Recontextualising Industrial Ruins through Visual Storytelling: A Conceptual Design Framework for Cultural Revitalisation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52152/heranca.v9i3/12631Keywords:
Industrial Ruins, Visual Storytelling, Cultural Revitalisation, Industrial Heritage, Cultural Memory, Design Framework.Abstract
Industrial ruins are increasingly recognised as culturally meaningful environments that preserve collective memory, labour identity, and material evidence of industrialisation and deindustrialisation. Nevertheless, most revitalisation projects continue to favour economic redevelopment or aesthetic reuse at the expense of the narrative of such sites. This paper suggests a conceptual design of utilizing visual story-telling to promote culturally competent regeneration of industrial ruins. The analysis was conducted on a corpus of archival photographs, documentary materials, exhibition examples, design case studies and visual models of the post-industrial heritage in order to use a qualitative, secondary visual ethnographic analysis. The analysis indicates that visual narration could mediate cultural memory by the use of narrative sequencing, material anchoring, temporal layering, symbolic contrast and aesthetic restraint. The framework is thus proposed as an idea synthesis and generalizable hypothesis and not as an empirically verified tool. Its practical implication is that it can be applied by designers, curators and heritage professionals to design interpretation in advance of physical redevelopment; it is limited by the fact that it lacks the primary fieldwork, community experimentation and validation of the site.
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