BowerbyrdCurate
Helping people connect knowledge, memories and collections into stories worth sharing.
Bowerbyrd Curate is a conceptual storytelling and curation product exploring how rich bodies of material can be gathered, connected and shaped into meaningful stories.
The idea grew from our work with community archives and cultural collections, but the opportunity is much broader. Communities, organisations and institutions often hold years of accumulated knowledge, photographs, recordings, documents, stories and other material. The challenge is finding the connections within it and giving people the tools to turn those connections into stories others can understand and explore.
Stories rarely start in one place
They might exist across photographs, interviews, documents, memories, data, collections and the knowledge held by different people. Individually these fragments can be valuable. Connected thoughtfully, they can reveal something much richer.
Bowerbyrd Curate explores ways to bring this material together visually, surface relationships across time, place, people and themes, and help storytellers see connections that might otherwise remain hidden.
Connect scattered material to reveal the story within.
Keep the storyteller at the centre
The concept is built around supporting the person telling the story, not taking the story away from them.
Curatorial tools could help people gather and organise material, explore themes, create relationships between sources and shape a narrative from what they discover. Different forms of content can sit alongside one another, allowing a story to develop through images, words, recordings, collections and contextual material rather than being reduced to a single format.
The aim is to make the act of curation more accessible while retaining the judgement, interpretation and voice that gives a story its meaning.
Connect your story to wider knowledge
A story becomes more interesting when it can reach beyond the material immediately in front of us.
Bowerbyrd Curate explores how personal or community material could connect with trusted archives, collections and other knowledge sources, adding context and opening new paths for discovery.
AI-enabled assistance could support this process by helping surface possible themes and connections across larger bodies of material. These are prompts for exploration, giving contributors and curators more to work with while keeping authorship and editorial decisions in human hands.
Bowerbyrd is also interested in what happens after a story has been created.
Communities are continually generating new material and new perspectives. A collection can grow through contributions, new relationships can emerge between stories, and material that once sat separately can become part of a larger shared history.
This creates opportunities for organisations to preserve knowledge while giving the people connected to it a more active role in deciding what is remembered and how it is told.
A concept for curation, discovery and connected storytelling
Bowerbyrd Curate is a Lumos Labs concept exploring new tools for curation, thematic discovery and connected storytelling.
It asks how design and AI-enabled technology could help people work with complex bodies of knowledge, find meaningful connections and tell richer stories, without losing the human perspective at the centre of them.
