Abstract
Narrative has long been used in cultural heritage for interpretation and communication, primarily within institutions and historic sites. Everyday heritage, however, foregrounds seemingly modest places and is constituted through routine interactions and practices, emphasising a continuing narrative between place and everyday life. Ubiquitous digital technologies make multi-layered narratives possible and bring underrepresented stories to light in situ. This pilot study in Loughborough’s Market Place, UK, explores narratives rooted in lived experiences that convey cultural-heritage significance. We designed and deployed cultural probes (a set of creative and speculative tasks) to prompt and record place-based stories. The analysis identified four themes: spatiality, temporality, sensoriality and social context. These findings inform a narrative framework for the next stage of the research: AI-assisted co-design of locative media for everyday heritage and, ultimately, a distributed and inclusive heritage experience in urban environments, fostering a sense of place and community connection.
Keywords
everyday heritage; urban narratives; cultural probes; co-design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2037
Citation
Chen, G., Harland, R.G., and Wilson, M. (2026) Exploring Everyday Heritage Futures: Co-creating Urban Narratives through Cultural Probes, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2037
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Exploring Everyday Heritage Futures: Co-creating Urban Narratives through Cultural Probes
Narrative has long been used in cultural heritage for interpretation and communication, primarily within institutions and historic sites. Everyday heritage, however, foregrounds seemingly modest places and is constituted through routine interactions and practices, emphasising a continuing narrative between place and everyday life. Ubiquitous digital technologies make multi-layered narratives possible and bring underrepresented stories to light in situ. This pilot study in Loughborough’s Market Place, UK, explores narratives rooted in lived experiences that convey cultural-heritage significance. We designed and deployed cultural probes (a set of creative and speculative tasks) to prompt and record place-based stories. The analysis identified four themes: spatiality, temporality, sensoriality and social context. These findings inform a narrative framework for the next stage of the research: AI-assisted co-design of locative media for everyday heritage and, ultimately, a distributed and inclusive heritage experience in urban environments, fostering a sense of place and community connection.