This study explores how digital media plays a role in creating a sense of authenticity in museum exhibitions. Cultural-historical museums deal with artifacts, memories, and events from past eras. It is the curator’s task to create reliable connections to history by organizing resources to present credible narratives and bring the past to life. Digital technologies like virtual reality and immersive projections may offer new rhetorical tools to foster a sense of connection to history. Although earlier research has centered on notions of aura and authenticity (e.g., Benjamin, 2008; Aravantis and Zuanni, 2021; Bolter et al., 2021; Latour and Lowe, 2011), our study contributes to this literature by approaching these ideas through the framework of social semiotics. It does so by examining how authenticity is constructed digitally and rhetorically through the use of semiotic resources like color, contextualization, light, and depth (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2021). These resources act as validity markers, indicating the represented level of authenticity. The study is part of a larger research project on the effects of digitization on exhibitions and visitor engagement, conducted in collaboration with staff from five museums in Sweden. Data includes photographs and video recordings of museum exhibits containing digital applications and transcripts from workshops with museum staff.

This special collection features articles from participants at the 8th International Designs for Learning Conference, “Conceptualizing Design in Research and Developmental Work”. The focus of the conference and the special collection is the versatility of the design concept, which extends from the theoretical and analytical level to the more practical level, where it can be used to shape concrete activities and tools for multimodal communication, teaching, and learning.The conference was held in August 2024 at Stockholm University’s Department of Education. A total of 43 abstracts, workshops, and symposia were presented, and delegates were invited to submit a full paper to the Designs for Learning Journal. Eight articles were finally included in the special collection and are presented below.

The article traces and examines the history of some of the specimens used in teaching in Swedish secondary grammar schools from the mid-nineteenth century up until today. Previous research has focused on empirical analyses of teaching materials and school collections, while this paper adds new knowledge to the history of education using an object-biographic approach. Whilst focusing on the history of two distinct specimens, a bird and a small collection of butterflies, and how these were circulated and recontextualised, the paper raises wider questions about how different actors are involved as meanings and knowledge content change. Through the object-biographic approach, we show that the use of natural history objects was multifaceted and had several purposes at the same time, ranging from research to education to providing status or being a hobby. The use of natural history specimens changed with reforms of the Swedish educational system. New teaching materials and new educational ideals were developed, and from 1960 onwards the importance of these objects decreased. We show how the specimens have taken on new meanings today as selected and displayed museum objects.