Nikolaos Partarakis

Traditional craft practices face growing marginalization under industrialization yet remain central to cultural heritage and community identity. The Horizon Europe project CRAEFT addresses this through a Valorization Pilot, applying digital technologies across four dimensions: cultural experiences, games, retail support, and maker-oriented activities. The pilot adopted the Europeana Impact Framework, built on the Balanced Value Impact Model, to structure and assess impact using strategic perspectives and value lenses. Using surveys, interviews, observations, and utilization-based evaluations by independent teams, we examine how the framework can be operationalized in a complex, multi-site craft context, what short- and medium-term impacts can be evidenced, and what methodological trade-offs arise in real-world deployment. The findings indicate that digital augmentations, when usable and context-aware, strengthen cultural connection, support learning, and improve practitioner visibility, with utilization-based replications providing initial evidence of transferability. The study documents measurable social and selected economic value aligned with sustainability goals concerning education, decent work, sustainable communities, and responsible consumption, while environmental and long-term legacy impacts remain only partially evidenced. We conclude that learning and socio-cultural outcomes are the most readily evidenced within funded pilot timeframes, and offer recommendations for heritage organizations adopting impact-oriented evaluation.

Accessibility evaluation in built environments increasingly requires performance-based methods that capture dynamic user–environment interaction rather than static compliance with dimensional standards. Existing computational approaches, including BIM-based rule checking and path-finding analysis, are effective for geometric verification but cannot quantify the physical demands imposed on users during task execution. To date, no existing framework combines task-driven motion generation with quantitative biomechanical analysis specifically for accessibility evaluation in built environments. This paper presents a modular simulation framework that integrates procedural kinematic planning with inverse dynamics analysis to enable performance-based accessibility assessment. The system generates deterministic motion trajectories using a gait-based abstraction layer and inverse kinematics, then computes net joint forces and torques via a stabilized Newton–Euler recursive algorithm. External contact forces, including ground reactions during locomotion, are modeled through a dedicated force management subsystem. The framework is implemented in Unity and evaluated in three representative scenarios: level walking, stair ascent, and stair descent. Computed knee joint forces fall within magnitude and temporal ranges reported in the biomechanical literature (peak forces of 2.5–4.0 body weights for stairs and 1.5–2.0 body weights for level walking), indicating biomechanical plausibility rather than subject-specific experimental validation. The framework offers a reproducible, extensible foundation for evidence-based accessibility design, allowing designers to detect and quantify biomechanically demanding interactions in architectural environments prior to construction, and supporting a shift from prescriptive compliance toward dynamic, human-centered evaluation.

The European crafts ecosystem faces critical structural threats, declining practitioner numbers, weakening intergenerational transmission, limited digital literacy, and competition from industrial imitation. Existing online craft communities are narrowly material-specific and structurally ill-suited to the cross-disciplinary dialogue required for systemic sector transformation. This paper presents the design, iterative development, and pilot evaluation of the Craeft Community, a multi-stakeholder Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) developed within the Horizon Europe CRAEFT project. Three research questions guided the study: how a multi-stakeholder VCoP should be structured to overcome disciplinary fragmentation; to what extent a stewarded digital forum can operationalize Situated Learning and Communities of Practice theory; and what factors facilitate or inhibit engagement and post-funding sustainability. Using design-based research, the platform evolved through four iterative phases, culminating in restructuring from a material-based architecture into five transversal thematic pillars, driven by survey evidence from 151 European craft professionals and systematic stakeholder feedback. The pilot phase yielded 86 registered members, 31 posts, and 27 interactions, with Transmission & Training as the most engaged pillar. Qualitative analysis reveals substantive cross-disciplinary discourse alongside a structural Effort-Engagement Gap, a persistent tension between forum participation demands and the gravitational pull of mainstream social media. The study demonstrates that a thematically organized, stewarded VCoP can meaningfully operationalize apprenticeship-based learning in digital settings, advancing craft heritage preservation, economic resilience, and hybrid professional identity formation at the intersection of craft and technology.

Traditional European craft practices face dual pressures: the erosion of tacit knowledge held by aging practitioners, and the risk of cultural homogenization through uninformed digital adoption. This paper presents a comparative analysis of a structured design pilot conducted across five Representative Craft Instances (RCIs): glassblowing, tapestry, marble/silversmithing, porcelain, and woodcarving within the Horizon Europe CRAEFT project. Drawing on co-creative workshops, motion capture pipelines, physically based rendering (PBR), interactive simulation, and additive manufacturing, we analyze how context-specific digital tools performed as mediators rather than modernizers across heterogeneous craft domains. Cross-domain analysis reveals that digital tools achieve cultural legitimacy only when introduced through co-creative, practitioner-led cycles; that gesture and tacit knowledge are transferable via structured computational pipelines; and that methodological portability, not workflow replication, is the appropriate model for cross-context scaling. Implications are discussed for sustainable heritage policy, design education, and the development of craft-sensitive digital infrastructure in Europe. A cross-RCI comparative assessment matrix evaluates all five domains across seven analytical dimensions: practitioner adoption, perceived usefulness, cultural legitimacy, technical maturity, sustainability impact, transferability potential, and educational effectiveness. Finally, practitioner reflective accounts from participating designers and craftspeople are presented to ground the analytical findings empirically.

This article reports an exploratory, small-cohort mixed-methods case study of how an e-learning platform and a virtual reality (VR) workshop simulator can be integrated into a traditional craft apprenticeship without displacing workshop-based learning. Drawing on the Craeft glassblowing Pilot 1 at the European Centre for Research and Training in Glassmaking (CERFAV), it reports a two-phase mixed-methods study contrasting a Traditional Augmented (TA) group, which used a Craeft e-learning platform and a VR glassblowing simulator, with a Traditional (T) control group following the standard Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC) program. Quantitative data from formative assessments and CPC examination results are combined with qualitative feedback, satisfaction surveys, self-assessment questionnaires, and interviews with apprentices and trainers. In Phase 1, where digital tools were deployed in a separate mode alongside existing instruction, the e-learning platform was perceived as pedagogically valuable, but descriptive differences in assessment outcomes were limited and uneven, with greater score dispersion in the TA group. In Phase 2, redesigned hybrid usage scenarios assigned distinct and complementary roles to the e-learning platform, VR, and workshop practice within an iterative learning cycle, and the descriptive results suggest more consistent patterns of higher scores for the TA group in cross-cutting theoretical subjects, with less variance in their scores. Qualitative analyses show that apprentices adopt a pragmatic stance towards digital tools, using the e-learning platform primarily for revision and exam preparation and VR for workshop discovery and tool recognition, while maintaining a strong attachment to material practice. The study suggests that, in small, high-stakes craft VET program, the perceived value of virtual learning environments depends less on their intrinsic properties than on their orchestration within coherent hybrid designs and on trainers’ capacity to align them with authentic tasks and assessment regimes. All findings should be interpreted as exploratory given the small sample size (n < 20), non-random group assignment, and potential self-selection biases.

This systematic review examines how Extended Reality (XR) technologies, i.e., Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), Mixed (MR), and Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) are designed, implemented, and evaluated in cultural heritage (CH) applications, addressing five research questions: (RQ1) How were XR technologies applied in CH between 2021 and 2025? (RQ2) What interaction paradigms are used, and how do they shape engagement and meaning making? (RQ3) What user experience outcomes are reported in XR CH applications? (RQ4) What evaluation methods are employed and what methodological gaps remain? (RQ5) What challenges persist across XR heritage implementations? Peer-reviewed, English-language studies reporting on implemented XR systems in CH contexts with empirical or evaluative data were included; conceptual articles without a described implementation, non-English publications, and studies published before January 2020 were excluded. Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and the ACM Digital Library were searched for publications dated January 2020 through March 2025, complemented by manual proceedings screening (SIGGRAPH, CHI, IMX, VRCAI) and backward/forward citation tracking. All databases were last searched in March 2025. Two independent researchers screened all records and extracted data; disagreements were resolved through structured discussion. Bias toward positive novelty outcomes was mitigated by including conference proceedings alongside journal articles to broaden the evidence base. A qualitative thematic synthesis was employed, as methodological heterogeneity across studies precluded statistical meta-analysis. Findings were organized inductively into four thematic domains through iterative coding and inter-author consensus. From an initial corpus of 359 records, 287 unique records were retained after deduplication; following title/abstract screening and full-text eligibility assessment, 64 studies were included in the final synthesis. The majority (60/64) were published between 2021 and 2025, with study sample sizes ranging from small expert cohorts (n ≈ 6) to large public deployments (n > 125). The thematic analysis across technology, interaction design, user experience, and evaluation reveals trends toward participatory, multiuser, and multimodal XR designs, reporting benefits including immersion, engagement, learning, and accessibility, alongside recurring challenges such as cost, usability, cybersickness, content authenticity, and lack of longitudinal evaluation. Beyond thematic description, using a cross-domain analytical synthesis, we identify the Design Coherence Framework for XR Heritage (DCF-XR); this is a four-dimensional interpretive model spanning technology, interaction design, user experience, and evaluation, which provides an original diagnostic lens for understanding the conditions under which XR effectively serves cultural heritage goals. A typology of four recurring design failure modes, derived inductively from the corpus, demonstrates that the most persistent shortcomings in the field arise not from the weakness of individual dimensions but from their misalignment with one another. Evidence is limited by the predominance of small convenience samples, single-session laboratory evaluations, and the absence of domain-specific standardized assessment instruments for XR in CH, which constrains the generalizability of reported outcomes. Targeted recommendations for rigorous, ethical, and inclusive XR practice in CH are presented, highlighting the need for longitudinal studies, open datasets, and standardized evaluation frameworks. This review received no external funding. This review was not pre-registered in a prospective register.

Traditional European craft practices face dual pressures: the erosion of tacit knowledge held by aging practitioners, and the risk of cultural homogenization through uninformed digital adoption. This paper presents a comparative analysis of a structured design pilot conducted across five Representative Craft Instances (RCIs): glassblowing, tapestry, marble/silversmithing, porcelain, and woodcarving within the Horizon Europe CRAEFT project. Drawing on co-creative workshops, motion capture pipelines, physically based rendering (PBR), interactive simulation, and additive manufacturing, we analyze how context-specific digital tools performed as mediators rather than modernizers across heterogeneous craft domains. Cross-domain analysis reveals that digital tools achieve cultural legitimacy only when introduced through co-creative, practitioner-led cycles; that gesture and tacit knowledge are transferable via structured computational pipelines; and that methodological portability, not workflow replication, is the appropriate model for cross-context scaling. Implications are discussed for sustainable heritage policy, design education, and the development of craft-sensitive digital infrastructure in Europe.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Shine Bright Like Silver, a mobile application developed for PIOP's Silversmithing Museum in Ioannina, Greece, to document, simulate, and present the sand casting and filigree silversmithing techniques. The proposed solution integrates semantic knowledge graphs, an interactive crafting simulation, and gamified learning elements to externalize and operationalize the implicit procedural knowledge involved in the craft. A user study was conducted with n=26 museum visitors to assess the system's effectiveness in terms of usability, learning outcomes, and early indicators of craft valorization. The findings suggest that combining semantic representation with interactive simulation, embedded within a museum context, offers a scalable and replicable framework for the digital preservation of heritage crafts. The work contributes to the broader discourse on technology-mediated craft education by illustrating how tacit knowledge can be systematically captured and transmitted through mobile digital environments, and by positioning visitor-facing tools within a broader reenactable preservation infrastructure.

The European crafts ecosystem faces critical structural threats, declining practitioner numbers, weakening intergenerational transmission, limited digital literacy, and competition from industrial imitation. Existing online craft communities are narrowly material-specific and structurally illsuited to the cross-disciplinary dialogue required for systemic sector transformation. This paper presents the design, iterative development, and pilot evaluation of the Craeft Community, a multi-stakeholder Virtual Community of Prac-tice (VCoP) developed within the Horizon Europe CRAEFT project. Three research questions guided the study: how a multi-stakeholder VCoP should be structured to overcome disciplinary fragmentation; to what extent a stewarded digital forum can operationalize Situated Learning and Communities of Practice theory and what factors facilitate or inhib-it engagement and post-funding sustainability. Using design-based research, the platform evolved through four iterative phases, culminating in restructuring from a material-based architecture into five transversal thematic pillars, driven by survey evidence from 151 European craft professionals and systematic stakeholder feedback. The pilot phase yielded 86 registered members, 31 posts, and 27 interactions, with Transmission & Training as the most engaged pillar. Qualitative analysis reveals substantive cross-disciplinary discourse alongside a structural Effort-Engagement Gap, a persistent tension between forum partic-ipation demands and the gravitational pull of mainstream social media. The study demonstrates that a thematically organized, stewarded VCoP can meaningfully opera-tionalize apprenticeship-based learning in digital settings, advancing craft heritage preservation, economic resilience, and hybrid professional identity formation at the inter-section of craft and technology.

This article investigates how an e‑learning platform and a virtual reality (VR) workshop simulator can be integrated into a traditional craft apprenticeship without displacing workshop‑based learning. Drawing on the Craeft glassblowing Pilot 1 at CERFAV, it reports a two‑phase mixed‑methods study contrasting a Traditional Augmented (TA) group, which used a Craeft e‑learning platform and a VR glassblowing simulator, with a Traditional (T) control group following the standard Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC) programme. Quantitative data from formative assessments and CPC examination results are combined with qualitative feedback, satisfaction surveys, self‑assessment questionnaires, and interviews with apprentices and trainers. In Phase 1, where digital tools were deployed in a separated mode alongside existing instruction, the e‑learning platform was perceived as pedagogically valuable, but effects on assessment outcomes were limited and uneven, with greater score dispersion in the TA group. In Phase 2, redesigned hybrid usage scenarios assigned distinct and complementary roles to the e‑learning platform, VR, and workshop practice within an iterative learning cycle, yielding more consistent advantages for the TA group in cross‑cutting theoretical subjects and reducing variance in their scores. Qualitative analyses show that apprentices adopt a pragmatic stance towards digital tools, using the e‑learning platform primarily for revision and exam preparation and VR for workshop discovery and tool recognition, while maintaining a strong attachment to material practice. The study concludes that, in small, high‑stakes craft VET programmes, the impact of virtual learning environments depends less on their intrinsic properties than on their orchestration within coherent hybrid designs and on trainers’ capacity to align them with authentic tasks and assessment regimes.