KNOWLEDGE DISSEMINATION
Editor’s choice in Journal of Cultural Heritage, Volume 52, 2021
Museums play a crucial role in society by educating the public and representing diverse aspects of culture through their exhibits. Therefore, it is imperative to render museums accessible to the largest audience and initiatives that reduce cultural exclusion of people living with disabilities are highly recommended and encouraged. Today, the utilisation of ICT, foster social inclusion and allow cultural heritage context to become more accessible physically and intellectually. In particular, the accessibility of museum collections by the visually impaired (VI) is a very active multidisciplinary research domain. Actually, haptic prohibition is one of the most common limitations when interacting with museum artefacts. This restriction aims quite logically at preventing damages while safeguarding the integrity of the cultural reserve, characterised by its uniqueness. Nevertheless, if museum visitors are visually impaired, the inability to touch the artefacts makes the whole experience incomplete as the haptic perception of an artefact’s morphology is the primary substitute of sight. ICT may play a significant role in providing assistive methods that enable individuals to access museums’ reserve through multimodal approaches that are not limited to the actual premises of a museum. The elimination of the ”Do not touch” ban in conjunction with on-demand narrative enrichment triggers the general interest and initiates a further involvement in comprehending the cultural and historical background encapsulated by exhibits.
News & Events
ICMATE on Orbit
From the end of February, the team at ICMATE-Genova, composed by Libero Liggieri, Francesca Ravera and Eva Santini, will be supporting the PASTA (Particle-Stabilized Emulsions) experiment onboard the International Space Station.
The experiment is part of an international (EU, USA, Russia, Japan) project, coordinated by ICMATE and funded by ESA, participated by academic and industrial partners.
During about 4 months, the experiment will be using the Soft Matter Dynamics (SMD) equipment, developed by ESA, to study the effects of surfactants on the mechanisms responsible for the stabilization of emulsions, exploiting the simplified weightlessness conditions of the ISS.
THIS WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS
To improve the efficiency of total conversion of solar thermal collectors, the conversion of solar energy into thermal energy has to be improved, for example by improving the solar absorption.
Chemical-physical design of metallic interfaces for alloys production and composite materials
High-tech devices require the development of components with different structures and complementary properties that are assembled into a final product either mechanically or by physical-chemical processes related to the tailoring of interfaces and design of novel structural and functional materials. The key role of interfaces and surfaces in determining performances and reliability of a new composite multilayer material is evident.
Interfacial properties and citotoxicity of laser irradiated antibiotic derivatives in biomedical fabrics
Biomedical fabrics with antibacterial or, more generally, therapeutic purposes are a challenging manufacturing task in textile industries. From one side, the fabric itself hosts the bacteria acting as a medium between the human organism and the microorganisms; on the other hand, it is regarded as a well assessed tool for drug delivery in contact of skin for external applications.