The IMPULSE Workshops at KU Leuven
How do you design an immersive learning and research environment that is both technically experimental and genuinely educational? This question lay at the core of a series of collaborative workshops organised at KU Leuven within the Horizon-funded IMPULSE project (Immersive digitization: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies). The workshops were grounded in the IMPULSE co-creation methodology, which emphasises iterative prototyping, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and experience-led design, and is closely connected to the user experience (UX) research conducted throughout the project.
At KU Leuven, the workshops drew on scientific collections spanning manuscripts, prints, maps, drawings, glass slides, and scanned pages from the Vesalius manuscript - materials that pose real questions about how heritage of varying dimensionality and complexity can be brought into a shared 3D space. The workshops treated these questions as productive starting points rather than obstacles. What kinds of spatial presentation, interaction, and collaboration become possible when diverse collection materials are placed in an immersive environment?
The central question was whether providing students and researchers with access to such material in a shared, multi-user 3D environment offers real added value; and whether that access could be genuinely reciprocal. Rather than positioning students as passive recipients of institutional knowledge, the workshops were structured so that students could actively help unearth new storytelling and valorisation pathways for the collections. Can spatial presentation support new forms of comparison and interpretation? And does designing for an immersive environment push students to surface narratives and connections that enrich the collections themselves?
The student teams experimented with exhibition-like scenographies, treating documents and images as objects to be arranged, grouped, layered, and sequenced. Inspired by curatorial practices, they designed spatial constellations that encouraged users to move through collections and construct shared interpretations. In doing so, they generated storytelling approaches and valorisation strategies that fed back into how the collections themselves might be presented and communicated. UX design played a central role throughout: attention was paid to navigation, interaction, accessibility, and spatial clarity, with design decisions evaluated against user feedback in line with the broader UX research within IMPULSE.
This presentation will analyse the outcomes of the workshop series held between February 2025 and September 2026 at KU Leuven. It will discuss which spatial and narrative strategies participants adopted, how archival and technical constraints shaped their decisions, and how insights from UX testing informed the development of the environments. It will also situate these findings within the IMPULSE methodological framework and its journal of good practices.
The KU Leuven workshops provide a grounded case study within IMPULSE, demonstrating how collaborative 3D environments can serve not only as visualisation tools but as experimental spaces where learning runs in both directions - students gaining skills in immersive design while actively contributing to the storytelling and valorisation of the collections they work with.