Weaving digital and traditional heritage: a lightweight ecosystem for willow weaving inheritance in Inner Mongolia

The fast-paced digitalization and globalization poses a threat to traditional handicrafts since it has the potential to cause cultural disruption and technical isolation. There are new possibilities for the preservation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), but there is also a risk that digital technology may damage this valuable asset. The Lightweight Digital Ecology (LDE) paradigm provides a community-driven, low-tech approach to the difficulty of digitizing the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH). The LDE framework was used in a combination of online experiments and in-person field investigations to study the willow weaving community in Inner Mongolia. Technological flexibility, ecological coupling, cultural autonomy, and intergenerational cooperation all saw considerable gains, according to the research. It helps overcome 76% of the technical barriers to digital archiving, which opens the door to community involvement. The use of smart contracts to streamline transactions and provide digital assets to craftsmen improves community-led decision-making by 89%. By fusing contemporary architecture with age-old willow weaving techniques, AI-assisted platforms have the potential to construct self-organizing cultural-ecological systems that protect intangible cultural heritage artifacts. This study found that digital technology has the potential to sustain and expand ICH by fostering cultural-ecological systems, community-led decision-making, and localized knowledge networks.