Not Post-Digital but More-than-Human: Rethinking Digital Design for Regional Natural History Museums
Abstract
What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This paper repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project between the Portsmouth Natural History Museum and the University of Portsmouth, we reflect on the interactive experiences using low-cost holograms and motion-capture avatars as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies. Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman.
Keywords
more than human, digital interaction design, regional museums; natural history collections
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.560
Citation
Grover, K., Ramirez Gomez, A., and Bailey Ross, C. (2026) Not Post-Digital but More-than-Human: Rethinking Digital Design for Regional Natural History Museums, 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.2026.560
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Not Post-Digital but More-than-Human: Rethinking Digital Design for Regional Natural History Museums
What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This paper repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project between the Portsmouth Natural History Museum and the University of Portsmouth, we reflect on the interactive experiences using low-cost holograms and motion-capture avatars as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies. Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman.