Remanufacturing Textile Archiving. Sustainable Practices for the Reactivation of Material Culture and Heritage

The writing explores remanufacturing as a design-driven strategy for the regeneration of material heritage. Based on the relationship between design and cultural heritage, the study introduces a methodology based on principles of de-archiving and re-archiving as theoretical-critical actions with implications on computational processes and interfaces. The work focuses on the textile archive study case of the Le Costantine Foundation, aiming to decode tacit knowledge, manual practices, and historical production through a socio-technical reverse engineering approach. The research translates analog practices into structured, transmittable, and codifiable digital systems, identifying metadata related to procedural (ideative and productive) and sensory (material-perceptual) aspects, This metadata structure supports comparisons between manual gestures from historical Made in Italy craftsmanship, local historical schemes or scripts for the transmission of textile knowledge (as forms of proto-design), and the perceptual-sensorial qualities explored in today’s design discourse on material-experience. The system enables the design of open, dynamic relational databases to reactivate archival knowledge by transmediating it into new narratives for contemporary textile design. Rather than preserving heritage statically, the archive becomes a responsive interface, integrating memory and future, materiality and digital culture. The project highlights how design can act as an epistemic and transformative agent for context-based, inclusive and sustainable innovation of Made in Italy’s heritage.