Blockchain, AI and data visualization: history and evolution of design in digital archives

Digitalization has radically transformed the way information is preserved and made accessible, profoundly influencing historical research and the promotion of design and communication culture. Emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are redefining the concept of digital archives, ensuring authenticity, transparency, and more efficient data management. The objective is to harness these innovations to improve preservation, security, and accessibility of sources, enhancing corporate cultural heritage and making it available to a global audience. Blockchain, developed to ensure immutable and decentralized records, has been implemented in the realm of digital preservation as a tool for certifying and protecting archival content. A significant example comes from Riva, a historic company in the recreational boating industry associated with Museimpresa, which utilized blockchain to link digital certificates to its historical images. Through notarization, a DIGEST was generated to certify data integrity. Simultaneously, artificial intelligence has been adopted in archives to streamline organization, indexing, and data retrieval. A noteworthy example is the Archivio Storico Fondazione Fiera Milano, which digitized its historical archive and enhanced navigation through the application of both discriminative and generative AI. The integration of AI also enables the use of advanced data visualization techniques, facilitating the intuitive graphical representation of large volumes of information. By employing analysis algorithms and machine learning, connections, patterns, and trends within the data can be identified, providing new tools for interpreting the history of design and corporate communication. Integrating corporate archives into advanced platforms such as Google Arts & Culture offers immersive and interactive interfaces for experiencing cultural heritage. The combined application of blockchain and AI has led to more secure, transparent, and efficient archive management. Blockchain ensures the integrity and authenticity of content, protecting digital sources from potential alterations. At the same time, AI simplifies document organization and analysis through automatic indexing, accelerating researchers' work and enabling more precise access to materials. A significant outcome is represented by data visualization, which offers new ways of exploring and presenting data. Researchers can dynamically visualize connections, enhancing their understanding of archival information and opening new perspectives for study. The adoption of blockchain and artificial intelligence represents a significant step toward more inclusive, interactive, and secure digital archives. These technologies facilitate the preservation and accessibility of historical sources and enhance their value. However, they cannot replace the interventions of archivists in ensuring the proper management and cataloguing of records, from which AI can then extract and operate on data. The proposed cases demonstrate the effectiveness of these innovative solutions in preserving and promoting corporate tradition. The introduction of data visualization, in particular, further enriches the potential for analysing and utilizing archives, contributing to the creation of a dynamic and open digital ecosystem capable of connecting the past, present, and future of design culture.