VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Heritage is not solely what is preserved, but what is reinterpreted and reimagined responding to contemporary and future socio-ecological conditions. This paper presents findings from participatory speculative design workshops conducted with Product Design students in a museum context within a Norwegian heritage site. Framed within speculative design practices, the workshops explored how cultural heritage can create socio-ecologically responsive and inclusive futures. Drawing on the histories of local sites, participants co-created speculative proposals engaging both with tangible and intangible heritage. Themes of memory, identity and place were translated into critical artefacts, narrative prototypes, and design fictions. Two main outcomes that emerged was the use of play and gamification as strategies for engaging communities with local histories, and envisioning museum grounds as sites of ecological regeneration and cultural continuity. The proposals reframe heritage not as static preservation, but as planetary living systems that are capable of sustaining new forms of community and interaction. Based on themes of the Cultural Pasts – Urban Futures conference, the research bridges product design education, heritage studies, and co-creation by demonstrating how speculative design can act as a tool for cultural storytelling, environmental resilience, and participatory placemaking. The paper argues that museums can move beyond a primary focus on the past, and become spaces for futures thinking and fusions of horizons, where historical narratives, contemporary experiences, and imagined futures are brought into conversation. Finally, it concludes that speculative games can function as epistemic infrastructures for collective worldbuilding, where play structures interpretation, negotiates meaning, and opens alternative more-than-human futures.