Notes from Archive to AR: towards a creative knowledge exchange

Archive to AR was a knowledge exchange project that took place during 2019 and 2020, and which was funded in its second phase by an XR Stories Small Collaborative R&D grant. A collaboration between the University of Sheffield, Sheffield-based digital agency Hive IT, and the National Railway Museum, its aim was to develop an idea and partial prototype for a mixed-reality game based on the National Railway Museum’s archive, which could be played on a phone or a tablet. Drawing on my experience as a practitioner-academic working on Archive to AR, the aim of this article is to present and reflect upon the creative practice-related methodological outcomes of the project. My intention is to consider which principles for doing knowledge exchange (KE) emerge when embodied, creative process is prioritised and, in line with a practice-as-research approach, the KE space is cast as a site of knowledge production as well as exchange. Part provocation, part ethno-autographic reflection and part analysis, this paper’s overall aim is to contribute to the ongoing conversation about how KE and creative work can overlap within a new ‘third space’ for academia in a way that prioritises process and method, but which is nevertheless conducive to high-quality artistic outputs.