Sensing Heritage is a participatory programme for museum learning, developed with the transmedia artist, author, and game designer Chris Solarski. It runs as a cultural game jam, which means an analogue, making-led session with no screens and no competition. Participants engage with curated collections, objects, textiles, works on paper, and other artworks, then translate what they sense into hands-on prototypes using simple crafting materials, guided by rhythm, balance, repetition, and interconnectedness.
Built around care, empathy and accessibility, with wide public audiences and minoritised communities at its centre, Sensing Heritage widens access to Islamic collections. It responds directly to current conditions of uncertainty in the cultural sector: a low-barrier, inclusive format for creative participation that supports museum learning and equitable access when budgets and capacity are under pressure.
What's involved
Sensing Heritage is artist-facilitated, so delivery doesn't fall to your team. We work with you to select the works participants encounter, and we run the sessions. Everything is analogue and low-barrier by design. Participants need no technical knowledge, no prior experience of games, and no equipment beyond simple crafting materials.
Sessions are built as safe spaces for creative risk-taking, and they stay sensitive to cultural context and representation throughout. What forms is a temporary community of practice around your collection, with young people, families, and minoritised communities experimenting, reflecting, and co-authoring their own interpretations. The result repositions the collection as a living, participatory resource.
Photo: Lauren Mclean © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 2026.
Announced at Digital Lab Days, held 4 July 2026 at Edinburgh Futures Institute. Presented at the V&A on 17 July 2026, at The Islamic Art Museumscape, a conference celebrating twenty years of the Jameel Gallery for the Islamic Middle East.
Every programme is scoped with you. Group size, session length, and how many groups take part are shaped around your collection, your audiences, and what your team has capacity for. Some institutions want a single extended session for one group. Others want to reach several groups across a day. We work that out together.
If you have an opening, a reinstallation, or a community engagement slot to fill, request a call with Dr. Glaire Anderson. A focused 30-minute conversation about your collection, your audiences, and whether Sensing Heritage fits what you need to deliver.
DLIVCC
I'm Glaire Anderson, Founding Director of the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Culture and Collections. I'm a historian of Islamic art and architecture of the caliphal period, and I've been working with game engines for Islamic art and architectural history since 2010.
I'm the author of A Bridge to the Sky: The Arts of Science in the Age of 'Abbas Ibn Firnas (Oxford University Press, 2024) and The Islamic Villa in Early Medieval Iberia, which won the 2015 Eleanor Tufts Award. I was a consulting historian and art historian on Assassin's Creed Mirage (Ubisoft, 2023) and its educational spinoff, Discovery Tour: Medieval Baghdad (2025). I build proof-of-concept games in-house, and I've spoken about this work at GDC San Francisco, MIT, and SOAS, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among other institutions.
Solarski Studio
Hi! I'm Chris Solarski, a transmedia director and acclaimed author based in Zurich, Switzerland. I empower people to playfully explore identity, culture, and creativity through shared interactive experiences, blending physical and digital media.
My career began as a game artist during the PlayStation 2 and PSP era at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio, before taking a pivotal detour into traditional art. This hybrid background, bridging games and classical art, led me to develop unique design methodologies that have gained an international following among students, academics and professionals exploring digital empathy and human-centred interaction across multiple design industries. Hollywood director Marc Forster has endorsed the approach. I've presented my work at organisations including the Smithsonian Museum, Disney Research, PechaKucha, SXSW, and Google.
Sensing Heritage is now booking. Let's talk about your collection and your audiences.