Connecting Contemporary Industry and Society with Cultural Heritage Through Semantic Tools for Searching and Visualizing the Content of an Archive that Preserves the Valencian Design Legacy

Design has profoundly influenced our lives, yet design archives that capture these narratives remain largely neglected. Preserving and making these archives accessible can enhance visual literacy, creativity and innovation. The Arxiu Valencià del Disseny (AVD) aims to preserve and share the cultural heritage of Valencian designers with a collection of over 150,000 items reflecting the region’s design history. This article reviews the outcomes of the "Arxiu Valencià del Disseny: shaping the future, designing the present, rescuing the past" project, which includes digitising the collection, creating a Design Memory Archive, and launching a web app that enables advanced semantic searches. The app integrates data from various archives using the CIDOC-CRM model, showcasing documents, sketches, products, and designer information. It also features interactive 2D and 3D maps, virtual galleries, and a Product Map highlighting material use and morphology. Future efforts will substantially expand content depth by integrating uncatalogued archives and extracting complex relational data from video interviews via automatic semantic processing. This phase will apply advanced AI for image-based recommendations and leverage mixed reality techniques to enable immersive, intuitive interaction with the knowledge graph.