Heritage Experience Design: case of Sardinia

This paper explores the emerging concept of heritage form the perspective of how design can contribute in promoting value to its experience, either individual and collective, tangible and intangible. It draws on previous research and projects by the AnimazioneDesign research unit, and discusses a series of approaches to heritage, design, and teaching. Every chance to experiment with new ideas and teaching approaches – especially when it is carried out in intensive form – is relevant to our work and research. The Heritage Experience Design Scientific School (HexD), which took place in Alghero and Porto Conte in September 2022, and that we wish to present here, was one of such: a major opportunity to explore a complex theme such as that of heritage, investigating ways and forms with which to promote and enhance some of its many and diversified manifestations. As a matter of fact, the HexD project addressed in the first place the need to explore a series of possibilities of valorization and mise en scene, and ways to convert them into guidelines to promote something as undefined – notably in its intangible form – as heritage. In the context of the current communication system, of a generalized access and almost obsessive consumption of information, promoting the heritage implies in fact today a mosaic of specialist skills, ranging from technological ones to the ability to represent places, or ultimately, to tell stories.