Digital transformation in the GLAM sector is frequently framed through narratives of maturity, seamless integration, and the transition toward a “post-digital” condition in which digital technologies become invisible and serve a ‘normative function’(Parry, 2013; Parry & Dziekan, 2021). Yet these narratives tend to privilege large, well-resourced institutions, obscuring differences in scale, capacity, and context across museums(Nikolaou, 2024). This paper argues that such narratives are poorly suited to understanding the realities of small regional museums, where digital practice unfolds under conditions defined not by technological abundance but by ongoing negotiation, infrastructural constraint, and embedded relations of care. From this situated perspective, digital transformation, and digital engagement, appear not as a measure of progress but as a relational practice in which institutions, audiences, technologies, and museum collections continuously shape one another. This paper argues that such contexts demand alternative frameworks for understanding engagement that foreground situated, playful, and more than human experiences rather than frictionless technology.

At a moment when academic discourse is rapidly reorganising around generative AI, large-scale datasets, and automated mediation, this paper offers a counterpoint rooted in small data, modest infrastructures, and situated local digital practice. This paper draws on a digital engagement experiment undertaken within a small regional natural history museum. The project initially aimed to investigate how creative technologies could support playful audience engagement with natural history collections through post-digital principles that integrate digital media without emphasising its technological novelty. To explore this, the research team in collaboration with the museum produced a series of cost-effective interactive gallery space interventions derived from 3D scans of a taxidermy porcupine fish specimen: a low-cost hologram animation and two playful digital experiences using motion capture and simple gestural interaction.

Much of contemporary digital museology, including the design approaches which underpin many museum digital interactives like the porcupine fish interventions, is deeply shaped by human centred design, were perspectives and contexts prioritise human needs and desires (Cameron, 2023; 2021; Giaccardi et al., 2025). This orientation is not neutral: it privileges human agency, centres human interpretive authority, and renders non-human entities as passive objects of knowledge (Cameron 2023). But is this what museums need? Is this what audiences want?

To investigate audience engagement, unobtrusive field observations were conducted, enabling prolonged access to visitors’ actions and interactions while minimising discomfort and avoiding undue influence on their engagement with the digital experiences. (Rogers & Marshall, 2017; Vishkaie et al., 2022). This method was selected because it enables naturalistic visitor behaviour to be captured without disrupting the flow or social dynamics of museum visits, offering insight into the kinds of engagement small institutions can realistically support. Researchers recorded, brief, partial and complete experience, between individuals or groups and the porcupine fish interventions, allowing for spontaneous and unexpected behaviours to be observed. An observation framework (Barriault & Pearson, 2010) was used, comprised of seven learning behaviours grouped into initiation, transition and breakthrough behaviour categories. For instance, initiation behaviours of doing/interacting or of watching others engaging/interacting showed how visitors took preliminary steps towards meaningful engagement. The study received ethical approval from the University of Portsmouth ethics committee, including permission to conduct unobtrusive observations in public gallery spaces.

Analysis of observation data highlights that engagement with the interactives was rarely seamless: most groups required adult prompting or staff intervention, and interactions often revolved around anthropomorphic comparisons (“you become the puffer fish”), underscoring the difficulty of designing genuine encounters with more-than-human collections. Rather than evidencing a trajectory toward frictionless digital integration, these observations highlight infrastructural fragility and relational labour, conditions that complicate dominant narratives of digital maturity in the GLAM sector.

While the digital experiences successfully engaged audiences by giving a specimen from the collections a voice and personality, they also revealed the persistence of anthropocentric defaults, and both the promise and the paradox of digital transformation in small museums. New interactives drew visitors in, yet often reinforced human-centred modes of interpretation rather than challenging them. This prompted a shift toward reflecting on the project through a more-than-human lens (Genç et al., 2024). Rather than evaluating the porcupine fish interventions solely through post-digital perspectives, the team came to understand them as mediations grounded in play, provocation, multisensory encounter, and productive ambiguity. In Cameron’s terms, these experiences function as small-scale experiments in ‘communitarian design’ (2023), where humans, digital artefacts, and non-human entities co-constitute meaning in relational ways. In this context, regional museums provide fertile ground for rethinking digital transformation as multispecies collaboration, offering a vision of museum practice that is not post-digital but post-human.

This contributes to DH in three ways. Empirically, it demonstrates how small-scale, low-cost digital interventionssurface infrastructural fragility and relational labour that remain largely invisible in postdigital accounts of museum practice. Conceptually, it proposes that digital engagement with natural history collections, as exemplified by the porcupine fish, can be reimagined through diegetic almost more-than-human perspectives which focus on ecological entanglements rather than representational fidelity or anthropomorphic relatability. From a diversity standpoint, it centres under-represented institutions; small regional museums; whose experiences are often marginalised within digital transformation discourse. Their resource limitations, community embeddedness, and ecological situatedness offer alternative models of digital practice that resist one-size-fits-all assumptions about digital maturity.

The paper argues that, for regional museums, digital transformation is not a linear path toward seamless integration, but a situated, negotiated, and playful process shaped by care, constraint, and local ecologies. Moving towards more-than-human encounters requires embracing play, ambiguity, provocation, and even discomfort as legitimate modes of digital engagement, modes that challenge the centrality of the human and resist the pressure to produce polished, frictionless experiences. In this view, digital mediation becomes less a matter of technological enhancement and more a practice of cultivating relations among visitors, collections, environments, and infrastructures.