ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on designing frameworks for co-production and, within that, making space for imaginative or speculative design of heritage interpretation by non-professional participants that is a way of linking self, time, and place. The chapter adopts and adapts a ‘research through design’ paradigm of imaginative engagement with the world to outline a key speculative method – cultural probes – within the project. Cultural probes are creative and speculative tasks – such as asking questions of a building as if it could hear and respond – that offer ways to create and capture people’s imaginative and deeply felt relationships with the past in the present. Such methods transcend the normal parameters and potentials of qualitative data collection methods such as interviews. They have potential for framing co-productions within a plural heritages framework in ways that provide both supportive structures and creative freedom to participants, bearing on the politics of participation and representation in co-production practices.