs. (Community Workshop 2) Collaborative Storytelling Games: Participants write a story about an artefact and others try to guess which object is being described. Encourages critical reflection on interpretation and multiplicity of perspectives. (Community Workshop 2) Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 99 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 99 Photographer Roleplay: Users take on the role of a photographer, collecting their own version of artefacts and building personal collections. Emphasises subjective seeing and recording, echoing historical practices of documentation. (Community Workshop 2) (Ship)-Building Simulation: Participants build ships and navigate them into imaginary places designed by artists. Combines collaborative world-building with personal journeys, splitting the experience into collective and individual phases. Dividing the experiences into two phases. (Community Workshop 2) Interactive Commentary & Voting Systems: Participants write interpretations of artefacts, which are then voted on by others. Introduces democratic and participatory dimensions to heritage interpretation. (Community Workshop 1&2) Feelings and Objects: Matching artefacts with emotions, inviting participants to connect material culture with affective states. Encourages empathetic forms of engagement. (Community Workshop 1&2) Box-Based Digital Repository - Loan Box: A digital platform where small 'boxes’ of posters, videos, and other assets can be assembled, printed, or remixed by participants. Encourages playful creation of new collections and personal interpretations. The concept of a loan box was a recuring theme across the workshops, which was a reason why it was decided to be a main approach at the pre-hackathon in Malta. (Community Workshop 4-recurring). Audio and Voice-Based Interfaces: Interactions centred on voice recordings, oral histories, or emotional tones, emphasising affect over literal translation. (Community Workshop 3). Play as Experts: Interactions that reveal the work of conservators of collection artefacts, giving participants opportunities to learn about the behind-the-scenes work of museums. (Community Workshop 3 & 5). Notes Over Notes Over Notes: Choose an artefact and write a layer of personal annotation on it, a "note over a note." Then pass it on. The next person can only see your note, not the original artefact, and must respond with their own. How does meaning shift with each layer? What kinds of cultural metadata emerge through this chain of subjective interpretation? (Community Workshop 1 - recurring). Folded Truths-Posters and Degradation as Narrative Metaphor: Wrap a printed poster around a surface (object or building), partially obscuring problematic content. Let others fold, unfold, or manipulate it. Observe which parts wear down over time. What does this say about how society curates, preserves, or erases difficult histories? (Community Workshop 1). Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 100 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 100 Walking as Time-Based Interaction: Walk a path defined by text or objects. Your task is to "exit a word" or identify an unseen object through motion and time. How does embodied exploration change your understanding of time, scale, presence, or historical context? (Community Workshop 1). You Are the Artefact: Stand or sit in a space. Others approach and comment on you as if you are a cultural object. They must guess what artefact you represent and annotate their assumptions. How does being “read” by others change your sense of identity or role? What does this say about interpretation and projection? (Community Workshop 1 - recurring). Build-a-Box / Remixable Cultural Kits: Use small boxes containing modular posters, objects, or printed assets. Re-arrange or build your own "mini collection." Add personal metadata and publish it online. How can self-curation and remixing foster new, intimate interpretations of cultural heritage? Who is it for? (Community Workshop 2). Alone Together / Designing for Intimacy and Interaction: Design an interaction where a user can either engage with others or retreat into a personal, solitary experience with a digital asset. What makes an interaction feel intimate? Can a digital experience allow for reflection, solitude, and connection simultaneously? (Community Workshop 1 & 3). Exhibition of Speculation: Create a speculative future or alternate history based on a single artefact. How would its context, use, or meaning shift? Present it as an exhibit label, zine, or short video. How can speculative narratives open up alternative readings of heritage? An exhibition framed around speculation rather than factuality, blurring lines between artistic and institutional approaches. Can also include commercial or community-based outputs. (Community Workshop 2 & 5). 9.3 Workshop Reports The workshop reports provided in Annexe 3 are a structured method of documentation that capture both logistical details and the deeper analytical insights of each co-creation session. By combining statistical data (e.g., type, date, number of participants, technologies used) with interpretative reflections (e.g., objectives, outcomes, dialogues, and design suggestions), these overview reports allow us to track the evolution of our methodologies across different contexts and user groups. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 101 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 101 One of their key strengths is that they connect the practicalities of workshop organisation (duration, structure, location, repetition) with the research objectives of IMPULSE. For example, questions about whether sessions were guided or open-ended, or how curated our approach was, allow us to critically reflect on the role of facilitation versus participant agency in shaping interactions. Similarly, documenting which collections and assets were presented helps us map the relationship between material heritage and its digital translation in XR environments. The outcomes section captures some of the most valuable insights: the interactions, questions, and dialogues that emerged, as well as the influence of participant backgrounds on their engagement. This enables us to understand how different groups, artists, educators, cultural heritage professionals, students, and CCIs, respond to the same material in distinct ways, and how these responses can inform the iterative design process. In this way, the templates directly support our RtD framework by feeding observations back into subsequent workshops and prototypes. Finally, the emphasis on 1. technical requirements, 2. design suggestions, 3. meaningful mechanics, and 4. affordances ensures that each session contributes not only to theoretical reflection but also to the development of practical design knowledge. This dual focus on conceptual exploration and applied outcomes is essential for the project’s ambition to bridge artistic research, cultural heritage practice, and technical development. Beyond individual documentation, the workshop reports also serve as a comparative tool across the different formats of online, offline, and hybrid workshops. By using the same categories of analysis, they allow us to trace recurring themes, successes, and challenges across varied contexts and participant compositions. This consistency enables us to identify patterns: for example, how levels of engagement differ when participants work with physical versus virtual assets, or how interdisciplinary groups generate different types of dialogues compared to more homogeneous ones. Moreover, by mapping these differences over time, the templates help us understand how our methodology evolves and becomes more refined, ensuring that each workshop iteration builds on the insights of the previous ones. In this way, they are crucial not only for accountability and reporting but also for guiding the iterative development of prototypes and methodologies throughout the IMPULSE project. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 102 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 102 Fig. 12. An empty Template developed for Task 1.3 featuring the guiding questions. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 103 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 103 The reports from each workshop are arranged in Annexe 3 as follows: • A3.1 Ideation Sessions (Task 1.2a and Task 1.2b) • A3.2 Ideation Sessions (Task 1.3) • A3.3 Institutional Deep Dives • A3.4 Pre-Hackathon in Leuven • A3.5 Community Workshop 1 (mixed) • A3.6 Community Workshop 2 (mixed) • A3.7 Community Workshop 3 (Heritage Malta) • A3.8 Community Workshop 4 (Heritage Malta) • A3.9 Community Workshop 5 (Heritage Malta) • A3.10 Live visits • A3.11 Online Interview with Professor of Digital Games 9.4 Next Steps The research undertaken through the workshops discussed in this deliverable present a number of concrete directions to test in future workshops, as the focus of Work Package 1 now shifts to Task 1.3.2: Co-creation immediately upon completion of this deliverable. Across all of the workshops a recurring theme was the importance of moving beyond static displays towards participatory, speculative, and affect-driven engagements with cultural heritage. Participants repeatedly highlighted that storytelling, whether emerging from professional conservation tools, playful speculation, or oral histories, lies at the core of how audiences connect with artefacts. The next phase of activity will focus on developing these points further, and consolidating, testing, and expanding the methodologies we have been developing. A central output will be the production of a playbook, a structured methodology that documents the interactions, design strategies, and workshop practices developed within IMPULSE. This playbook will function both as a toolkit for future sessions and as a transferable methodology for other institutions wishing to experiment with playful, participatory approaches to cultural heritage. The proposed upcoming workshops can be divided into five main strands: 1. Prototyping and Testing Key Concepts. Some of the novel suggestions and themes emerging from the previous workshops will be explored in practical, play-based workshop exercises. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 104 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 104 2. Game Jam-Inspired Sessions. While most of the workshops so far leaned on speculative and theoretical formats, future iterations will experiment more directly with game jam styles of co-creation, encouraging fast prototyping, collaborative design, and playful experimentation as a way to engage with collections. 3. Integration into Curricula. We will work with researchers and educators in game design, digital humanities, and related fields to incorporate IMPULSE workshop methods into teaching. By offering assets from the Dockyard, Malta Maritime Museum, and other partner collections, students and faculty will be invited to develop their own experimental approaches, ensuring a reciprocal exchange between academic learning and project development. 4. Further Interviews and Playtesting. Building on the valuable input from earlier expert interviews, we will conduct additional workshops with cultural heritage professionals, educators, and game designers. These will be combined with reference playtesting, exploring principles of meaningful mechanics, affordances, and interaction design to refine our methodology. The MUVE will feature strongly in this strand, as some of the workshops will take place within the prototypes that are being built. 5. Pre-Hackathon in Germany and Final Hackathon in Greece. Preparatory work will also begin for the next major co-creation pre-hackathon event in Saarbrucken (Task 5.3.3) with a main focus on engaging CCIs, while the final hackathon in Athens (Task 5.3.4) will bring together a wider range of participants to integrate insights from across the project into a collective prototype. Through these steps, IMPULSE will continue to operate within a research-through-design framework, maintaining an iterative feedback loop where workshop findings feed directly into new prototypes, methods, and research questions. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 111 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 111 Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 112 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 112 Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 113 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 113 A.2 Template consent form for Community Workshops, Malta Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 114 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 114 A.3 Workshop Reports A3.1 Ideation Sessions (Task 1.2a and Task 1.2b) Summary Type of Workshop: Online Date(s): M1-M20 (Ongoing) Duration: 1h Repetition: Bi-weekly Location: Online Teams and Discord Number of Participants: 2-6 Analysis of workshop group / user composition In these workshops, the participants were consortium members, mostly from WP1, apart from occasions that other representatives from the consortium partners wanted to participate. (link with groups and roles here) Technology Used Microsoft Teams / Discord Structure The workshops were divided into separate subgroups led by different participants: 1.2a and 1.2b. One was led by Aikaterini Antonopoulou (NKUA) and the other one was led by Luka Prinčič (UM). Both were coordinated by WP1 leader, Adnan Hadziselimovic (UM). Links: Performing Heritage Report: here Artistic experimentation on visual aspects of MUVEs: here Artistic Research Collaborative DocumentPerformance Ideation: here Objectives Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 115 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 115 The main objective is to fulfil the outcomes described within the grant agreement for WP1, Task 1.2. Artistic Research is being divided into two groups. The one led by Aikaterini Antonopoulou (NKUA) is researching artistic experimentation on visual aspects of MUVEs, focusing on designing multispecies entangled worlds and challenging anthropocentric design. The one led by Luka Prinčič (artist / UM) is exploring performing heritage, queering the archives, gender representations/identities and mythmaking, designing memories, live coding, democratising heritage through LLM and highlighting structures of power. The main objectives of these sessions will be described in Deliverable 1.5. Collections All of the consortium collections were available for experimentation. Outcomes Live Performance / Experimentation, Movement workshop. Observations / Valuable information Digital Culture and the Influence of Technology on Art and Memory The intersections of digital culture and cultural heritage invite us to consider how technology reconfigures art, memory, and identity. One important area is algorithmic folklore and vernacular creativity, as described by Gabriele de Seta, which highlights how folklore, creativity, and automation mutually shape one another within digital spaces. Here, folklore is not a relic of the past but an ongoing, adaptive process that emerges through algorithms, memes, and networked practices. A second strand concerns artificial aesthetics and AI, where generative models increasingly influence visual media and interface design. These technologies do not merely replicate existing aesthetics but actively participate in shaping the frameworks through which art and heritage are produced, circulated, and experienced. Related to this is the notion of poetic engineering and embodied AI interfaces, which foreground AIenabled systems designed to augment creative thought and embodied interaction, pointing toward new forms of human–computer relationality. Language and identity also provide a critical axis for exploration. AI and gendered linguistics, exemplified by experimental systems such as AI Nüshu, a reimagined women’s script, show how computational tools can question normative gender roles Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 116 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 116 and linguistic histories. In parallel, projects such as TransCoder reframe programming itself as a queer, speculative practice, embedding myth, spellcasting, and the identity of the witch into software libraries that resist dominant technological paradigms. Finally, glitch art and glitch studies expand our understanding of digital representation. Glitches, whether in games, interactive media, or virtual heritage environments, can be mobilized as critical artistic expressions that reveal the underlying structures and limitations of technological systems. By embracing the “error” as a creative act, glitch aesthetics open space for rethinking how digital artefacts can embody both fragility and critique. A3.2 Ideation Sessions (Task 1.3) Summary Type of Workshop: Online Date: M1-M20 (ongoing) Duration: 2-3h each Repetition: bi-weekly at first and then weekly Location: online Number of Participants: 1.3 members of WP1 link here Analysis of workshop group / user composition The bi-weekly participants were consortium members, drawn mostly from WP1, apart from occasions that other partner representatives wished to participate. In the weekly workshops the core team of Task 1.3 was present, led by Margerita Pule (UM), Afroditi Andreou (HM), Andrew Pace (MŻ), Kris Polidano (MŻ), Jacob Saliba (HM). Technology Used Microsoft Teams, Zoom Structure Initially speculative sessions and discussions took place during the first months, where the main topic was how education can be approached and how places of learning and experimentation can look like. During these meetings, the following months, every Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 117 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 117 institution had an allocated date when they presented their collections and then discussion followed among the participants. During every meeting a different collection was the main focus. After M15 the meeting became weekly, and mostly the core group of Task 1.3 was participating, since the preparations for the preliminary workshops started at that time. The second part of these sessions was mostly exploring questions of: placeness, time specificity, implied space • Is Malta used as a stand-in for somewhere else? Questioning concepts of place and identity, and how Who owns the temples/assets? • What is the existent narrative? • Different point of views in videos/ spellcasting / Whose rituals are we witnessing? • Who is watching? How changing point of view happens in the virtual realm? • What are the chosen narratives that give context? • Who choses these narratives? • How are the temples integrated to the landscape and are entangled with the lives of people around them? • What are the boundaries we are allowed to move in? (whether they are conceptual or tangible) • Where was this footage supposed to be seen in? What was the original context that these artefacts were designed for? • Are we presenting snippets without context? • How language should be approached? Many assets are in a different language (i.e. oral histories, voice messages, posters) • How do we design for people who do not have the same experiences as us? (future generations who do not have a personal connection/memory of something?) • How do you communicate a memory? • How different demographics (ex. Women) were perceived and portrayed in cinema? Collections: All of the available collections were used and discussed within these online interactions and iteration sessions. Most questions emerged from the sessions with the MZ and The Thessaloniki Film Festival Collection. A highlight of this session is how some of the MŻ 2D/4D footage features neolithic temples that are now protected HM sites with restricted access, adding to their multifaceted identity. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 118 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 118 Objectives The main Objective is to fulfil the outcomes described within the grant agreement for WP1 Task 1.3. The purpose of these sessions was to learn more of each collection from a technical standpoint (i.e. format, assets catalogued, time period, previous interpretations) while also exploring the implied questions behind every CH artefact represented. Additionally, another key point was to better comprehend the relation between the institution owning/representing the collection and what they envision for these digital assets, or what difficulties they have encountered so far. It was also explored how the audience/other participants connect with them. The first part of these sessions were very curated since they were presentations of the artefacts, but in between free dialogue was encouraged, while they continued with open ended discussions while trying to identify the emergent questions/themes from each collection. Outcomes Some of the new questions that emerged were: • Ownership, same artefacts from different timelines/ belonging to different collection, whose stories are we here to describe? • What is the implied space? • What are the embedded questions of the assets? What can we learn from what is not there? The outcomes of this session provided our team with a clearer sense of how to proceed. It became evident that live visits to the collections are necessary to deepen our understanding of the material and inform subsequent design choices. At the same time, the team identified the need to strengthen technical knowledge, particularly in relation to Godot, which led to the decision to schedule an online follow-up session. The discussions moved fluidly between technical considerations, such as mechanics, requirements, and affordances, and more speculative reflections, where we explored personal and thematic connections across and within collections. Both technical and speculative discussions emerged. Most participants were trying to find personal connections with the assets or create parallels between the different collections or find emerging themes from the same collection that could then built upon theoretically. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 119 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 119 This process helped us recognize the collaborative potential of the virtual platform and reaffirmed the role of design as a tool for co-creation. Notes were kept online and live and then they were used to form questions who guided the next sessions. Margerita Pule’s (UM) who is also guiding the online sessions document: Exhibitions as Playgrounds: link here WP1.3 Datasets for Ideation Sessions.xlsx Observations / Valuable information Interesting Commentary: A number of reflections emerged during the workshop that point to how cultural heritage assets operate as placeholders for broader identities and narratives. In the Maltese case, participants observed that the assets often serve as stand-ins for something else, allowing multiple and sometimes conflicting identities to be projected onto them. Similarly, the video recordings from MŻ were seen as having a ritualistic dimension, where the act of documentation itself becomes part of the process. The prehistoric temples, for example, were described in metaphorical terms, as if “bleeding humans” or “giving birth” to people, an image that illustrates how participants negotiate meaning beyond factual description. Discussions also turned to the Thessaloniki Film Festival posters, which were striking for their lack of names, Greek-language dominance, and irregular shapes resulting from how they were originally placed and cut. These features underscored how collections not only embody implied spaces but also situate audiences in specific temporal frames. Participants noted that ambiguous or fragmented artefacts invite speculation and critical engagement, raising questions about what a collection “should be” versus what it actually is. Interestingly, more recent artefacts tended to spark stronger critical commentary compared to older ones, with participants more willing to discuss their implications openly. However, in early discussions, even difficult artefacts were approached with caution, particularly when representatives of the holding institutions were present, suggesting how authority and context shape the framing of critique. A3.3 Institutional Deep Dives Summary Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 120 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 120 Type of Workshop: Online Date: Collaborative Workshop interlinking WP’s Program March 2025 – July 2025 28th March 2025 25th April 2025 23rd May 2025 20th June 2025 18th July 2025 Duration: 1h30m each Repetition: yes (ongoing series) Location: Online Number of Participants: 15-30 Analysis of workshop group / user composition Partners from all of the consortium members, and the representatives within the institutions. Technology Used Microsoft Teams Structure Feedback from the pre-hackathon workshop (1 hour) • Joint preparation by team-leads and story-telling experts • Each team gets 10 min + 5 minutes discussion • Feedback towards the development of the platform • Lessons learned for future workshops Deep Dive 1: What is 2D Digitisation? (1 hour KU Leuven) Deep Dive 2: What comes first: the data or the story (1 hour) • Link with future ECCCH • prepared by storytelling experts, breakout session Deep Dive 3: Making data available on the platform (1 hour) Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 127 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 127 ways to reimagine flat archival materials as dynamic 3D environments, requiring participants to think not only about content but also about how users would move through and interact with the story spatially. A number of technical suggestions, recommendations and potential requirements for the upcoming prototypes emerged from these sessions which were all collected via questionnaires that informed WP2. WP 2 Questionnaires Questions emerged through these sessions: • How were glass slides used? How do we translate this? • What questions did we try to address? • What should be augmented? The object? the bond/connection? A speculative story? • What are the emerging patterns of the collections? How can these guide us? • History & Patterns of Movement - Where is this coming from? • Idea of placelessness intangibility of objects, replication and ownership • How do you avoid/ surpass representation in VR/ AR/ MR environments? • How do you experience Stories? The same story through dif mediums? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 128 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 128 • designing for interactive immersive installation, there is no specific “frame” , the viewer/player picks their own frame • Game agency/mechanics/restrictions as a form of art and storytelling • Walking moving in space – experiencing alone or with others/ affecting others ‘experience • Outcome doesn’t matter as much as the process • Agree with what the user wants to do? How would you interact? What are the ways of interacting? • What are the embedded questions? • Grouping of the objects? • What are the connotations of the material? Shape? Form? • How is this artefact making you feel? What parallels can you draw? • How are the artefacts presented connected? Through similarities or differences? • How would they interact with each other? • What is the implied story here? • What would you like to communicate to someone? • Can you find an item and create a dialogue with it? • What are the physical aspects / physics of the object and how do they affect the object’s identity? Is it heavy? • How can we translate these things in a digital environment without taking away from the objects itself? • How do we enhance the experience? • Can we enhance every part of it? Or augment a specific one? • What's augmented reality for you? • What should be augmented? The object? the bond/connection? A speculative story? • With which item do you feel more connected to? • What does the curation / of objects say to you? • How can we group different things and projects together? • Who is visiting? What is our target audience vs the project’s target audience? • Why do something digitally when you can create it as an actual installation? What does technology enhance? • Is gamification gimmick? Ho does that work? pros and cons Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 129 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 129 A3.5 Community Workshops 1 (mixed) Summary Type of Workshop: Offlinelive Date: Saturday 26 July 2025 Duration: 2h 55min Recording here: link Repetition: This is the 1st of 2 workshops with the same structure, approach, and research questions. Location: Unfinished Art Space Studio, 203 Old Bakery Street, Valletta, Malta Number of Participants: 9 Analysis of workshop group / user composition The workshop brought together a deliberately interdisciplinary group of participants, including students and educators from game design, digital humanities, computer science, CH professionals and the visual arts. Participants included a lecturer specializing in procedural content generation game development and AI, students studying digital game analysis and design. They contributed alongside a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator working with archival fragments and nonlinear narratives, with experience in XR technologies and immersive storytelling. Transcript for 1 and 2 : here Report for 1 and 2: here Technology Used Laptops Screen /Monitor Audio Recording AI transcript Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 130 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 130 Cameras for photographs / Phone Cameras Structure This workshop was deliberately designed as a fast-paced, high-pressure exercise to push participants out of their comfort zones. The “Fast Q&A” format encouraged immediate responses, preventing overthinking and surfacing instinctive reactions to complex cultural heritage scenarios. Participants were presented with a set of provocative case studies, chosen precisely for their diversity in scope, approach, and complexity. These included: • The Ise Grand Shrine (Shinto shrine in Mie Prefecture) and Hōryū-ji, which exemplify non-Western approaches to preservation, where sacred buildings are ritually torn down and rebuilt every 20 years, shifting the focus from material permanence to cyclical renewal. • Monuments to Guilt, a digital project that explores the weight of cultural guilt and layered histories through interactive environments. • Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places (Studio Oleomingus), a poetic videogame exploring erasure, edible history, and the violence of completion. • The British Museum (multiple case studies), particularly its experiments with gamified presentation of collections i.e. The Museum of The World • New Palmyra, a digital reconstruction project addressing destruction, memory, and contested narratives of heritage. The session concluded with an interactive demonstration of the existing IMPULSE prototype, giving participants a chance to apply their reflections directly onto the project’s framework. Collections All of the available collections were presented and explored through speculative discussions throughout the workshop. Objectives The sessions focused on the creative use of virtual spaces in heritage storytelling, touching on topics such as agency, layered narratives, speculative design, and the affordances of virtual versus physical environments, attempting to answer the questions: Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 131 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 131 • What are the interesting and creative restrictions that we can encounter, and how would restrictions influence storytelling and agency within the virtual environment? • How do aesthetics influence storytelling and world-building within a virtual environment? • How can we design non-linear, layered, and multi-sensory narratives, where audiences become co-authors? • What should be augmented when representing a cultural heritage asset (tangible or intangible) in a virtual environment? (the object, the connection, or a speculative story) • What level of agency should be granted to the virtual visitor? • How can a virtual space be successfully curated using meaningful game mechanics? • How do we experience the same story across different mediums, and what is gained or lost in translation? • What is the role of movement, spatial navigation, and social interaction in shaping audience experience? • What can virtual environments offer that physical spaces cannot, what are the unique affordances of the digital realm? Outcomes Questions that emerged from this session: • How do you avoid/ surpass representation in XR environments? • How do you create relevant encounters for audiences of different generations? • We only look each other in the eyes in an emergency? • Everything in A VR setting is intentional/made to be seen (or not?) • Multiple lenses, how do you create multiple layers? How do we remove those layers between the creator and the audience? how do we co design? • How does the creator lets go of control? Self expression within those realities is being curated/censored by the creators • in games currencies • How do you want to interact with these items? • Where is the line between interpretation and misrepresentation? When is it acceptable for artistic or playful interventions to diverge from strict historical accuracy? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 132 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 132 • How do you balance education and entertainment? Should cultural heritage experiences primarily aim to teach, or is there value in speculative, ambiguous, or playful engagements that prioritize affect and curiosity? • Can a digital or playful representation ever capture the same sense of presence, authenticity, or reverence as the physical original? • Who has the authority to decide how artefacts are represented? • How do you communicate a time frame? • How do you tag objects? • How are people’s interpretations and perceptions of the artefacts subjective yet relevant for the multilayered identity of an artefact? Observations / Valuable information The workshop explored a range of topics intersecting cultural heritage, digital preservation, and interactive storytelling, with a particular focus on decolonial practices and the subjective nature of engagement with artefacts. The idea of "destroying everything" was explored metaphorically and literally, using examples such as Greek movie posters and glass slides of Palmyra. These were discussed in terms of how repeated use or concealment could gradually erode or obscure their content. However, access often depends on institutional permissions and is shaped by underlying power structures. The discussion critiqued Western-centric ideas of preservation and raised questions about whose interpretation of heritage is privileged or considered "acceptable." A recurring theme was the ethical question of whether to avoid using problematic elements entirely, or to confront and critically engage with them. Ethical considerations relating to “sensitive content” such as the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies by University of Babelsberg and the representation of the glass slides by KU Leuven were often polarised. Whilst certain participants emphasised that such content is represented (particular in the case of the glass slides in the KU Leuven collection) by contextualising them, others insisted on them completely not being represented. This attests to the sensitive nature of the collections being presented and brings into question whether narrative reinterpretation and decontextualisation in virtual worlds is an appropriate approach to tackling metacultural issues such as postcolonial exploitation and the Holocaust. It also puts into question what type of Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 133 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 133 approaches to storytelling can be adopted in order to communicate these instances where trauma is at the centre of the content being used. The workshop also addressed how aesthetics function in both physical and virtual spaces, particularly regarding representation in digital or reconstructed heritage environments and how storytelling can be affected by aesthetic choices. A key concept was the idea of "notes over notes over notes", a metaphor for the subjective interpretations people project onto artefacts. This was likened to personal tagging or metadata that allows for research through more abstract, affective, or cultural frameworks. The physical act of wrapping posters around buildings, selectively hiding problematic imagery or messages, served as a metaphor for how cultural narratives are curated. As these posters are repeatedly folded and unfolded by different people, they begin to degrade in specific areas, symbolizing how stories and artefacts can be worn down or altered through repeated handling or ideological manipulation. Walking as Time-Based Interaction Embodied Exploration: The act of walking was used both literally and metaphorically to represent a form of interaction with cultural heritage. For example, students were asked to walk while trying to exit a "word" or identify an object, illustrating how scale and motion can create a timed, immersive interaction and communicate a time frame. Mechanics and restrictions within a game or interactive space were framed not just as technical features, but as narrative tools. This approach, influenced by immersive theatre and game design, positions agency and choice at the centre of the storytelling experience. A3.6 Community Workshop 2 (mixed) Summary Type of Workshop: Offline - Live Date: 28 July 2025 Duration: 2h 33m Recording: link here Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 134 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 134 Repetition: Yes, this is the 2nd out of 2 workshops of the same structure Location: Unfinished Art Space Studio, 203 Old Bakery Street, Valletta, Malta Number of Participants: 13 Analysis of workshop group / user composition The second workshop included visual artists, cultural heritage professionals, and both board game and AAA game designers, alongside an ethnomusicologist and experts in digital humanities working at the intersection of philosophy and interactive virtual spaces. A senior university lecturer with expertise in game studies, phenomenology, narratology, aesthetics, literary theory, and the construction of experiences and identities in virtual worlds also contributed to the discussions. As with the previous workshop, the participant group included students from the arts, games, and IT and three participants had experience and had developed XR-based games specifically focused on exploring and representing site specific marginalised histories. Technology Used Laptops Screen /Monitor Audio Recording AI transcript Cameras for photographs / Phone Cameras Structure This workshop followed a similar structure to the first community workshop. It began with an introduction to the overall project, and a presentation of the different collections involved, followed by the sharing of specific case studies deemed particularly relevant to the themes of the session. The open discussion that followed was intentionally paced more slowly, creating space for participants to guide the conversation organically and bring forward topics of interest from their own disciplinary and professional perspectives. Collections: All the available collections were presented and explored through speculative discussions throughout the workshop. Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 135 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 135 Objectives (Remained same as the previous one) The sessions focused on the creative use of virtual spaces in heritage storytelling, touching on topics such as agency, layered narratives, speculative design, and the affordances of virtual versus physical environments, attempting to answer the questions: • What are the interesting and creative restrictions that we can encounter, and how would restrictions influence storytelling and agency within the virtual environment? • How do aesthetics influence storytelling and world-building within a virtual environment? • How can we design non-linear, layered, and multi-sensory narratives, where audiences become co-authors? • What should be augmented when representing a cultural heritage asset (tangible or intangible) in a virtual environment? (the object, the connection, or a speculative story) • What level of agency should be granted to the virtual visitor? • How can a virtual space be successfully curated using meaningful game mechanics? • How do we experience the same story across different mediums, and what is gained or lost in translation? • What is the role of movement, spatial navigation, and social interaction in shaping audience experience? • What can virtual environments offer that physical spaces cannot, what are the unique affordances of the digital realm? Outcomes Questions that emerged through this session: • How do we make language accessible in cultural heritage contexts? • Is accessibility about translation, or about affective qualities such as tone, rhythm, and emotion? • Can oral histories communicate meaning without traditional subtitles or textual support? • What role do speculative or “imaginary” artefacts play in learning and interpretation? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 136 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 136 • Can building narratives around non-existent or discarded objects help participants think more creatively? • Whose truths or assumptions are being privileged when we invite imaginative reinterpretations? • Why use advanced tools such as volumetric video, what added value do they bring? • How can technology be used to foster presence, intimacy, or empathy (e.g. “watching them from home, having them sitting next to you”) rather than just novelty? • How do we ensure accessibility of digital platforms across different devices, generations, and contexts? • Who owns cultural heritage artefacts, the government, the institution, or the people? • How do institutional differences (e.g. Heritage Malta’s top-down authority vs. MŻ’s grassroots approach) shape engagement? • What role should curation play in balancing factual authority with community participation? • How do we seduce people into learning without falling into over-curation? • What new forms of meaning emerge when access is made broader and more open? • How do we design digital heritage spaces that encourage both collective and intimate encounters? • Whose truth are you observing/ listening to? The focus that was given to CH Institutions during this session is the main reason why the next Community Workshops were decided to be internal workshops with CH professionals from HM, since HM is the biggest CH entity in Malta. Observations / Valuable information Quotes: How do you make language accessible? Is it just abstract sounds? Imaginary ships, a reference to the HM drawings of ships that never came to life/ blueprints of things that never came to be- (Concept of how some artefacts have been not taken as seriously in the past or dismissed as speculations) It weird to just refer to them as simply as “digital assets” Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 143 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 143 • How might game mechanics, restrictions, and spatial storytelling function as forms of art and critique? • In immersive installations without a fixed perspective, how do participants choose their own frames? • What is the role of movement, navigation, and social interaction in shaping audience experience? • How can we design non-linear, layered, and multi-sensory narratives, where audiences become co-authors? • What unique affordances can virtual environments offer that physical spaces cannot? • There are multiple ways we represent the artifacts, the interactions, that people want to have with these assets, both 1. creatively and 2. functionally; so what interactions would be useful for CH professionals? • What would you like to see/ be available to you when you interact with one artefact virtually as a professional? How is that helpful in your research? And everyday workflow? • Who do these collections belong to? The institutions that have them? • How do you group them, and what is the language that local CH professionals use? • How can artefacts be described accurately without relying on a Western-centred point of view? Are we sometimes over-careful in trying to avoid misrepresentation? How do we design with care in such occasions? • When dealing with wall paintings, which layers should be preserved? How do you decide? Do you sometimes need to destroy one layer to preserve another? • Who takes images of artefacts and sites, and what does it mean when soldiers or individuals take them back to their countries? Is this looting, or does it become a personal act of taking away? How do the children and grandchildren of those individuals connect with these photographs? • Given the abundance of artefacts being found, how do we decide what to expose? How do we tell their stories in meaningful ways? • How much pressure is there on curators and conservators to make assumptions? Where does responsibility lie? • What does it mean in the long run when our interpretations today affect the future? Are all interpretations equally valuable, or does one interpretation make others obsolete? • How do university systems sometimes fail us in connecting with heritage? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 144 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 144 • What should be prioritised in an educational system, and how can misconceptions (such as the idea of “giants”) be challenged? How do assumptions and stories become embedded in heritage? How do we preserve the sense of wonder for younger audiences and create lines of connection across generations? • What should be done with unprovenanced artefacts? How should they be approached digitally? Should they always be seen as artefacts, or could they also be treated as educational tools? • How do extended or augmented reality experiences allow people to “play” with objects in ways that real life does not? Should this be encouraged? • What is the role of virtual places in cultural heritage? How do you want to interact with them? • What is allowed in a virtual space, and what is not? Should there be an expected behaviour? • Do volumetric videos make us more empathetic, or are they just a way to elicit emotion? Should AI-generated stories be used if their main purpose is to provoke reactions or raise money through awareness campaigns? • XR was mentioned many times – but what is truly needed from it? What do we consider “extended reality,” and what should its purpose be in the context of cultural heritage? Observations / Valuable information The main observations from this conversation were the importance of storytelling and the narrative of objects for curators and other cultural heritage professionals. It was also interesting to see how these professionals recognize the potential of digital tools but remain concerned when such tools become overpowering. Another concern mentioned was the level of digital literacy required for some digital projects. An additional observation was the use of layering and linking particular timelines and artifacts to build stories. It was highlighted that every object can have more than one link and storyline, which is particularly challenging to present in physical museums but can be implemented in virtual ones. What stood out particularly was the need for alternative modes of storytelling to be adopted for different demographics. This first workshop revolved around the ways artefacts are represented, and how audiences and professionals imagine their interactions with them. Two central threads Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 145 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 145 emerged: the tension between creative and functional uses of digitised heritage, and the need to rethink how museums frame learning. Participants questioned ownership and belonging: “Who do these collections belong to? The people who decide? Their origin? The institutions that have them?” This opened up broader reflections on institutional authority and how different contexts produce different readings of the same object. The presence of problematic and difficult collections also prompted concerns about over-cautious language, with one participant asking, “How do you design with care in such occasions?” The issue of looting, colonial displacement, and what is omitted from narratives added further complexity. Education and storytelling were recurring focal points. One student remarked, “I hate history – I think from what you say you love stories. When I see things visually I remember them, I find them interesting.” This statement highlighted how the framing of artefacts within narratives can determine whether audiences connect or disengage. Similarly, another participant stressed the importance of storytelling in conservation practice: “When I restore, I need to know the story when conserving – this should start from the professional and then cascade to the visitor.” The dockyard collection surfaced as a particularly charged site of learning. A participant who had worked there shared his unease: “You talked about the dockyard before – I worked there, so my connection is not the same as the one other people would have. A fear, a vulnerability, that others would not connect or understand some things.” His comment revealed how lived experience complicates curatorial narratives, and how exhibitions risk alienating visitors if they fail to convey personal histories. Digital tools were seen as both an opportunity and a challenge. While extended reality (XR) was repeatedly mentioned, participants were cautious: “I love technology and there are so many possibilities, but if the site is there, why replace it? If I can hold it in my hand, I want to hold it, not see it on a monitor.” This underlined that technology should be positioned as a tool for access and context, not a replacement for embodied experience. Finally, questions of responsibility lingered throughout: How should museums balance facts and narratives? Which stories deserve to be highlighted? Are all interpretations equally valuable? These discussions positioned education not as a neutral transfer of knowledge but as a negotiation of voices, contexts, and identities. This session brought forward several important reflections on the relationship between cultural heritage, interpretation, and technology. Participants began by identifying the artefacts and interactions to which they felt most connected, Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 146 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 146 underscoring the importance of personal resonance in shaping meaningful engagement. A recurring theme was the idea that technology should not be viewed as the solution in itself, but rather as a medium that can enable or enhance interpretation. Participants stressed the need to remain realistic and grounded in what cultural heritage sites and institutions actually require, rather than imposing unnecessary layers of technological intervention. The discussion also touched on the role of curators and artists in relation to heritage sites, emphasizing that site-specific projects must establish a genuine connection with the objects they reference, rather than using them as mere background or decorative context. Some participants expressed a sense of disconnection, feeling that previous initiatives required them to "put up with" external impositions rather than encouraging meaningful dialogue. Specific examples highlighted these dynamics: a dockyard worker and guide spoke about how installations risk removing heritage objects from their lived context, while discussions of storytelling raised questions about how narratives can be adjusted to suit different audiences. The “Main Guard” project was noted for its exploration of layered conservation practices, prompting reflections on what audiences might most want to experience, whether the act of conservation itself, the opportunity to step into the role of an expert, or other forms of interaction. Concerns about the “Disneyfication” of museums also surfaced, pointing to the risk of oversimplification or entertainment-driven distortion. At the same time, participants expressed interest in approaches that create affective connections, feelings that can transcend and link across timelines, offering more than simple factual engagement. These insights highlight the importance of balancing authenticity, audience expectations, and innovative modes of storytelling in the design of future workshops and prototypes. Quotes: There are multiple ways we represent the artefacts. The interactions, that people want to have with these assets, both 1. creatively and 2. functionally. What interactions would be useful for CH professionals? As an institution? What would you like to see/ be available to you when you interact with one artefact virtually? How is that helpful in your research? And everyday workflow? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 147 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 147 Who do these collections belong to? The people who decide? Their origin? The institutions that have them? How do you group them? Vast differences even within the same collections Things designed for someone else What about problematic/ difficult collections? Captions of local archaeologists/ what is the language that they use? And how do you describe them accurately / and western centred point of view-/ maybe are we over careful? How do you design with care in such occasions? Looting/ where are the museums? Which countries? Where are the artefacts from? Accidental censorship They are very time specific and site specific. What are we teaching? /Learning? MŻ as a counternarrative to HM - MŻTourist like photos Photos of the temples before the installations of the protective tents by HM, Temples as a backdrop to tell a different story Amateur film in malta / Dracula story / playful use of these spaces MŻtoo many levels of abstractions? Instead of how MŻ catalogues the collections Asset/ artefact as a trigger to discussion -Which artefact /Site from our collections do you identify more? My favourite site is Haġar Qim / bronze age figurines, the dynamic change of form and structure that is evident into the form Oil lamps, to connect and catalogue all of them As a national agency we have to offer the facts, but we lose the narrative of the sites, how people interact with the sites? I think digital tools, I think MŻ-HM can help a lot because these pics can give us better context on restoration approaches/ mindsets I wouldn't call them temples I don’t want to impose my interpretation Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 148 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 148 He used to work in the dockyard, Mention to the reserve collections What do you think of the contemporary exhibition there? “I was expecting something more, I wasn’t challenged” “I was hoping the works would have been among the real artefacts” reluctancy to express opinion Main Guards – there is already a story within every painting, she is a conservator, which layers do you preserve into wall paintings? Which layer? How do you decide? You need to destroy a layer? Or some layers? “There are not enough photos to give us context when restoring” “it would be nice to expose every type of life /interaction that was in the site not just the important highlights, what about the everyday life?” “Who takes images? Soldiers take images and then taken them back to their country, it is not looting but it is taking away something, making it personal, removing it?” “It is the kids and grandkids who have these photos” “how will the children of our children connect with an artefact that they don't have memories of?” What we architects consider as an artefact is very different. Some of our more valuable recourses are photos, we see a photo of a family, and I look into the background, the building. Storytelling is essential, because an artefact is not just facts, we are finding a lot of artefacts so how do you expose them? How do you say their stories? -fireworks/canons in the backgroundWere the works of the biennale relevant for you? They were supposed to be site specific/ i was much more interested by the walls than his work, the connection was not there, they were beautiful drawings, but it was used more as a multipurposed place than a place of history. “What did you think of the performance there” “artists sometimes interpret for themselves instead of someone else and how can we reverse that? What makes it successful” Artefacts give stories, we want to see the use. This is important information; the objects are puzzles of another day. “How would you tell a story?” “i would start by the site itself” “so you would return the artefact back to a place? The landscape is important?” “Yes, I would place it where it was last used, found and start the place there, we place things based on factual things and from the go to interpretations” I love the concept of memory, the psychology of discovery and the archaeologists themselves, how much is the pressure of making an assumption? There is so much Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 149 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 149 responsibility? But it is also valuable to hear about the personal opinions and personal commentary of an archaeologist when they found something. The reverse collections and working on them makes you feel important. Each era would have different interpretation, what does it mean in the long run? Our interpretations today affect the future. There are many layers of interpretation. One find can make something completely else obsolete. Or does it? Are all interpretations equally valuable? Student: I hate history – I think from what you say you love stories. - you always ask the people what is important to them/ why is she called to take photos? What do they want to see later in the pictures? When is see things visually I remember them, I find them interesting. How university systems sometimes fail us? Things happen across time periods; specific things tie things together. What do we prioritise in an educational system? How do we challenge that? What do they mean by giants? How misconception gets created? How is that interesting from an artistic point of view? How are the assumptions of people interesting? Why are those stories there? Younger audiences are not part of the project but the sense of wonder.. How do you find the lines of connection? My favourite is the large vessel , it is the only artefact i remember from school, it is incredible how someone would go in such extent to create an educational model, it is also extremely hard to digitise, we still haven't managed to digitise it (sense of ephemerality/ temporary) the tangible aspect of the educational value. It is an artefact but it was a tool, a tool that shows us that something has been lost. A level of education no longer existing. I think the dockyard collection is interesting because it is a way for us to document contemporary history, how do we document efficiently? We need to record oral histories, because they are dying. When you record from a personal perspective you can say very different stories than when digitising for an agency. We interview people and then they die. Oral histories are so important. What do you think of virtual places? How do you want to interact with them? What is allowed in a virtual place and what not? Is there an expected behaviour? Volumetric videos= someone asked us why? Does technology make us more empathetic? Do we use it as a way to illicit emotion? Do we want the highest possible way for usability? What about AI generated stories? Created only to exploit emotional reactions and raise money with the coverage of awareness? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 150 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 150 -XR was mentioned a lot of times. But what do you need from this? What do you think extended reality is? / considered? -we recently had research about Tarxien the theoretical part was exiting but in the actual prototype was so clanky, and difficult and complicated with so many buttons and confusion, I love technology and there are so many possibilities but if the site is there why replace it? If I can hold it on my hand I want to hold it not see it in a monitor. Technology is a tool, i want technology when there is no alternative, want is as a solution Extended reality means the merging of physical and digital / virtual, we can combine different elements, we want to see what it is needed and to identify gaps -for us this is like a new language, i do remember in audio guides a good voice is the most important for me , and sometimes we overlook details, I would focus on the quality than innovation, the way we invade a space with virtual late, that's why sometimes it can be seen as clunky. These technologies are based on how we perceive all of our senses and how all together they can create an experience British museum music case study: how simplicity can be so effective / functional Technology should always give something extra it shouldn't replace something but augment something, offer something that it is not there Digital Benin project mentioned and explained Instead of erasing how do you highlight the problematic/ issue areas? How do you shed light to omitted parts of history? They are looking into provenance research, tracking the traveling of the objects, where they are now, where they were installed and where they are now. In malta it has never been addressed, the colonial aspect of the island. What do you do with unprovenanced artefacts? How do you tackle with digitally those artefacts? Why do we use them/see them as artefacts and we shouldn't we be able to handle them as educational tools? - lots of people would be reluctant to use it otherwise? - if it just sitting there? If there is no story behind it why put it on a pedestal? Extended or augmenting reality we allow people to play with these objects, can you do that in real life? Show them a weird one Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 151 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 151 These were very website flat/ strong concept but not weird enough Studio Olemingus The poem was not even there This shows us that you can have fun with the storytelling element and at the same time keeping the educational value high, and like that you can always target different people and audiences, so if you want to think without constraints we want to hear your suggestions Sometime when we make something we take away of an object You talked about the dockyard beforei worked there, so my connection is not the same as the one other people would have. A fear / vulnerability that others would not connect or understand some things, You are presented artefacts and you are presented curated emotions / emotional states as well. Storytelling depends on what aspect you want to show to the people. The advertising of these experiences is the problem/ commercialisation of feelings, Experiences I loved the musical site, because it is easy to navigate and it shows connections that otherwise you wouldn't be able to portray. Why leave out certain generations who could even contribute more to the discussions It is based on a poem, but the poem is not there/ an implied connections / people who designed the dockyard experience were not dockyard experiences, -there was a lot to read, too much, explaining takes time. There is no link to the actual poem during the experience With which parts of the exhibition did you connect more? - i saw all of it , i read all of it for me everything makes sense. But what about the people who are not into ships? It is not for everybody Something else, that i don't hate but it should be mentioned, is access. In our sites the architecture is designed to restrict access. But if the people who designed they didn't want to offer access to a specific space to i grant it today or no? - i hate long text, i enjoyed a museum about costumes, triggering more senses, doing something digitally -how would you re-interpret a building? Deliverable 1.9: Online and offline workshops with communities 152 IMPULSE IMmersive digitisation: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies 152 -why malta hasn't kept up with VR like other countries? I think for some sites is ideally why some other not. We are currently working on the permanent collection, what we learned from the island of crossroads, when liam took people around the exhibition everyone made sense, when i took them it was just a bunch of objects, we want to give a visitor the experience of experiencing the collection with the curator, making it come to life, it is the storytelling - can the actual architecture guide the storytelling? If i go as a tourist to NMA I don’t understand why it looks like thisbut when i talked with an architecture and they explained to me I understood the different layers of what can happened or not - I always thought that why would a 3D asset at an online site make me intrigued to go see it in real life -the difference of our museums vs other ones is the connection with social media platforms - i think everything should be access and available but for some this is very hard – that's why we have WP focused on copywrites – what if someone finds a picture online and do something with them? Let them – what will happen? We need more self-reflection with virtual realities / digital spaces, we need to dismantle the curatorial authoritative voice – you give voice to a very colonial museum – maritime, sociopolitical aspect of museums, i get access and then it is taken back from me XR helps us address existing questions in different ways Artefacts were spaced and not loaded, you were not overwhelmed you could experience it, and space is limited especially at Maritime Museum, St Johns co-cathedral When you explain, you don't explain everything Imagine if you had the ability to create multilayered narratives within a platform, would that be useful? There is no limitation of time when you experience something digitally. You can approach something from the scope of dark tourism to engage / but you need to be a storyteller yourself Technology allows you to offer options, this is the potential of this technology. At the end of the day it is about choices, the visitor has to choose. - you always need to add something more, you could relate it even with modern music.