The craft trade in Portugal faces challenges that compromise its productive and economic sustainability and may result in the disappearance of millenary techniques, traditions, and industrial practices of high symbolic and historical value. The growing incompatibility of these traditional activities with digital technologies, the lack of resources, and a growing age gap are among the main problems identified. This situation made worse by various restrictions pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic points towards the possibility of extinction of this type of manual arts. The goal of this research is to demonstrate how the design process of an e-marketplace platform, throughout its different phases, may contribute to the revitalization of traditional industries. The methodologies adopted in the framework consisted in the study of UX and UI best design practices, including wireframe design, user flows, definition of personas, development of prototypes, and style guides. The results of the conducted usability tests to the prototype allowed a gradual improvement of the solution, culminating in the confirmation of its effectiveness. The study concluded that digital technology, namely a designed e-marketplace solution, could potentially bring buyers and sellers closer together, thus being a tool with high potential for the dissemination and sustainability of the craft industry.

In this paper we will maintain that cultural institutions are increasingly facing the inevitability of a profound revision in their traditional parameters of unidirectional communication. Given the increasing availability of tools for audiovisual production as well as the diversity of networked communication contexts, the roles of the user and the audience have come to assume a participatory potential in the content they consume and attend; this will dictate their repositioning in relation to the universe of institutions' work. In order to communicate new messages, media narratives, views or perspectives on the same reality are constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. In this age of ‘ConsumerGenerated Media’, identities and representations are constantly changing. The idea and the concept of a brand now extends far beyond its own limits, taking on important emotional values, and people enjoy being a part of that brand's mythology. The Serralves Foundation, along with its Museum of Contemporary Art, in Porto, Portugal, was the subject of a first study of an empirical nature: a series of audio-visual objects were developed, in order to generate material for analysis and proposition. In this subsequent stage, we aim at the identification of new procedures and practices that may be effectively implemented within the institutional universe. We intend to establish more efficient communication contexts, including the maximizing of a set of relationships between institutions and audiences regarding dimensions that are traditionally outside the institutional radar: identity, narrative and affection. By referring to key examples, we will posit that in order to achieve more success in their missions, cultural institutions should focus on participatory education and communication processes regarding contemporary issues. By doing this, they will strengthen their engagement with their audiences and bring them into the institutions' projects. This project is currently undertaking a wide inventory and taxonomy of the various institutional paradigms in regards to communication practices. We aim at producing a map of vocations and positions within the institutional world in regards to the aforementioned issues that require participatory communication.