Abstract
It is essential for curators to evolve from knowledge guardians to collaborative catalysts, activists, and agents of social change. This shift entails active engagement and co-creation of cultural experiences. The curator’s role is transitioning from authority to collaboration, involving increased community interaction. Cultural management is moving toward participatory, inclusive, and socially engaged practices, with methods of social design. This study explores how social design can reinforce the evolution of cultural management, especially in terms of curatorial practices. It examines how social design can strengthen the transformation of curators’ roles through thematic analysis of primary and secondary interviews. Ten regional curators were interviewed in 2025, and the secondary data stems from podcasts recorded in 2024 and 2025. The key findings reveal that curatorial practices are becoming more complex in the era of artificial intelligence, as new technologies are introduced. In the contemporary context of the AI era, critical curatorial practices have to assume pivotal roles in counteracting the influence of power and bias, while concurrently facilitating the expansion of communities’ capacity to influence cultural narratives to ensure they are served by AI-driven tools. This can be achieved by expanding social design’s agendas to curating with community input, interrogating algorithmic power, and creating spaces where plural voices continue to actively influence relational meaning-making.
Presenters
Melanie SarantouProfessor, Strategic Design, Faculty of Design, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Curator, Artificial Intelligence, Social Design, Relationality, Meaning-making, Communities
