Part III. Communication of Heritage | 1 Lohren Deeg a , Sean Rotar b , Sean Burns c a Urban Planning, College of Architecture and Planning, Ball State University, Muncie Indiana, USA. b Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Agriculture, Purdue University, Lafayette Indiana, USA. c Architecture, College of Architecture and Planning, Ball State University, Muncie Indiana, USA The Persistence of the Senses: Materiality, Precedent and Narrative in Communicating Heritage Abstract Communicating a culture’s constructed heritage to students yearning to design within a relevant and communicative context is a complex task of pedagogy. In an age of instant access to information, the importance of a grounded experience in the stories and artifacts that communicate a society’s cultural heritage is necessary for design to be relevant in the present and loved in the future. Engaging the senses, particularly the haptic, is also vital to the formation of memories and experiences in defining meaningful spaces for people. This paper examines two design projects and one built example that are intended to inspire students to explore, embody, and translate stories of cultural heritage into relevant projects of architecture, vibrant proposals for landscape architecture, and rooted plans for urban development. Introduction Heritage implies a rootedness, a connection to past people and ideas, and a foundational understanding of the long threads of culture in a place. Because of this implication, heritage thinking is often difficult for students to achieve in a contemporary culture focused so heavily on the popular, the transitory, and the disposable. To anchor their design work in a larger context of heritage, designers must make a connection with the heritage of a place and communicate that heritage through the narrative that drives their design work. Designers must generate deep understanding of heritage through observation and analysis of the characteristics that make an object, place, building, or landscape unique, as well as the particular context that surrounds the designed element and infuses it with meaning. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that communicating heritage through narrative implies that designers must be firmly and literally reliant on the forms and structure of the past, as in the manner of the academic classicism of the Beaux Arts. Rather, connecting to heritage and communicating heritage through narrative in a contemporary design idiom relies on a different set of processes and outcomes. While heritage begins with understanding the cultural past, designers must also be able to translate that understanding into original forms that nevertheless remain rooted in heritage and to communicate an understanding of heritage through the meaning created by spatial narrative. In design education, form and