RS6 | Transformational Involvement Collaborative Co-Design For Heritage Interventions: The National Trust, Seaton Delaval Hall

RS6: Transformational Engagement is a funded design research work (£14,000), and 1 of 17 funded Rising Stars projects - led by the research authors (£150,000) - as a critical ingredient to deliver the £7.8m NLHF Curtain Rises initiative. It was pivotal to the development of community and education focused activity at the estate, and as a disseminator of a programme of design, creative arts and performance events.
This research defines how co-design and participatory research - through institutional, practice-based and educational partnership - can be employed to redefine how heritage organisations develop their estates and disseminate knowledge through designed intervention and artefact. The research created a 2-phase intervention strategy that defined how a designed artefacts can disseminate macro and micro definitions of a major National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) project for the National Trust at Seaton Delaval Hall. It employed iterative design approaches, collaborative engagement, and participatory co-design methods to a set of exacting heritage contexts to facilitate passive and interactive knowledge dissemination.
The Creative Partnership defined how the National Trust works with other institution as co-authors of their estate development, programming and has established a new paradigm for future collaborative practice.