Design research and cultural heritage: activating the value of cultural assets as open-ended knowledge system

The purpose is to demonstrate how the design discipline can contribute in the valorisation of Cultural Heritage (in its tangible and intangible aspects, from artefacts to processes, practices and performances), in terms of re-generation of its “use value”, through designing sustainable, socially and economically, repertories of knowledge for new “cultural intensive” artefacts. These repertoires will give evidence to the evolutionary and transformative nature of cultural heritage, whose value changes by time according with meanings and context, and will be used to verify an approach of design for cultural heritage based on a synergy of processes more than traditional competences (like interior, communication, services etc). These processes are “relations” like production and reproduction (of the form), recognition (of the sense) and activation (of the function) of Cultural Heritage, and connect the heritage with the context which generated it and the community who experiences it through systems, technologies, narrations. The paper will demonstrate that it is possible, by an hermeneutic and interpretative design process, to identify and clearly isolate and define a system of recognizable elements of a cultural patrimony in terms of “authentic qualities” of forms and processes, codified in cultural archetypes and expressed by visual, material and procedural codes and atlas; and that the same authentic qualities can be used as creative sources for actualising the heritage in the contemporary context in innovative artefacts and practices through essentially re-contextualisation strategies in a new geo-cultural context or thematic ambit, thus opening the patrimony to new interpretations but without losing the reference with the original and traditional matrix in a concept of “new contemporary authentic”. So in particular, active-action and actualisation of the authentic are considered two crucial design actions that enhance the value of cultural heritage through relations by mean of artefacts. The paper presents a pilot project, “Inspired by Beijing Opera” which proves this heritage activation by design, providing an example of a possible methodology, process and set of tools that can be considered specific for design research in cultural heritage. The patrimony of a collection of objects (costumes, accessorize) relative to Chinese theatre has been analysed and reduced into minimal cultural units and archetypes, repurposed in inspirational visions and concept and redesigned in a design workshop.