The convergence of cultural heritage and visitor experience design represents one of tourism's most promising frontiers for digital enablement.
The convergence of cultural heritage and visitor experience design represents one of tourism's most promising frontiers for digital enablement. Julie Van Oyen, Product Designer at the Europeana Foundation, presented a compelling framework for how destinations can leverage Europe's vast digital cultural heritage resources to create more meaningful, contextually rich visitor experiences. Transcending traditional technology demonstrations, she instead offered a detailed exploration of how visitor-centred design principles can transform cultural heritage from static historical content into dynamic, experience-enhancing infrastructure.
The convergence of cultural heritage and visitor experience design represents one of tourism's most promising frontiers for digital enablement. Julie Van Oyen, Product Designer at the Europeana Foundation, presented a compelling framework for how destinations can leverage Europe's vast digital cultural heritage resources to create more meaningful, contextually rich visitor experiences. Transcending traditional technology demonstrations, she instead offered a detailed exploration of how visitor-centred design principles can transform cultural heritage from static historical content into dynamic, experience-enhancing infrastructure.
The convergence of cultural heritage and visitor experience design represents one of tourism's most promising frontiers for digital enablement. Julie Van Oyen, Product Designer at the Europeana Foundation, presented a compelling framework for how destinations can leverage Europe's vast digital cultural heritage resources to create more meaningful, contextually rich visitor experiences. Transcending traditional technology demonstrations, she instead offered a detailed exploration of how visitor-centred design principles can transform cultural heritage from static historical content into dynamic, experience-enhancing infrastructure.
Articulating what might be termed the "temporal context problem" in destination experiences, Julie observed how it's challenging to portray the past of a specific location within the limits of their modern surroundings. While physical places remain accessible, their layered histories, comprising the stories, cultural significance and temporal depth that often motivate travel, require additional support for driving impactful visitor interpretation. This was exemplified through the example of Uist Unearthed in the Outer Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland, where grassy mounds can be transformed into Bronze Age roundhouses through augmented reality (AR) to enable visitors to view the original settlements as they would have appeared 3,500 years ago.
By spanning time itself, what initially appears as an unremarkable landscape transforms into a portal to an ancient civilisation to augment visitors' understanding of the temporal context of what they're experiencing. This observation forms the foundation of a broader argument that adding layers of cultural heritage through technology can create multisensory experiences that increase visitors' intent to visit and enrich their in-destination experiences.
The approach to experience design builds upon established tourism research, particularly destination image theory, which frames how cultural heritage integration affects visitor psychology. Three interconnected components shape how visitors form mental models of destinations:
This framework proves particularly valuable for understanding why cultural heritage integration works so effectively in tourism contexts. Cultural heritage artefacts naturally address all three psychological components simultaneously. They provide emotional resonance through storytelling and visual beauty (affective), deliver historical facts and contextual information (cognitive) and create compelling reasons to visit and share experiences (conative). The integration of visual, auditory, and increasingly, tactile experiences amplifies these effects, creating more memorable experiences.
The theoretical foundation becomes practical through an emphasis on visitor-centred design principles. Rather than technology-first approaches that prioritise innovation over user needs, the design process begins with understanding visitor motivations, behaviours and decision-making processes. This approach ensures that cultural heritage integration serves authentic visitor needs instead of just demonstrating technological capabilities. Rather than attempting comprehensive implementations, the approach advocates for identifying "quick wins" where relatively modest investments in cultural heritage integration can deliver significant visitor experience improvements.
Nevertheless, a crucial distinction emerges between traditional user experience design and digital service design. While user experience design focuses on individual touchpoints, digital service design considers the entire ecosystem of interactions that support visitor experiences, including the business processes, partnerships and infrastructure that enable each touchpoint to function effectively. This distinction becomes particularly important when considering the complexity of cultural heritage integration as successful implementation requires coordination between diverse stakeholders, including cultural institutions providing content, technology providers creating delivery platforms, destination management organisations promoting experiences and local businesses integrating cultural attractions into visitor journeys.
The service design approach recognises the complexity of visitor experiences and the abundance of touchpoints from inspiration to post-visit memories. Aside from the physical visit itself (which may include multiple sub-touchpoints), these include social media engagement, word-of-mouth recommendations, pre-visit research and planning and post-visit sharing and memory creation. Acknowledging that technology adoption varies significantly among visitor populations, the most effective digital service design solutions often provide multiple ways to access the same content.
In thinking systematically about how to integrate seamless visitor experiences across the entire visitor journey, UX research and usability best practices, such as web accessibility guidelines, support for assistive devices and wayfinding, are extremely important in shaping user-centred digital service design, feeding into prototype development for visitor testing and iterative improvements to ensure it produces the desired visitor experience. In taking this pragmatic cyclical approach, technology becomes a seamless enabler for driving cultural immersion and boosting visitor experiences.
Ranging from simple audio guides to extensive AR installations, cultural institutions have already successfully integrated digital service design into their experience offer. As a lo-fi approach, zines also have strong potential to blend the physical and digital environments, where AR markers can be layered on top to create a truly immersive experience. These best practice examples reveal several strategic principles for successful implementation:
With an abundance of cultural artefacts across European cultural institutions, Julie explored how Europeana's cultural heritage data space functions as cultural heritage infrastructure, providing a vast, searchable and increasingly accessible repository of digitised cultural content that destinations can integrate into visitor experiences. Housing over 60 million heritage items from more than 2,600 archives, museums, libraries and galleries, this collection's open-license nature means the over 20 million artworks, manuscripts, photographs and natural history specimens; more than 50,000 heritage videos, classical music recordings and natural sounds; and over 300 3D archaeological objects, heritage sites and monuments can be freely used by anyone for cultural storytelling.
Europeana's extensive API capabilities reveal the sophisticated technical infrastructure supporting cultural heritage integration. The search API allows the integration of Europeana's search functionality and metadata records into external applications, while the record API provides direct access to Europeana's data about each artefact. This technical architecture enables the creation of seamless cultural heritage content experiences using Europeana's collections that appear to be native to their own platforms.
The strategic implications of this infrastructure are profound. Destinations no longer need to develop their own cultural heritage collections or negotiate individual licensing agreements with multiple institutions. Instead, they can focus on experience design and visitor engagement while drawing from a shared, high-quality cultural heritage resource. This approach democratises access to cultural heritage content, enabling smaller destinations with limited resources to create sophisticated, content-rich visitor experiences.
Julie addressed the dilemma faced by providing open-access cultural heritage collections and how to protect this content from being exploited for training AI large language models, one of the most pressing contemporary issues in cultural heritage digitalisation. Revealing a nuanced approach to AI platforms scraping Europeana's collections that balances openness with protection, significant bot traffic increases over the past two years have required Europeana to implement technical protections to prevent website crashes. However, rather than treating cultural heritage collections as proprietary assets and implementing blanket restrictions, Europeana views them as resources that should benefit society, provided that the licensing wishes of contributing institutions are respected. With this outlook, Europeana actively supports AI companies in ethically democratising its content, such as Spawning's PD12M model. This approach reflects broader strategic thinking about cultural heritage as a public good. At the same time, this position becomes particularly complex when considering that Europeana operates as an EU-funded initiative, raising questions about whether European taxpayer funding should support American and Chinese AI development.
A similar strategic subtlety arises when considering how to enhance Europeana's collections with the support of AI. Experimentation with AI is underway to improve low-quality images, moving content from "unusable" quality tiers to higher standards. This work is approached cautiously, with significant testing to ensure that AI enhancement doesn't alter objects to the point where they no longer accurately represent the original items. This concern proves particularly important for objects with detailed inscriptions or other features that visitors might expect to examine closely. Nevertheless, while AI offers plenty of potential to support the scalability of cultural heritage integration, the question of authenticity presents another significant challenge. The balance between entertainment and education requires careful consideration and ongoing dialogue with cultural heritage experts.
Product Designer
Europeana Foundation
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Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
Designed to teach you how to master must-have tools and acquire essential skills to succeed in managing your destination or organisation, be ready to challenge all of your assumptions.
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