HeritACT Consortium Meeting Recap: Advancing Heritage Co-Creation and Sustainable Engagement
HeritACT is committed to advance the way local communities interact with heritage, facilitating tools, urban innovation solutions and participatory processes to rethink and revamp areas of social gathering and historic linkage. The project has already achieved two years of activity, and the Consortium got together once again last week, for the second General Assembly celebrated in two inspiring locations: Europa House in Dublin and the heritage-rich town of Ballina. The meeting is a milestone in itself as it is only once a year that the project Consortium meets in person, serving as a unique opportunity to align ongoing work packages, share progress, and collaboratively reflect on lessons learned and upcoming challenges.
Day 1: Setting the context in Dublin
The meeting kicked off with a warm welcome at Europa House, the European Parliament Liaison Office, where Fearghas O Béara and Senator Mark Duffy conducted the opening emphasising the importance of cultural heritage as a cornerstone for better resilient communities. Their remarks set the tone for a series of insightful presentations, starting with the work on #EcosystemMapping, which included advances in the development of the #NEBCompendium and the #NEBCompass.
This was followed by a deep dive into the design, development and learnings of applying the HeritACT Toolkit, focusing specifically on the learnings taken from the process of supporting the 3 pilot Cities in setting up tools for co-creation activities with local communities. Tool developers did an exercise in digital participatory tools integral to co-recognition and co-envision processes. Highlights included:
The UCD Particimap platform has expanded its use beyond HeritACT despite some interface translation challenges. NegoDesign Tool keeps evolving to v2.0, enhancing stakeholder negotiation capabilities. HeriCRAFT has finished the 3 different developments for each of the 3 pilot sites, and is the most prolific tool to enhance youth involvement in heritage redesign. It has been through dealing with ethical considerations, as young communities are vulnerable groups with specific characteristics to be taken into account.
ACT is going through a refinement of SUSTAINACT, proven as a very useful (and sustainable) web platform deployed in all pilot sites that is now being tested in other appliances beyond HeriACT. Also there's development of the crowdfunding tool Fund4ACT, to keep empowering communities in heritage action funding, with new functionalities.
There are preparations for the next version of UserSENCE by UniAegean, the user experience evaluation tool.
Day 1 concluded with a policy-briefing focused workshop led by ENCC. Aimed at opening the discussion about the upcoming Policy Brief report, participants went deep into the broader impact and application of HeritACT work and collaborated on strategies to help engage with policymakers around the dimensions of the NEB project: sustainable, beautiful, and inclusive.
Day 2: Hands-on engagement in Ballina
After a late afternoon transfer to Ballina (located at more than 200km from Dublin) the consortium started Day 2 in the Belleek castle, a 19th-century manor house that today serves as hotel and event center. On this second day, we focused on updates from the remaining work packages, highlighting on-the-ground community engagement efforts.
Partners reported key insights from pilot sites:
Participants require more time and support to fully grasp digital engagement tools.
Blended approaches that combine digital tools with physical activities, such as heritage walks and solution card games, yield stronger engagement.
Time commitment remains a challenge, calling for flexible involvement options.
Solution experts shared all the updates from recent co-design activities, including the completion of co-creation sessions in Milan and the initiation of site permissions and physical solution planning in Ballina. The update of the processes of adapting the initially planned urban solutions with the requirements and outputs of the co-creation processes with locals was very enlightening, showing differences between substantially adapted solutions to others that, for various reasons, haven’t been adapted that much.
Research outputs are advancing even if there’s still some more work to be done around publishing scientific content. For now, two scientific papers are currently under peer review, addressing user experience evaluation through physiological and multimodal data approaches. The consortium also gathered valuable feedback through an “emotional walk” in Ballina, engaging locals in heritage perception studies. Discussions explored how visual data from these activities could enhance dissemination efforts and public awareness.
Updates about communication and dissemination depicted the state of the art of the project’s outreach, with good advances in reflecting the pilot processes, and substantial effort the last 12 months to illustrate the activities carried out to ensure networking presence and spreading of the HeritACT project around Europe.
A series of workshops on solutions, site-activation events and tools evaluation revealed practical learnings:
Simplifying language and using tangible objects (e.g., models, game elements) greatly increase participant involvement.
Mixed-age community engagement fosters intergenerational connections and richer storytelling.
Targeted invitations to specific groups, along with creative and professional facilitation, improve the quality of participation.
Managing expectations about project scope and funding is critical, as heritage can be a sensitive and sometimes contentious topic.
The day concluded with a site visit and dinner at Belleek Castle — a one-of-a-kind fitting celebration of the cultural heritage that enlightened and amused the consortium’s work.
Next Steps
The HeritACT meeting underscored the complex but rewarding nature of co-creating urban innovation solutions to revamp living heritage, in an effort to balance digital innovation with human-centred engagement practices. As the project moves towards its final phases, the consortium remains committed to keep refining the tools and place the urban co-created solutions, fostering inclusive participation, and delivering policy-relevant insights that support sustainable cultural heritage management across Europe.
