Unikathek Web App
The Unikathek is the web application through which the research project hand.gemacht makes its digitised objects accessible. It brings together what each documentation session records separately: the object captured by 3D scan and the context of meaning drawn from use, attachment and memory. Julian developed and designed it within the project. Within the dissertation it also serves as the central design proposal against which digital mediation of regional object and memory culture can be tested. The application is fully built and is being developed further.
hand.gemacht digitises objects that remain in the everyday worlds of their owners, and records their meaning alongside their form. For this holding to become accessible to research and mediation, it needs an interface that shows both as intertwined. The Unikathek takes on this task. It understands itself not as a list or catalogue but as a constellation in which object, place, event and memory enter into relation. The individual object stays visible without falling out of the web of relations that gives it its meaning.
Four routes open up the holding. A themed tour leads along set stops through a context, such as the history of the Wackersdorf reprocessing plant, and links objects to places and events. The network view makes the relations between objects and their features spatially tangible and gathers what shares a common theme. Search and filter offer the faster, list-shaped path to the same material. At the centre stands the three-dimensional object itself, such as the digitised Franziskusmarterl, a wayside shrine, which can be turned freely and is opened up through annotations. These annotations couple text, image and sound to specific points of the model and so bring form and context together at the object.
For research the Unikathek is more than a mediation tool. In Julian’s dissertation it counts as an articulated design proposal through which, following the logic of research through design, one can examine the conditions under which digital mediation of regional object and memory culture holds. An expert study with mediators from museums, education and cultural work tests the case along five dimensions of virtual mediation. The application thus answers not only how digitised objects can be shown, but makes visible at a concrete design what such mediation can achieve and where its limits lie.