(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
A challenge to heritage protection efforts is to make visible intangible factors that participate in the formation of a community’s memory and identity, even to community members themselves. Recent work in digital heritage has shown the potential of digital and hybrid environments to help integrate tangible and intangible aspects of heritage buildings and artifacts. Through a case study situated in the Freedom Corner, Pittsburgh, United States — a landmark and symbol of an ongoing struggle for community deliberation, unity, and civic action in the city — this paper explores how intangible aspects of a place, including historically and culturally meaningful events, may be made visible and put in conversation with a physical space, and with people, in a mixed-reality environment. Approaching community heritage as a wide range of perspectives and activities developed and run by communities themselves, we document progress towards the collaborative development of an augmented reality application that overlays historical and cultural contextual information at Pittsburgh’s Freedom Corner and its neighboring historic district. Describing the interplay between historical research, collaboration with community actors, and progress towards the environment’s technical implementation, it offers a practical example of how interactive augmented reality (AR) might help publics create meaning through experiences that creatively and interactively overlay heritage information with a physical landscape.
Yang Bai is a graduate student in Computational Design at the School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, US. She holds a degree of Architecture from South China University of Technology. Her research interests lie primarily in the field of digital heritage, community heritage and storytelling. Based on her architectural background and research interests, she conducted an internship in China about digital twins and urban computing, which made her get closer access to community identities and regional histories in cities. Currently, she is mainly conducting research work in Pittsburgh, digging deeper into the cultural contextual information and group memory.
Daniel Cardoso Llach is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the Master of Science in Computational Design and co-directs CodeLab. He is the author of publications, exhibitions, and technologies critically exploring the nexus of design and computation. His publications include the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, a history of CAD which identifies and documents a technological imaginary of design emerging from postwar technology research (and its architectural repercussions); the co-edited special issue Other Computations: Technologies for Design and Architecture from the Global South; and the forthcoming co-authored book Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, among others. He is also founding co-editor of the “Design, Technology, and Society” Routledge book series, and of the web platform lattice.space, both of which foster critical perspectives at the crossroads of design, technology, and society. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program, among others, and is a 2021-22 Pennsylvania Manufacturing Fellow. Daniel holds a Ph.D. and a MS from MIT and a B. Arch. from Universidad de los Andes in his native Bogotá.
9:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Thursday 16th June, 2022