Museums serve as custodians of cultural heritage yet, in the transition to digital environments, the affective
dimensions of presence, emotion, and intimacy are often diminished. While virtual museums promise
accessibility and preservation, they frequently struggle to convey the embodied and atmospheric qualities
that give physical spaces their meaning. In today’s fast-paced world, marked by increasing urban pressures,
many individuals experience a growing sense of disconnection and a lack of meaningful engagement with
their surroundings. This erosion of meaning makes it harder to form caring relationships with external
environments. Intimacy involves a subjective and genuine form of care, an emotional investment that
incorporates the environment into one’s sense of self. Therefore, it is essential to advocate the role of
intimacy within virtual spaces.
This thesis explores the concept of digital intimacy, that is, the presentation of an emotional landscape
within virtual space, shaped by personal agency and subjectivity in response to, and care for, the
surrounding environment, through the lens of house museums. House museums have traditionally been
defined as museums in which the building and its original furnishings form an inseparable whole, creating
a unified environment rather than one adapted to display. Within this research, this domestic environment
is valued not simply for its architectural integrity but for the intimate relationships it sustains between
people, objects, memories, and everyday life. It is these qualities of domestic intimacy that inform the
development of future virtual museums. House museums are therefore understood not simply as preserved
domestic environments, but as spaces in which experience, emotional attachment, material culture, and
personal memory are transformed into forms of public interpretation. Within this research, this historical
transition from private domestic life to public display provides a critical lens through which the future
development of digital heritage and virtual museums can be reconsidered. Rather than reproducing
domestic environments digitally, the thesis draws upon the tensions between intimacy and exhibition,
privacy and accessibility, and personal memory and public interpretation to explore how digital intimacy
may be critically reconfigured within virtual museum environments. Drawing on interdisciplinary
methodologies including case studies, material culture, autoethnography, spatial mapping and speculative
design, this research addresses three central questions.
1. How can physical and virtual museum spaces be combined to form intimate meanings?
2. In what ways can digital environments replicate the intimacy and subjectivity typically
associated with domestic collections?
3. How can speculative designs of virtual house museums serve as prototypes for exploring personobject
digital intimacy?
By examining how intimacy is formed and expressed in digital environments, this research describes
different forms of ‘digital intimacy’ and its role in virtual museums. Through case studies of the Glasgow
Tenement House, a typical nineteenth-century Glasgow tenement belonging to Miss Agnes Toward (1886-
1939), and now in the possession of the National Trust for Scotland, Sir John Soane's Museum, located in
Lincoln’s Inn, Fields, in London, and previously the home of Sir John Soane (1753-1837) and Dennis
Severs' House, in Spitalfields, London, an eighteenth-century silk-weaver’s house, owned by Dennis Severs
(1948-1999), the thesis investigates how domestic spaces create intimacy through experiences of sensory
participation and narrative layering. By translating these principles into both physical and virtual museum
contexts, this thesis proposes that virtual museums must move beyond conventional archival models and
embrace curatorial strategies and collecting practices that encourage immersion in aspects of subjectivity
and everyday life, alongside the replication or recreation of established collections of museum objects.
Ultimately, this research suggests that ‘digital intimacy’, and its potential as an interpretive and
communicative medium in future virtual museum collections, lies in conserving and preserving the past
while fostering a live, embodied connection between audiences, objects, and historical narrative through
the processes and meaning-making of collecting.
