From Data to Design. AI, Blockchain, and New Frontiers in Digital Archives

The digital transformation is reshaping the role of corporate archives, expanding the possibilities for preserving, managing, and enhancing companies’ historical heritage. This study stems from the following research question: how are emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain altering the practices, meanings, and potential of corporate digital archives for design and communication?Through an interdisciplinary analysis and three significant case studies (Fondazione Fiera Milano, Museimpresa/Google Arts & Culture, and the Riva Historical Archive), the paper examines how AI and blockchain introduce new tools for automatic indexing, multimodal search, metadata generation, document certification, and authenticity safeguarding. The findings show that digitalization not only improves the effi-ciency of archival processes but also expands the ways mate-rials can be accessed and interpreted, transforming archives into true laboratories of innovation for design, brand storytell-ing, and heritage communication strategies. The contribution of this research lies in proposing a theoretical-applied frame-work that demonstrates how the integration of digital archives, AI, and blockchain opens new perspectives for the study of design culture, for the enhancement of Made in Italy excel-lence, and for the development of more transparent, accessi-ble, and future-oriented archival ecosystems.