Reimagining the Past: Play and Digital Innovation in Cultural Heritage

Dear Colleagues,

The concept of the post-digital museum, in which digital has become part of museums’ missions, structure, and practices, opens up a space for opportunity to reimagine heritage. The adoption of digital innovation continues to transform the cultural space and promises to transform audiences’ experiences with their past, present, and future. However, critical questions remain: Is this transformation what museum staff and audiences truly want? How sustainable are these innovations in practice? How can playful and interactive approaches sustain meaningful engagement?

This Special Issue explores the post-digital museum and cultural heritage more broadly. We seek contributions that critically reflect on successes and failures, offering insights into how digital innovation reimagines, augments, and reinterprets cultural heritage in practice. Our aim is to build a comprehensive vision that interrogates the impact and value of digital technologies on museums and cultural heritage, focusing on audience experiences, staff perspectives, sustainability, and play. By promoting interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, this Special Issue moves beyond technological novelty to ask what kind of digital futures museums should build.

We invite original research articles, case studies, opinion pieces, design methods, descriptions of artefacts and/or museum experiences, theoretical frameworks, and review papers that provide insights into the use of digital innovation to reimagine, reinterpret, and augment museum collections and heritage. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Digital interventions and innovation in heritage context: emerging technologies, creative computing, interactive and immersive experiences, digital storytelling, and user/audience research.
• Playful and interaction design approaches: ludic engagement, co-play, and experimental interaction methods that reimagine how audiences connect with cultural heritage.
• Design-driven and art-led approaches: participation, co-design, co-curation, speculative methods, and other experimental, creative, and art-led design methods.
• Reflective and critical discourses on post-digital practices including lessons learned from successful and unsuccessful projects and digital innovation in national, regional, and local museums, highlighting challenges to implementation, sustainability, impact, representation, and ethics.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Argenis Ramirez Gomez
Dr. Claire Bailey-Ross
Dr. Jenny Kidd
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Heritage is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• digital heritage
• post-digital museums
• human–computer interaction
• digital museology
• interaction design in heritage
• emerging technologies in museums
• XR for heritage
• digital storytelling
• experimental design in museums
• participatory design approaches in heritage
• creative technologies