From Fragment to Artefact: Heritage Mining as a Design Method for Cultural Production

Presentation abstract

Abstract

Design practice routinely draws on inherited cultural knowledge, traditions, artefacts and memories to create new meanings, experiences and forms of value. Yet these inheritances rarely survive intact. Records, artefacts, traditions and memories are maintained unevenly, while other traces disappear entirely. Heritage therefore reaches the present through processes of selection, interpretation, and representation rather than as a complete historical record. These conditions create a need for methods that can work productively with fragmented evidence.

Tangible and intangible heritage often survive as traces that cannot support complete historical reconstruction. Researchers, designers, and creative practitioners must therefore move beyond documentation and make interpretive decisions about how fragments relate to broader cultural narratives. Existing approaches offer limited guidance on how evidence, interpretation, and reconstruction connect across heritage and creative practice.

This exploratory paper tests the viability of Heritage Mining as a transdisciplinary design method. It uses literature from heritage studies, critical fabulation, cultural production, and design research to examine Heritage Mining as an approach to fragmented evidence. Critical fabulation provides the mechanism through which partial records, absences, and contradictions support interpretation. Design and illustration then transform cultural narratives into new cultural artefacts and forms of cultural value.

The paper advances propositions rather than empirical findings. The mining metaphor provides a process of prospecting, extraction and cultural production. Heritage Mining positions design and illustration as sites where interpretation transforms fragmented heritage evidence into contemporary cultural production. Heritage is therefore understood not as a fixed inheritance from the past, but as something actively produced through interpretation, synthesis and creative practice. The study establishes a basis for future work on Heritage Mining as a design method. It reframes heritage from an object of conservation to a resource for contemporary cultural production and cultural value creation.