Conference Agenda

As we face mounting environmental and societal challenges, design has a critical role to play in shaping sustainable and meaningful futures. In response, the design research community is working to understand and tackle these issues head on in multiple ways – for example through facilitating radical transitions (Coops et al., 2024), developing regenerative practices (Nowaki & Foissac, 2022) and exploring beyond human perspectives (Bessai et al,. 2024). These aim to meet the systemic challenges of the future and address the complexity of  plural evolving cultures. To support this growing body of work, there is a need for exploring new applied methods that challenge short-termism and build new modes of designing that foreground temporality and future significance.

Heritage practices offer a radically different temporal orientation through which to consider how we design. Heritage practices are explicitly concerned with value over time: how artefacts, practices, and environments are selected, protected, reinterpreted, and transmitted across generations (Harrison, 2021). Heritage thinking foregrounds questions of significance, care, stewardship, and loss, while acknowledging uncertainty about future values and contexts – offering the context necessary for developing lived futures (Sandford, 2019). What if we applied the same reverence to the things we design and to the methods of design practice today - treating all products, services, and systems as potential future heritage? This reframing, bringing together design and heritage, opens new possibilities for sustainable, culturally embedded, and ethically responsible design.

This Conversation proposes designing for future heritage as a provocation that brings these domains into dialogue. It asks what might change if designers approached products, services, systems, and infrastructures as potential future heritage - objects and practices that will shape cultural memory, environmental conditions, and social meanings over extended timescales. Rather than focusing solely on the near future and on reducing harm, this perspective invites design to engage with questions of long-term significance: what should endure, what might be allowed to disappear, and what responsibilities designers hold toward future generations.