Designing Educational Experiences: Resurrecting the Archive through Collaborative Exhibition

This article considers the creation of an exhibition at the National Library of New Zealand. Specifically, this project was a collaborative endeavour between the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington and the National Library, aimed at utilising new technologies and traditional archival research to bring forgotten and rarely accessed data back to life in a public exhibition. From the outset this project sought to combine the best of both new educational technologies (augmented reality) with tactile, physical materials (created using laser cutting and 3D printing) that the public could handle and use in a way that would break down the barriers between exhibition objects and resurrected archival data. The result was an interactive exhibition focused upon the emergence of Wellington as a city and the growth of its waterfront over the last century and a half. The design research project took place between November 2016 and February 2017 and resulted in a project exhibition open to the public running from May 2017 to February 2018. The principle supervisors were Leon Gurevitch and Tim Miller with a research team of three research assistants (Stefan Peacock, Alasdair Tarry and Louis Elwood­Leach).