This paper aims at presenting the findings of a study on the documentation and visualization of the artefacts, “process” and “knowledge” relative to exhibition design inside a wider digital repository of temporary exhibitions.
The contemporary cultural offer is always richer of temporary events and exhibitions, that come in quick succession and are fast realized, so it’s very difficult to keep track of this important contemporary cultural production. Events and exhibition often provide the catalogue of the art works but there isn’t any documentation about the exhibition itself.
At the same time the exhibition design practice about the cultural events is a mean for the staging and of experience of culture; it’s also a mirror of an articulate system of knowledge, processes, techniques, materials, design and designers that represent the culture of the project about the Temporary.
This contribution proposes an analysis of the contemporary models of conserving, archiving and communicating the memory of the “Temporary” through a critical interpretation of cluster of several case studies; it studies also on the potential about the ICT (virtual reality, cultural web, user generated content and so on) in the visualization and experience of the cultural heritage.
The project “Digital archive of the temporary cultural exhibitions” was an opportunity to study the potential of design to elaborate new models, styles and narrative frameworks for a renovated experience of the temporary exhibition.
This research project proposes a new way of archiving, promoting and enhancing the ephemeral nature of temporary exhibitions. In fact the “Digital archive of the temporary cultural exhibitions” collects heterogeneous and complex set of documentation as sketches, maquettes, technical drawings, pictures, video, interviews and so on. We can explore this digital archive through three different paths: the historical masters (where the user can find several exhibitions made by the most famous designers in the past), different exhibition for same place (where the user can do a comparison among different exhibitions in the same place) and contemporary experiences (where the user can immerge himself in the narration of the process of exhibition). This last part is focused on the “exhibition design knowledge” as an emblematic form of contemporary heritage. With the expression “exhibition design knowledge” we indicate the complex set of knowledge and skills that is mobilized during the process of exhibition design, from concept to realisation. Different configurations of knowledge and relational dynamics among the actors involved in the exhibition design process (from project to installation) play an important role in shaping exhibitions arrangements. In example, we detected three knowledge dimensions like: cognitive knowledge (systematic application of knowledge and skills like the ideative, design, productive), collaborative knowledge (exchange and transmission of knowledge and skills among the actors), contextual knowledge (interpretation of the context, and adaptation of knowledge to the situation, exploitation of latent cognitive systems).
The integration of design and exhibition design knowledge about practices and skills represents, in itself, a form of heritage that mixes traditional cultural elements with innovative practices, and is worth conceiving as a culturally valuable layer of contents to be both exhibited and documented.
These aspects innovatively challenge and reconfigure the strategies of exhibition design practices interpretation, documentation and archiving asking for an approach that combines design and new media.
