Enriching Museum Collection with Virtual Design Objects and Community Narratives: Pop-up-VR Museum

In the Pop-up-VR Museum, a selection of design objects from the Design Museum collection can be explored as virtual reality experience together with stories and comments collected in workshops organized with senior communities and museum visitors amongst others. The collaboration between the museum and the Aalto University Department of Art and Media in the EU Horizon 2020 project SPICE (2020–2023), seeks to increase social cohesion and inclusion through cultural heritage. Using semantic tools designed and developed in the project, it studies ways to promote novel forms of “citizen curation” activities. The article discusses the co-design process between media designers, heritage professionals, and different user communities, with varying understandings and needs regarding museum data and Finnish design heritage. In the museum, community-based data raises practical as well as ethical issues. Also the new digital artifacts challenge existing systems: what and how should be preserved in the museum collection from the dialogue with the user that takes place in the Pop-up VR Museum and does this new data demand re-assessing earlier information and, how does should the process of creating new digital artifacts be documented and described.