Chi Yao
(She / Her)
My project investigates how interactive digital heritage can make artefact interpretation more transparent. Taking the Scottish Crannog Centre as my case study, I built a prototype that guides users through progressive stages of discovery, moving from individual objects to grouped combinations. At each stage, new relationships emerge, challenging the idea that interpretations should remain static. Through this work, I aim to demonstrate that interaction can be a tool for revealing the uncertain, evolving nature of historical understanding, a theme that has driven my design decisions throughout this project.
Scottish Crannog Centre
This project explores how interactive digital heritage experiences can make the process of artefact interpretation more visible. As artefacts are discovered and brought into different relationships, the prototype shows how interpretations can develop progressively instead of remaining fixed.
Developed through a case study of the Scottish Crannog Centre, the interactive experience takes users from excavation to a series of interpretation stages. Individual artefacts are first introduced separately, before being brought together in pairs and finally as a three object combination. At each stage, new information and possible relationships are revealed, allowing different understandings to emerge from the same group of evidence.
The project uses interaction not simply to increase user participation, but to structure when and how interpretation is encountered. Through this approach, the prototype explores how digital heritage can communicate the changing, uncertain and interpretative nature of understanding the past.
Demonstration of the interactive prototype, showing excavation, artefact interaction, and progressive interpretation.
Interactive excavation using a dredge to uncover waterlogged artefacts
The reconstructed Iron Age roundhouse and artefact display at the Scottish Crannog Centre
Single artefact interpretation stage, where information is introduced after an artefact is placed on the display