Designing for Nature, Time and History: Novel Locative Technologies for Multilayered Heritage

Natureculture heritage sites are dynamic spaces where ecological, cultural, and historical forces converge, often creating tensions between preservation, accessibility, and interpretation. This study explores how locative technologies can navigate these tensions by embedding digital interaction within the material and affective fabric of place, enabling context-sensitive storytelling and surfacing silenced narratives. We investigate visitor experiences at three contrasting sites — Madeira's Levadas (Portugal), the Avebury Landscape (UK), and the site of the Battle of the Boyne (Ireland) — to examine how visitors engage with more-than-human histories and temporalities, thus identifying six distinct design spaces within three overarching typologies of natureculture heritage: Ideal Nature , Ideal Time , and Ideal History . Based on how these novel typologies inform the operation of locative technologies as ethical mediators between human and nonhuman agencies, we subsequently present the design of seven bespoke locative experiences across the three sites, diversely exploring communication technologies in support of novel heritage encounters. This paper advances HCI debates on posthuman design for naturecultures by illustrating how locative media concepts can be informed by the particular context and challenges of the heritage site, and how its design can consider situated, relational, and ethically attentive engagement with multilayered heritage.