Hypersensing Creative Acts. The Role of Design in Transmitting Intangible Cultural Heritage through Digital Tools

Craft objects represent material culture, artisans’ heterogeneous know-how shaped into tangible artefacts as results of creative acts, evidence of an “intimate connection between hand and head”. Craftspeople are alive custodians of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), conceived as embodied knowledge about practices, representations, living expressions, and skills inherited from the past and belonging to specific, situated communities. Due to sociocultural, economic, and technological barriers, the Fashion sector counts few attempts to preserve and transmit ICH to posterity. Digital technologies could preserve, revive, transmit and valorize ICH’s creative acts through their data, information, and knowledge encoding. Digital tools for data mining coupled with design ethnography could be powerful means to analyse, record, and archive analogue creative and productive processes. Through literature review, the paper aims to reflect on the relationship between craftsmanship, digital technologies, and ICH, firstly by identifying their applicative crafts sectors and secondly highlighting limits and opportunities of digital tools and procedures for crafts ICH representation (encode, document, analyse, preserve, and archive embodied knowledge) and presentation (translate data into engaging narratives toward ICH’s dissemination and spreading). Resulting guidelines highlight the role of design toward sustainable development in preserving cultural diversity and identity against the fashion industry’s mass production and growing globalisation.