Prof Chris Speed(Chair of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh) “Designing Value within a Digital Heritage Economy”
In this talk, Chris will extend the concepts of value within a digital economy and use design case studies to explore how values can be associated with the flow of data, and the cocreation of value.
Abstract:
Understanding value within digital economies is now a challenge for any organisation, as the representation of value is no longer restricted to money, but to the values that a product or a service means to the consumer according to the data that is exchanged. In this sense, people are not only using money to buy things that they value, they are using data to co-create value alongside social, political and environmental values.
Designing the flow of data can better support organisations ability to anticipate how the values that are associated with products and services can be better articulated. With data travelling between a heritage organisation, the internet and the visitor, value in the digital heritage economy can be understood to be co-produced and a host of new values are brought into play. Mediated by algorithms and involving potentially hundreds of parties, the term value chain has now largely been superseded by the concept of a constellation, which describes how value is entangled within a complex network of social and environmental connections. It is critical for heritage organisations to recognise the role of co-created value within value constellation. As custodians and processers of historical and personal datasets they can help both the visitor and the organisation to identify the value of a product or service that it is commensurate with social, environmental and political values.
The talk will be supported by design case studies from funded projects including the EPSRC funded Tales of Things project, that enabled visitors to museums to attach personal stories to museum artefacts, the AHRC funded Art Casting project that challenged traditional evaluation process by asking visitors to send an artwork to somewhere around the world, and the KASH Cups a collection of RFID augmented ceramic cups that exchange social, economic and cultural value, as well as great coffee.