Research-led by design
shrine is developed as a long-term, interdisciplinary research initiative at the intersection of culture, technology, and lived human experience.
It explores how memory, identity, and belonging are formed, fragmented, and re-connected when lives unfold across cultures, languages, and places. shrine approaches memory as a dynamic cultural process shaped by relationships, context, and time.
This research orientation informs every aspect of the project’s development.
knowledge & perspective
Interdisciplinary by necessity
The questions shrine addresses cannot be meaningfully explored within a single discipline or sector.
Memory, identity, and belonging sit at the intersection of cultural research, social experience, narrative practice, and technological design. shrine brings these perspectives together by design, fostering sustained collaboration between academia, creative practice, and applied technology.
Knowledge emerges through dialogue across disciplines, allowing different ways of knowing to inform one another throughout the research process.
shrine brings interdisciplinary perspectives together, fostering collaboration between academia, artistic practices, and applied technology.
art & creativity as research tools
Narrative, art, and inquiry as research tools
Rather than aesthetic layers, shrine treats narrative, documentary, and artistic practices as research instruments.
Approaches informed by documentary work and investigative journalism support depth, contextual accuracy, and care when engaging with personal and culturally sensitive memories. Artistic research contributes sensitivity to pacing, ambiguity, and emotional presence, enabling forms of insight that structured approaches cannot reach on their own.
These practices complement technological research by expanding how memory can be explored, articulated, and understood.
shrine treats the depth of artistic practices and the rigor of investigative journalism as research instruments.
ethics & values
Values as design constraints
Technical development within shrine is guided by principles of value-based engineering and digital humanism.
Ethical considerations such as consent, privacy, ambiguity, and restraint are treated as foundational design constraints. This approach ensures that technological decisions remain accountable to human experience, cultural context, and long-term social impact.
Responsibility is embedded into the research process itself.
Ethical considerations such as consent, privacy, ambiguity, and restraint are treated as foundational design constraints.
DIVERSITY
Research shaped by lived diversity
shrine’s research is informed by an international and multicultural team and by collaboration with partners from diverse cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary backgrounds.
This diversity is an epistemic necessity. Understanding hybrid identities and transnational memory requires perspectives shaped by different cultural positions and lived experiences.
These perspectives actively shape how research questions are asked, interpreted, and evolved.
Understanding hybrid identities and transnational memory requires perspectives shaped by different cultural positions and lived experiences.
grants & funding
Research context and support
shrine is currently developed through publicly supported research and collaborative partnerships.
The project is funded through national research and innovation programs and evolves through collaboration with cultural institutions, academic partners, artists, journalists, and independent practitioners.
Partner institutions and research collaborators will be published as collaborations are formally established.
current funding: FFG Expedition Zukunft Start (2025-2026)
participate
An evolving research ecosystem
shrine is conceived as an evolving research ecosystem.
Its questions, methods, and collaborations develop over time through dialogue with participants, researchers, artists, technologists, and institutions. This openness allows the research to remain responsive to new insights, contexts, and ethical considerations as they emerge.