AUGMENTING URBAN LANDSCAPES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE DIGITAL AGE**
<aside> 🚧 This is a living document. It will change over the course of the co-design process.
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Course code: BETA-B3LH
Level: 3 (advanced bachelor’s course)
Period: 2022-2023, first period (September 7th – November 11th 2022)
Course Team: Toine Pieters (he/him), Ivar Troost (he/him/they/them), Simon Dirks (he/him), Joja Bos (they/them)
Email: [email protected]
Locations: Teaching & Learning Lab, BBG 3.22 & 3.19. Where necessary or desirable: online teaching. Excursions may be part of the course.
Class times: Wednesdays 13:15–17:00 / Fridays 13:15–17:00
Office hours: Online appointments can be requested via mail or over Teams.
In principle, students should be in their second or third year of studies. They do not need to have completed any particular course to be able to join. An interest in bridging the fields of the Humanities, Science and/or Social Sciences is essential, however. The course is built on principles of co-design, which means we welcome and wish to integrate any relevant expertise students bring to the table.
In this hands-on course, you and your interdisciplinary team will uncover the rich history of Utrecht and share your findings with the public. Combining historical, architectural and societal data, you will develop and design an innovative application for the city of Utrecht. In the process, you will learn how to cooperate across disciplinary borders, take charge of your own learning process and experimentally assess the added value of new media and ICT. The course will accumulate in presentations and, if feasible, interactive demos of the teams’ final prototypes.
Design prototypes of previous course iterations offer an opportunity for you to further expand upon. Likewise, the next iteration of the course will continue to work where you left off. Some examples of what has previously been created in the course (see The Visual Living Pasts Repository for more inspiration) are:
Escaping Zuilen (archive) An educational escape room to showcase the rich history of Zuilen in an innovative and interactive way.
**Under the Lime Trees (archive)** A visual novel inspired by events on the Maliebaan during World War II.
[Lombok documentary (archive) In ‘Living Memories of Lombok’ (Dutch: Levende Herinneringen aan Lombok), you will hear Bülent, Peter and Sam, three residents of Lombok, share what Lombok means to them. Questions such as ‘How did Lombok originate?’, ‘How has Lombok changed over the years?’ and ‘What makes Lombok, Lombok?’ will be addressed. The documentary is in Dutch, but will be accessible to English speakers with subtitles.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OE8arbnoBQ)
Lombok documentary (archive) In ‘Living Memories of Lombok’ (Dutch: Levende Herinneringen aan Lombok), you will hear Bülent, Peter and Sam, three residents of Lombok, share what Lombok means to them. Questions such as ‘How did Lombok originate?’, ‘How has Lombok changed over the years?’ and ‘What makes Lombok, Lombok?’ will be addressed. The documentary is in Dutch, but will be accessible to English speakers with subtitles.
Empathizing Werkspoor construction workers (archive) An immersive VR experience that teaches about the working conditions at Werkspoor in the early twentieth century.
**Taste of time (archive)** Bringing historical recipes from Utrecht straight to the modern kitchen.
In September 2022, Lombok will be central. Depending on your team’s preferences and disciplinary knowledge you will zoom in on aspects such as the historical events, social dynamics, earth samples, Linked Data architecture and even game technology for visualizing your team’s findings. You will work with the best available data provided by the Utrecht Archives and other partners, and collaborate with scientists, data & heritage experts, programmers, and local history buffs.
Living Pasts is a co-design course in two respects: students build a product prototype together, and students are co-responsible for the contents of the course. Depending on your needs, the problems you encounter, and feedback required, you will create the course itself, in collaboration with the course leaders. You can, e.g., request that specific expertise is ‘flown in’ or ask for tailored guidance by process facilitators. You and your team will plan the various phases of the course, such as the problem analysis, research, design, pilot testing and evaluation.
This process of co-design will get you acquainted with a real-world situation in which you need to reflect on the process and decide the next steps. In addition, this didactic approach will challenge and improve your skills, including cooperation, organization, problem-solving and creativity.
After this course, students are able to: