BSc Dissertation: Inside the Metallurgist’s Workshop

BSc Projects
2021, 2022

Grade: A3 (First)

Supervisors: 

Prof. Stuart Jeffrey
Claire Eaglesham

In cooperation with the Casa del Alabado museum in Quito, Ecuador and Dr Emilia Ferraro of Dundee University, in my BSc Dissertation, I developed an interactive reconstruction of a Pre-Columbian smelting workshop . The reconstruction establishes a new pedagogical tool for Ecuadorian educators teaching indigenous heritage. One of the design challenges navigated in the development process is constructing a critical approach to visualisation, which responds to the problem of building virtual reconstructions of the past using fragmentary evidence. To this end, the project combines 3D scans of museum objects (evidence) with hand-drawn elements (hypothesis and interpretation).

User-centred design and evaluation methods were deployed in collaboration with researchers and local museum educators to devise a tool that can have a meaningful impact on their work. Evaluations with experts revealed the virtual workshop as an effective pedagogical tool that offered inherent advantages compared to ‘static’ learning materials: museum objects are discovered and recontextualised through interaction, exploration and use, allowing learners to better imagine how they would have been used and to insert themselves in an imagined past world.