The archaeology of service design: how to unravel, locate, surface, and transmit the significance and meaning of place in a complex heritage setting

This research expands service designs approach to designing in and with a place to reveal nuanced insights into the relationships between and among people’s lives, their cultural connection to significant sites, and a place’s tangible and intangible heritage values. The result is a design framework called the Archaeology of service design. The framework supports the development of mnemonic heritage experiences, improves access to local knowledge and facilitates the transmission of heritage meaning to new audiences to keep it alive. The research aimed to identify participatory and co-design methods to encourage greater willingness from local people to engage with and participate in heritage projects. The approaches developed through the research expand how service design crafts safe, open and empathic spaces capable of bridging cultural divides, identifying shared interests and encouraging dissonant stakeholders into conversations. The creative practice research was undertaken between 2019 and 2020 as an embedded researcher at Montsalvat, a culturally significant site in Melbourne registered as Australia’s oldest living artisan colony since settlement. Four design processes, titled Unravel, Locate, Surface, and Transmit, emerged through several lines of inquiry and various interventions. Together, these processes aid designers to unravel the complexity of a local context, locate intangible heritage values buried on the grounds and then, along with local communities, surface the tacit meaning of heritage stories. The final method encourages the designer to transmit more critical, inclusive and respectful interpretations of significant heritages. The research projects reinforce the value of sensory ethnography’s relational, sensory and embodied approaches. This approach enhances the designer’s physical immersion in a setting, assists sensemaking through complexity and improves participant experiences in the design process. The Archaeology of service design identifies how designers can more effectively work and deliver projects at the complex intersect of heritage, community and technology. Engaging with the framework and the four processes improves designers’ sensitivity and helps identify hidden connections. These design processes extend service design’s scope and approach when designing with historical places. They offer more profound insight into social history, the evolution of a community’s cultural identity, and the intertwined nature of heritage values. The approaches also improve a designer’s capacity to navigate existing socio-political and power relations, understand the meaning of place for heritage custodians and bearers, and communicate local meaning within the visitor experience. The Archaeology of service design contributes a future-oriented approach to negotiating the increasing complexity of intangible heritage values as their meanings shift through time.