Technological Tools for the Conservation and Dissemination of Valencian Design Archives

Abstract

Design has shaped the world in which we live; it has improved our lives in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Even if design is everywhere and is the memory of the world, collections associated with it are not usually well-known as design archives which capture spatial and temporal narratives. Saving these types of archives and making them accessible to the public, using them as cultural hubs, might improve our lives thanks to visual literacy, creativity, and innovation. The Arxiu Valencià del Disseny aims to recover, preserve, protect, and disseminate the archival cultural heritage of the Valencian designers. With a collection of more than 150,000 objects, it recovers history and evolution from the applied arts and product design, but with a markedly future-oriented character through the enhancement of the collections and their dissemination thanks to an intelligent computational system featuring cutting-edge technologies in order to prove our understanding of Valencian and European design. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we introduce the AVD project, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the Valencian Government in order to preserve and promote the heritage of design archives; second, we introduce a set of interactive tools related to the project, such as the digitisation and cataloguing of the collection, the generation of a Design Memory Archive, advanced searching, and semantically relating the digitised collection of the Arxiu Valencià del Disseny based on data interoperability across its collections and a benchmarking tool for designers.