Heritage Spark: A card-based toolkit for navigating challenges of digitising intangible cultural heritage

This paper addresses the challenge novice designers face in the complex, multidisciplinary process of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) digitisation. We present Heritage Spark, a card-based toolkit designed to scaffold this process, and we discuss findings from our empirical evaluation through a 16-week design course involving 64 novice designers. The evaluation results indicate that the toolkit effectively supports novices by functioning as a cognitive scaffold, a collaborative medium, and a process guide helping to enhance empathy, expand knowledge, stimulate multi-dimensional inspiration, and foster synergistic effects. We argue that the Heritage Spark approach provides a generalisable method for developing scaffolding tools for other complex domains. Furthermore, we contribute to design theory by extending the taxonomy of card-based tools and advancing the discourse on design thinking by demonstrating how its simplified frameworks can be enriched with expert design methodologies.