Not post-digital but more-than-human: Rethinking digital design for regional natural history museums

What if the future of digital design in museums isn’t found in cutting-edge institutions, but in the often-overlooked ecologies of regional natural history collections? This paper repositions small regional museums not as lagging behind in digital transformation, but as fertile grounds for exploring more-than-human digital design. Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project between the Portsmouth Natural History Museum and the University of Portsmouth, we reflect on the interactive experiences using low-cost holograms and motion-capture avatars as mediators between human and non-human actors within museum ecologies. Giving collections voices and personalities engaged audiences, yet in attempting to become more-than-human, the collections instead became more human. This tension exposes the limitations of digital museology, where such experiences risk reinforcing anthropocentric ways of knowing. We argue that genuine more-than-human design requires play, provocation, discomfort, and multisensory encounters that decentre the visitor, reframing digital transformation as multispecies collaboration that is not post-digital but posthuman.