Designing for Emotional Engagement in Archives

As archival institutions evolve from custodians of information to facilitators of memory and meaning-making, emotional engagement has become a vital, though often overlooked, dimension of archival design.  

Archives are no longer neutral containers of facts but spaces of remembrance, grief, healing, and connection.  Designing archival experiences that support emotional resonance requires intentional, empathy-driven practices that integrate affect theory, trauma-informed design, and user-centered thinking.  

Move Beyond Neutrality

Archival collections often contain emotionally charged materials such as letters exchanged during wartime, testimonies of injustice, personal narratives of survival, and family photographs that mark the passage of time. Despite this, the systems through which users access these records (finding aids, digital platforms, and reading rooms) are often stark and impersonal. The presentation of emotionally significant content in neutral or clinical formats can feel jarring or dismissive. 

Emotional engagement in archives differs from dramatizing the content or prescribing how users should feel. Instead, it requires acknowledging the emotional labor inherent in archival research and creating systems that offer users space to reflect, respond, and proceed with care. This approach is particularly important when collections involve histories of trauma, displacement, or erasure. In these cases, insisting on neutrality can betoken a lack of empathy or even complicity. 

Center Empathy in Archival Design 

Empathy mapping, a tool drawn from user-centered design, offers a way to consider archival users’ emotional states, motivations, and challenges intentionally. When applied in archival contexts, empathy mapping can help institutions anticipate how users might respond to content and tailor the design of interfaces, services, and physical spaces accordingly.  

For instance, a researcher exploring archival materials related to forced migration may arrive with feelings of uncertainty, hope, or even inherited trauma. Designing for such an experience might involve preparing users with context before they engage with materials, offering content warnings, or incorporating pauses in the user interface to allow for emotional processing. These subtle, human-centered design decisions can transform the archival encounter from passive information retrieval to active, reflective engagement. 

Apply Trauma-Informed Design Principles  

Trauma-informed design brings another critical perspective to emotionally engaged archives. Rooted in health and social services, trauma-informed practice emphasizes physical and psychological safety, empowerment, and transparency. In archival spaces, this means creating physical and digital environments that recognize the potential for re-traumatization and support users as they engage with sensitive or painful histories. 

In practice, this may include designing quiet, private reading rooms with calming features, providing multiple access pathways to difficult content, communicating what materials contain before users view them, or allowing users to control the pace of their research. For online platforms, it might mean offering options for guided discovery rather than confronting users with difficult content without warning. These strategies acknowledge that engaging with archives is not always emotionally neutral and that users deserve care. 

Design Interfaces for Connection 

Digital archives offer unique opportunities to foster emotional resonance through thoughtful design. Rather than presenting materials as flat inventories, the right archival CMS or digital interface can highlight stories, relationships, and themes that invite users into deeper connections. This state can be achieved by embedding oral histories alongside textual records, incorporating user-contributed narratives, or offering interpretive elements that place materials within broader social and historical contexts. 

Designers can also consider how users search for meaning, often through themes like love, loss, migration, or resistance, and allow browsing by those emotional or experiential categories. Visual storytelling tools such as timelines or story maps can further support emotional connection, especially for users unfamiliar with archival systems. These design choices enhance intellectual rigor by meeting users where they are. 

Consider Emotional Design an Ethical Imperative 

Designing for emotional engagement honors the lived experiences represented in the collections and the emotional labor of those interacting with them. It provides a more honest framework for understanding how knowledge is formed and transmitted through archival encounters. 

This approach also draws attention to the experiences of archivists themselves, who often work with painful histories and carry the emotional burden of ethical stewardship. Institutions must consider how to support their users and staff in navigating the emotional terrain of archival work.   

Feeling the Archives

As archival work intersects with memory justice, community-centered practice, and public reckoning, emotionally attuned design isn’t optional; it’s foundational. By integrating empathy, trauma-informed care, and narrative-rich interface design, archives can foster spaces where users are informed, seen, supported, and connected.  

The archives is more than a storehouse of records but a site of feeling. Designing with that in mind allows for more meaningful, humane, and transformative engagements with the past.