A participatory approach to define user requirements of a platform for intangible cultural heritage education

In the last years the protection and safeguarding of cultural heritage has become a key issue of European cultural policy and this applies not only to tangible artefacts (monuments, sites, etc.), but also to intangible cultural expressions (singing, dancing, etc.). The i-Treasures project focuses on some Intangible Cultural Heritages (ICH) and investigates whether and to what extent new technology can play a role in the preservation and dissemination of these expressions. To this aim, the project will develop a system, based on cutting edge technology and sensors, that digitally captures the performances of living human treasures, analyses the digital information to semantically index the performances and their constituting elements, and builds an educational platform on top of the semantically indexed content. The main purpose of this paper is to describe how the user requirements of this system were defined. The requirements definition process was based on a participatory approach, where ICH experts, performers and users were actively involved through surveys and interviews, and extensively collaborated in the complex tasks of identifying specificities of rare traditional know-how, discovering existing teaching and learning practices and finally identifying the most cutting edge technologies able to support innovative teaching and learning approaches to ICH.