XR Heritage Summer School 2026 Concludes in Suzhou

One week. One historic city. The Grand Canal. And a new generation of digital heritage storytellers.

Original article published by the XJTLU Design School
Photos by XJTLU Design School

Over one week in Suzhou, the XJTLU-CIPA XR Heritage Summer School 2026 brought ideas, fieldwork and creative practice together around a shared challenge: how might emerging technologies help us see, understand, and connect with cultural heritage differently?

Participants of the XR Heritage Summer School in Suzhuo, P.R. China

Organised by the Design School at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), endorsed by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee, CIPA Heritage Documentation, and supported by the ICOMOS China Heritage Conservation and Digitalisation (CHCD) Committee, the summer school took participants from the historic landscapes of Suzhou’s Grand Canal to the possibilities of digital interpretation and presentation.

From 30 August to 6 September, participants explored the city through site visits, lectures, and hands-on workshops, before turning their observations into collaborative XR heritage projects. The result was a week of exploration that connected place, memory, technology, and storytelling—culminating in a public exhibition of the participants’ work.

Suzhou as a classroom

This year’s programme placed the Grand Canal at the heart of the summer school.

Participants visited sites connected to Suzhou’s canal heritage, exploring how waterways have shaped the city’s architecture, streets, movement, livelihoods, and cultural memory.

Instead of simply documenting historic places, participants were encouraged to look more closely: What stories are embedded in these places? How are they experienced today? And what might XR allow us to see, hear, or experience differently?

PHOTO REPORT — EXPLORING THE GRAND CANAL

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From fieldwork to ideas

The field visits were not simply excursions. They became the starting point for the week’s creative work.

Back in the studio, participants brought together their observations and began asking how the places they had encountered could be reinterpreted through XR.

Across interdisciplinary teams, they experimented with heritage research, storytelling, spatial design, and digital technologies, developing projects inspired by Suzhou and its Grand Canal heritage landscape.

The process also raised bigger questions about digital heritage: What happens when a historic place becomes an immersive experience? How can XR communicate atmosphere, memory, and meaning? And what does “authenticity” mean when heritage is digitally reconstructed or mediated?

PHOTO REPORT — WORKING IN TEAMS

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From ideas to XR heritage projects

By the end of the week, those early observations had become concepts, stories, and visual experiments—and eventually, completed project proposals.

The final works approached heritage from different directions. Some explored historic environments and reconstruction; others focused on stories, memory, interaction, or embodied experience.

What connected them was a shared interest in using technology not simply to show heritage, but to create new ways of encountering it.

Bringing the week together

The programme concluded with guest lectures by CIPA-HD Honorary President Prof. Mario Santana Quintero and CIPA-HD Expert Member Ms. Chloe Pei, who discussed the potential, future, and ethical dimensions of digital technologies for conservation, preservation, and storytelling in a heritage context.

The lectures were followed by closing remarks from Prof. Marc Aurel Schnabel, the Dean of XJTLU Design School, and an open exhibition of participants’ work.

Participants presented their work, shared their ideas, and exchanged perspectives with guests, bringing together the research, fieldwork, and experimentation that had shaped the week.

PHOTO REPORT — CLOSING EVENT

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What comes next?

The week in Suzhou was about more than learning how to use XR.

It was about looking differently at places we might otherwise take for granted—walking along the Grand Canal, noticing the layers of history within the city, asking new questions about familiar heritage, and then finding creative ways to share those observations with others.

The projects developed during the summer school are a starting point for that conversation. Building on these experiences, articles reflecting on the outcomes of the summer school are being prepared for the CIPA2027 Conference in Abu Dhabi and the UHC-HEI 2027 International Conference in Seville, organised by the International Network for Urban-rural Heritage Conservation in Higher Education Institutions. Through these contributions, we aim to share our approach and experience, and to inspire and inform the development of more innovative heritage education programmes around the world.

By bringing together heritage, design, technology, and creative practice, the XJTLU-CIPA XR Heritage Summer School created a space to experiment with what digital heritage could become, and to ask how emerging technologies might help us build deeper connections with the places, stories, and memories of the past.