Scanning What Matters: IX in a Bumbag

Nov 1

8 min read

Scanning What Matters: A Bumbag Pedagogy for Introducing Immersive Experiences to Non-Technical Professionals in Participatory Heritage

Abstract

Immersive experiences (IX) are increasingly commissioned by municipalities, non-profits and heritage organisations, yet the professionals who commission them rarely have the knowledge to judge when IX is meaningful or how to brief a maker. At the same time, community heritage is disappearing faster than institutions can document it: around 70% of the street art in the collection of Street Art Museum Amsterdam no longer exists. This paper introduces IX in a Bumbag, a low-cost, hands-on learning method in which non-technical professionals scan something their community values, share it immersively, deliberate on its meaning and ownership, and translate the experience into an informed brief. We situate the method in participatory heritage, the democratisation of 3D capture, and constructionist and experiential learning, and propose a participatory evaluation design. The method is offered as an open training module with a commercial service layer around it.

Introduction

Immersive experiences (IX) – augmented, virtual and mixed reality, 360° media and 3D reconstructions – are now an established way of presenting, exploring and reconstructing cultural heritage (Bekele et al., 2018). Yet the professionals who decide whether and how IX is used are often not technologists. Civil servants, programme managers in non-profits and staff of small heritage organisations commission IX projects, write tenders and judge proposals, frequently without a working understanding of what the technology can and cannot do. The result is a familiar pattern: IX is either avoided as too complex, or commissioned as a spectacle that answers no real question.

This gap matters most where heritage is fragile and community-owned. Street art is a case in point. It is ephemeral by nature: walls are repainted, demolished or redeveloped, and attempts to preserve it raise questions of authenticity, ownership and whose values count (Merrill, 2015; Bonadio, 2019).

Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA), a community-based museum in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, estimates that around 70% of its collection has already disappeared. Documentation – photographic and, increasingly, three-dimensional – has become one of the few forms of preservation that respects the participatory and transient character of the work (Bonadio, 2019).

At the same time, the tools for capturing heritage in 3D have moved from specialist laboratories into people's pockets. Image-based modelling has long been central to heritage recording (Remondino, 2011), and recent radiance-field methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting make photorealistic, real-time reconstructions possible from ordinary photographs or video (Kerbl et al., 2023). This shifts the question from whether non-experts can capture heritage to how they learn to do so meaningfully, ethically and in dialogue with the communities concerned.

This paper introduces IX in a Bumbag, a hands-on learning method developed by SAMA, Wonderment by Design and Dwarsleggers. In a single session, non-technical professionals use a small, low-cost kit to scan something their community values, share it as an immersive experience, deliberate on its meaning and ownership, and translate the experience into a brief for a professional maker. We ask: to what extent, and in what ways, can a short, hands-on capture-and-share experience help non-technical professionals to understand IX, judge its suitability, and commission it responsibly? The paper contributes a practice-based method, grounded in participatory heritage and constructionist learning, and a participatory design for evaluating it.

Background

Participatory heritage

Heritage studies have moved away from an expert-led "authorised heritage discourse" towards an understanding of heritage as something people actively make, use and contest (Smith, 2006). The Council of Europe's Faro Convention (2005) frames this as a right of communities to define and engage with the heritage that matters to them. Participatory heritage describes the spaces in which people outside formal institutions come together to safeguard aspects of the past, often in do-it-yourself and do-it-together forms (Roued-Cunliffe & Copeland, 2017). Museums have explored similar ground through participatory practice, inviting visitors to contribute, collaborate and co-create rather than only consume (Simon, 2010).

Street art makes these questions concrete. It is created in public, altered by others and experienced as part of everyday life; scholars have argued that it is best understood as an embodied, affective heritage experience rather than a fixed object (Nomeikaite, 2017). Freezing such work in place can undermine the dialogue it sustains, which is why documentation is often proposed as a more fitting form of preservation (Merrill, 2015; Bonadio, 2019). But documentation is never neutral: someone decides what is captured, how it is presented and who may reuse it.

Democratised 3D capture

Photogrammetry and 3D scanning have been used for heritage recording for decades, mostly by specialists with dedicated equipment (Remondino, 2011). Immersive technologies built on such data now serve education, exhibition, exploration and reconstruction in cultural heritage (Bekele et al., 2018). The arrival of 3D Gaussian Splatting, which achieves high-quality real-time rendering of scenes reconstructed from multiple photos or videos (Kerbl et al., 2023), has lowered the threshold further: a phone and free software can now produce results that were recently out of reach for most organisations. Technical access, however, is not the same as understanding. Knowing how to press "scan" does not tell a commissioner when an immersive approach serves a social question, or what is lost when a living wall becomes a digital asset.

Learning by making

The method draws on two related traditions. Constructionism holds that people learn particularly well when they build a tangible, shareable artefact (Papert & Harel, 1991). Experiential learning theory describes learning as a cycle of concrete experience, reflection, conceptualisation and active experimentation (Kolb, 1984). Co-design adds that people who are not trained as designers can contribute meaningfully to creative processes when given appropriate tools and settings (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Together, these traditions suggest that non-technical professionals may learn more about IX by briefly making something immersive about their own community than by being shown examples of what others have made.

The method: IX in a Bumbag

Origins

The method grows out of three existing practices. First, SAMA has assembled a small kit of low-cost tools with which residents and organisations capture the heritage they themselves consider important. Second, SAMA and Wonderment by Design built the Digital Street Art Depot, an online 3D depot of vanishing murals. A key example is Fatherhood, painted by Stinkfish in Amsterdam in 2015. Before its demolition in 2019, SAMA documented the work with spatial computing specialist Gabriele Romagnoli; in 2026 he reconstructed the vanished mural from the drone footage using Gaussian Splatting, so that it can again be explored in three dimensions. Third, the Erasmus+ project STAR 2.0, whose curriculum was written by Dwarsleggers, produced an open toolkit for co-creation with communities.

The kit

The bumbag holds a phone with a free scanning app, a 360° camera, a simple viewer, AR markers or QR codes, a set of method cards and a one-page briefing canvas. The components are deliberately cheap and widely available, and an open parts list allows any organisation to assemble its own kit. The bag is a pedagogical choice as much as a practical one: it signals that IX can be carried, handled and tried, rather than reserved for specialists.

The session

A session takes three to four hours and follows five steps:

Wonder. Participants experience IX first-hand through short examples, including the Digital Street Art Depot and the reconstructed Fatherhood.
Capture. In small groups, they scan a place, object or artwork that their community values.
Story. They discuss what the capture means, whose memories it carries, and who should have a say in how it is shown and reused.
Share. They publish the result in a simple viewer or as AR on location, and experience it as an audience would.
Decide. They assess whether IX would genuinely serve a question from their own organisation, and complete a briefing canvas for a professional maker.

The intended learning outcome is that participants can explain what IX is, capture and share heritage or a place with simple tools, judge whether IX suits a question from their own practice, and formulate a first brief for an IX maker.

Linking the method to learning and public values

The five steps can be read as a compressed experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984). Wonder and Capture provide concrete experience; Story invites reflection; Share tests that reflection with an audience; and Decide asks participants to conceptualise what they have learned and apply it to their own practice. Because participants produce a tangible, shareable artefact about something they care about, the method also follows the constructionist premise that making is a powerful route to understanding (Papert & Harel, 1991).

First, the method lowers the threshold. Many non-technical professionals approach IX as something reserved for specialists. Scanning a familiar wall with a phone, and seeing it appear in three dimensions minutes later, can disrupt that expectation and open the way to a more informed view of what the technology can do. We expect this moment of surprise to be an important entry point, although this remains to be tested.

Second, the method moves the conversation from technology to purpose. The Story and Decide steps shift attention from "how do we scan this?" to "why would we, for whom, and with what consequences?". This is the judgement that commissioners most need, and that technical training rarely addresses.

Third, the method treats public values as part of the craft rather than an afterthought. Capturing a community's heritage raises questions of consent, privacy, ownership and representation, especially for street art, where authorship is often contested and the work's meaning lies partly in its impermanence (Merrill, 2015; Nomeikaite, 2017). Value sensitive design offers concrete ways to make such values explicit in technology choices, for example through stakeholder analysis and value scenarios (Friedman & Hendry, 2019). In the Story step, participants practise exactly this, before they ever write a brief.

Finally, the method is collective. Participants capture, discuss and decide in groups, often across organisations. This mirrors the reality of IX projects, which depend on collaboration between commissioners, makers and communities (Sanders & Stappers, 2008), and it reflects the participatory heritage view that heritage is made together rather than handed down (Roued-Cunliffe & Copeland, 2017).

Evaluation design and outlook

The method will be tested in 2027 in two to three sessions with representative participants: civil servants, staff of non-profits and staff of heritage organisations, partly in a neighbourhood of Amsterdam Nieuw-West that is being demolished and rebuilt. Evaluation follows a participatory approach led by Dwarsleggers. Rather than measuring learning only through conventional indicators, participants and facilitators reflect together on questions such as:

What did participants understand about IX that they did not before?
Whose knowledge shaped what was captured and how it was told?
Which tensions around consent, ownership or representation surfaced?
And how did the experience change the way participants would brief a maker?

Data will combine the briefs participants produce (assessed against the intended learning outcomes), short reflection sessions and facilitator observations. The findings will inform a full, transferable training module, including a trainer manual and the open parts list for the kit.

The module will be freely available for others to use. Around it, the partners are developing a commercial layer – ready-made kits, facilitated workshops, train-the-trainer licences and follow-up commissions – so that the method can be sustained and maintained after its development phase. In this sense, the bumbag is itself a small experiment in combining open educational resources with a viable model for practice. During this interactive session, we will present the method and invite participants to try the bumbag: scanning, sharing and discussing a small piece of the conference venue as if it were their own community's heritage.

We don't teach people how to make immersive experiences. We teach them how to know when an immersive experience is worth making.

References

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