Rethinking Cultural Heritage: From Horizon 2020 to the Everyday Struggles of Innovation

In an era where digital transformation is reshaping every aspect of our lives, cultural heritage institutions—once seen as bastions of tradition—are stepping into the vanguard of innovation. The Horizon 2020 project ReInHerit exemplified this shift, bringing together museums, researchers, and technology developers to rethink how we engage with the past using the tools of the future.

But innovation doesn’t just happen at the project level—it lives or dies in the everyday work of people trying to implement it. At Arcada UAS, we’re currently working to take the learnings and tools from a Horizon2020 funded project, ReInHerit and explore how they might become something more: new practices, spinoffs, collaborations, and digital services that make sense in our local Nordic context. And here’s the honest part: it’s not easy. Finding resources, building lasting partnerships, and working with institutions that often have little capacity for digital experimentation is a real challenge.

Still, the promise is powerful. ReInHerit introduced a compelling vision: the “phygital museum”—a hybrid of physical and digital experiences. Tools like Smart Lens, Strike-a-Pose, and Face-fit show how playful, AI-enhanced interaction can trigger curiosity and deepen engagement. A travelling digital exhibition, created by the ReInHerit project opened new pathways to collaborate and share the heritage of European museums across the board.  These aren’t gimmicks; they’re strategic responses to the changing expectations of audiences who want to learn, feel, play, and participate.

The innovation goes beyond visitors. AI-powered tools like Smart Retrieval and Multimedia Chatbot reshape how collections can be searched, interpreted, and communicated. Smart Video Restoration breathes new life into analogue archives—reminding us that digital doesn’t erase the past. It can revitalise it.

But the gap between vision and implementation is real. As we’ve seen in our own work, many small and medium-sized cultural institutions are underfunded, under-resourced, and overwhelmed. The ReInHerit Toolkit attempts to bridge this gap with open-source, mobile-first design that works on visitors’ own devices. This is critical: the fewer barriers to entry, the better the chances of adoption.

Most importantly, ReInHerit offered a people-centred and co-creative approach. It didn’t just deliver tech; it invited institutions and communities to shape the tools through workshops, hackathons, and shared design processes. That philosophy is what we at Arcada are trying to carry forward. But it requires time, funding, and strong partnerships—resources that aren’t always easy to come by.

Still, we believe the struggle is worth it. Digital tools in cultural heritage are most impactful not when they dazzle, but when they foster dialogue—between institutions and audiences, between memory and imagination, between the past, the present and the future.

In the end, cultural heritage isn’t something fixed. It’s living knowledge—co-created, reinterpreted, and passed forward. With thoughtful, inclusive innovation, we can ensure the stories of yesterday and today continue to inspire, challenge, and connect us in the digital world of tomorrow.

What we today consider to be important to preserve for the future may shift and lose its importance in the future. With insights gained from the ReInHerit project we at Arcada want to engage our students and local communities in considering what digital heritage needs to be preserved for tomorrow. This is not a straightforward question because as UNESCO Chair in Heritage Futures, Cornelius Holtorf points out, we cannot preserve all heritage and we may be faced by something he calls ‘Global Alzheimer’:

“Today, the predominant way to publish is online. Stories reflecting our present such as blogs and online-journals will vanish comparatively fast. The digital age bears the risk that future generations may be able to recall events prior to the 21^st century, but not their most recent past.”

This may mean that the co-creation work we need to engage in actually requires more simple technology—paper and pen to record our stories of today. As educators we welcome this return to basics as writing by hand is known to support our cognition.

For us the innovation produced by the ReInHerit project was to introduce us to the limits and possibilities of cultural heritage as food for the thoughts of tomorrow. It prompted us to mobilise the greatest resource we have at our disposal—the youth that populate the classrooms of our university in search of knowledge.

Further Reading & Resources:

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Writers:

Tomas Träskman Principal Lecturer in Accountability and Sustainability
Susanne Ådahl Senior Lecturer in Cultural Management