Storytelling as a Bridge to Heritage and Cultural Identity

Tuesday 25 March 2025, 12pm – 1.30pm including light lunch
QUT Creative Industries Precinct, Building Z9, Room 607 (how to get there >)
Hybrid event: in person and zoom

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I will present the outcomes of several EU projects in which interactive digital storytelling was applied to tackle societal challenges. In the MEMEX project, we used digital storytelling to promote social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related tools that provide inclusive access to tangible and intangible cultural heritage and, at the same time, facilitate encounters, discussions, and interactions between communities at risk of social exclusion, in Lisbon, Paris, and Barcelona. In the LogaCulture project, we take this approach further with locative games for cultural heritage, bringing together nature and culture through novel digital technologies such us VR/AR/MX. Finally under the scope of the BIG Project we explored how DLTs can be used to provide traceabiity and NFTs can be used to enhance natural heritage. In this talk, I will present several case studies from these projects and discuss how these mixed realities come together in practical examples.

This guest seminar is hosted by the QUT Design Lab and kindly supported by the Horizon Europe project BIG – Blockchain Technologies and Design Innovation for Social Good (GA 952226).

SPEAKER

Valentina Nisi is currently a Visiting Professor with the QUT Design Lab and a full Professor of Design Thinking at Técnico - U. Lisbon, where she teaches and researches in Digital Interactive Design, Art and Media. She holds a BA in Fine Arts, an MSc in Multimedia, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin. She worked for four years at MIT MediaLabEurope, investigating wireless mobile technologies' potential in cinematic non-linear narratives. Valentina has published and exhibited, and taught internationally in digital media, art, and design. Her research interests focus on designing and producing digitally mediated experiences in controlled spaces and "in the wild", merging architecture, environment, and landscape with multimedia and narrative and artistic elements. Her most recent efforts are now investigating how to integrate sustainability concerns with digital art and interactive media in Urban environments impacting social issues such as inclusive design, cultural heritage, and tourism. Valentina worked on several EU projects (including memexproject.eu) and is currently coordinating the logaculture.eu project.

READINGS

• Paulo Bala, Valentina Nisi, and Nuno Jardim Nunes. 2024. Stories as Boundary Objects: Digital Storytelling with Migrant Communities for Heritage Discourses. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 177 (April 2024), 32 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641016
• Valentina Nisi, Mathilde Gouin, Marta Galvão Ferreira, and Nuno Jardim Nunes. 2025. From visual sketching to knotted figurations: Fabulating in the contact zone. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 49, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704418
• Pedro Galvão-Ferreira, Marta Galvão Ferreira, Teresa Maritza Gouveia da Silva, Nuno Jardim Nunes, and Valentina Nisi. 2025. The Entangled Tales that Landscapes Tell: An Embodied HCI Pedagogy for Re-enchanted Nature Walks. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 13, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3705012
• Anna My Bertmark, Mathilde Gouin, Nuno Jardim Nunes, David E Millard, Pedro Galvão-Ferreira, Vera Fearns, Marta Ferreira, and Valentina Nisi. 2025. Natureculture Probes: Opening up dialogues in natural heritage(s) landscapes. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 39, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704430