Cultural Heritage Safety Portal
One place to know what a heritage asset is, where it is, and how at risk it is.
Overview
Role: UX/UI Designer @DXC Technology
Sector: Cultural Heritage
Client: Ministero della Cultura
Italy holds one of the largest cultural heritages in the world, and protecting it means making decisions about hundreds of thousands of assets: buildings, movable works, archaeological and underwater sites, historic centres. I designed the interface of a portal for the Italian Ministry of Culture’s safety department, where each asset is catalogued by registry data, location and risk
The challenge
Information about heritage assets lives in different systems, with different structures and levels of completeness. People who must protect them need to quickly connect three things: what the asset is, where it is, and how vulnerable it is. The challenge was to make a very large, institutional dataset feel searchable, trustworthy and actionable.
Who it’s for
The portal serves the stakeholders of the Ministry’s Risk Map of Cultural Heritage:
Superintendencies, the preferred users for protecting assets and planning interventions
Local authorities (Regions, Provinces, Municipalities) responsible for land management and urban planning
Church bodies, such as Dioceses, which own and manage a vast historic and artistic heritage
Universities and research bodies, involved in studies and monitoring
The Ministry and its central bodies, which coordinate prevention policies
They are professionals working on desktop, often with high stakes and little time. For them a wrong or missing piece of data isn’t an inconvenience, it can affect a decision.
Research and process
To understand how the people who will use the portal actually work, I ran stakeholder interviews, mainly with Ministry of Culture employees and representatives of the bodies involved in heritage protection
The conversations covered their daily tasks, the tools they use today, where they lose time or information, and the risk-related decisions they have to make.
Then I brought the inisght inside a whiteboard using affinity mapping and user journey mapping. This led to the design question:
How might we help professionals find, understand and assess the risk of any heritage asset without having to know which system holds its data?
Key design decisions
1. Two ways in: territory or search. The Assets hub combines category counters, an interactive map of Italy linked to the region filter, and a search form. Some users know the asset code, others think geographically, so the portal supports both without forcing a choice.
2. Hierarchy and data provenance made visible. Result cards show not only the name and address but also where an asset sits (“Part of Complesso Barberini”, “4 component assets”) and where the data comes from (“Imported from VIR”). In a system that integrates many sources, knowing where a piece of data comes from is part of trusting it.
3. A detail page built for orientation. Anchored navigation on the left, map at the top, registry in the centre, related entities (components, parts, emergency events) on the right.
4. Risk you can read, not just see. Vulnerability is expressed as a value and a class (“3.20, Medium”), never by colour alone, in line with accessibility principles for public services.
5. Safe destructive actions. Deleting an asset is isolated, visually distinct and separated from everyday actions, because it’s irreversible on institutional data.
Accessibility and edge cases
The interface is built on a government-style design system (clear type hierarchy, high contrast, visible focus, labelled fields above inputs). I designed for the states that real data produces: assets with no components, no parts or no events, imported records, assets belonging to more than one category, and result sets in the thousands.