Exploring Deaf heritage futures through critical design and ‘Public Things’

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, critical design methods offer heritage scholars new ways of exploring identities, experiences and relationships, extending a dialogic approach that supports the testing and realisation of heritage futures. This paper focuses upon a two-year national project that aimed to bring together curators, heritage professionals and Deaf communities to consider Deaf heritage as future-making.

Throughout four collaborative workshops, participants co-designed model museums, designed BSL infrastructures, formulated Deaf heritage professions and prototyped BSL souvenirs. By materialising heritage processes and ‘public things’ participants re-purposed their symbolic power to articulate prevailing inequalities and possible Deaf futures. We discuss the ways in which these playful future-making objects revealed hidden, oppressed, and contradictory heritage relations. We argue that a critical design approach to working with BSL users facilitated the disruption of conventional categories of heritage, Deafness and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Heritage
• Deaf Heritage
• critical Design
• participative Methods
• public Things

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh [Networking Grant].

Notes on contributors

Kirstie Jamieson

Dr Kirstie Jamieson teaches on Edinburgh Napier University's MFA in Design, specialising in Design for Heritage and Research as Critical Practice.

Marta Discepoli

Marta Discepoli is an artist and researcher whose work brings together critical design, community engagement and participatory arts practice.