TAPESTRY
Community-Driven Digital Platform to Preserve Cultural Heritage
Tapestry is a digital platform designed to preserve tangible and intangible cultural heritage by empowering communities to document their own stories.
Where traditional archives depend on institutions, Tapestry shifts the power back to the people. Communities upload artifacts, share lived experiences, validate authenticity, and engage in respectful discourse — all within a system designed to reduce bias and promote cultural equity.
Context
Globalization has widened the gap between the Global North and South, especially in culture preservation. Wealthier nations have digitization infrastructures; marginalized communities often do not.
Tapestry responds to this imbalance. Offering a low-tech, accessible, community-led preservation model rooted in research, ethics, and UX.
Core Questions
Tapestry began with four guiding questions:
How can communities maintain authenticity without relying on external institutions?
What does ethical moderation look like in culturally sensitive spaces?
How can conflicts be resolved without bias or cultural insensitivity?
- How can UX design build trust, reduce bias, and make digital heritage engaging across generations?
Research Approach
Primary Research
Interviews with an anthropologist (expert in authenticity & power dynamics)
Interviews with Reddit cultural moderators (ethical moderation, conflict resolution)
Secondary Research
Case studies: Wikipedia, Europeana, Reddit forums
Literature review: UNESCO, cultural theory, digital preservation, UX in archives
Key Insights
Authenticity is dynamic, not fixed
Communities must define their own narratives. “Authenticity” shifts across generations, contexts, and lived experiences.
Moderation must be culturally grounded
Moderators should come from within the community, not above it. Diversity in moderation directly reduces misinformation and conflict.
UX & Accessibility
UX design directly impacts who can participate, how easily they can access culture, and how sustainably the archive endures.
Stakeholders
A diverse group of community members, experts, and moderators who collectively shape how cultural artifacts are documented, validated, and preserved.
Personas
Personas represent the real community voices, everyday users, moderators, and cultural experts whose needs and behaviors shaped how Tapestry supports sharing, validating, and preserving heritage.
Click to see rest of the personas
Core Idea — Two Ways to Share
Thread vs Artifact
Tapestry supports two distinct ways for communities to share their culture, designed to balance open expression with trusted, expert-led validation.
User Roles
Tapestry is built around three key roles that balance openness, moderation, and authenticity.
Each role mirrors real community structures and keeps the platform self-governed.
Process map
This process map outlines how different stakeholders participate in building, governing, and sustaining Tapestry across its full lifecycle from initial setup to everyday engagement and long-term maintenance.
Design Style
Visual explorations that test how different aesthetics influence trust, engagement, and cultural expression within the platform.
Prototype
A high-fidelity prototype that brings Tapestry’s core flows, threads, artifacts, validation, and community interaction to life for testing and refinement.
Outcome
A clear design framework + platform model that:
protects authenticity without freezing culture
supports respectful, ethical moderation
enables sustainable archives in low-resource contexts
encourages multi-generational participation
Tapestry becomes not just an archive — but a living, evolving cultural ecosystem.
Tapestry imagines a future where cultural preservation is community-led, equitable, and shaped by many voices. It embraces technology without losing cultural nuance and removes institutional gatekeeping so people can document, contest, and evolve their own heritage. Ultimately, Tapestry shifts authority back to the communities who live these stories, ensuring culture remains alive, dynamic, and truly theirs.