Human-Centred Digitisation: Contextualising museum digitisation in collaborative and socio-technical environments

<p dir="ltr">Digitisation involves converting tangible objects into digital metadata, making museum collections to be accessed online as open and interoperable data sets. Over the past two decades, research on museum digitisation has primarily focused on enhancing accessibility, openness, and user engagement through platforms designed to curate collection data and enable further interactions and reuse. This thesis provides a new perspective by examining digitisation through the lens of design, exploring how human-centred design principles and methodologies influence the interactions and collaborations among people involved in digitisation, including museum professionals, technology service providers, collection experts, and users. It investigates how these actors negotiate values, redefine roles, and exchange ideas to address the “wicked problems” inherent in digitisation, while also considering the socio-technical challenges within the museum context. The research adopts a theoretical framework that integrates human-centred design with activity theory, providing a systematic way of analysing the interactions between individuals and their interplay with cultural, technological, and institutional factors. These interactions are studied through the design interfaces—transitional zones where roles, ideas, and practices are negotiated. Based on sixteen semi-structured interviews with practitioners from institutions of varying sizes and collection types, this study examines nine digitisation projects across the UK, Europe, and North America. The findings show that digitisation, as a design activity, is inherently cross-disciplinary and iterative. It is shaped by different degrees of participation from stakeholders, users, and designers across different levels of collaboration, crystalising the needs of diverse communities into its outcomes. Throughout the collaborations, participatory and co-design methods emerge as important pathways for facilitating knowledge exchange, externalising tacit knowledge and orchestrating expertise, and generating new ideas. This process has transformative potential to enhance museums’ digital capacities while navigating governance frameworks, technical constraints, and resource limitations. Based on the findings, the thesis identifies a framework to understand the conditionalities of human-centred digitisation, which considers: (i) how values influence the design activity of digitisation; (ii) the central role of creating design artefacts in design knowledge production and mediation; (iii) the relationship between roles of design actors and types of collaboration. I also argue that future practices of digitisation can be based on the logic of “knotworking” by fostering improvisational, continuous collaborations rather than focusing on immediate influences of specific design methods and techniques, which helps museums navigate evolving technological and societal challenges. This thesis contributes to digital museology, design research, and the broader discourse on collections-as-data. It provides practical insights for building digitisation infrastructure with collaboration across disciplinary expertise and industries, offering a timely perspective on the growing trend towards developing aggregated, unified collection databases.</p>