The maintenance of oral histories, specifically maintaining access to archived oral histories, has largely been overlooked as a method to improve their reuse. While digital technologies have facilitated wider access to oral histories, the complexities of sustaining such access over time have been underestimated within the oral history community. My study frames maintaining access as foundational to the secondary use of oral histories and presents it as a ‘wicked problem’ – a design term meaning a multifaceted dynamic problem with no definitive solution. Through this critical commentary and my portfolio of practice, I explore how to design and update structures to enable long-term access by focussing on maintenance, using Seaton Delaval Hall, a National Trust property, as a case study. My design-led practice consisted of an action research strategy where I shared explanatory and exploratory design artefacts with the staff and volunteers at Seaton Delaval Hall, the wider National Trust, the British Library, and Archives at National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangaluru to gain continuous feedback on my conception of the ‘wicked problem’ and the opportunities for positive intervention. This iterative journey revealed maintaining access to oral histories in a world of rapid technological and societal change is a complicated and deeply undervalued enterprise. My concluding outputs emphasise how maintaining access to oral histories will always be ‘wicked’. Accepting this when designing or updating a structure to access oral histories will encourage the development of a space within the structure for those working within to reflexively react to change.
How to read this PhD by Practice
This website showcases my portfolio of practice alongside my critical commentary. There is no required reading order for either. Likewise, the portfolio itself is divided into sections that can be explored in any sequence.
Each section of the portfolio features a collection of various design artefacts with my annotations. It is essential to read all annotations, which are presented in grey boxes. Each grey box has a code reference to help those who are reading the text only print version of this project alongside this website
Reading all the information in the design artefacts or listening to all the audio is not mandatory. The reader may engage with the material at their discretion. Some documents have been summarised using AI chatbots as indicated. Within these summaries, certain text has been highlighted to emphasise key points.
If the reader wishes to venture further into the design artefacts they are welcome to explore the OHD_Archive online or the catalogue.
There will be spelling and grammatical errors in some of the design artefacts included in the OHD_Archive, which can no longer be altered due the file type.